Upper School

Few school management organizations propose to operate urban high schools. Their trepidation is understandable: Many students arrive performing far below grade level and require intensive remediation. Worse, chronic academic failure has bred alienation and hostility to schooling. Any effective intervention is assumed to be extraordinarily costly—even before considering the expense of providing the traditional high school amenities of academic electives, extracurricular activities, and expansive athletic offerings.

Equipped with SABIS’s proven systems, however, Ascend is pursuing K-12 opportunities with confidence. Each Ascend school will at maturity include a lower, middle, and upper school; the last will offer a rigorous, common studies program (as implemented at other successful SABIS schools) and a focused offering of athletic and extracurricular programming.

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’s first high school will open in 2015.