The different histories and cultures of the partner schools provide the Adam Institute with an opportunity to learn how to help different schools develop into powerful centers of learning for all students.
The Adam Institute’s network of partner schools is centered in Main South, an ethnically and linguistically richly diverse urban neighborhood in Worcester, Massachusetts. Partner schools represent the neighborhood’s diversity fully. Woodland Academy in fact has had the largest proportion of English learners in Massachusetts for several years. The partner schools reflect a wide range of the challenges and possibilities of reform, and so an opportunity for co-learning and cross-fertilization with the Adam Institute. All of the partner schools collaborate in support of the Master of Arts in Teaching program, each hosting a cohort of students annually.
University Park Campus School (UPCS) stands tall in the history of Adam Institute work. UPCS was co-developed with Clark in the 1990s to provide new educational opportunity to Main South students and to enhance the revitalization work in the neighborhood. UPCS teachers and principal are graduates of our teacher education programs, its students almost universally qualify for postsecondary education, and it serves as a national model of effective urban schooling and partnership.
Neighborhood Innovation School Cluster
UPCS became a model for the development of the “Innovation School” option in Massachusetts legislation, An Act Relative to the Achievement Act, in 2010. Subsequently, four partner schools, including UPCS, have qualified as innovation schools with Adam Institute support. This status has a bearing on the flexibility the schools have in certain areas, including hiring, and enhances their ability to work with the Adam Institute in partnership.
Closely related to the work of UPCS, since 2012 the Institute has strived to be a supportive partner in the effort to rebuild culture and practice at Claremont Academy. The institute supports the efforts of the school’s leaders and teachers to develop practice and a college-going culture at Claremont. The institute envisions Claremont and the three innovation schools in the immediate neighborhood (Goddard Elementary, Woodland Academy, and UPCS) as the basis for a closely networked, neighborhood-based educational campus.
As teacher and then principal of University Park Campus School, I came to understand that the value of this partnership went beyond the teachers and administrators. Students were also the beneficiary. From the beginning, the students in our neighborhood felt connected to the University. It was a place where they felt they belonged. They were welcomed there, and came to see themselves as college-worthy well before they applied. Students went to the library, to the athletic center; they played football in the President’s backyard. The lines separating the University’s campus and ours were so blurred we all felt at home no matter where we were.
In the late 1990s I was a Clark University sophomore, doing observations for an undergraduate education course that took me to University Park Campus School, a new neighborhood school founded by Clark and the Worcester Public Schools. Now I am that school’s principal.