The students’ home districts 鈥� Agua Dulce, Premont, Brooks County, Freer and Benavides 鈥� used to operate separately. They had a shrinking student population, were unable to provide much career and technical education, and struggled with low achievement. But seven years ago, a handshake between the superintendents of the Premont and Freer independent school districts gave rise to what would become the .

Today, the consortium, created to stave off consolidation threats and improve student outcomes, is being lauded as a . And the Texas legislature has encouraged other districts to follow its lead.

The five districts, located 45 to 90 minutes southwest of Corpus Christi and serving a student population that is at least 75% Hispanic, share six academies: Early College, for credit toward an associate degree; Grow Your Own, for future teachers; Ignite Technical Institute, focusing on welding; Next Generation Medical Academy, offering nursing and pharmacy education; Willa Zelaya STEM Discovery Zone, featuring computer technology, drone aviation and robotics; and Trade Winds Academy, for HVAC, construction and electrical.

Students wishing to participate in an academy choose the program they want in eighth grade. They take traditional core classes at their home high school and travel to the academies twice a week and every other Friday 鈥� about 10 times a month. 

Sophomore Juliana Farias catches a 6:45 a.m. van, driven by school staff and internet-equipped, at her high school in Agua Dulce for the 45-minute trip to the Grow Your Own Academy. Her friend Emmerson Perez, also a sophomore, does the same in the small town of Freer, nearly an hour west. 

They meet up at Premont Collegiate High School around 7:30 a.m. and walk to a nearby elementary to begin their day as teacher interns. The two won鈥檛 be in Premont long. They’ll return to their respective high schools by midday to continue their regular classes. 

Mylan Pena, a junior at Falfurrias High School in Brooks County Independent School District, chose the welding academy because it offers the chance to earn a free associate degree as well as industry credentials. When Pena was a child, his uncle and grandfather worked as oil pipeline welders, leaving home for weeks at a time. It鈥檚 a job he wants to pursue after he graduates.

鈥淚’m blessed to even have this opportunity,鈥� he said. 鈥淢y mom is a single mother. I know she wouldn’t have the funds to provide this for me. Getting the opportunity to take college (classes) for free and learning to weld for free means a lot.鈥�

Pathways like these are more commonly found in larger, wealthier metropolitan school districts. Texas has more schools in rural areas than any other state 鈥� about . As families flock to more densely populated communities, rural schools are left with scarce resources and sometimes merge as they struggle to serve isolated towns. 

That was the situation in 2019, when the Rural Schools Innovation Zone officially launched. 

The districts had to find something innovative to keep the doors open, said Michael Gonzalez, Rural Schools Innovation Zone director. 鈥淲e had no opportunities for kids,鈥� he said. 鈥淲e needed to do something about it.鈥�

The Premont and Freer districts obtained grant funding and partnered with Brooks County Independent School District to form the consortium. It expanded to include the Agua Dulce and Benavides districts in 2023. The five districts together have about 3,250 students.

Last year, 424 students were enrolled in the academies. Now, there are nearly 600. Gonzalez said 680 are projected to participate in the 2026-27 school year.

It 鈥渨as phenomenal鈥� how the Rural Schools Innovation Zone turned trends around for the communities in south Texas, Gonzalez said. He鈥檚 been the consortium’s director since it was created and was the sole employee for five years, before recently hiring a liaison to help coordinate between the districts and their college partners.

Premont, which had the worst of the partner school districts, increased its student population from 570 students in 2012 to in 2024. From 2018-19 to 2023-24, the school districts the percentage of their graduating students who pass the state鈥檚 in both math and reading from 30% to 51%. The percentage of seniors with dual credit jumped from 16% to 50%, while those with industry certifications increased from 8% to 38%.

Based on the program鈥檚 success, Texas legislators in 2023 to create a that funds similar collaborations among rural districts. The Rural Schools Innovation Zone is such partnerships across Texas. Last year, lawmakers for career technical and education programs, including the rural collaborations, and promoted them as a key strategy for economic growth in the state. 

Here’s a look inside some of the academies, and what their students have to say about their experiences.

Grow Your Own Educator Academy 

Farias chose the Grow Your Own Educator Academy at Premont Collegiate High School to fulfill dreams she鈥檚 had since she was a little girl.

鈥淢y mom was an aide for special education students and some of my best friends are autistic, and as a little kid, you don’t realize the differences until you grow up,鈥� she said. 鈥淚 get a lot of, 鈥榊ou don’t want to do special education. It’s a hard place to be and it’s a lot of work.鈥� But that’s what I want to do, so looking into the program, I was like, 鈥業 need to be in this. It’s something I want to do and I get to start early on in my life.鈥欌��

It was initially intimidating for Farias to travel to Premont, because she was the only Agua Dulce High School student in the teaching academy. But soon she met Perez, from Freer High School, and Ava Gutierrez, a Premont senior.

