I attended the Cleveland STEM Community Meeting on December 4 with my wife and 8th grade daughter.
First, the important parts.
My daughter is excited about the program. To her it looks like a good mix of the academic challenge of Garfield with the more personalized instruction (and project-based learning) of NOVA. She got most excited when she saw a list of the possible classes in the Global Health Academy.
My wife and I are much more confident about the probability that the program will actually be there and that it will be something like what has been advertised.
There was a pretty good crowd of people there - I'd say about forty to fifty (not counting staff).
The folks from Cleveland who were there are excited about the program and have a very clear picture of the idea - the project-based learning, the integration of technology, the alignment between classes, the extended school day and accelerated schedule, etc.
The STEM program looks real and, to us, it looks good. They still have some things to work out. The schedule is inspired, but needs some tinkering. They haven't figured out how to get the student:computer ratio to the promised 1:1. They are still missing a lot of the curricular elements - they haven't found the puzzle pieces but they know what they have to look like.
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