The Mission of Synergy Academies is to eliminate the achievement gap that has persisted for generations among educationally disadvantaged students. This achievement gap has not gone away despite many people’s best efforts and best intentions. Synergy believes that only by working more effectively together can we eliminate the achievement gap and create educational equity for all students. Synergy Academies does this by creating a sense of synergy among all community stakeholders and by showing the educational community how to make better use of resources in order to achieve greater results.

Our Vision is that our students will meet or exceed the California Content Standards and be prepared to take college-preparatory classes in secondary school so that they can eventually attend the four-year university of their choice.

How Do We Create a Sense of Synergy?

Synergy occurs when the combined action of two or more agents is greater than the sum of their individual effects. As urban schools implement programs that attempt to eliminate the achievement gap of educationally disadvantaged students, they must find ways to synergize their efforts in order to maximize results from a finite set of resources.

In other words, if your resources are limited, you need to find ways to make those resources work together in order to get better results.

We chose to open both our elementary campus and middle school campus in an area of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) that has struggled for years with the problem of severely underperforming schools. Our elementary campus, Synergy Charter Academy, uses the same reading program (Open Court Reading) and math program (Harcourt Mathematics) as LAUSD, and yet, our students still outperformed those from neighboring schools. How were we able to do that? We created synergies by taking existing resources and finding ways to make them work better together. For example, instead of treating listening, speaking, reading, and writing as separate components of a literacy program, we show students how they are interconnected, which makes it easier for them to gain proficiency in each area.