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University Public Schools Initiative
We are not just an old-way university, training undergraduates and graduate students to enter the workforce in Arizona. Not at all! We are participating in an educational continuum that starts at birth and continues through the last course you take, whether that’s when you are 18 or when you are 80. As a part of that continuum, ASU has a responsibility to bolster the other educational resources available to our students in this state, and to make sure that our current educational system is relevant to the contemporary needs of our students. The current architecture of Arizona’s education is based on a design from the agricultural age, and operates in the same way that education does in the Midwest, despite radically different surroundings. This shouldn’t be the case. We are in a different time and place, and ASU research should and can be translated in a scaled way.
The University Public Schools Initiative, or UPSI is a plan to create a top-tier public school on or very close to each of the four ASU campuses. These schools will allow ASU to be in the trenches, learning more than ever about the challenges of the PreK-12 public school system in this state, and figuring out ways to effect systemic change. It will also allow students, teachers, schools and districts to be engaged in this process, learning and sharing and helping to direct the changes that will immediately affect them.
President Crow spearheaded this initiative at its inception. UI helped by putting together an advisory team, with representation from all four campuses and from experts on the school system. That team laid the framework for what UPSI could become. They did research, by visiting schools all across the nation, some with university affiliations, some with focus areas that were of interest to the team. They also held meetings to find out what kind of community interest there was in this project. UI worked with Professor Emeritus Bruce Merrill, who conducts polls, to carry out a feasibility study. After developing interview questions with UI and Gene Garcia, ASU’s Vice President for Education Partnerships, Bruce interviewed school-age parents in the various districts affiliated with each campus. UI helped to fill out the charter application; research governance structures for the schools; compare funding models; and research everything they could that would help ASU figure out how to really make this happen.
And now, it’s happening. UI worked with Vice President Gene Garcia in a national search for an executive director and hired Larry Pieratt in 2006. The initiative is now housed in the Office of Education Partnerships, where it will be institutionalized and remain fully connected to ASU. UI continues to be involved by providing guidance to the UPSI team, assisting with networking and communications, and by sharing the research we have done over the last few years. The first of the four schools is slated to open in fall 2008.
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