Innovative Teaching Method Offers Second Chance
Published Feb 19, 2009
A student at work at Paradigm Accelerated Charter School in Comanche
Encouraging character development as well as academics, the Paradigm Accelerated Curriculum is finding a home in charter schools throughout the Texas Midwest and the rest of the country.
The brainchild of Dr. Ronald Johnson, founder and chief executive officer, Paradigm was envisioned as a contract school that would help turn around street kids. Since the first charter school was founded in 2000, the program has grown to more than 50 schools in eight states.
PAC publishes textbooks and audio texts for computer use, as well as companion student activity books for grades seven through 12.
Dublin in Erath County, Brownwood in Brown County and Comanche in Comanche County have charter schools using the Paradigm concept.
Johnson, whose company is based in Erath County, is working on his 214th book, which is designed to help education-oriented entrepreneurs set up his program, or one like it.
“A group of people gave us a generous gift to produce a curriculum for father-challenged teenagers, so we began developing that,” Johnson recalls. “It was science, English and social studies for kids who come from a home where the father does not nurture or train them, or is not there, and also for kids who have lost grade credits in high school. Our job was to set up the schools where they could come half a day and earn those failed credits and a high-school diploma.”
Built into the curriculum, he says, are “life principles” not being taught in the home, such as anger management and the appropriate reaction to authority figures. Empowering the student is a chief goal, and by learning some basic life lessons along with academic subjects, the child’s whole future may be turned around for the better.
“We researched what it was that caused academics to become secondary to that child, and found that they are struggling with grief and anger, and can’t concentrate very well. They never were trained in certain principles, and so we’ve put those back into the math, science and so forth. Now they are getting reintroduced to those principles that set people apart for success.”
Story by Joe Morris
Photo by J. Kyle Keener
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