|
Dear Friends,
We are delighted in your interest in Great Hearts Academies. We hope our website provides a useful overview of our mission, our school program, and our academic results.
The success of Great Hearts is based on combining an unwavering commitment to Classical, Liberal Arts education with the understanding that our schools can constantly be improved through sound, data-driven leadership.
Our founders commissioned the name "Great Hearts" for our organization because we never want to lose sight of our ultimate purpose: to graduate great-hearted Seniors, magnanimous young men and women with the capacity for the meaningful leadership that our culture so desperately needs. Each of our graduates is characterized by a life-long commitment to the pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty.
Onward and Upward,
Dr. Daniel Scoggin, Chief Executive Officer
The mission of Great Hearts Academies is to create a network of academically rigorous, classical, liberal arts primary, middle, and high schools in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area. This network will prepare its graduates for success in the most highly selective colleges and universities in the nation, and to be leaders in creating a more philosophical, humane, and just society. Great Hearts’ public academies surpass the best public and private school options in academic outcomes, student moral formation, and comprehensive extra-curricular participation.
The ultimate goal of the organization is to graduate “great-hearted” young men and women who possess a sense of destiny and purpose that is directed to the service of the greater good. By engaging in an intense and formative dialogue with the Great Books and Ideas of Western Culture, by conversing with peers and teachers who also seek the truth, students come to understand more fully what it means to be a human being.
Based on the success of the founding academies, Great Hearts sets high goals for all of the schools in the network:
Average annual student retention rate of 90%.
90% of graduates will directly attend a four-year college or university.
The average total score of seniors on any portion of the SAT college board exams will exceed 600. Example: 1200, previous scoring system, 1800, new scoring system.
75% of high school students will complete at least one extra-curricular season each year.
90% of parents who respond will rate their academy as successful in preparing their child for college and life.
All students will pass all portions of the mandatory AIMS graduation test by the end of the 11th grade; 90% of 10th graders will meet all standards on their first attempt.
7th, 8th, and 9th graders will maintain an average national percentile score on the Terra Nova of at least 80%.
From its current size of twelve schools, Great Hearts will build a network of fifteen academies in the Phoenix Metropolitan region by 2013. At capacity, the network will graduate nearly 1000 students each year. This critical mass of highly impressive graduates will change the educational landscape in Phoenix, and the Great Hearts network will be a catalyst for reforming public education in Arizona.
Great Hearts Academies continues to actively explore regional growth in Arizona, and is considering future academies in promising markets outside of Metro Phoenix. Additionally, Great Hearts Academies is considering growth to other states as well.
|
