Our Vision
We use our Teaching Firm, a unique teacher-led organizational model, to be a fun, holistic, ‘college-successful’, career-ready, community-centered, culturally rich and relevant incubator of exceptional human potential where we spark, nurture and unleash mindful people empowered to affect positive change in the communities we serve.
our program
Everything we do here at Ember is centered around courting critical thinking. From our integrated classes such as: ESA (ELA/Social Studies) and STEM (Science, Math, Tech) to our Socratic Inquiry & Dialogue approach, critical thinking is our DNA. On top of engaging in analysis and complexity, cultivating love & kindness is at the core of our program. We are developing human beings who will go out and create a more equitable world based in love & kindness.
We’ll offer our target “at-risk” population (low income, socioeconomically underserved youth), with expansive progressive, holistic and global education opportunities that have been widely unavailable to them before now. We’ll nurture and enable students to become social entrepreneurs, engineers and global leaders.
Study Abroad
Ember will offer substantive, guided study abroad experiences to students in 7th and 8th Grade on a bi-annual basis.
Ember’s international experiences will be similar to the private and Gifted and Talented (“G&T”) study abroad opportunities for their privileged peers, with the following differences:
Ember’s international education experience will be structured around single-sex cohorts, one for boys and one for girls;
Ember’s international education experience will NOT be a part of a separate school or program, but will instead be a full part of the same Ember public school experience that they receive when they are in Brooklyn;
Ember’s study abroad experience will be led, guided and conducted by Ember’s fulltime, highly qualified instructional, mental health and operational staff who will travel abroad with students during the entire international educational experience;
During the international travel experience, Ember students’ core academic learning will mirror the same common core-aligned academic instruction that they receive in Brooklyn; and
Ember’s upper middle school students will not spend the entire two-year period abroad—they will travel internationally several weeks during both the Fall Semester, and eventually the Spring Semester, for the latter semester returning to Brooklyn in time to take New York State assessments locally.
Ember’s international experience will also mimic boarding school, in that students will receive an additional 49 hours of holistic instructional time per week, including an additional five hours of planned programming each day Monday thru Friday, and an additional 12 hours of planned programming on each Saturday and Sunday. Thus, Ember students will receive even more intensive and immersive instruction in our already strong pedagogy of socio-emotional health, and common core-aligned knowledge and thinking skills, yielding an additional 45% of holistic instructional time per week.
For the high poverty, “at-risk” children Ember will serve, the impact of this portion of our program can literally mean the difference between prison and prosperity. For adolescents in Bedford Stuyvesant-Central Brooklyn, where gang violence is rampant and gang recruitment begins as early as 5th grade, middle school represents one of the most precarious and dangerous periods of young Black and Latino children’s lives. The international education component of Ember’s educational plan will provide students with the kind of transformative middle school experience that is lifesaving. Furthermore, this type of experience is typically only reserved for far more privileged, often wealthy and white, students in private or public selective admission G&T programs.
Ember’s single-sex structure for upper middle school (Grades 7 and 8), and high school (Grades 9-12)
Single-Sex Upper Middle School
Ember’s single-sex structure for upper middle school (Grades 7 and 8), and high school (Grades 9-12) will build on the success of these well-honed programmatic strategies in three important ways:
Ember will offer single-sex cohorts for both boys AND girls, giving us an opportunity to not only serve our entire community, but to also strategically expose our students to gender-integrated programming to proactively engage well-documented psycho-social challenges that characterize so much of adolescence, from body image to bullying, sexism to homophobia;
Ember will combine single-sex schooling strategy and attending to the socio-emotional needs of students with our core practice of developing students’ executive functioning and critical thinking skills, which are proven to lead to increased student achievement; and
Ember will enhance the impact of both of the above strategies by taking advantage of boarding school conditions during international travel learning experiences that will comprise a significant portion of students’ 7th and 8th grade years, with a community-based boarding school experience during high school.
Boarding school environments provide an opportunity to greatly amplify the impact of otherwise highly effective instructional strategies by reducing external distractions and exposure to negative psycho-social narratives that can impede the development of self-efficacy, agency and growth mindsets.
"My children have learned the art of critical questioning, of not taking things on their face, but of asking the deeper meaning of things. Ember Charter school arms our youth a dangerous curiosity and an unyielding need to know how, when, where, and why!"
— Sis. Ayo, Ember Parent & Teacher
Our Model
“It’s a marathon, not a sprint.”
- Nipsey Hussle
who are we?
All of our students, nearly all of whom are Black and LatinX, are from Central Brooklyn, one of the lowest income communities in New York City. Almost 90% of our students qualify for Federal free and reduced priced lunch (an indicator for serve poverty). 10% of our student are English Language Learners and more than 35% of parents were born abroad, from the Caribbean, to Central and West Africa, to Central and South America. More than 15% are students with disabilities. More than 55% of all students have experienced trauma, with more than 40% of those students experiencing severe and ongoing trauma.
Our unique approach furthers and achieves the objectives of in the New York Charter Act (Education Law §2850(2))
By design, we improve student learning and achievement. We offer Ember students instruction that focuses on the development of self-efficacy, executive functioning and critical thinking skills. All of which have been shown to significantly improve student learning and achievement outcomes for students from high poverty households – the same demographic Ember will serve.
Encourages use of different and innovative teaching methods
Our instructional methodology includes a focus on the utilization of the following innovative teaching practices:
Integrated Instruction, Differentiation and Looping
Culturally Relevant Pedagogy
Economically Relevant Pedagogy
Socratic Questioning and Design Thinking
Neuropedagogy (incorporation of self-efficacy, critical thinking, and executive functioning skills into instructional practice)
Mindfulness and meditation
Equal Education
Our goal is to provide the children in this high poverty, high unemployment and high violence community with an education equal or better than higher socio-economic school zones. When they are well educated with academics and leadership, they’ll become leaders who lift up their whole community.
Access to Quality
Ember offers admission preference to students who qualify for free and reduced-priced lunch (to the extent permitted by law).
Provide parents/students with expanded choices in educational opportunities
We provide parents and students with expanded choices in the types of opportunities available within the public school system through our unique offerings in four major program components:
Looping - Teachers stay with their schoolhouse/cohort for 3-4 yrs on average.
Single-sex cohorts (upper middle school and high school)
Substantive and guided international learning experiences in 7th and 8th Grades
Residential, community-based boarding opportunity in High School
Ember School Culture & Behavior Management Policy
Click here to view the pdf.