Nazareth college hosted an urban education summit attracting education leaders from across the state. The summit offered an opportunity for several speakers from high performing urban schools to discuss the innovations that made them successful.
Among the panelists were:
- Michael Wiltshire, principal of Medgar Evers College Preparatory School in Brooklyn, where tenth-graders take college-level courses and begin research internships.
- Tolga Hayali, superintendent of Syracuse & Utica Academies of Science Charter Schools. Syracuse Academy students win awards at international academic competitions and achieved graduation rates of 89% in 2013 and 84% in 2014.
- Rashid F. Davis, founding principal of Pathways in Technology Early College (P-TECH) in Brooklyn. There, students can graduate with a high school diploma and an associate degree in computers or engineering from a six-year program, which is a collaboration between city public schools, CUNY, and IBM.
- David C. Banks, president & CEO of Eagle Academy Foundation, which runs multiple public schools in New York City and in Newark, N.J. where all 2014 graduates were accepted to college.
- Sheela Webster, principal of World of Inquiry School in Rochester, which uses an expeditionary learning style that has been so successful at the elementary level that the school has expanded and will graduate its first class of seniors in 2015.
Nazareth President DaanBraveman moderated the panel discussion. He says this event is meant to highlight the successful innovations of some educational leaders in hopes of inspiring others.
"We want to generate a discussion about, what are they doing, how can we replicate what they're doing, how can we scale up what they're doing. And start changing the discussion away from the negative, the failure, to the positive and how we can work on the positive."
Braveman says many of the education leaders have the same strategy in common.
"High expectations. Each one of the programs mentioned the need for high expectations. You have to walk into that class room expecting a lot of the students."
Braveman says these programs also have strong leadership and in many cases expanded school days and years.
