Reaching a consensus for an academically diverse population required compromise. We believe that our new Graduation Standards will allow all students to reach their goals and to develop their abilities to the highest level possible. It is our belief that the purpose of Educational Reform is to enrich the years that a student spends in high school. Citizens who are intellectually equipped to preserve democratic institutions and to assume their civic obligations must have a proper background in history, in economics, in government, in language and literature, in science and technology, in philosophy and the arts, and in the other areas of learning that will allow them to contribute to and participate in democratic life. Americans must gain a full comprehension of the duties and responsibilities of nationhood.
Civic virtue depends on it.
As Jefferson said, it can be no other way. Our job has been to set acceptable minimum standards with practical levels of accomplishment for all students in this comprehensive liberal arts high school. In order to do that, we have tried to recognize the contributions made to learning by all the disciplines we teach, and to establish reasonable distribution requirements for all students, no matter their ultimate career or educational objectives. We believe that in the 21st century people will need not only strong computational and linguistic skills, but also the capacity to analyze, interpret, and imagine solutions for problems in the workplace and the ability to engage in research and formulate new questions in jobs not yet invented. The imperative that students study the Arts and Sciences, Language, Humanities and Social Studies, acknowledges the world as an increasingly global community, where the need to communicate internationally in every discipline is an urgent fact of life.