Two D.C. high schools will remodel their curriculum with the intention to better prepare students for college and careers.
Paul Laurence Dunbar High School and the Francis L. Cardozo Education Campus will be the first cohort of the DC+XQ, a partnership between D.C. Public Schools and the XQ Institute to “rethink and redesign all DCPS high schools,” a schools and XQ Institute news release said.
The XQ Institute is an organization that develops programs aimed at improving high school education in the U.S.
Dunbar and Cardozo will spend the current school year “prototyping and piloting elements of their school models, testing ideas, and gathering input from their communities.”
For Dunbar, this means students will have a school year through the lens of Afrofuturism, a cultural and intellectual movement that “leverages knowledge of the past to create possibilities for the future.”
Cardozo students will focus on the goal of financial independence, including building an interdisciplinary approach that will fuse academics and business and financial skills.
“Keeping up with a changing world means having the flexibility, vision and willingness to re-imagine how we prepare young people to succeed in school and after graduation,” D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said in a statement.
D.C. Schools Chancellor Lewis Ferebee said the initiative is a “step forward” in making sure students are prepared for college and their careers.
The DC+XQ initiative launched in February, and in the last seven months six D.C. high schools participated in XQ’s research design, which included an equity audit of their schools. Community members were also invited to share their input.
Each school came up with its own design concept that identified the greatest areas of need for their students, and the assets and opportunities available.
