Narrative
Arthur Academy
An Academically Focused Public Charter Elementary School

I. Vision, Mission and Objectives

The VISION of Arthur Academy is to establish a school that focuses on traditional academic disciplines that builds intellectual capacities and character attributes in all its students. It will be a school that combines traditional educational values with the most advanced research-based methods, especially as they pertain to children at-risk of school failure.

Arthur Academy will be known for its focus on traditional values in terms of the aims of the school and for its use of the most advanced non-traditional research-based methods and programs available as a means of attaining these aims. Arthur Academy will also be known for its ability to teach all students successfully, regardless of their background experiences and/or their learning differences.

The MISSION of Arthur Academy is to ensure the educational achievement and academic competency of all its students at an accelerated rate. In this effort, Arthur Academy wishes to become an effective and innovative school model and to provide the community with an alternative approach to teaching children.
Role of Charter Schools

One way of finding exceptional approaches to meeting today's higher demands for achievement for all students is to implement and use an innovative model that has accumulated evidence of being very promising at a school-wide level. For most school districts this is very difficult to do. Most public schools have difficulty implementing innovative approaches faithfully and accurately throughout a school in order to test the approach and then demonstrate the model. They usually do not assess frequently enough to evaluate a given approach.

Charter schools can play an important role in this effort when viewed as "lab" schools. In this role, they can help find, test and demonstrate high performance, innovative approaches that promise to bring unprecedented student success relative to new demanding benchmarks. Fortunately, given the state of research at the elementary school level, these schools do not need to be new experiments. They simply would be applying and replicating previously researched approaches packaged within a single school. There are ample amounts of research that provide a high promise of meeting these goals. One job of a Charter school is to accurately and clearly define and implement a promising research-based approach in order to provide further evidence relative the strengths and weaknesses of a particular innovative model.

Arthur Academy has identified a particular innovative approach to teaching and schooling that is well founded and, for which, there is reason to believe that it can become an effective school model. The Mastery Learning Institute would like to establish this model on a small school-wide basis under typical conditions within the David Douglas community with the expectation of becoming a demonstration of one effective school model from which other schools in the area can learn. In so doing, this school can play a part in the overall efforts of school improvement towards meeting today's extraordinary demands.

As an additional benefit of this effort, establishing an effective innovative model provides the community an additional educational alternative as a choice for parents.