Not a Second To Waste
Fast-growing UP Education Network has an innovative approach to educating low-income students that starts with not wasting a second of valuable learning time…
Editor’s note: UP Education Network operates five schools in Massachusetts, including two in Lawrence, where the author of this piece taught. While the school she describes is operated like a charter school, it is a public 6-8 middle school that students are zoned to attend. UP recently received $4.3 million from the US Department of Education in order to replicate and expand its high-performing model.
I was hired to teach at UP Academy in Lawrence, MA starting in August of 2014. Everyone on staff had a duty and mine was to stand in the girl’s bathroom and make sure that the students were leaving quickly and that they only used two pumps of soap and took two paper towels. If they used more I was supposed to give them a demerit. Everything is timed, and teachers walk around with timers. Kids are timed when they go to the bathroom and when they have their snack so that they aren’t wasting valuable learning time. At orientation, which lasted a month before the start of schools, we spent an entire day on how to pass papers and how to get the students to compete against each other as Not a Second To Waste | EduShyster:
