Maria is 15 years old. She holds a 20-hour-a-week job that provides a critical part of her family's monthly budget and has to work her high school schedule around that. She starts her days at school at 8:00 a.m. then heads to a nearby office for her minimum wage job from 1:00-5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday.
Sixteen-year-old Steven, among his care-giving responsibilities, has to manage school. Because his mother works full-time, Steven is responsible for taking care of his three-year-old brother until noon on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays until his grandmother can take over. Steven's obligations to his family mean that he has had to de-prioritize school.
While Maria and Steven are fictional, they represent thousands of students in Los Angeles County. Young people with incredible potential, energy, and commitment -- and crushing adult-sized obligations. One third of high school dropouts leave school because of these kind of obligations; their decisions are catastrophic for their future lives and our society.
USC Hybrid High School will change that.
The mission of Hybrid High is ambitious: graduate 100 percent of its high-need students prepared for academic and career success by dramatically increasing their access to school—10 hours per day, seven days per week, and year-round—on the same tax dollar as other public schools. According to USC's Dr. David Dwyer, "This can only be accomplished if we rethink high school from the ground up and leverage technology to provide personalized instruction, track and direct student achievement, and allow flexible scheduling to accommodate students' other responsibilities."
Dwyer holds the Katzman/Ernst Chair in Educational Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship at USC's Rossier School of Education. Established in 2008, the designation alone was unique among Schools of Education, where looking at the role of teachers and schools hadn't changed much for decades. But under Rossier Dean Karen Symms Gallagher, innovation became a rallying cry.
"We are not your grandmother's school of education," states Gallagher. "We are looking at new, different, and disruptive ways of re-making K-12 schools in order to meet the 21st-century needs of students. Our first departure from tradition was to offer the first online Master of Arts in Teaching degree program at a major research university. The program mirrors the rigor and standards of the on-campus program, a bold effort to better achieve Rossier's mission to impact urban education locally, nationally, and globally. The USC Hybrid High project will be our second bold experiment and gives us the opportunity to focus on students themselves."
The new charter school is in the process of securing its first home in USC's South Los Angeles neighborhood. The school will grow to serve 650 9th- through 12th-graders who are likely to drop out of school without significant intervention. The typical student is likely to be Hispanic or African American, living in poverty, speaking English as a second language, and falling drastically behind in math or language arts proficiency. As the school demonstrates student success, USC will open additional schools in the Los Angeles area and then in other urban centers nationally.
At USC Hybrid High, Dwyer says, "students will find a caring environment focused both on academic and social/emotional growth from both in-person and online teachers." They will work in school on digital courses and projects and find just-in-time support from an instructional team of teachers, reading and language specialists, instructional aides, and online subject matter experts. Teachers will also advise students weekly, customizing schedules – including Saturdays and Sundays – to personalize instructional plans so that students are working at their own pace on the most beneficial learning tasks. Every student is expected to master the school's rigorous college-preparatory curriculum in order to graduate college- or career-ready.
The planning phase is over and the focus is now on opening the school: finalizing and equipping the facility, hiring staff, and recruiting students. While the school will exist on public tax dollars, it does need crucial start-up support to launch. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is an early supporter of the school, and Dwyer and Gallagher are convinced that this innovative model will continue to attract funding from philanthropists committed to shaking up the status quo.
"The nation cannot afford to lose the Stevens and Marias," says Dwyer. "It is our responsibility as educators to build learning environments where they can and will succeed."
Barbara Goen is Assistant Dean of Communications at the USC Rossier School of Education.