Atlanta's Ben Franklin Academy Gets Students Back on Track

"We were deadlocked. We knew it - he knew it,"says the mother of 18-year-old Darius (not his real name) as she reflects on the memory of a son who very nearly failed out of his urban high school in Decatur, Ga. As a last grasp at hope, Darius enrolled in a new program called "Back on Track," that joins the public Decatur High School with a nearby innovative private school, Ben Franklin Academy (BFA), run by Headmaster Wood Smethurst, Ed.D.'70, and Dean of Studies Martha Burdette.

"Ben Franklin Academy gave him hope," says Darius' mother. "He felt like the teachers cared about him personally." Darius graduated with his class, but he also graduated with a new sense of possibility and a new vision of what he can be and do with his life. Now in junior college, Darius' hopes appear to have grown as well. He looks forward to a career in the Air Force.

Ben Franklin Academy is like no other school either Darius or his peers have ever seen before. The houses and rooms are comfortable and homey feeling. The teachers are caring and encouraging, and all their teaching is done one-on-one or in very small groups. There are no traditional classrooms or desks, no bells or buzzers. Instead, there are gardens, cats, kitchens, and a seemingly unlimited supply of free snacks. It seems more like a vacation spot than a school, but learning here is serious business - and under the constant, focused attention of his teachers, Darius' confidence grew, and he began to excel.

More than four years ago, BFA accepted the challenge by an Atlanta foundation to partner with Decatur High School (DHS), a public secondary school with approximately 770 students in downtown Decatur, Ga., to decrease its dropout rate and increase its diploma rate. Together, City Schools of Decatur and Ben Franklin Academy created the "Back on Track" program, in which BFA offers individualized instruction at its own campus to a group of students whom the Decatur High School faculty considered almost hopelessly "off track" for graduation. Now in its fourth year, the "Back on Track" program is well established and is proving to be highly successful. So far, the program has been able to help 110 juniors and seniors, all of whom were severely behind in their work.

Despite the hurdles, and due in large part to the commitment of both Ben Franklin and Decatur leaders, the first three and a half years of the program have been quite successful with the great majority of participating students having graduated with their classes or shortly thereafter. Overall, Decatur High School's diploma rate has jumped from 78.4 percent in 2005 to 89.3 percent in 2007, well above the 71 percent that is the average graduation rate for Georgia public schools. The Back on Track program has the stated goal of helping every student graduate from high school.

A Powerful Collaboration
Burdette and Smethurst have found that their school's quality and Montessori-like educational philosophy and practices work well for students from varying socio-economic conditions and of varying abilities and skill levels. BFA believes that nearly all students want to make progress, and almost all want to graduate. When the opportunity came to try their model with the group of students from nearby Decatur High School, they jumped at the chance.

"The success of this public-private collaboration -- the "Back on Track" program -- could not have been possible without the powerful and creative help of the City Schools of Decatur public schools' administration," says Smethurst.

City Schools of Decatur Superintendent Phyllis Edwards first heard about BFA from a Decatur school board member who knew Burdette and Smethurst. "We realized that we shared the same philosophy about helping students, and they expressed an interest in partnership," says Edwards. "I asked them quite frankly, 'I know what's in it for us and our students, but what's in it for Ben Franklin?'"

"For BFA, partnering with Decatur High School has provided a way to expand our model beyond our building and to begin to replicate it within other schools," explains Smethurst. "Taking students from another school into our program is a strong first step. As a research institution, we're also delighted to add these students to our population. They help us to learn more about our instructional approach and our work in failure prevention. We want our students to succeed in school, to learn effectively, and to graduate."

Every afternoon for the past three and a half years, 25 juniors and seniors from DHS have ridden a school bus to Ben Franklin Academy for an afternoon of intensive, one-on-one instruction. Ben Franklin teaches all of its students in this way, customizing instruction and teaching methods for each individual student. This approach allows BFA to determine what a student knows and what a student doesn't know, and then decide on the best way to help that student learn. The goal for the Decatur students has been for the seniors to complete graduation requirements and graduate from DHS, and for the junior students to catch up and return to DHS full time.

Each year, prospective Decatur candidates for the program are identified by the DHS teachers and administration and are interviewed by both schools' counselors. Like all Ben Franklin students, the applying students have to want to be at BFA, have to want to attend, want to graduate, and they must agree to BFA's Four Rules which apply to everyone from the President of the Board of Trustees down to the cats:

1. Do your own work and avoid interfering with the work of others. Be gentle with the equipment, furnishings, and animals. Be sensitive to the needs, concerns, property, and feelings of the rest of us.
2. Do what teachers tell you.
3. No fighting, no hate speech, or threats. No weapons, illegal drugs, tobacco or tobacco-related products, and no alcohol on school property.
4. Don't let the cats out.

Preparing teachers at both schools was important. While BFA faculty were accustomed to teaching students who had previously come from public schools, the fact that the DHS students came all at once as a large group made the transition somewhat harder for the students and for the BFA teachers. Initially, many of the students struggled to adapt to the BFA school culture, but gradually they got it. For Decatur teachers, there were a good many questions about why and how students could succeed in the BFA approach when they had not done well in their previous classrooms. The answer to this is that often those youngsters are quite bright, in many ways, but they do not take well to large group instruction. They often thrive when taught individually - and this can be demonstrated with proof of successful work and high test scores.

Keys to Success
Burdette and Smethurst believe that one of the reasons that some of these students each year have struggled in their traditional classrooms was that they may have had learning difficulties that had not been detected or addressed in earlier years, letting the students fall further and further behind. As part of their enrollment in the program, students who needed psychoeducational testing were evaluated by outside learning psychologists whose fees were paid by the grant. These students have then been able to receive increasingly appropriate educational accommodations at BFA and in college.

With coaching and practice, the DHS students have learned how to manage their time and their academic work better than expected. "It takes a while each year for our students to adjust to the constraints of quieter, smaller learning spaces," says Burdette. "They have to see the value of quiet and purposeful one-to-one work with a teacher and the goal of mastery of the subjects."

The key to the transition was, as always, building individual relationships with each student, especially through BFA's advisory system. At BFA each student works closely with an advisor who gets to know the advisees well. These faculty advisors help their students to plan their work and to evaluate their own performance. Advisors follow through with their advisees, personally and academically, to graduation and college admissions. Once the bridge of trust is established between advisors and the students, then other teachers can make more progress with students as well. As students experience more and more success and trust, they begin to raise the expectations they have for themselves. The process repeats itself, and students see other kids becoming successful. As the BFA/Decatur partnership is demonstrating, academic success is not necessarily a matter of family income or social class. It is, in BFA's view, a matter of sustained work and cooperation. It is axiomatic in BFA's work that all high school coursework can be taught successfully to any average student who is willing to work.

Numbers, however, do not tell the full story. BFA's true effect can be heard in the voices of the students, their friends, their parents, and grandparents. When asked what they liked best and least about the program, responses ranged from an 18-year-old female student saying that she liked best "the fast-paced learning, the teachers, and the food," to a senior girl reporting that the program "made me feel better about myself. It made me look at school very differently, and I want to go to college now." Another senior boy said, simply, "It saved my life."