Welcome, I sincerely hope you will enjoy these two books in one: Lesson Up!
Our premise at K12 Counts is that our children need adult coaching and help to reach their highest potential. That’s what we facilitate.
In the process, we’ve seen the cyclical cause of today’s poor student performance: the lack of skilled adult coaching.
For example, recently, our team at K12 Counts did a pilot program at a high school in San Jose, California. When one of the parent participants did not show up with her daughter, we called to make sure they were all right. They were instead spending the day at a local amusement park. The girl, who was in 9th grade, was reading at a 3rd grade level, and this particular pilot program was a reading development workshop. It could have been a life-changing event for the daughter. But it was a missed opportunity to begin to change the game.
This high school is 5.3 miles away from the Google campus in downtown San Jose.
Do you think this overlooked student, and many others like her, are likely to be candidates for the skilled jobs at Google? Or at Deloitte, 4.9 miles away? No, they want to hire fresh college students. And so do hundreds of other employers in the San Francisco Bay Area, including Silicon Valley.
Yet, many of today’s high schoolers can’t read or write at their own grade level before graduation.
Government and business must share the expensive burden of remedial education for new employees. As a country, we’re ignoring what will become perhaps one of our most precious resources: the education of our future workforce.
Imagine students you know, in a similar predicament, and, given the high availability of jobs, how are they going to break this cycle of underachievement?
Often, those closest to them are undermining their chances. How?
Research has shown that educated parents:
Uneducated and/or low-income parents:
Recently published studies from Brookings.edu, delve deeper: ‘The pandemic has had devastating impacts on learning. What will it take to help students catch up?’
Our K12 Counts Coaches are experienced and accomplished parents themselves. Their children have successfully navigated the same school district as K12 Counts program students. They know how to help, and have the capacity and commitment to give back.
The team at K12 Counts plays a critical role in first assessing a student’s academic progress appropriate to their grade, and then they develop a specific plan to accelerate individual learning designed to get the student up to their own grade level, or ideally, beyond.
Our program provides always-available coaching, teaching, and virtual parenting with a methodology that builds the skills necessary to ensure that kids not only actually perform at their best, but learn how they did it.
For too many kids, their family or community circumstance simply doesn’t provide a success-enabling environment. The most determined and able do succeed, but many strive and fall short, become cynical and succumb to the tyranny of low expectations, aging into their parenting years, ill-equipped to foster their own family’s future success. The cycle repeats.
All they need, students and parents, is the right help at the right time. They need to experience a supportive environment that provides the encouragement, guidance, and assistance that effective parents and communities do – that their parents would provide if they could.
This is what we do: We provide an always-available virtual family to create the social and educational infrastructure that more affluent or fortunate kids receive, so that the K12 Counts program children succeed academically, and grow into success-generating parents. Disadvantaged community children suffer graduation and drop-out rates 30 percent worse than their peers. We know it’s not biology, and can be improved.
Our vision is to end this evil in a single generational cycle. The solution is surprisingly simple and scalable, because the Internet is both. And because of the Pandemic, parents and students have adapted to online learning, even though it’s not ideal, and certainly not a replacement for the classroom.
As a team, we provide both online virtual tutoring and coaching to the kids, and engage both their parents and the school in the process so that academic outcomes improve, and the children experience the thrill and confidence of winning at academics.
Our Coaches are successful parents with the time, skills, and life experiences to guide, challenge, and nurture students. Skills are delivered, lessons are learned, attitudes and expectations are raised by osmosis. We build their success as children and their future success as parents, breaking the generational repeat behavior. This is the “teaching people how to fish” analogy applied to school-age development.
The pandemic has provided a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to all three players – the parents, the students, and the education department – to reset their respective roles to fully support academic excellence.