鈥淭hey’ve made it so much more than just the program, and I think that’s what keeps our programs going 鈥� because we all have relationships within the program that make it so much more than just college hours,鈥� Perez said. 鈥淚t’s cool because we’re from different districts, but we’re still friends.鈥�

The trio assist classes at Premont鈥檚 elementary school and day care before taking college courses at the high school. Premont High School staff teach some of the classes, while others are in person at colleges closer to Corpus Christi, like Texas A&M University’s campus in Kingsville, about 30 miles away.

鈥淥n Tuesdays and Thursdays, I was traveling to Kingsville, and then on Monday, Wednesdays and every other Friday, I was in the classroom in Premont,鈥� Gutierrez said. 鈥淚t was pretty overwhelming for a while, having to travel back and forth, but you get used to it. After a while, it just kind of starts becoming part of your routine.鈥�

Will Zelaya STEM Discovery Zone 

Andrew Herrera, 16, is a junior firefighter for a Brooks County volunteer fire department. He has been known to stay up until 5 a.m. at the station fixing equipment and changing the oil in the fire trucks.

His dad, the department chief, encouraged the Premont sophomore to enroll in the school鈥檚 science, technology, engineering and mathematics academy because of his passion for drones and fire truck mechanics. The program offers instruction in computer technology, engineering, oil and gas drilling, robotics and drone aviation. 

Herrera is pursuing a drone pilot license to assist with fire department calls. 

鈥淚 want to do it because nowadays it’s been getting a lot more difficult for ranch (owners), since they’re building so many houses and stuff like that,鈥� he said. 鈥淚f there’s ever a fire, I’ll be able to fly (the drone) up and I can do 3D mapping or I can find better routes for the trucks to take.鈥�

Haven Farias, a Premont senior, earned his drone pilot license this year. He said he鈥檚 also proud of his work building a life-size robot in one of his academy classes. The two passions are something he wants to continue to follow when he pursues a mechanical engineering degree in the fall at Schreiner University in Kerrville, Texas.

鈥淚’m licensed to fly, so I’ll have more opportunities with jobs and everything for the drone side,鈥� Farias said. 鈥淚 think it’s a great opportunity. Even though I’m in, like, 10,000 sports, and I’m doing five college classes, and then I have to do all my high school classes, it鈥檚 not really difficult. It’s all about time management.鈥�

Ignite Technical Institute 

For Amber Garcia, a commitment to achieving an associate degree is what鈥檚 kept her going at Ignite Technical Institute, the welding pathway at Falfurrias High School in Brooks County Independent School District. 

The Premont senior works two part-time jobs 鈥� sometimes overnight until 6 a.m. 鈥� while taking her regular classes, pursuing pathway courses and gaining college credit. Garcia was in the foster system when she was introduced to the Rural Schools Innovation Zone. Now she鈥檚 one of the best welders in the program, Gonzalez said, and one of the few female students.

鈥淚n my eighth grade year, my older brothers were doing it, and I was kind of inspired by it, but they didn’t like it,鈥� she said. 鈥淚 wanted to do it. I fell in love with it.鈥�

Garcia said it鈥檚 sometimes hard to get up in the mornings and make it to school, but she always attends her welding classes. Gonzalez said he calls her on days she doesn鈥檛 travel to Falfurrias to make sure she鈥檚 still going to Premont High School. The work has paid off, she said, because soon she鈥檒l go straight into the workforce as a welder.

鈥淎 lot of kids are lazy, and our generation is horrible, but you just have to want it,鈥� she said. 鈥淵ou鈥檝e got to push yourself. You have to say, 鈥業’m going to do it.鈥� And no matter how frustrated you get, you just have to keep going. It’s just the growth mindset, but a lot of people don’t have that.鈥�

Next Generation Medical Academy

Mary Alice Cantu was admiring neighborhood Christmas lights with her children and Freer High School鈥檚 curriculum director in 2016 when she heard the school had landed a grant to build a health science pathway. She was the school nurse at the time.

鈥淚 said, 鈥業 really would love to do that,鈥� 鈥� Cantu said. 鈥�(My co-worker) turns around and goes, 鈥榊ou’re running it.鈥� And I’m like, 鈥業’m what?鈥� So I went from the school nurse to this, which was a totally different hat that I wasn’t expecting, but I’ve loved it ever since.鈥�

Cantu began teaching classes at what would become the Next Generation Academy without an education degree. She soon pursued a master鈥檚 program to have the credentials under her belt and entered her district鈥檚 new teacher academy. 

鈥淚 realized it’s one thing to be a teacher and another to be a nurse,鈥� she said. 鈥淭here鈥檚 behavior management, pedagogy 鈥� all these terms. I was like, 鈥榊ou want me to do a lesson plan?鈥� It’s like a patient care plan, but it’s for your class.鈥�

The nearest college program and hospital is close to an hour away, so it鈥檚 important that the medical academy be equipped as closely to a professional setting as possible, Cantu said. The high school鈥檚 home economics kitchen was into a model hospital, complete with a reception desk, patient beds, drug administration carts, IV stands and dummy patients. 

