Excellence in Education and Learning | Academy for Career Exploration
The Academy for Career Exploration is a school rags-to-riches story.
ACE Head of School Mario Cirillo said that Rhode Island’s first charter school, founded in 1994, had a bleak outlook when he came on board five years ago, after nearly five decades in various education roles. ACE, the former Textron Chamber of Commerce Academy, had deteriorated so badly that it was on the brink of closure.
“By the time I got there, they were not much of a player. The budget was not good. Academically, test scores were down the tubes,” he said of the Providence high school.
This all came at a time when charter schools were under intense scrutiny, said Cirillo.
Enrollment, with a capacity of 225 students, was down to about 170. Financial backers were retreating. There was no rigor in the classrooms. Test scores were low, and there was a revenue deficit with little accountability or return on investment. Teachers were sending students out for sandwiches during the school day, he said.
What followed was a complete paradigm shift in terms of culture, mission and structure.
It has moved from a school approaching the goal of developing talent for the labor market based on old constructs of the economy with a curriculum to match – to three state-approved pathways: Cisco networking and cybersecurity; application programming and software development; and data science, said Cirillo. All are high-skill, high-wage and high-demand fields. This planning was guided by business connections ACE had with Tech Collective, Bridge Technical Talent and Atrion, a Carousel Co., as well as the University of Rhode Island, Community College of Rhode Island and Roger Williams University.
The educational system at ACE underwent a radical overhaul as well.
ACE is the only school in the state to be strength- driven, using the Gallup educational model. Students and faculty learn their top individual strengths with a model “maximizing outcomes by leveraging what’s strong, not wrong,” according to Gallup.com, and use it to their unique educational advantage.
“Every adult in this building – including the custodian – has mapped that all out, and it’s made a big difference in the way we operate as a team. … Kids know what their strengths are and how they apply it in class,” said Cirillo. Every classroom, he said, has its teacher’s top five strengths posted.
The school’s strengths, meanwhile, are being noticed. The R.I. Department of Education renewed ACE’s charter for five years, naming it one of the state’s Amazing Schools for 2016-2017.
With 22 team members ready to take on the innovative challenges ahead – Cirillo says the changes will help teachers advance their resumes and ultimately, careers. Less of a “sage-on-a-stage” now, teachers are using a cognitive apprenticeship approach at ACE. “It’s where if you want to be a stone mason, you work with a stone mason,” said Cirillo. “He releases the task to you when you both feel you’re ready.”
Bloom’s Taxonomy, an educational model of “create, evaluate, analyze, apply, understand and remember,” is also in the mix at ACE.
“We’ve worked diligently to release teachers from that [traditional] role and be facilitators of learning. Kids don’t just sit there and absorb knowledge. They have to understand who they are, what their strengths are and how they engage in intellectual learning.”
For 2017, 100 percent of ACE graduates made post-secondary school connections, said Cirillo: 98 percent to college, 1 percent to the military and 1 percent to full-time employment. Enrollment’s up to 204. The school has a healthy budget and a contingency fund of $1.9 million. Cost efficiencies were introduced to further reduce administrative expenses; last year enough money was saved to buy Chromebooks for all students.
Coming up at ACE: A potential dual academy, at which students can earn a college associate degree in high school; a senior-year “experienceship,” where they solve problems with real-world members of industry; a middle school program; and, eventually, a new building.