SABIS Educational System
Steady advances in student outcomes can only be achieved if students’ knowledge is built, from the earliest grades, like a house, floor by floor, with the certainty that every precursor concept has been demonstrably mastered before the next is taught.
American students, commonly promoted grade to grade without mastering essential skills at each level, rapidly fall behind their international peers. Learning gaps form that impair their acquisition of successively more difficult material.
The syndrome is most acute in our large urban school systems. By the time students reach high school, many are disaffected with schooling and, in alarming numbers, drop out.
SABIS, an international operator of English-language schools, offers a remedy: a systematic approach to building skills and knowledge in each subject, where students learn point by point, establishing a solid foundation on which to build successive levels of knowledge, from the basics in kindergarten to Advanced Placement classes in high school. Children of ordinary abilities master difficult material, feel successful in school, and gain the discipline and confidence that will carry them through college.
At a SABIS school in Springfield, Massachusetts, serving 1,500 racially and economically diverse students in K-12, every senior has gained college admission in each of the past seven years. Of the students enrolled in the school for at least two years, 100% passed the English portion of the MCAS (considered among the most rigorous state tests in the nation) and 99% passed the math portion of the test on their first try. Compared to the SABIS school, the percentage of Springfield district tenth-graders found proficient on the exam was 48 percentage points lower in English and 58 percentage points lower in math. Still more impressive is that the SABIS school’s low-income and minority tenth-graders approached universal proficiency in reading and math, beating district and statewide averages and literally closing the achievement gap. The waiting list, of nearly 2,700 students, is the largest of any Massachusetts charter school. In 2008, Newsweek named the SABIS school one of three urban "top U.S. high schools" in Massachusetts.
Ascend Learning has licensed the SABIS design for its own schools. A tightly interlocking array of intellectual property that dramatically increases teacher productivity, the SABIS educational system includes a detailed, college-preparatory curriculum linked to an electronic assessment system, innovative pedagogical protocols, tools for building a transformative school culture, and state-of-the-art school management software.
