Techniques Feb 2013 - 48

Feature

“Here’s to the Crazy Ones:”
Legendary Words Spark
Educators and Businesses
By Michael S. Realon

“… The people who
are crazy enough to
think they can change
the world, are the
ones who do.”
—Steve Jobs

48
Techniques

February 2013

Here’s to the crazy ones. The
misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the
square holes. The ones who see
things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And
they have no respect for the status quo. You can
quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify
them. But the only thing you can’t do is ignore
them. Because they change things. They push the
human race forward. While some may see them as
the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people
who are crazy enough to think they can change the
world, are the ones who do.”
These words, first spoken by icon Steve
Jobs in Apple’s legendary “Think Different” commercial, were reused by Olympic
High School senior India Gregory to
inspire more than 300 business professionals from Charlotte, North Carolina,
to rethink how they must engage with
education if students are to succeed.
Motivated Charlotteans had gathered at a
TEDx Charlotte Education event last year
so they could hear success stories about
how to effectively partner with schools to
make a difference in the academic lives
of children. Gregory chose these words to
describe the essence of her transformative
experience at the Olympic Community of
Schools where she experienced authentic
learning experiences, both in the classroom and in the workplace.
Olympic, part of the 2012 Broad
Prize-winning Charlotte-Mecklenburg
School (CMS) District, is a fascinating
turn-around story. During the summer
of 2006, as part of a court ruling, the

original Olympic High School was accused of committing “academic genocide”
against its students and was threatened
to be taken over by the state of North
Carolina. However, in 2005, Olympic had
earlier won a $1.2 million grant from a
high school change agent associated with
the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
By the time of the ruling, the school was
already deeply engaged in a transformation to become a campus of five themebased small high schools: International
Business and Communications Studies;
Biotechnology and Health; Global Studies
and Economics; Arts and Humanities;
and Math, Engineering, Technology and
Science.
The school improved immediately. In
fact, just five years after Olympic became
a small schools campus, the CMS district
conducted an exhaustive study about
the performance of its schools because of
serious impending cost cuts which would
require closing many schools and unsuccessful programs. The performance data
compiled by the district demonstrated that
Olympic’s proficiency scores on statemandated tests had actually risen by 65
percent since becoming a small schools
campus, and its campus now houses four of
the top seven CMS high schools in terms
of the district’s key performance metric—
the academic growth of its students.

Building a Strategic Partnership
So how did such a significant transformation happen in such a short time? Obviwww.acteonline.org

Techniques Feb 2013

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