Lee Academy: A school focused on closing the achievement gap
HGSE Lecturer Richard Weissbourd
The achievement gap is already evident when children enter kindergarten. The Lee Academy, a pilot school in Boston, works to close the achievement gap by enrolling children at the age of 3 and focusing on literacy and social-emotional development in a high-quality learning environment. HGSE lecturer Richard Weissbourd has helped to shape the practices of this innovative school. In these video clips, Weissbourd describes some of the core elements of the school's design.
The Lee Academy was founded by Richard Weissbourd, Jake Murray, a policy analyst at the Harvard Children's Initiative, and Lesley Ryan and Jennifer Friedman, two former HGSE students. Richard Weissbourd explains the rationale, and the ingredients, of high-quality early childhood education as a strategy for closing the achievement gap.
Video Clip: Richard Weissbourd Part 1
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One core strategy at the Lee Academy is to create parent engagement opportunities with real depth. Rather than involving only small subsets of parents, the school tries to engage a wide range of families, including parents of children who are struggling most at the school. The Lee Academy also has a new program that engages fathers in promoting their children's learning.
Engagement efforts focus on supporting learning at home. For example, the school is considering developing a home visiting component to improve parents' capacity to promote children's language and literacy at home. Encouraging parents to talk and read with their children is an especially important component of closing the early achievement gap in literacy. (For more insight on creating family engagement programs that are linked to learning, see "Popping the question: How can schools engage families in education?", a Usable Knowledge article with HGSE lecturer Karen Mapp.)
A second core feature of the school is its focus on children's social-emotional development. It is clear that children with behavior problems, as well as those with many other kinds of social and emotional troubles such as depression and anxiety, have a difficult time learning in school. Social and emotional problems can in turn disrupt the learning of all children in a classroom. The Lee Academy is trying both to weave social-emotional development throughout its curriculum, and to promote social and emotional growth by focusing on teacher-student, student-student, and teacher-teacher relationships.
In the next clip, Richard Weissbourd introduces the third core feature of the school, its focus on maintaining a vibrant professional climate for its teachers. He then describes the risk and resilience framework underlying the school's practices, and strategies to make the Lee Academy a model that can be replicated elsewhere.
Video Clip: Richard Weissbourd Part 2
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By Maria Fusaro, doctoral student in Human Development and Psychology at HGSE
Find out more about the Lee Academy by visiting the school's Web site: http://boston.k12.ma.us/LeeAcademy/index.html
