The Urban School of San Francisco

The Urban School of San Francisco is a private high school located in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, California.It is known for its unique approach to education, its emphasis on the arts, and for taking advantage of its location to provide a uniquely urban educational experience for its students.

Curricular innovations include block scheduling, narrative evaluations, service learning, student collaboration, and relating different areas of knowledge to each other (interdisciplinary learning) while allowing students to develop their own talents and pursue their interests in depth.

Self-motivation is a key factor in the Urban educational process. Urban's faculty seeks to foster a taste for learning, and then to allow that taste to flourish in its students. Urban's curriculum is both rigorous and progressive. Students are prepared both for college and for the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.

The school's faculty, most with advanced degrees in their teaching subjects, have been committed to setting the highest standards and inspiring students to meet them since 1966.

The Urban School, because it is private and self-supporting, charges $29,000 per student for tuition. Urban tries to provide financial aid to all who have demonstrated need as determined by the school and the Student Service for Financial Aid (SSS). Approximately 22% of students receive financial aid.

Mission statement

The Urban School of San Francisco seeks to ignite a passion for learning, inspiring its students to become self-motivated, enthusiastic participants in their education—both in high school and beyond.

Narrative evaluation

Urban presents its students with narrative evaluations instead of grades so that they will have a greater understanding of how well they are doing. An English evaluation might note a student's penetrating insights in class discussions but point out that those thoughts are weakly conveyed in essays due to poor essay structure. The narrative evaluation process depends upon close interactions in the classroom between teachers and individual students. Class sizes are therefore kept small (where small means 18).

Students receive letter grades for use in college applications. However, students do not know what those grades are until they apply to college. In terms of grades, students receive indications of how well they are doing in general through grade point averages (G.P.A.) at the end of each school year.

The narrative evaluation process involves several steps. There are individual student-teacher conferences at mid-term, followed by the writing of student self-evaluations and subsequent teacher-evaluations at the end of each term. In addition, students receive extensive feedback on their work in between formal evaluations through constant interaction with their teachers in the classroom.

Block schedule

The Urban scheduling system divides the school year into three 12-week-long trimesters.

Each trimester, four classes are taken, scheduled as A, B, C, and D periods. Classes are held for 70 minutes each. The week one is as follows: on Monday and Friday, there are all four classes; however, on Tuesday and Thursday, there are double periods of A and D, and Wednesday is double periods of B and C. The week two schedule is as follows: the same Monday and Friday schedules; however Tuesday and Thursdays are double periods of B and C; and Wednesday is double periods of A and D. The rest of the day is devoted to physical education, sports, or extracurricular activities such as the literary journal, newspaper, chorus, jazz band or yearbook.

In addition, time is set aside for weekly advising sessions and all-school meetings.

This schedule allows for in-depth class sessions with plenty of time for discussion or for laboratory work in science classes. Under the block scheduling system, many different teaching methods can be applied to help students get the most out of the subject material, as opposed to short class times with only cursory checking for student comprehension. No student can be left behind in a small classroom environment that demands that every student participate.

Because of the intensity of the Urban trimester system, a trimester-long class at Urban is considered equivalent to a semester-long class at another school. The block system lends itself to in-depth consideration of course topics; for example, an English class specializing in Faulkner, or a mathematics class focusing on infinity.

Laptop program

Urban has a unique laptop program, in which every student and teacher is given an Apple laptop. These laptops are an essential part of the curriculum, and are used in many ways. For example, in a science class, USB sensors could be connected to students' computers, allowing them to easily measure temperature, pH, and a variety of other values. In a math class, students could use software on their computer to create graphs and equations. If a group of students conducted video interviews during a project, they could easily create a presentation using programs such as iMovie.

Students receive a new laptop in their senior year, which they can choose to purchase at the end of the year, for a lowered price. The students are allowed to take their laptops home with them every day, and use them for whatever they need, as long as it doesn't violate the Terms of Use (i.e. no illegal file sharing, etc.).

Currently, the Junior class have iBook G4s while the Freshmen, Sophomore and Seniors received MacBook laptops at the start of the year.

Urban has been at the center of much national attention regarding its program and has hosted several conferences on bridging the gap between computers as a "subject of study" (as most high schools simply have computer use classes) and how to integrate them into everyday schooling. Senior Apple marketing officials and engineers frequently visit Urban for question sessions and to observe students' iBook and Macbook usage.

tudent newspaper

The Urban School's student newspaper, called "The Urban Legend," is a part of the High School National Ad Network.

Notable alumni

Rebecca Walker, writer-activist, daughter of Alice Walker
Gabby La La, musician.

Children of notable people who attended Urban

Like Alice Walker, many prominent San Francisco residents have sent their children to school at Urban. Students have included the children of actor-comedian Robin Williams; former San Francisco mayor and California Speaker of the Assembly Willie Brown; US Senator from California
Barbara Boxer; and other families including the Getty, Bostwick, Brown, Dinkelspiel, Garfinkel, Gordon, Haas, Hallinan, Kenter, Marver, Meckler, Shorenstein, Siegel, Smith, Stull, Walbridge, Waldman, and Williams.

ee also

*San Francisco County high schools

External links

* [http://www.urbanschool.org/ School Site]
* [http://www.apple.com/education/profiles/urbansf/ Apple Article on Urban]