Students wear blue scrubs, clock into class with timecards and poke needles into silicone arms to draw synthetic blood before they practice on each other. There are multiple 7-foot-long touchscreen tables with digital replicas of bodies donated to science. Cantu can peel back layers of the cadavers and simulate health conditions for her anatomy or physiology classes.

Students can earn certifications in phlebotomy, electrocardiogram testing, patient care and medical assistance that can be used in the workplace. The academy got so popular that Freer鈥檚 next school nurse was hired as a second educator.

鈥淚t’s a good problem to have that we’re going to have so many students with certifications, and I don’t mind it, the numbers are growing, and we’ll just figure it out,鈥� Cantu said. 鈥淭here’s just so much opportunity for these students, whether they decide to go into nursing or not, they’re going to have the confidence and the people skills to be able to step into any setting and succeed.鈥�

This growing enrollment is a double-edged sword, Gonzalez said. As more students join academies like Next Generation, teachers have to play a game of Tetris with class schedules and schools have to consider hiring more staff in a remote area that鈥檚 hard to recruit for. 

Student attendance can also be tricky. Gonzalez said some teachers and coaches value athletics or extracurriculars over their academy programs, and students may miss a class they get only twice a week if their team has to travel for a game or conference. 

The number of educators who were present during the zone鈥檚 creation is also dwindling. The partner districts have gone through five superintendents in the past three years together, meaning more people are coming in who are unfamiliar with the model and how it works, Gonzalez said.

A couple of districts have the traditional eight class periods, while the others have block schedules, making it difficult to coordinate transportation between schools. And then there are the students who switch academies or decide to leave a program altogether. The STEM academy has the lowest retention rate, at 86%. Next Generation Medical Academy retains more than 96% of its students.

鈥淚t’s crucial that we have 鈥榢id magnets,鈥� or teachers who have a relationship with these youngsters,鈥� Gonzalez said. 鈥淭hey keep them in there, right? I’m not going to lie 鈥� we lose kids all the time.鈥�

Gonzalez鈥檚 own job keeps him working all hours of the day. That dedication earned him a from South by Southwest last year.

鈥淚 didn’t realize the magnitude of it,鈥� he said. 鈥淚t’s pretty neat. You know, I just try to stay the course, try to stay on it. I use the word 鈥榞rinder’ a lot because that’s just the way I was raised.鈥�

Gonzalez said the Rural Schools Innovation Zone allows the remote, small districts of south Texas to remain operating and, in turn, keep their communities alive. 

Each town can still gather under bright stadium lights on autumn Fridays to cheer on its football team. Students can continue to walk to their neighborhood school. And families stay because their children can still get big-city opportunities, he said.

鈥淲hy do kids pick schools? Usually for programs. They don’t go because they have the best English teacher, right?鈥� he said. 鈥淭hey have the best nursing program, the best baseball program, the best football program. They go for programming and then the 鈥榢id magnet鈥� teachers running the program. So if I can allow you to be involved with the best program in the world and you don’t have to leave your school district, it’s a no-brainer. That’s what we did.鈥�

If anyone could sell you a $2 million school bus, it鈥檚 Karina Butler.

The 17-year-old spent last fall learning about hydrogen fuel cells 鈥� New York school districts must stop buying conventional diesel buses by 2027, and by 2035, Butler explained, all school buses in the state must operate electrically. 

The new buses are clean, she said, but at $2 million apiece they’re also 鈥渧ery pricey.鈥� That鈥檚 a tough sell for cash-strapped districts in the state鈥檚 capital region. So working with a local , she and three classmates developed a pitch for the company to deliver to nearby districts.

A senior at Tech Valley High School in Albany, N.Y., Butler is by now used to this. She said she owes her confidence to the school, which pushes students to embrace discomfort and grow into their own through an unusual mixture of corporate-inspired teamwork, self-discovery and personal attention from adults.

When it opened in 2007, Tech Valley was at the forefront of project-based STEM learning. One of the early schools, it was conceived during a high-tech building boom, taking its name from a marketing campaign in the late 1990s to promote eastern New York State as a high-tech competitor to Silicon Valley.

But while other schools built on the principles of STEM, projects or corporate partnerships have come and gone, Tech Valley has endured for nearly two decades. Now in its own boxy two-story building on another tech campus, it endures due to an unusual funding structure, small size and a close-knit community.

It鈥檚 not a charter school and it鈥檚 not a traditional district school. Technically, it鈥檚 a state-funded technical school underwritten by two regional chapters of New York鈥檚 Board of Cooperative Education Services, or , which typically offer training programs in welding, cosmetology and the like. Many rural districts rely on BOCES programs for one-off courses they can鈥檛 afford.

