How University High School built a 100 percent college-going rate on one shared requirement, and what teachers can borrow from it.
In Whiplash, a music instructor hurls a chair at a student’s head over a tempo problem. It made for a great movie, but a terrible teaching method.
Jeffie Esparza Hickman runs an actual music school and has never thrown anything at anyone, which is part of why it works. She’s the superintendent and principal of University High School in Fresno, a 500-student charter on the Fresno State campus where every student plays an instrument or sings.
And get this: her graduation rate is 100%. Her college-going rate? That’s 100% too!
But what got us in tears is when says her proudest result has nothing to do with either number:
“What I’m truly most proud of is the kindness of the students, how sweet they are.”
Jeffie spent years in the classroom before roughly two decades in administration, and she has a specific idea about where a teacher’s hours should go.
Key takeaways:
- One shared requirement builds classroom culture faster than a longer list of rules.
- Groups that mix grade levels turn classmates into people who look out for each other.
- Time spent counting and recording is time nobody spends reading what the numbers say.
- The hours you clear from busywork are what make the community-building possible at all.
The One Shared Thing
University High School runs on a single condition: musical ability.
“Students have to have two years of music experience in order to go through the lottery process,” Jeffie explains.
That one requirement does more work than a handbook, and the four-part structure underneath it scales down to a room of 32 kids and a bell schedule.
Pick the one non-negotiable
We’re talking one thing every student in the room has to do, with no opt-out and no bench.
At UHS, “everyone’s in a performing group.” A teacher without a music program has other options. Or maybe it’s a weekly ritual nobody skips, class-wide project that runs all semester, or even a lab table with assigned roles.
What matters is that participation is the price of admission rather than a bonus for the kids who like you.
Put the goth kids with the jocks
This is the shared thing that puts students together who would never choose each other.
Performing groups at UHS do this by design, and Jeffie described the result as a thriving music community that “helps to unify the whole school.” She credits it to students who “meet students from other grade levels that they can then form that family together.”
A freshman and a senior in the same section learn each other’s names during rehearsal instead of during an icebreaker. Any teacher running a club, an elective or a team can build the same crossing pattern on a smaller scale.
Make sure the skills travel
This is when the demands of the shared thing travel into everything else.
Jeffie pointed to critical thinking and processing skills that music training builds and students then carry into unrelated classes. The research points the same direction.
An analysis of a decade of Boston Public Schools data found that students enrolled in arts courses showed stronger school engagement and higher daily attendance, and attendance rose by about a third of a day per student across a 180-day year. That works out to nine extra instructional days for a class of 25.
Treat the shared thing as core work rather than the reward for finishing the real work.
Clear an hour for yourself first
None of the above survives a teacher with 90 unread assignments and a Sunday to burn.
Jeffie’s final (but most important) move is about clearing the time, and at UHS this became a staff project rather than one person quietly experimenting.
“This year for our staff, we’ve really been looking into AI and how AI can help us,” she adds.
One teacher built his own grading bot, but the point was never the bot.
“We spend so much time crunching the numbers that we don’t spend time analyzing the data,” she explains. “We need to spend more time analyzing the data rather than just gathering the data.”
A tool earns its place if the hour it saves goes somewhere. If the saved hour produces a second report nobody reads, the busywork moved rather than shrank.
Busywork is eating the time you wanted to spend on kids
Ask Jeffie what she wants changed in education over the next ten years and she skips past curriculum and funding. “Right now there’s a lot of compliance, and that’s a lot,” she said. “I would like to see a little bit less of that and more focus on the students.”
The math backs her up. A nationally representative survey run by the EdWeek Research Center found that a typical teacher works a median of 54 hours a week, and only 46 percent of the time spent in the building goes to teaching. Pew found that 84 percent of teachers say their workload leaves them without enough time for lesson planning, working with colleagues and grading. There is also a perception gap that will surprise nobody who has ever sat in a staff meeting.
In EdWeek‘s State of Teaching survey, 32% of principals said they don’t think teachers are asked to do things beyond their professional responsibilities. Among teachers, 14% agreed.
Every time something goes sideways in a school, the reflex is another form. Jeffie’s worry is what that reflex crowds out. “I’d like to see different pathways for students to be seen in the world and not so much of the kind of rules and regulations of schools,” she said. A student who needs to be recognized for something cannot be recognized by a spreadsheet.
Three prompts before you plan the year
Jeffie still runs activities she first experienced as a high school student in Fresno.
Her activities director at McLane High School, Mr. Casner, ran things that stuck so completely that she brought them into every school she later led.
“Some of the activities we do are the ones that I did in high school,” she adds, while also recalling that she still remembers his birthday, decades later.
That gives teachers a usable standard for planning a year. We’ve broken it down into three prompts:
- Name one thing in your classroom a student will still be describing in twenty years.
- Name where it came from. If it came from a teacher of yours, the test is working.
- Name the paperwork you would have to move to protect it.
The third prompt is the hard one, and it is the whole argument. The thing worth protecting almost never fits into the hours left over.
The adults have to catch up too
The choice facing teachers this year has moved past whether to use new tools. Jeffie framed the shift around her students rather than the technology.
“They’re used to that instant feedback,” she observes. “That’s something that we as the adults need to embrace as well.”
Kids who grew up with a phone in hand expect a response in minutes, and a stack of essays returned three weeks later reads to them as static.
She has watched this arc from the far end of it: handwritten tests, three years before a computer landed on her desk. But now a colleague down the hall is writing his own grading tool because waiting for a district rollout was slower than building one.
The direction of travel is clear, and the open question is what teachers spend the recovered time on. Jeffie’s answer runs through everything else she said. Spend it on the students, in mixed rooms, doing the one thing they all share.
As we mentioned earlier, her proudest moment as a principal was not an award. It was her students collecting donations and driving them to Palisades Charter High School after the LA fires.
“That’s why we’re here in LA,” she said, “because we’re bringing donations down to Palisades Charter High.”
No form asked them to do that. Somebody just built a school and fostered a culture where it was the obvious thing to do.
FAQs
What is the “one shared thing” model for building classroom culture?
The one shared thing model builds classroom culture around a single activity every student must take part in. At University High School in Fresno, that requirement is music, and every student performs in a group. Teachers without a music program can use a weekly ritual or semester-long project.
How much time do teachers spend on non-teaching work?
Teachers spend more than half their in-building hours on work other than teaching. An EdWeek Research Center survey put the typical teacher at a median of 54 hours a week, with 46 percent of building time spent teaching. Pew found 84 percent report workload crowding out planning and grading.
Why does mixing grade levels matter in a classroom or club?
Mixing grade levels puts students together who would not choose each other, which turns classmates into a group that looks out for one another. Jeffie Esparza Hickman says University High School’s performing groups let students meet peers from other grades and form a family across them.
Does using AI for grading actually save teachers time?
AI grading saves teachers time only when the recovered hour changes something. One University High School teacher built his own grading bot. Jeffie Esparza Hickman’s test is whether the time goes toward reading patterns in student work rather than producing another report.