One of Delaware’s newest charter schools is getting a huge investment from a national organization in the hopes of overhauling the American education system.
Delaware Design-Lab High School in Christiana earned a $10 million grant Wednesday to help better develop its curriculum and approach to education, which only opened last spring.
“It’s going to help us to continue to develop academic areas of the curriculum and the school practices that we would’ve taken a little bit longer to develop," said Cristina Alvarez, a founder and CEO of Design-Lab High School.
The school teaches kids to deeply analyze a problem, develop a solution and share their work with classmates to get feedback on what works best with their model.
Since students are the ones who choose what to study, Alvarez says that makes the learning environment much more engaging.
“Because the responsibility is on the student, the students do get very interested and very motivated and that alone begins to give them the motivation to learn at a much higher level,” she said.
The money will be spread out over a five-year period to help teachers best apply this learning style in the classroom and possibly build new learning spaces.
XQ Institute awarded the grants to 10 schools across the country to overhaul the American education system.