Tech Valley offers a BOCES program in STEM-focused, project-based learning that spans four years. Instead of a license or certificate, students earn a full diploma, taking a full load of courses that includes one year of computer science and two of Mandarin. 

鈥淚 sometimes personally call it 鈥榓 unicorn school鈥� because it’s something that doesn’t exist in nature,鈥� said Sarah Hugger, Tech Valley鈥檚 outreach coordinator.

Even after 17 years, it enrolls just 150 students. As a BOCES program, the school draws students from 30 school districts via random lottery. The small size means virtually everyone knows each other.

鈥淵ou literally can鈥檛 avoid anybody here,鈥� said junior Willow Kabel. While she鈥檚 not good friends with all of her classmates, 鈥淚’d say I’m friendly with everyone.鈥�

She added: 鈥淎 lot of us are introverts, so we don’t want to socialize. But the introverts find each other.鈥�

In their applications, most prospective students say they鈥檙e looking for something different from what they got in their first eight years of schooling. Many write of bullying in elementary and middle school, often over gender identity. Others, from small towns, simply don鈥檛 want to continue with the same handful of kids they鈥檝e always known. 

鈥淓veryone is coming from other districts, so no matter how many friends you had at your home district, coming here is basically starting over,鈥� said junior George Hartman. 鈥淎nd I think what that really does is it puts everyone on such a level ground.鈥�

Once they arrive, students encounter a program in which many classes are team-taught and interdisciplinary, with an emphasis on 鈥� perhaps even an obsession with 鈥� collaboration. Open-access, flexible work spaces dot the building, inviting impromptu brainstorms and conversations. Teachers long ago ditched the traditional coffee-and-donuts teachers鈥� lounge for a central common work space with a long work table. Students are welcome.

Long, multi-period, interdisciplinary classes are the norm rather than the exception, and teachers鈥� time planning lessons together 鈥渋s non negotiable,鈥� said special education teacher Danielle Hemmid. 

The school assesses students not just on communication and literacy but on their ability to work together to get things done. 鈥淲e know that being able to collaborate with others is going to help you now and in the future,鈥� said Principal Amy Hawrylchak. 鈥淪o we want to give you those tools and skills while you’re here.鈥�

For students, the responsibilities they bear for group projects are well understood. Unlike in many high schools that dabble in projects 鈥� these days that鈥檚 basically every school 鈥� students at Tech Valley are graded not just on their work but on how they share and delegate tasks. 

Freshman Ari Story recalled that when he was assigned a project at his previous school, 鈥淚 would just sit there and think, 鈥榃hat am I going to do? How do I start this? How do I continue? How do I spread it out?鈥� I wouldn’t know what to do鈥�

Teachers look closely at who鈥檚 doing what and assign (or withhold) 鈥渃ollaboration points.鈥� Senior Teddy DuBois noted that in a few circumstances, teachers might even check the revision history on a shared document to determine if one person typed it all. Typically, though, teachers get good at spotting team members who are skating by and letting others do the work. 

Eventually, skating by catches up: After three warnings, a student who鈥檚 not participating can be removed from a team and lose valuable points. 

鈥淗ere, if you don’t work together, you don’t really pass, and you don’t do well,鈥� said Hartman. 

Hawrylchak studied student and teacher agency in graduate school and as a result the school is thick with it. Virtually all clubs and activities, from debate to drama to flag football, are student-run.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the school attracts a large number of neurodivergent students. At last count, 35% of Tech Valley students arrived with either an individualized education plan or a less restrictive 504. Even with such a small student body, the school employs three full-time special education teachers.

鈥淲e’re bridging this gap between who you were in elementary and middle school and how you are going to function in college,鈥� said Hemmid, the special education teacher. That most commonly looks like helping kids develop so-called 鈥渆xecutive functioning鈥� skills that allow them to work independently. 

The goal, she said, is to help every graduate do well in college with minimal accommodations such as more time on exams or extra help in a writing center. 

By planning together, Hemmid said, teachers are able to anticipate the challenges students bring and navigate them. 鈥淭he classroom just runs and it should be so that I don’t need to say, 鈥楺uick, let me prepare something so that my students can do this work.鈥欌�� 

While a direct comparison with local high schools is difficult, Hawrylchak said that with few exceptions students attend Tech Valley all four years. Of those, virtually 100% graduate.

鈥淪tudents who stay here graduate,鈥� she said, 鈥渁nd have since we started.鈥�

I-Term and 鈥榠kigai鈥�

Once a year in the winter, all classes stop for a week so students can take part in a schoolwide 鈥淚-Term鈥� that matches them with community partners to explore careers. Like much of the curriculum, the project is guided by the Japanese principle of 鈥渋kigai,鈥� or purpose. It asks students to consider not only what they love to do and are good at, but what the world needs and what they might someday do well enough to earn a living.

