I’ve written about the personalized learning lab school we launched while I served as the executive director of a Houston-based educational non-profit. In 2015, our lab school partnered with a Houston area school district to apply for a XQ Super School grant. The hope was to take what we were learning in our lab school and apply it to traditional secondary school practices. We came close to winning “the prize,” but couldn’t move beyond the semi-finalist level.
We were bummed right out.
Recently, I decided to investigate how the XQ Super School Project is doing these days. What I found is interesting.
The XQ Super School Project was started by Lorraine Powell Jobs in 2016. The Super School Project, a massive idea competition that Powell Jobs invested $100 million in — double the amount originally intended— to get teams of educators to imagine how they’d reshape high school, making it more relevant to helping students succeed in today’s world.
Today, the XQ Super School Project is working with 57 high schools across the country, including district work inside New York City, Washington D.C., and the state of Rhode Island.
According to the XQ website, “Every XQ school is unique, but they all share a commitment to equity through fundamental principles that defy traditional approaches to high school education and put students first. XQ schools are:
– Mission Driven: Operating under a unifying set of values.
– Engaged: Actively fostering curiosity and the drive to think differently.
– Empowering: Giving kids the space to learn their way.
– Connecting: Building positive relationships between students and adults.
– Productive: Making smart use of resources like time, space and technology.
– Collaborative: Partnering with students, educators, families, community leaders to drive action.
This seems to be “the XQ promise.”
But a 2019 Chalkbeat article raised questions whether “the XQ promise” was really a promise or something less – worst yet a lie. According to the 2019 article,
“Four winning XQ teams haven’t opened schools as planned, though, and their struggles underscore the headwinds XQ faces in its effort to show that high school can be reinvented with enough money and the right ideas.”
“Compass Academy in Denver, for example, received an XQ grant to help it expand from middle school to high school, but it’s had to put those plans on hold. The existing middle school earned the district’s lowest rating for its first two years, and the Denver school board won’t allow Compass to add grades until it improves.”
“Compass’ executive director Marcia Fulton said the school is working to do just that, but also argued that the evaluation, which focuses on test scores, gives short shrift to the school’s work on social-emotional skills and bilingual education for its mostly Hispanic students.”
“XQ has continued to back them. ‘They rolled up their sleeves,’ Fulton said, asking, ‘What else can we be doing? What supports do you need?’”
Today, XQ is no longer a supporter of the Compass Academy.
Chalkbeat continued in 2019 to report,
“Meanwhile, in Somerville, Massachusetts, a winning XQ team known as Powderhouse Studios saw its proposal for a 40-student school be unanimously rejected in March by the local school board. The superintendent cited potential financial strain on the district.”
“Alec Resnick, the head of Powderhouse, says the team is considering potential next steps, including reapplying to the district or bringing some of the ideas elsewhere. A spokesperson for XQ said the grant to Powderhouse was no longer active.”
“In Oakland, where XQ itself is based, the charter network Summit Public Schools won $10 million to open a school there. It scrapped that plan just months later, and the XQ money ended up supporting an existing Summit school in Daly City, California.”
“’It became a situation of where it was like, wait, what’s going on here? What do you mean there’s going to be a new charter school?’ said James Harris, an Oakland school board member. Summit had not garnered enough support locally, he said, particularly as debates were swirling in the city about whether the district already had too many schools.”
“A spokesperson for Summit declined to comment on its experience in Oakland. XQ has since awarded a separate $10 million grant to Latitude High School, a charter school there that opened last year.”
“Finally, Design Thinking Academy, a charter school in Delaware, announced in May that it was shutting down at the end of this school year amid declining enrollment, among other challenges. XQ terminated its partnership with the school in April after issuing only $2.1 million of the awarded $10 million.”
“’XQ has been very concerned about DTA’s lack of progress toward implementing the Team’s Super School Application,’ CEO Ali wrote in a letter to the school’s leadership, posted by a local blogger. ‘DTA is not using innovative approaches to curriculum and teaching.’”
“Are these sorts of setbacks simply to be expected for schools looking to shake things up?”
“’To have that kind of mortality rate at the end of three years — that would strike me as high given that huge amount of money,’ said Larry Cuban, an emeritus professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education who has written about innovation in education.”
The 2019 Chalkbeat article concludes by stating,
“The extent to which these schools’ practices spread depends on a lot of factors, including how different and how successful they really are. Some of the XQ schools are spending their money on more bread-and-butter concerns like building renovations, lowering class sizes, or hiring additional staff members while the school is growing.”
“Other schools nationwide have struggled to implement some of the ideas embraced by XQ schools, like competency-based education, and there’s limited research on whether these concepts will actually improve academic outcomes.”
“Cuban said there’s another hurdle to spreading these ideas: the appeal of more common structures, which he calls the “grammar” of schooling. ‘It’s very hard to change the grammar of schooling because most people in America want to keep it the way it is,’ he said.”
Recently it was announced that research group MDRC, in partnership with the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, is leading three main studies for XQ schools: (1) an impact evaluation of XQ high schools across the country; (2) a qualitative study of new school start-up and redesign in New York City and Rhode Island, with a specific focus on learning about the design teams and how they operate; and (3) administration and analysis of a student survey focused on students’ socio-emotional well-being designed by XQ, the CREDO Institute at Stanford, and MDRC.
Promise or lie? Stay tuned.
Til tomorrow. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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