Achievement First reviews

Thank you for sharing your frank opinions on AF. It’s tough to know how to respond to this. I appreciate some of what you’re pushing on. There are differences to our approach vs. other schools. We have expectations for things like posture, tracking the speaker, and many classroom procedures -- and that’s not something all educators choose to do. Our schools serve primarily children of color, and so when we’re taking an approach that is different in some meaningful ways to the environment of a typical public school (including those serving predominantly white students) that can and should cause discomfort. It should provoke discussion and reflection. At AF, we welcome that discussion. We have to constantly reflect on the purpose of what we do and what we expect from kids (for the record, our scholars do move their fingers - and indeed, their entire bodies -- during the school day). We work hard to create classrooms where every kid can take part in distraction-free learning and expect a lot from our kids to make that a reality. We don’t hold those expectations lightly and if we ever think it’s not serving our kids then we have to do differently by them. Good people can have honest disagreement about what we should expect from our students (and how to go about that), and it sounds like you have clear disagreements with some of what we do. What is harder to accept, painful to read, and hurtful to consider - is the notion that we would treat or would think about our kids like “savages.” If that was what you experienced then something went grotesquely wrong and please don’t hesitate to reach out to share more (you can email me at tomkaiser@achievementfirst.org) about what that was. Our approach has to be open to criticism. How we feel about our kids is something that I would truly hope is not up for debate for anyone who has worked here, so I want to get past my defensiveness and learn more.