As freshmen, students explore openly, Hawrylchak said 鈥� many freshman boys take this opportunity to shadow game designers at local studios, for instance. But by sophomore year, teachers are asking them to think more holistically about their purpose. 鈥淲e’re saying, 鈥極.K., now we want to add the layer of: What are you good at?鈥欌��

It gets more complex: As juniors, they must confront not only their tastes and abilities, but whether the world needs what they have to offer 鈥� and how they can make a living doing it. 

Pretty soon, Hawrylchak said, 鈥淭hey’re aware of this entire Venn diagram鈥� that encompasses a larger sense of purpose. That鈥檚 when they begin job-shadowing for a week as juniors. As seniors, that becomes a two-week commitment, offering 鈥渁 deeper, richer experience,鈥� she said.

It all leads to a lot of soul-searching, with students often taking years to narrow down their ideas. One student who loved soccer spent her first I-Term shadowing soccer coaches at both the high school and college levels, then developed an interest in politics and worked in a state senator鈥檚 office and, later, for a legislative lobbyist. She eventually attended the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, intending to study politics.

鈥淢y deepest hope is that the kid exits high school with a sense of maybe, 鈥楾hese are some things I don’t want to do,鈥� 鈥� Hugger said. 鈥� 鈥楾hese are not things that inspire me or make my heart beat fast. And maybe here’s the thing that I do want to do.鈥� 鈥�

鈥楾he more times I do it, the more skills I learn鈥�

Each fall, seniors spend about six weeks on a capstone project in which they partner with a local business 鈥� given the region, that can mean anything from a small advertising studio to IBM or State Street Bank.

Students take a day to 鈥渟peed date鈥� with company representatives and figure out which one they want to work with. Then they settle in and work out solutions to a problem the company presents. 

For one group this winter, the challenge was to design soundproofing surfaces for a in nearby Troy. DuBois, who wants to study engineering, designed a chandelier that absorbs sounds and a gaming surface that turns into a moveable, soundproof wall, while a classmate proposed panels filled with homegrown mushrooms that absorb sound.

Butler recalled that she was an abysmal public speaker when she arrived at Tech Valley as a freshman. She would cry, laugh 鈥� or both 鈥� when called upon to make a presentation. Four years later, she is now quite comfortable in front of a crowd. 鈥淭he more times I do it, the more skills I learn. You get better at it.鈥�

After graduation this spring, she鈥檚 hoping to study education or museum curation at a nearby state university campus 鈥� she has always loved wandering through museums, ever since she visited one that her grandmother cleaned.

Her previous school couldn鈥檛 come close to what Tech Valley offered: 100 community service hours, working with business partners, job shadowing. 

鈥淚 wanted to go [here] because they said that you get to go out on your own, discover who you want to be, what you are going to be,鈥� she said. 鈥淚nstead of just sitting in traditional classes and people talking to you about their careers, you got to experience that.鈥� 

For her senior project at Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School, Katie Collins decided to learn how to play guitar.

She鈥檇 originally planned to learn and record four or five songs in eight months, but by early May she told a small crowd, 鈥淚 chose, in a very Parker fashion, to do two songs, in depth.鈥�

If a school鈥檚 ethos can be summed up in a single sentence, that might be it: Less is more. It guides much of what happens in this unusual, if influential, school 30 miles northwest of Boston.

鈥淚 went into this having slightly unrealistic expectations of myself,鈥� Collins told judges at her presentation, having predicted this time last year that she鈥檇 be 鈥渁 rock star by May.鈥� 

Asked whether she considers herself a guitar player yet, she was unequivocal: 鈥淢y idea of being a guitar player is 鈥榮hredding.鈥� I鈥檓 not there yet.鈥� One day, she said, she鈥檒l be a rock star. 鈥淚鈥檓 gonna keep at it.鈥�

鈥榃e鈥檙e not afraid鈥�

Founded in 1994, Parker is a throwback to , when educators rebelled against the impersonal tyranny of bell schedules and the very idea of letter grades. It has found a way to operate without these, laying the groundwork for some of the most influential school experiments happening today.

Parker students aren鈥檛 assigned grades. Instead, they constantly revise their work, which teachers judge on a continuum from 鈥渂eginning鈥� to 鈥渕eeting鈥� expectations. Work that fails to pass muster doesn鈥檛 receive a traditional D or F. Students simply stay in the 鈥渂eginning鈥� phase of the process, invited to try again without the traditional consequences lower grades carry in most schools.

While operating without traditional letter grades presents a challenge for many new students, this problem soon solves itself, said Brian Harrigan, Parker鈥檚 head of school. By the end of the school year, he no longer hears new students talking about grades. 鈥淭hey are definitely motivated by ‘meets.’鈥�

It seems to be working: Parker boasts an enviable college-going rate of 82.4%. And though it doesn鈥檛 offer a single Advanced Placement class, Parker鈥檚 pass rate on AP exams is among the highest in Massachusetts.

In its latest state report card, Parker鈥檚 out-of-school was 0.7%. The number of students disciplined for any reason hovered in single digits.

