On a Tuesday a little after 4 p.m., when ASU Preparatory Academy Phoenix ends its classes for the day, students roam about in a sea of maroon polos as they leave a place some describe as “almost like a family.”
ASU Preparatory Academy Phoenix is set to graduate 100 percent of its second graduating class in May, a continuation of the school’s consistently high performance.
“I think what really has contributed is we know every student really well,” said Art Lebowitz, director of secondary education at the school. “We really care about every student. We check on their progress all the time, and we’re about guiding and supporting them and setting the goals really, really high.”
Lebowitz said about 70 percent of graduating students are admitted to ASU and about 50 percent attend the university right after graduation.
Lebowitz said staff do not discourage students from going to other colleges or pursuing different paths, but that ASU Prep certainly acts as a feeder school for ASU. Juniors and seniors can even take classes for ASU credit.
ASU Preparatory Academy Phoenix, located on Seventh and Fillmore streets, is one of two ASU Prep locations. It began in 2009 after ASU inherited an underperforming school from the Phoenix Elementary District. It was originally a kindergarten through eighth grade school, but Lebowitz said they added one high school grade each year until it had classes of kindergarten through twelfth grade, making the class of 2015 the first graduating class.
According to ASU Prep, last year’s graduation rate was 98 percent. One hundred percent of the 133 students were admitted to post-secondary education or military service. Seventy-two percent were admitted to ASU, and fifteen percent of these students were also accepted to ASU’s Barrett, The Honors College.
Lebowitz said the goal of the public charter school is not only to prepare students for college but also ready them for life after college.
“We want to have every single student graduate from college, support their community and be competitive with any student or any person anywhere in the world,” Lebowitz said.
Andrew Collins, senior director of school development for the Arizona Charter Schools Association and New Schools for Phoenix, said he believes the high expectations of ASU Prep coupled with their ties to the university to contribute to the school’s academic success and high graduation rate this year.
“I would say that ASU brings a culture of post-secondary educational attainment,” Collins said. “When I think about students going to ASU Prep, they’re already engrained into the culture of the ASU university experience. They also have access to some of the resources the university has.”
ASU Prep uses the Cambridge Curriculum, a teaching method used in over 160 countries. Last month Gov. Doug Ducey signed a bill allowing schools to use tests other than the standard AzMERIT test to measure student progress, which includes the Cambridge exams.
“It’s not about memorizing a bunch of facts,” Lebowitz said of the curriculum. “It’s about deep learning, it’s about being able to describe and explain and analyze and evaluate, which are the kinds of skills that you need for success in college and the real world.”
According to ASU Prep, students across all grades improved by 23 percent in reading and 24 percent in math from 2010 to 2014. The overall average reading growth in the state of Arizona was 3.7 percent, while the overall average math growth was 3.6 percent.
Students at ASU Prep also participate in capstone classes: a homeroom type of class that meets daily. The capstone classes include community projects and learning leadership skills.
“The teacher is their mentor and pushes and watches over them,” Lebowitz said. “So they sort of form a family bond. That teacher meets with the kid’s parents four times a year and we kind of guide their progress.”
According to ASU Prep, 46 percent of the approximately 2,000 students at the two schools are Hispanic or Latino. Lebowitz said the school has developed a program, run by Lily Mesa Lema, director of elementary learning, that allows Spanish-speaking parents to teach the language to English-speaking teachers and vice versa.
“I actually wasn’t a Spanish speaker, but I’ve conducted parent conferences in Spanish as a result of the parents teaching me Spanish,” he said. “It’s been really successful. It’s been going on for about two or three years.”
Lebowitz said ASU Prep offers both Spanish and Mandarin Chinese and requires high school students to take three years of a foreign language in order to encourage being bilingual or trilingual.
“There’s a great need to be able to reach out in multiple languages, so it is not just a cultural issue for us, but it’s a marketable skill,” Lebowitz said.
Brooklynn Ingram is a senior at ASU Prep who will be graduating next month. She said her favorite thing about ASU Prep is the small size and the fact that everyone knows and cares about each other.
“It’s almost like a family,” she said. “It’s really cool to make friends, and it kind of forces you to be more understanding of other people because I’m friends with a lot of people here who I wouldn’t normally associate with.”
Ingram said she is not sure where she wants to go to college yet, but that she wants to go into the medical field. She said her favorite class at ASU Prep is advanced history, a small elective with only four students. The class includes a 30-page paper, and each student gets to pick their own topic.
“My topic was eugenics and how eugenics influenced the civil rights movement,” she said. “It’s kind of eye-opening because when you take a normal history class it’s generalized, so it was cool to be able to choose my own topic and learn about it on your own.”
Lebowitz said the Phoenix school is at capacity, but that a location in Casa Grande will open by the 2016-2017 school year and an online school will launch in 2017.
“We’re leaving no one behind,” Lebowitz said of the school. “At other schools, it might be that, ‘we want everyone to graduate, but it’s up to you.’ Here, we’re leaving no one behind. Everyone’s gonna graduate, everyone’s gonna go to college. They know that we believe it.”
The commencement ceremony for ASU Preparatory Academy Phoenix will be Thursday, May 26 at ASU Gammage.
Contact the reporter at libby.allnatt@asu.edu.
