205 Rockaway Parkway

Brooklyn, NY 11212
t 347-464-7600
f 347-464-7560
www.ascendlearning.org
believe :: achieve :: succeed :: ascend
Ascend Learning
June 3, 2014

Dear families of Brooklyn Ascend Middle School scholars,

The coming academic year will bring many significant and exhilarating
changes to Ascend schools. I am writing today to invite you to a session at
your childs school where you will learn about the changes we are
planning for our curriculum as we continue to improve our academic
offerings to prepare our students for success in high school and college.

Please join us on Tuesday, June 17 at 8:00am, 4:00pm or 6:00pm at
Brooklyn Ascend.

For those who are unable to join us at this session, I want to summarize for
you some of the most noteworthy changes.

Since opening our first school in 2008, we have implemented the SABIS
curriculum as our core instructional program for the following subjects:
reading, math, science, social studies and Spanish. This curriculum served
our scholars well. Our schools continuously outperformed their district
peers, and in 2012, Brooklyn Ascend Charter School performed in the top
ten charter schools in all of New York City in both ELA and math. Our
students continued to outperform their district counterparts on last years
Common Core-aligned assessments, but nonetheless, over the course of
this past academic year we have engaged in a painstaking reassessment
of our curricula to make certain that we are serving our students in an
academically rigorous and intellectually engaging fashion, and with
curricula that matches the elevated expectations of the Common Core.

We have come to believe that the Common Core standards require that
we do much more than what we have done in past years to respond to
State revisions to standards and expected performance levels. We can no
longer rely on supplementing our core instructional program, SABIS.
Instead, responding appropriately to the richer, deeper Common Core
standards requires that we rethink the structure of our school day and
revise the approaches and the amounts of time devoted to our academic
subjects. Since December, we have begun making just such revisions, and
are already enlivened and optimistic about the results. Many of you are
likely aware of some programmatic changes we have made to our school
day as we move away from SABIS and toward the program we will
implement fully in the fall. For example, you may have heard your child
talking about Math Stories or perhaps Literature Circles if that latter
program is new to your school. Early reactions from teachers and scholars
are quite positive, and our data demonstrate to us that these changes are
already having a strong positive impact on student performance.





The new school day at Ascend schools will include the following exciting highlights:
1) A more varied pedagogy during the school day. Until now, we have implemented a
fairly teacher-centered program with a heavy emphasis on direct instruction. In the
new school year, your child will experience more inquiry learning in math and science
and far more discussion in reading and writing.
2) Instructional programs that are fully aligned to the Common Core standards in all
grades.
3) Less emphasis on testing as part of the learning process. The SABIS program included a
great deal of testing. In our new school year, we will reduce testing in our classrooms
by at least one-third. This will allow us to continue assessing carefully your students
progress, but permit an increase in instructional time in our classrooms.
4) Small group guided reading instruction, and Ascends Literature Circles program at all
of our lower schools.
5) An expansion of the Humanities Program in our middle schools to more periods a day.
6) A shorter school day for most of our scholars. Most scholars will now be dismissed at
4:00pm, while some scholars will stay in school until our previous dismissal time. This may
sound counterintuitive. Why would we decrease the length of the school day if our
goal is to make certain our students are as prepared as possible for academic success?
The answer has two parts. First, we are modifying and improving the use of time during
the regular school day. For example, reducing assessment by 1/3 will add between
one and two hours of instruction each week. Second, the students who will stay longer
will be only those students for whom our data indicate additional instructional time
would be beneficial. You will be notified as soon as possible about your students
dismissal time by your school director. For now though, please prepare for the fact that
your childs dismissal time may be 4:00pm next year.

Finally, we wanted to share one more piece of information with you about Ascends growth.
In the fall of 2014, we will open one new elementary school - Central Brooklyn Ascend Charter
School - and launch the middle school of Brownsville Ascend. Central Brooklyn Ascend will
open with a smaller cohort than that which inaugurated other Ascend schools, and will be
incubated at the Pitkin Theater, benefiting from the strength and experience of Brownsville
Ascend. In the fall of 2015, we will not open any new schools, but will instead focus on the
natural growth of our schools at the upper grades, including the first Ascend high school.

The adaptation to the Common Core standards is not a simple one. This substantial alteration
of educational standards is affecting all of New York City, New York State, and the rest of the
country. We applaud New York State for its early adoption of this intellectually challenging
educational model, and commit ourselves wholeheartedly to ensuring that our scholars will
master the skills necessary to succeed. But it is not something that we are likely to master in just
one year; we should instead think about this adjustment to the Common Core as a two to
three-year project.

Again, we hope that you can join us at your childs school to hear more about these changes
in depth at the time identified above. If you cannot, please know that we will continue to do
all that we can to keep you informed as the summer progresses. As always, your childs school
will hold mandatory family orientation sessions in late August. This will be another opportunity
to hear about the exciting year ahead!




In partnership,

Brandon Sorlie Zelda Washington
Chief Academic Officer School Director