OUR APPROACH
We firmly believe that every student has the potential to be extraordinary and accomplish remarkable things. Every decision, every choice, every assumption that we make is based on this simple premise. Nothing less than high academic and behavioral standards are accepted. Period. No shortcuts. No excuses. Our approach has yielded exceptional results for our students, who are truly reversing the odds.
TEAM’s students
Click to learn more about our students, their trips, and their academic results.
We believe that there are no excuses — either for us or for our students — when it comes to the work of ensuring that every child achieves the entirety of their human promise. This principle of course presupposes that our children, staff, and board are capable of achieving our lofty goals. This seemingly undeniable supposition is subversive in a place like Newark. Newark, like too many of our cities, is rampant with doubt about the capacities of our children. They’re too poor. They’re too violent. Their needs are too special. We reject these and all other excuses.
We posit, irreducibly, the following: our children are human and therefore capable of achieving everything that any human being can achieve. Thus, when children fail to fulfill their potential it can only be due to correctable failures of execution, not unalterable insufficiencies in condition. Our unyielding conviction in the former stimulates our philosophy that no excuses justify educational failure.
Shavar JeffriesFounding TEAM Board Chair
At the 2007 Be the Change Celebration