The Shasta Experience

April 2

My name is N and I am a high-schooler working on a school project with my partner Ethan. This week, we planned out our approach to complete our project. We plan to create a survey asking people about their experiences at our school. It all started 2 months ago… our school began participating in a survey which attempts to represent the culture on campus. The problem with this survey is it is very long. This makes students bored and they give inaccurate responses. We plan to create our own survey with only one simple question: “what has been your experience at our school?“. We hope that having a shorter, more simple survey will keep students more interested. The survey will also be anonymous so students can be as personal and open as they want, giving an accurate representation of our school culture. We hope to create a website that has a collection of experiences that represent the school culture for students. It is important to value opinions so that people’s experiences can be made better. As a student, I value the opinion of my peers and enjoy making people happy. The first step in this was to give a project pitch to our class. We created a slideshow to go with our presentation and I think it went well.

May 2

Over our break, we created the survey. Previously, we planned to only have one question. However, we realized this would be impractical for collecting data. Therefore, we revised our survey to instead have 5 questions that give a more detailed response. This way, we can understand exactly what people like and dislike our their experience, and a way for them to offer improvements. On returning to school, we finalized the survey and sent it out. We did this by asking our teacher to send it to our whole class. After 3 days, about a fifth of the class has given us a variety of positive and negative responses. Our next step is to create a website to display our results, while we are waiting for people to complete the survey.

May 9

Over the past 2 weeks, we have been collecting answers to our survey asking what students thought about our school. Since we had few responses in the first couple day, at the beginning of the week I asked the mentors of our class to request that their mentees take the survey. This doubled the amount of responses that we had before. The survey shows what people think about our school by asking questions such as what they like about it and dislike. The survey also asks important questions like “do you feel that our school prepares you for college more than a traditional High School?”, to establish if people prefer our school over others. So far, there has been 42 responses. People generally agree that our school better prepares them for college in some aspects such as test taking, while also gives a disadvantage by not preparing us for the workload. Additionally, I worked on our website by adding a description about our project and its purpose to our website. I also removed unnecessary features from the webpage such as contact information and online store.

May 23,

You may have heard about the recent New York Times article criticizing Summit Learning. Many actual students who attend summit schools disagree with that opinion. That was pure coincidence which made our project look like it had a purpose. The Shasta experience started as a joke between my friends and I to explain Shasta’s unique culture. The goal of our project was always to capture the culture that surrounds Shasta. We wanted a way to accurately represent our school’s culture, without having any bias. To do this, we decided to ask the students themselves. We created a survey and sent it out to our entire class. The survey asked students about their overall experience and whether or not they think our school prepares them for college. As well as their favorite aspects of Shasta and what they think can be improved. Through our project, I learned that to create a solution you must recognize all arguments. Shasta claims to prepare students for college. However, students believe that summit does well to prepare them to get into college, but not for college itself.

It is clear that Summit believes they doing a good job at preparing its students for life; and in most aspects, this is true. According to Summit Learning, 98% of its students get accepted to a four year college. This is much higher than the national average. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 69% of high school graduates were enrolled in college in 2018. Furthermore, 55% of Summit students who were enrolled in college, go onto graduate. This is in line with the national average of 60% of college students graduating, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Summit does exactly what they claim to do. According to this data, Summit is doing an excellent job at getting its students into college, and Summit students are doing just as well as students from traditional schooling systems. Summit tries to prepare its students for college by teaching them the necessary skills to be successful in everyday life. These skills include mindset and behaviors, and pursuit of interests and goals. Summit not only teaches content, but attempts to motivate its students. But, this is just one side of the argument.

We know summit’s opinion, but what do the students think? In a poll, ⅔ of students agreed that summit prepares its students for college. When asked to explain their answer, a popular opinion from the students was that summit does well to prepare them to get into college, but not for college itself. More than 1 in 5 students believe that, among other things, the workload at shasta could be improved. A common argument for this reasoning is that students feel like they will be overwhelmed with all of the homework and studying that comes with college. The survey shows that it is undisputed that Shasta does very well to get its students into college. However, it is commonly agreed that students are not prepared for the workload of college. Nearly all Summit students go to college. However, almost half of them do not graduate. This is where the problem is: students are not being prepared for the content of college. Of course, there are many possibilities for why a student may drop out of college. However, it is a recurring problem that students complain about the work at Shasta being too casual. Students are not accustomed to college environment because they are not used to being stressed by workload or having re enforced due dates. Does this mean that students actually believe that they are not working hard enough? Compared to other high schools, no. Summit was even recognized on the Washington Post’s America’s Most Challenging High Schools List. After all, college is supposed to be challenging. However, both parties may stand to benefit if Summit can change some learning methods to give its students even more of a head start in preparing for college. Students will feel more comfortable acclimating to college life and hopefully more students will graduate from college, and and Summit may improve their reputation by being known to prepare its students to not only get into, but be successful in college as well. It not only matters what the administration believes is right or sufficient, but the people who are experiencing it.

My project showed me how to address a problem and analyse multiple points of view to create a solution which I believe to be reasonable. Personally, I believe that summit is doing a good job of preparing its students for college. College is supposed to be challenging and I don’t think there is a way to give students the same experience without completely changing the high school schooling system to be the same as college. Furthermore, my peers and I are yet to experience AP classes, which are supposedly more challenging. As a takeaway, I encourage you to improve your problem solving skills by taking a step back and viewing problems from multiple points of view and to use an educated analysis to create a solution.