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The Beacon School
The Beacon School (also called Beacon High School) is a college-preparatory public high school in the Hell's Kitchen area of Manhattan in New York City near Times Square and the Theater District. Beacon's curriculum exceeds the standards set by the New York State Regents, and as a member of the New York Performance Standards Consortium, its students are exempt from taking most Regents exams. Instead, students present performance-based projects at the end of each semester to panels of teachers. In 2019, the school received roughly 6,000 applications for 360 ninth-grade seats, yielding an acceptance rate of approximately 6.2%.
Beacon was founded in 1993 by District Three educators Ruth Lacey and Stephen Stoll as a new high school in the district (at the time, the only District Three high school was Martin Luther King Jr. High School).
Lacey and Stoll "envisioned an interdisciplinary high school small enough to allow teachers to act as advisers to groups of kids, with an emphasis on computers and the arts;" further emphasising community service, open-mindedness, and new ways of teaching. The curriculum represented an alternative to the Regents Exam-based testing system in favor of portfolio-based assessment. The school's purpose was also purportedly to keep class sizes down and total student population at, or just above, one thousand students.[citation needed] The school started in 1993 with 100 students, initially gaining a new 100 students each year.
Over time, Beacon was forced to accept certain aspects of the Regents-based testing curriculum and to abandon its portfolio-assessment system as the sole method of graduation, which had been the case until mid-1999.[citation needed] Beacon now utilizes traditional testing, but "[t]o graduate from Beacon, students must present and defend selected projects each year."
The class schedule at the Beacon School is organized in bands, designated by letters A through H. As a Beacon student advances in grade level, they are gradually given more opportunities to choose classes of their choice in the subject area of the band in question, rather than relying on their stream to do the selecting. This is both a preparatory measure for the university system of class selection, where students are permitted to select all their classes themselves on an individual basis, as well as a means of allowing students the ability to find what interests them among the course offerings.
Instead of offering a large number of Advanced Placement (AP) courses, "Beacon offers rigorous semester-long, college preparatory courses for seniors. Extensive research, critical analysis, and writing are required components of the courses." Examples of such offerings include courses like:
Nonetheless, Beacon offers a selection of AP courses. As former principal Brady Smith explained,
[W]hile we might philosophically be opposed to AP exams — I personally am opposed to that kind of high-demand testing as an educator and parent — I think a lot of our community members still believe that AP is important, and that it carries cachet with colleges especially with the benefit of credit. It’s pretty hard to deny so many people — we had 350 people sit for AP science exams last year — who would otherwise be wondering why they can't take APs at Beacon. We’re struggling with the balance between demand and policy.
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The Beacon School
The Beacon School (also called Beacon High School) is a college-preparatory public high school in the Hell's Kitchen area of Manhattan in New York City near Times Square and the Theater District. Beacon's curriculum exceeds the standards set by the New York State Regents, and as a member of the New York Performance Standards Consortium, its students are exempt from taking most Regents exams. Instead, students present performance-based projects at the end of each semester to panels of teachers. In 2019, the school received roughly 6,000 applications for 360 ninth-grade seats, yielding an acceptance rate of approximately 6.2%.
Beacon was founded in 1993 by District Three educators Ruth Lacey and Stephen Stoll as a new high school in the district (at the time, the only District Three high school was Martin Luther King Jr. High School).
Lacey and Stoll "envisioned an interdisciplinary high school small enough to allow teachers to act as advisers to groups of kids, with an emphasis on computers and the arts;" further emphasising community service, open-mindedness, and new ways of teaching. The curriculum represented an alternative to the Regents Exam-based testing system in favor of portfolio-based assessment. The school's purpose was also purportedly to keep class sizes down and total student population at, or just above, one thousand students.[citation needed] The school started in 1993 with 100 students, initially gaining a new 100 students each year.
Over time, Beacon was forced to accept certain aspects of the Regents-based testing curriculum and to abandon its portfolio-assessment system as the sole method of graduation, which had been the case until mid-1999.[citation needed] Beacon now utilizes traditional testing, but "[t]o graduate from Beacon, students must present and defend selected projects each year."
The class schedule at the Beacon School is organized in bands, designated by letters A through H. As a Beacon student advances in grade level, they are gradually given more opportunities to choose classes of their choice in the subject area of the band in question, rather than relying on their stream to do the selecting. This is both a preparatory measure for the university system of class selection, where students are permitted to select all their classes themselves on an individual basis, as well as a means of allowing students the ability to find what interests them among the course offerings.
Instead of offering a large number of Advanced Placement (AP) courses, "Beacon offers rigorous semester-long, college preparatory courses for seniors. Extensive research, critical analysis, and writing are required components of the courses." Examples of such offerings include courses like:
Nonetheless, Beacon offers a selection of AP courses. As former principal Brady Smith explained,
[W]hile we might philosophically be opposed to AP exams — I personally am opposed to that kind of high-demand testing as an educator and parent — I think a lot of our community members still believe that AP is important, and that it carries cachet with colleges especially with the benefit of credit. It’s pretty hard to deny so many people — we had 350 people sit for AP science exams last year — who would otherwise be wondering why they can't take APs at Beacon. We’re struggling with the balance between demand and policy.