Most schools keep kids in check by threatening lost points or detention if they鈥檙e late, forget an assignment or misbehave, said Deb Merriam, Parker鈥檚 academic dean and one of three original staff members. 鈥淎t this school, there’s no sense that there’s something to lose.鈥�

She added bluntly, 鈥淲e don’t 鈥榙o fear.鈥欌��

There鈥檚 also no sense that adults fear kids acting out if they鈥檙e unhappy or bored, because so much of the school鈥檚 energy is spent ensuring that everyone succeeds in pursuit of their interests.

That principle is central to student life at Parker: Each student owns his or her education. 

鈥淓veryone has chosen to be here,鈥� said Harrigan. 鈥淚 think that’s important.鈥�

Roots in Sizer鈥檚 work

Ironically, fear played a role in the school鈥檚 creation three decades ago.

Parker opened its doors in 1995, a year after Massachusetts approved its charter 鈥� one of the first in the state. It was led by a group of parents and teachers inspired by educator Theodore R. Sizer 鈥� known to colleagues as Ted 鈥� who a decade earlier had written the seminal book Horace鈥檚 Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School.

The book followed a fictional beleaguered English teacher named Horace Smith, who confronts a system that somehow expects little of students but simultaneously fears their capacity for trouble. The 鈥渃ompromise鈥� of the title describes Horace鈥檚 bid to make peace with students by not challenging them too much.

Sizer naturally envisioned a more positive and democratic way to run a high school, with teachers becoming trusted coaches rather than simply getting by. He and his wife, Nancy, founded the Coalition of Essential Schools, which worked to spread the word about his ideas, outlined in 10 鈥溾�� such as 鈥淪tudent as worker, teacher as coach.鈥�

The Sizers were among the school鈥檚 founders and served as co-principals from 1998 to 1999. Ted Sizer died in 2009, and the coalition folded in 2016, but many of today鈥檚 most innovative high school models 鈥� from California鈥檚 heralded to the national network of schools 鈥� were founded by his disciples.

鈥業s this far enough?鈥�

Individualization is perhaps the key component of what makes Parker work, giving students leeway to build skills and explore interests at their own pace. It also allows teachers to avoid leveling or tracking students, as most schools do.

In an Arts and Humanities class one recent morning, students strummed ukuleles in preparation for the day鈥檚 lesson: studying and composing protest songs.

Within a week of picking up the instruments, they鈥檇 be expected to perform a protest song, either a cover of a classic, a new version with different lyrics or an original. 

In one of his upper level math classes, teacher Jon Churchill hands students an imaginary $1,000 monthly salary and a handful of bills to pay. Then he tasks them with creating a budgeting spreadsheet. 

The push to individualize sometimes makes Churchill think of himself as a sort of mountain guide, forever asking students, 鈥淚s this far enough? Is this far enough? What do you want to do? Do you want to go forward?鈥�

A few kids scramble up the mountain, their energy spent making their spreadsheets as efficient and elegant as possible. Others struggle to create the functions needed just to pay one bill. Individualizing the assignment, he said, means 鈥渢hey can all have that same common language, even though the kids are doing slightly different things.鈥� 

The key to succeeding in such differentiation, Harrigan said, is class sizes of no more than 20 to 25 students and a commitment to team teaching, especially in the early years. 

Teachers assigned to Parker鈥檚 youngest students co-teach two long, two-hour sessions daily, assessing the work of no more than about 25 students daily, much smaller than the load of most high school teachers, who must often grade upwards of 100 papers per assignment 鈥� one Chicago English teacher recently recalled having to grade as many as per assignment. 

Parker also offers teachers a daily two-hour prep period. That means they can offer 鈥渁 ton of revision, a ton of reflection鈥� for students to improve their work, Harrigan said. 

The school has inevitably inspired broad interest from two groups: homeschoolers and students with special needs. Students with individualized education plans and less restrictive 504 plans now comprise about 40% of Parker鈥檚 student body. 

鈥淲e have a lot of parents whose kids have struggled in traditional districts come here for the support that the school offers,鈥� said Sue Massucco, the arts and humanities domain leader. Parker鈥檚 ethos allows students to 鈥渃ome and be yourself,鈥� she said. 鈥淚f they want to wear a cape to school, they wear a cape to school.鈥�

Senior presentations

Just as they鈥檙e spared letter grades, they also attend classes in groups that aren鈥檛 strictly age-segregated. Instead, they study sequentially in one of three 鈥渄ivisions,鈥� working at their own pace as they master 13 competencies. 

Each division is roughly equivalent to two years, ranging from 7th to 12th grade. Because they 鈥済ateway鈥� out of each division, presenting their work to small groups of teachers, parents and classmates, students soon get used to talking to adults, said Marena Cole, a Division 2 arts and humanities teacher. That helps make them more reflective. 鈥淭hey know themselves well,鈥� she said. 鈥淭hey’re asked to reflect on their work constantly, starting from when they’re 12.鈥�

This process culminates in their senior project and a formal, if-friendly, hour-long talk, with 17- and 18-year-olds holding forth on everything they know on topics from hypnosis to van conversion.

