Green Dot’s school model is focused on graduating students and preparing them for college, leadership and life. There are two main components of Green Dot’s school model, the Six Tenets of High-Performing Schools and Recommended Practices. The Six Tenets are a set of six core principles which all Green Dot schools must follow.
The Green Dot model should work in any educational context, because our principles are taken from and embodied in all high-performing schools. Consider a small private school. There are very high expectations of students, families, and staff. Everyone is held accountable for results. Decisions are made at the school, not at some far-flung district office; indeed there is no district office, of course. Funding (whether that is $25,000 private school tuition or $7,200 per student public charter school funding) is spent at the school site. Parents are highly involved. The school is open long after class hours for activities. If a school like that works for the wealthy, it can also work for the less well-to-do - and all on current public funding, even in California.
The Six Tenets of High-Performing Schools
1. Small, Safe, Personalized Schools
All Green Dot schools are small (no more than 525 students when fully developed), giving each student the best chance of success. Small schools are safe, help ensure that no students fall through the cracks, and allow students to receive the personalized attention they need to learn effectively. Classes at each school will be kept as small as financially possible with a target student to teacher ratio of 22:1.
2. High Expectations for All Students
Green Dot schools are centered on high expectations for all students and every student takes a rigorous college-prep curriculum that meets the University of California (UC) A-G requirements. Green Dot believes that all students should be prepared to attend a four-year university after high school if they so choose. Extensive intervention and support programs are offered to help students master the challenging college-prep curriculum.
3. Local Control with Extensive Professional Development and Accountability
Principals and teachers own critical decisions at their schools related to budgeting, hiring and curriculum customization. While the Home Office provides Recommended Practices to schools, principals and teachers have ultimate autonomy to decide whether to follow those Recommended Practices or take different approaches. Comprehensive professional development is delivered to principals and teachers to ensure that they make effective decisions related to instruction and management. Green Dot schools invest far more time and money into quality professional development than traditional public schools.
Local control works in Green Dot’s school model because schools and all stakeholders within them are held accountable for student results. If students in a particular school or classroom are not performing up to expectations, then teachers and principals are held accountable and local control can be taken away. Green Dot’s accountability system defines quarterly and annual performance targets for each school and teacher as well as the period of time that a school or teacher can under-perform before Green Dot’s Education Team will intervene with supports and/or take away a school’s local control.
4. Parent Participation
Green Dot is committed to actively integrating parents/guardians into all aspects of their students’ education experiences. Parents are required to give at least 35 hours of service annually at all Green Dot schools and a wide variety of service opportunities are made available. Education programs are provided to new parents to help them learn the best ways to support their children’s educations.
5. Maximize Funding to the Classroom
Green Dot’s organization is centered on getting more money into the classroom to enable principals and teachers to effectively serve kids. Green Dot’s Home Office incorporates best practices from the private and public sectors to maximize efficiency and drive dollars towards activities that directly impact kids. Each school keeps 94 cents of every dollar of public funds allocated to it. The remaining 6% is paid to the Green Dot Home Office as a management fee for providing back-office support functions such as finance & accounting, facilities & operations support, and data & knowledge management.
6. Keep Schools Open Later
Facilities of Green Dot schools are kept open until at least 5:00 pm daily to provide students with safe, enriching after school programs and to allow community groups offering quality services to the neighborhood to use the facilities. Keeping schools open later accommodates the schedules of working families as they know where their children are until they get off work. Allowing community groups to use school facilities helps ensure that the local neighborhood takes ownership and responsibility for the school.
Recommended Practices
Recommended Practices are best practices in areas such as curriculum, interventions, professional development, parent participation and operations, which the Green Dot Home Office provides to each of its schools and strongly encourages them to follow. Schools receive comprehensive, year-round, training in these practices. Green Dot firmly believes in the principle of local control and does not require its schools to follow the Recommended Practices. If a school fails to meet performance expectations, however, then the Home Office will require some or all of its Recommended Practices to be followed at that particular school. Site walkthroughs, standardized tests, interim assessments and stakeholder feedback surveys are all used to detect early warning signals of struggling schools or teachers so that the Home Office and/or principals are able to provide supports and require recommended practices quickly.
The Home Office provides all Green Dot schools with Recommended Practices in order to ensure a consistent level of quality and standardization. Recommended Practices are provided in all curriculum and operational areas to help principals and teachers make the most informed decisions for their schools. There is a significant amount of consistency across Green Dot’s schools because the majority of the Recommended Practices are implemented at all of its schools.
If a school site chooses not to follow a Recommended Practice, they are required to provide a plan that describes why they are not following that practice, lay out the new practice that the school site will employ, and provide support for that new practice in the form of research and evidence from other successful schools. If a school site or teacher is not following the Recommended Practices and does not meet its performance targets, it will be required to adopt the Recommended Practices. Green Dot is continually updating its Recommended Practices through innovations from within Green Dot’s own network and from best practices developed by other school operators.