High Jump Partnership

Academic Approach is partnering with High Jump Chicago to offer 11th and 12th grade students who have limited access to high-quality college-preparation programming a unique five-week summer experience at no cost to participating students and families.

Through our partnership with High Jump, we will host a Summer Intensive with the mission to address inequity in education and help close the post-secondary opportunity gap and resulting achievement gap by providing research-based and data-driven college-readiness instruction and resources to low-opportunity students.

• The top predictors of college admittance, perseverance, and graduation are socioeconomic status, parent education levels, and race.
• For predictive at-risk populations, top indicators of college admittance, perseverance, and graduation include academic rigor and GPA, academic intervention, SAT/ACT college readiness benchmarks, targeted college readiness outreach programs and resources, summer bridge programs, senior year transition programs, and college attendance within one year of high school graduation.
• We have the knowledge and expertise to develop new resources that will directly influence the top indicators of college admittance, perseverance, and graduation for students who are adversely impacted by the top predictors.
• The cycle of educational inequity continues to be pervasive because those who have the greatest barriers to learning are statistically the ones who have the least access to resources and opportunities to help them break the cycle.
• COVID-19 has created a need for immediate targeted intervention programs, especially during summer when students have almost no access to other resources.
• Greater resources need to be focused on supporting low-income students and students of color to reduce the opportunity gap for these students.

Our goal is to increase college admittance, perseverance, and graduation rates for low-opportunity students.

Our objective in year one is that 95% of graduating seniors who participated in our program will attend a four-year college or university within one year of high school graduation. We’ll continue to track and set goals for college persistence and graduation for alumni.

Currently, for High Jump students, the college completion rate is 84%; we seek to improve this significantly through the addition of resources in our first year. In following years, we seek to reach students without access to High Jump’s existing resources and thus greater needs for support.

We are excited to partner with the amazing Chicago-based, nonprofit organization High Jump. Since 1989, High Jump has continued to advance its mission, close the education opportunity gap in Chicago, and enhance students’ long-term academic success.

High Jump’s Mission: High Jump equalizes access to education for Chicago middle school students who have exhibited academic ambition and potential and who are of limited economic means.

We provide academic enrichment, counseling and support to students of diverse backgrounds, with the goals of sending our participants to superior college preparatory schools, ensuring their success while they are there, and enhancing their ability to gain admission to highly regarded four-year colleges and universities.

Through best-in-class SAT prep, social-emotional learning, high-interest electives, and individual projects and mentorship, we will provide the opportunities necessary to improve outcomes for high-need rising seniors.

The core of the program will be:

Academic Approach has an ongoing partnership with UChicago Impact to deliver the Undefeated Minds curriculum that works to equip students with a “resilience toolkit.” They are taught seven interventions — simple in content and practical in application — that they can then draw upon when challenges arise. The Undefeated Minds is an ideal, researched-based curriculum to teach our students these non-cognitive, social-emotional skills.

• Combination of Academic Approach test prep curriculum and academic rigor
• Approximately 21 total hours of instruction — 12 hours of test prep and nine hours of academic instruction
• Academic work will be based in supplementing expected in-school learning, fostering exploration of STEM activities, and preparing for post-secondary rigor.

• Combination of Academic Approach test prep curriculum and academic rigor
• Approximately 21 total hours of instruction-12 test prep and 9 academic
• Academic work will focus on analyzing texts, forming evidence-based arguments, and persuasive writing to support expected in-school learning and prepare for post-secondary rigor

We are continuing to develop supplemental programming to complement these core offerings.