Senior Ava Soderman detailed what it鈥檚 like to be a ranger at Yellowstone National Park, which she visited last winter. She hopes to work at a national park after she graduates from college 鈥� and it shows.

Dressed in a makeshift ranger outfit, Soderman recalled meeting and training with park personnel, persuading one ranger to be her mentor and confronting her doubts about the job. She admitted that she didn鈥檛 quite get around to earning her required emergency medical services and paramedic training. 鈥淚f you guys know me, I don’t do well with needles and blood, and I pass out frequently,鈥� she said. 鈥淪o this is something that I do plan to get my certification in. It’s just going to require a lot of good mindset and good practice.鈥�

The presentations are smart, often funny and deeply personal.

鈥淏y the time they’re seniors, they can hold a room,鈥� said wellness teacher Kafi Beckles. 鈥淭hey can present, they can share their opinions, they’re able to have their own thoughts, not just regurgitate facts.鈥�

Less is more

As a lottery-based charter school, Parker serves students from 40 towns in the Boston area. The 鈥渆ssential鈥� in the school鈥檚 name means that, as with others guided by Sizer鈥檚 ideals, it strives to do just a few things well. Among the coalition鈥檚 10 principles, one of the most often-quoted is: Less is more: depth over coverage. 

So there鈥檚 no band or football team, no high-tech classroom gear, and no pretense that it can do it all.

The less is more sensibility makes a kind of sense at Parker, which for much of its life has been housed in a repurposed, slightly run-down 1960s-era elementary school on a decommissioned Army base. While Harrigan and others often dream about what life might be like in a newer, nicer building, the idea tends to melt away in favor of discussions about curriculum, teacher feedback and student growth.

But it has occasionally hurt Parker in recruiting, as prospective families inevitably compare it to offerings in their communities.

Board chair and parent Pam Gordon, who has had two children attend Parker, recalled sitting in on town meetings in Harvard, Mass., a few years ago as the town council debated building a new $53 million elementary school. Mold had been discovered in the existing school, which offered a 鈥減retty good reason鈥� to start anew.

But when people stood up and said a new building would improve the education there, she said, 鈥淚 actually laughed.鈥�

She tells people, 鈥淐ome over to Parker, 10 minutes away, and see what they’re doing, because the education is far superior. And the care that’s given to the students, and the way students treat each other 鈥� you don’t need a splashy building.鈥�

Fortunately, the U.S. Department of Education鈥檚 Office of Educational Technology (OET) released new guidelines for EdTech companies earlier this year called 鈥�.鈥� The report underscores the need for 鈥渞esponsible innovation,鈥� adding, 鈥渆ducator and student feedback should be incorporated into all aspects of product development, testing, and refinement to ensure student needs are fully addressed.鈥� As , 鈥淭he era of tech-first solutions is over. Developers must collaborate meaningfully with educators from day one. Understanding pedagogy is as crucial as coding skills.鈥�

The shares this mindset as part of our mission to reimagine the high school learning experience so it鈥檚 more relevant and engaging for today鈥檚 learners, while better preparing them for the future. We see AI as a tool with transformative potential for educators and makers to leverage 鈥� but only if it鈥檚 developed and implemented with ethics, transparency and equity at the forefront. That鈥檚 why we鈥檙e building partnerships between educators and AI developers to ensure that products are shaped by the real needs and challenges of students, teachers and schools. Here鈥檚 how we believe all stakeholders can embrace the Department鈥檚 recommendations through ongoing collaborations with tech leaders, educators and students alike.

Keeping Tech and Learning Student-Centric

XQ鈥檚 approach to high school redesign is always student-centric. In that spirit, we must shift from the mindset that AI and other tech tools are solely for educators; they also exist to improve students鈥� learning. Rather than focusing exclusively on improving output (such as lesson plans and assessment materials), makers should also emphasize improving outcomes, such as student proficiency and engagement. Ann-Katherine Kimble, XQ鈥檚 Director of School Success, said that鈥檚 why it鈥檚 wrong to focus only on how AI can save teachers time and make their jobs easier. 鈥淥ur young people, teachers and classrooms don’t deserve that,鈥� she explained. 鈥淭hey deserve a point of view that believes that AI can enhance your practice and knowledge, deepen your creative and responsive approaches and help educators capitalize on the sweet spot where the art of teaching and the science of learning meet.鈥�

At , an XQ school in Memphis, Tennessee, computer science teacher Mohammed Al harthy sees AI as a partner in the classroom 鈥� something students engage with during the learning process but never rely on for the finished product.

