The motto of the Alternative Choices in Education program (ACE) is “high school your way.” It is not just a motto; it is an idea core to ACE’s mission. Students are encouraged to show their competency and knowledge through largely open-ended projects, and the program has many opportunities to participate in internships and even a dual-enrollment program with Roxbury Community College.
ACE uses competency-based learning, which is an alternative form of education that focuses on showing skills through projects and classwork over traditional grading. Students get into ACE on a first-come firstserved basis, and it is open to all students in 10th through 12th grade. It usually has around 55 students.
Ben Little, an ACE science teacher who has taught in the program for a decade after 10 years of mainstream teaching, said competency-based learning has fundamentally different principles than mainstream style education.
“Essentially, the core of competency-based learning is that your grade comes from the skills and knowledge that you demonstrate, rather than a percentage on Canvas of work that you completed,” Little said.
Laura Honeywood has been teaching at the high school for 15 years, six of them in ACE. They said that one of the positive elements of competency-based learning is the relationships between students and teachers. Along with the relationships being more enjoyable, they said that it also lets them teach individual students more effectively.
“[In mainstream school,] I didn’t really have a great sense of what students could do, what they knew and what they didn’t on an individual level,” Honeywood said. “There’s just a lot more nuance [in ACE] where I can be like, this kid just really can’t present well on tests. But then I have the freedom and they have the freedom to be like, ‘What I really need to work on is this skill,’” Honeywood said.
According to Little, many teachers often desire a different method of teaching but are restricted by mainstream education.
“In all these places where they do things differently, it was really still the same system: This is how we instruct, we rely on lecturer notes and write it down, and you’ll see it again on the test,” Little said.
Honeywood said competency-based learning’s inherent flexibility allows them to adapt a course for many different types of students.
“I’m able to pivot a lot based on what’s happening for this particular group of students,because, one year, I’m teaching a class and I might have 17-year-old boys who all have ADD,” Honeywood said. “Another year, I might be teaching the same class, but it’s like five highly motivated political scientists who are interested in doing internships in D.C. So my political science or comparative politics class is going to be really different with those two groups.”
Amy Bayer, director of ACE, said that ACE is a very diverse program, mainly because of the competency-based system’s adaptability.
“There’s no typical ACE student. Our program is so diverse. I have students in ACE who [were] getting straight A’s in mainstream [school], and were unhappy.” Bayer said. “I have students that were not getting straight A’s, were really struggling with their grades, but are really brilliant, and they just needed a different way to do school, and now they are getting straight A’s.”
