Graduation

This weekend is my favorite of the year – graduation. It began on Friday evening with eighth grade graduation for Independence Charter Middle School, my first charter school. The excitement continued with graduation ceremonies for Harding Charter Preparatory High School. Both school’s ceremonies were a marvel to watch and all of the students are to be congratulated.

The stories that I heard about the Harding Charter Prep seniors, their challenges and accomplishments continue to both amaze and inspire me. I often talk about last year’s class, whose accomplishments led Newsweek magazine to rank the school in the top 200 high schools in the nation.

So what about this year’s class? Some of the statistics and accolades are still coming in but what we know so far is truly amazing. The class had 80 students and 98 percent are going to college. About 70 percent are the first in their family to go to college, and over 30 percent are the first in their family to graduate from high school. The students earned, to date, $1.75 million in scholarships, but more notifications are coming in. Their ACT composite score was 22.7, which is above the national average. The school administered an astonishing 427 Advanced Placement End-of-Instruction examinations to 125 students. The pass rate has yet to be reported but that is nearly double the number of tests administered to the entire Oklahoma City School District.

Those results might be expected at a high school in an upper-income suburb, but the school’s free/reduced lunch rate still hovers around 56 percent. Four of the students in this year’s senior class were homeless, and all of them are going to college.

Each year a scholarship is given in memory of my late husband, John. It honors a student who has persevered through difficulty while completing the rigorous course of study at Harding. The finalists wrote essays about adversity and how it shaped their character. The essays told stories of homelessness, crushing poverty, parents or family members with drug or alcohol addictions, families torn apart by divorce and violence, and physical and emotional illnesses. These students faced challenges greater than most adults have faced, yet in each case, they made it through. Many of them credited Harding Charter Prep faculty, their churches, and parents of fellow students with helping them succeed.

I felt privileged to be a part of the ceremony and to watch the students accept their diplomas. I looked at the faculty and was in awe of what they had achieved. We hear, too often, that kids can’t learn when they are caught up in poverty, broken homes, and drug addiction. For those kids, we are told that school work is too difficult and if we make it more rigorous, then the dropout rate will soar. Excuses for poor performance have become the norm and expectations for students have been lowered.

This way of thinking must end.

At Harding and at all schools of excellence in our state, when expectations are high for student performance, kids meet those expectations. At Harding, we operate under the following philosophy; “No excuses – period. If you work hard, you will succeed and we will move heaven and earth, but you’re going to college!” By the work that is done day in and day out at Harding Charter Preparatory High School, children’s lives are changed forever.

It’s time we applied that same philosophy to our state’s education system.