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Voices in Urban Education
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Small Schools and Race
VUE Number 2, Fall 2003
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
EXCERPT:
Spinning a Web of Relationships
By Thomas Toch, writer-in-residence at the National Center on Education and the Economy and the author of High Schools on a Human Scale: How Small Schools Can Transform American Education (Beacon Press, 2003), from which this article is excerpted.
> Complete bio
By treating its students with respect and connecting them with committed adult advocates, a small urban high school in Rhode Island that serves predominantly youths of color fosters learning by creating a close community.
Bianca Gray, a deputy policy director to Mayor Vincent Cianci Jr. of Providence, Rhode Island, wasn't a teacher. But she was among the most important people in Tawana Ruiz's high school life.
Tawana (not her real name) recently graduated from the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center — the Met for short — an alternative public high school in Providence serving mostly troubled students that has taken the radical step of organizing its instruction around internships that its students do with Providence-area professionals. As a junior, she spent two days a week at city hall, where Gray was her mentor.
Despite its name, the Met isn't a vocational school and doesn't train students for particular types of work. It requires students to do internships, instead, because the school believes that many students are more motivated and are more successful when they learn through “real world” experiences that they're excited about. No less importantly, the school believes that internships build strong bonds between students and adults — bonds that the school argues are a critical ingredient of successful secondary education.
Many students enter high school alienated, apathetic, and often angry. They simply don't care about school. The Met's response has been to create an education environment where every student is well known to a range of adults during the four years of high school, where students sense that they are cared about, and where they believe their work is valued. Breaking down students' disaffection in this way, the Met believes, is the key to motivating them to learn. The school's motto is “One Student at a Time.”
The Met is the culmination of the long and often controversial career of Dennis Littky, a high school principal and onetime New Hampshire state legislator who has been the subject of two books, a made-for-television movie, and coverage in the New York Times and nearly every other major American media outlet.
Littky and the school's cofounder, Elliot Washor, are strong advocates of the progressive principles of John Dewey, who wrote that students learn best when confronting challenges that arise in the course of pursuing personal interests. But they have gone further than other progressive educators. There are no classrooms at the school. There are no textbooks. There aren't even any teachers.
Instead, there are “advisors,” who spend their days working with a group of fourteen students assigned to them as ninth-graders and who stay with those students through graduation four years later. They guide the students through a series of internships and independent projects and ensure that they complete the school's learning requirements. It's a highly personalized system.
It was Tawana's advisor, Kristin Hempel, a petite, twenty-six-year-old Swarthmore graduate with a flinty resolve to help her students achieve, who brought Tawana and Bianca Gray together. When I visited the Met she was nearing the end of her third year with Tawana, a tall, outgoing girl with brown eyes, blue nails, and a gold necklace engraved with her name.
Archives
Small Schools and Race
VUE Number 2, Fall 2003
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
EXCERPT:
Spinning a Web of Relationships
By Thomas Toch, writer-in-residence at the National Center on Education and the Economy and the author of High Schools on a Human Scale: How Small Schools Can Transform American Education (Beacon Press, 2003), from which this article is excerpted.
> Complete bio
By treating its students with respect and connecting them with committed adult advocates, a small urban high school in Rhode Island that serves predominantly youths of color fosters learning by creating a close community.
Bianca Gray, a deputy policy director to Mayor Vincent Cianci Jr. of Providence, Rhode Island, wasn't a teacher. But she was among the most important people in Tawana Ruiz's high school life.
Tawana (not her real name) recently graduated from the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center — the Met for short — an alternative public high school in Providence serving mostly troubled students that has taken the radical step of organizing its instruction around internships that its students do with Providence-area professionals. As a junior, she spent two days a week at city hall, where Gray was her mentor.
Despite its name, the Met isn't a vocational school and doesn't train students for particular types of work. It requires students to do internships, instead, because the school believes that many students are more motivated and are more successful when they learn through “real world” experiences that they're excited about. No less importantly, the school believes that internships build strong bonds between students and adults — bonds that the school argues are a critical ingredient of successful secondary education.
Many students enter high school alienated, apathetic, and often angry. They simply don't care about school. The Met's response has been to create an education environment where every student is well known to a range of adults during the four years of high school, where students sense that they are cared about, and where they believe their work is valued. Breaking down students' disaffection in this way, the Met believes, is the key to motivating them to learn. The school's motto is “One Student at a Time.”
The Met is the culmination of the long and often controversial career of Dennis Littky, a high school principal and onetime New Hampshire state legislator who has been the subject of two books, a made-for-television movie, and coverage in the New York Times and nearly every other major American media outlet.
Littky and the school's cofounder, Elliot Washor, are strong advocates of the progressive principles of John Dewey, who wrote that students learn best when confronting challenges that arise in the course of pursuing personal interests. But they have gone further than other progressive educators. There are no classrooms at the school. There are no textbooks. There aren't even any teachers.
Instead, there are “advisors,” who spend their days working with a group of fourteen students assigned to them as ninth-graders and who stay with those students through graduation four years later. They guide the students through a series of internships and independent projects and ensure that they complete the school's learning requirements. It's a highly personalized system.
It was Tawana's advisor, Kristin Hempel, a petite, twenty-six-year-old Swarthmore graduate with a flinty resolve to help her students achieve, who brought Tawana and Bianca Gray together. When I visited the Met she was nearing the end of her third year with Tawana, a tall, outgoing girl with brown eyes, blue nails, and a gold necklace engraved with her name.
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