This week, we are profiling the extraordinary Oliver Sicat, CEO of Ednovate, a fast-growing charter management organization serving thousands of students in Los Angeles and Orange County.
Oliver Sicat’s parents immigrated to the U.S. from the Philippines and had big hopes and dreams for their son. They settled in Southern California where they experienced the inequity that often occurs when students are assigned to schools based upon their place of residence. It led to his family having to navigate an inequitable system in order to access to the strong schools that Oliver ultimately attended.
He worked hard, was involved in his school, and had good test scores. So, when the time came, he applied to 10 colleges. And to his shock, he was rejected by every single one.
It was a defining moment in his life.
“I felt like the hopes and dreams of my parents were crushed at that point,” he said. But never once did he think that their belief in him had wavered. He just realized that, much like his parents had had to be resourceful in finding him great K-12 options, so too would he have to be resourceful securing himself a great college option.
So, he dusted himself off and found two colleges with rolling admissions, the University of Colorado and USC. He applied to both and was admitted.
It was an early example of his building on the contributions of others—standing upon the shoulders of his parents’ belief in him such that he became the first in his family to go to college.
An Entrepreneurial Spirit
After graduating from USC, Oliver became a teacher in Boston. It was work that he loved and he proved to be great at it. In 2006, he was named Boston Public Schools’ Teacher of the Year.
But as much as he enjoyed teaching, he also knew he had an entrepreneurial spirit within him that was waiting to be released. One day, when he was given the opportunity to visit a Noble charter school in Chicago, the spark was lit.
“The first time I visited Noble, I remember being viscerally angry that the kids I was teaching in Boston couldn’t have an education like that,” he said. “They were doing so many innovative things…. It just tapped into my entrepreneurial spirit in a way that my regular teaching didn’t.”
It was another defining moment in his life, one that not only led him to move to Chicago and join the team at Noble, but ultimately positioned him seven years later to take over a fledgling charter school that had been formed by his alma mater in Los Angeles.
Building on the work of what he had seen at Noble, Oliver grew Ednovate into a highly successful CMO operating a network of high-performing college prep charter schools in Los Angeles and Orange County. Most of the students that Ednovate serves, like Oliver himself had been, are first-generation, college-bound. And like their school’s founder, Ednovate students are incredibly resourceful at securing access to higher education.
In fact, 99% of them do!
In the process of generating such impressive results with students, Ednovate has become recognized to be one of the most innovative education organizations in the country, one that educators from across the world come to visit every year, much like Oliver was drawn to Noble all those years ago.
Each visitor affords the organization the opportunity to share the innovative model that Ednovate has developed to serve the unique needs of students.
It has put the organization in a position to be even more ambitious in terms of its broader impact on public education.
A New Report Card
As committed as Oliver is to the notion that our high schools must completely revamp the kinds of programs they offer students, so too is he committed to the idea that our high schools must rethink the way we assess learning and communicate student progress. It has led the organization to develop a Whole Child Report Card …
… that reports on a range of indicators giving students far richer feedback than they would receive from a typical high school report card. Those indicators include:
- Mastery: Passing all classes with a C- or above
- College Rigor: Meeting state proficiency levels or above
- Self-Regulation: Minimizing the need for external reminders for on-task behavior or working within a community
- Positive Multigenerational Change Hours: Minimum of 10 internship or community service hours in pursuit of one’s passions
- Critical Thinking: Solving a real-life problem within the context of various adult roles and responsibilities
- Presence: Now measuring attendance, but eventually seeking to develop broader indicators of social and emotional well-being
“Now, when students graduate from us, they’re not only intellectually prepared but they’re thinking about how they can use their talents and skills to improve the world around them and achieve multigenerational change,” Oliver said.
It’s a change in assessment that has been fully embraced by Ednovate’s students and is now gaining widespread attention.
It’s led to only more of that entrepreneurial spirit in Oliver being released.
As he says it: “We aspire to nothing less than changing the American high school report card.”
Offering His Shoulders
Certainly, Oliver’s passion for innovation makes him a good fit for working in charter schools. But he’s now thinking about what comes next—and how to create the conditions for other schools to thrive.
“In the long run, charter school organizations are going to be run by educators who must learn how to manage boards and budgets while enabling their teams to do things even better,” he said. “We need to pay more attention to the fact that we are a maturing market now, not a start-up market. We need to think differently.”
Remembering the transformative experience of visiting a Noble school for the first time, Oliver has gone on to coach hundreds of other charter school leaders, helping stimulate even more innovation while fulfilling a sense of “pay it forward.”
“I love growing future leaders,” he said. “I’m doing all that because so many people did that for me in the past.”
From his work teaching in Boston, to founding UIC College Prep with the Noble Network of Charter Schools, to serving as Chief Portfolio Officer for Chicago Public Schools, to now leading Ednovate as CEO, Oliver has crisscrossed the country and the field of education, seeing the impact that emerges when educators build upon the work of others to create innovative solutions for students. But nowhere has he seen the spirit of camaraderie and sharing thrive as fully as it does within the charter school movement.
“From the very beginning, there was just this generosity of spirit. We’re all entrepreneurs, but we’re all doing this for social impact. I feel responsible for continuing that culture,” he said. “We are all building upon and standing on the shoulders of each other’s work.”
For having been one who stood upon the shoulders of others, and for having become one upon whose shoulders so many now stand, we are honored to recognize Oliver Sicat to be a walking example of CharterFolk Extraordinaire.