The Beacon School
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The Beacon School is a formerly Alternative-assessment, now "performance-based assessment" public high school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, near LaGuardia High School. The initial founding of Beacon in 1993 was intended as an alternative to the Regents exam-based testing system in favor of portfolio-based assessment. The school's purpose was also purportedly to keep class sizes down and total student population at, or just above, one thousand students. The total population, for example, was once listed in a 1998 high school selection guide as "less than 600 students." The first graduating class of Beacon was in 1997.
Over time, Beacon was forced to accept certain aspects of the regents-based testing curriculum, and to abandon its portfolio-assessment system as the sole method of graduation, which it had been up until mid-1999. Today's Beacon utilizes, in its own words, "traditional testing ... [but] our students' progress is largely assessed through performance-based projects, completed individually and in groups. To graduate, students must present their best work to panels of teachers" 1."
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[edit] System of Classes at Beacon
Beacon's class schedule is organized into bands, designated by letters A through H. In the first through third years A specific grade is usually organized into streams, with about 25 to 30 students in each stream, while there may be several hundred in a grade. With the system as it is, the classes for each band letter in a stream are often the same for each member of the stream, providing continuity in core subjects such as math, science and English. However, some band letters are cross-stream and even cross-grade level, leading to a diverse class with multiple age groups and grade levels. The system is intended to instill a sense of stability in first-year students who have just emerged from junior high school, where most, if not all, classes contain the members of a single grade level and do not switch around from class to class. As a Beacon student advances in grade level, s/he is gradually given more opportunity to choose classes of his or her choice in the subject area of the band in question, rather than relying on his or her stream to do the selecting. This is most both a preparatory measure for the university system of class selection, where students are permitted to select all their classes themselves on an individual basis as well as a means of allowing students the ability to find what interests them among the course offerings.
Beacon also offers several Advanced Placement courses for those that have shown merit for them. These courses can count for up to six college credit hours at any university, depending on the subject(s) taken. AP courses are available currently in the Math, Language, and Science departments. This History department is notable for its stand against offering such courses, preferring to offer challenging, but heterogeniously grouped classes in the twelfth grade.
[edit] College Preparation
Beacon's in-school requirements have been significantly more stringent than those of comparable New York City public high schools since well before its forced acceptance of the Regents Exam system. There are still critics who complain that Beacon's acceptance of that system hindered, not helped, its overall college-preparatory initiatives, since Regents Exams are standardized tests that do not tailor themselves to the particular academic performance strategies and attitudes of each student the way portfolio-based systems do.
Though the yearly schedule is officially broken up into two semesters, these are not standard United States college semesters; rather, after one is over, students return to their previous classes with the same teachers for the second semester. Teachers and classes only fundamentally change with an advancement in the grade level.
[edit] Internships and Community Service
The school does not require its students to do internships, but internship opportunities are available for those that want to pursue them. A certain number of community service hours, however, is a strictly-enforced requirement of the Beacon School for graduation, and can be fulfilled however a student likes, as long as s/he clears the work with an academic advisor in writing before beginning it.
Beacon states 2:
Every tenth grader (15-16 year old) at the Beacon School takes the Community Service class in either the Fall or Spring semester. We try to provide internships that are educational for students and at the same time meaningful for the community. Beacon students reflect on their experience in written journals and in a weekly classroom seminar. Beacon students are expected to work five hours per week over a semester (about 4 months) in a site that they select. Students are let out of school at 2:00 p.m. on Tuesdays and at 2:20 p.m. on Friday to facilitate completion of these hours. However they may negotiate any work schedule that is convenient to themselves and their community service site. A total of 50 hours is required for passing credit in the course. Students who complete 75 hours are eligible for "honors" credit. Students in Community Service meet weekly in a seminar to reflect on their community service work and to explore related social issues. Some students are responsible for writing a weekly guided journal entry that is submitted to their community service seminar teacher.
[edit] Culture at the Beacon School
Despite its racial and socioeconomic diversity and its tendency to mix students in certain classes irrespective of grade level, there is still a pervasive atmosphere of cliqueiness at the school, which, like most high schools throughout the U.S. and the world, tends to self-separate people based on race, class, political beliefs or style of dress. In addition, there are some instances where cliques are not only formed on the basis of grade level -- that is, the people that came in with you when you were a firstyear-- but also by stream.
Part of this phenomenon is cured by the proliferation of clubs and activities at the Beacon School, particularly sports like Tennis, Softball, Track, Boys and Girls Bowling, Boys and Girls Basketball, Boys and Girls Ultimate, Boys and Girls Soccer, Girls Cross Country, the Fencing Team. The Boys Baseball team won the B Division PSAL championship in 2002 and 2003.
There is also After-School Theater and Studio Stage Crew, B-DAT (Beacon Drama, Art, Theater), Beacon Book Club, a Biking Club, a Rock Climbing Club, a Dance Club, a Debate club, an "End of the Tunnel Press club," a Gay/Straight Alliance, a Live Poets Society, a Mural Project/Art Club, Music Performance, a Photo Club, a Senior Committee (populated solely by, of course, Senior-class volunteers, partially responsible for graduation preparations other than yearbook such as the annual Senior Trip), a "Smackdown" Chess Club, an activist group (Students Organizing Students, or SOS), a Student Council, and others.
Politically, the school has been described as hanging largely left of center, both in its student body and faculty outlook. There is a long tradition of organizing and/or attending protests; a number of faculty as well as students participate in these events.
Educational Travel has become, in more recent years, an important part of the educational culture. Class trips have gone to destinations that include Cuba, Venezuela, South Africa, and New Orleans, where the school has an ongoing relationship with a charitable organization that is attempting to rebuild the Lower Ninth Ward of the city. As of the beginning of the 2006-2007 school year, approximately 100 students and 10 faculty had gone down to New Orleans to perform volunteer service; more trips are planned.