For instance, in one project his students explored how to build AI applications to track hand movements for American Sign Language, highlighting the value of learning how AI works, writing code in Python and experimenting with tools like Google鈥檚 MediaPipe. Al harthy isn鈥檛 so worried that his students will simply copy and paste as they learn. 鈥淎rtificial intelligence never sounds like a high school student, so the concerns about cheating are kind of silly,鈥� he explained. 鈥淚f you鈥檙e concerned about that, you should step back and reassess what your students are doing from the start.鈥� This approach aligns with a national shift toward focusing on and collaboration rather than rote answers, allowing students to use AI as a tool to enhance their problem-solving and critical-thinking skills.

AI is just one of many topics covered by the, a newsletter that comes out twice a month for high school teachers. Check it out and subscribe now.

Ensuring Equitable Learning Opportunities

At XQ, we believe that ensuring equitable access means creating AI-driven learning experiences that are flexible, adaptive and tailored to the unique needs of diverse student populations, especially neurodivergent students and multi-language learners. AI can help by creating tools designed to serve all learners fairly and effectively without stripping away our students’ individuality.

One of the technology鈥檚 most promising capabilities is its ability to provide real-time, actionable feedback to students and educators. Tim Brodsky, a thought leader on AI who taught social studies at the XQ high school in Santa Ana, California, was recently for his innovative use of generative AI to support multilingual learners in his AP courses. With automated feedback occurring in real-time, Brodsky said systems can analyze data and provide immediate insights about student engagement, attendance and other factors to predict risk factors. 鈥淭his takes the load off teachers, who often have to sift through spreadsheets to find trends and nuances,鈥� he said. 鈥淎I provides a better method for holistic data collection and a more effective way of measuring it.鈥� 

However, student data always comes with caveats. Too often, algorithms mirror the on which they鈥檙e trained. found this can result in mischaracterizing the writing of non-native English speakers as AI-generated, and experts found language models that classified certain jobs, like secretary or flight attendant, as feminine. XQ addresses this problem by working closely with developers to ensure their products are more culturally responsive to the needs and outcomes educators are looking to provide for their students.

For example, teachers at Crosstown worked with the EdTech company to develop (PBL) experiences. The company鈥檚 CEO and co-founder Aatash Parikh said this collaboration was helpful for both sides and influenced the evolution of the company鈥檚 AI products. 鈥淗aving educators at Crosstown High School walk us through their workflow designing project-based learning experiences helped us realize what would make Inkwire a more complete solution for schools,鈥� he said. 

A former PBL teacher himself, Parikh wanted to ensure that Inkwire鈥檚 generative AI tools don鈥檛 just stop at creating PBL plans, but also incorporate deeper pedagogical layers to be more responsive for educators and schools. At Crosstown High, educators, including science teacher and Head of Innovation and Research Nikki Wallace, showed the Inkwire team what they were learning from each other, and how to integrate that professional feedback into their platform. 鈥淲e鈥檙e helping these makers understand how equity is created in the classroom, helping them make more responsive products,鈥� Wallace said. 鈥淭eachers learn best from other teachers.鈥�

Fostering Ethical Collaboration Between Educators and Developers

The days of tech-first solutions are over; what鈥檚 needed now is a deep partnership where developers and educators work hand-in-hand to ensure AI tools are technologically sound and pedagogically effective. The DOE鈥檚 new guidelines for EdTech refer to this as a 鈥渄ual stack鈥� approach鈥攁 framework that combines the 鈥渄evelopment stack鈥� applied to product creation alongside a 鈥渞esponsibility stack鈥� to ensure these products are built with ethics, transparency and public trust for classroom use.

While many AI tools help create engaging projects and lessons, Wallace wanted a tool to better support personalized learning. While working alongside Inkwire, she said XQ connected her with other AI makers, such as , to build an AI Chatbot that would support an interdisciplinary, community-centered project for her students. 

鈥淲e frontloaded the bot with all the information I need to build a successful learning experience in my classroom,鈥� Wallace explained. Her students looked at statistics for infectious diseases that impact Memphis. Their chatbot then served as what Wallace called a 鈥渃ognitive partner.鈥� It helped them progress through the science project by unpacking and generating complex questions such as 鈥淲hat community partners in Memphis can I reach out to?鈥� and 鈥淲hat information in the research might I have overlooked?鈥� and 鈥淲hat governmental systems are in place?鈥� From there, Wallace said, students figured out which were associated with the project.

鈥淲e wanted the students to be able to identify, build and then reflect on the project benchmarks, learning outcomes and pathways they would need in order to progress at their own pace.鈥�

Wallace said this experience was grounded in two of the : and . The chatbot helped make learning more personalized and rigorous.

Betsey Schmidt, founder and CEO of MeshEd and a veteran curriculum designer, said customizable large language models (LLMs) like PlayLab and Inkwire can transform lesson planning. 鈥淏y understanding what excites and motivates students, educators can more easily adapt core curricula to resonate on a deeper level with learners, incorporating their passions, hobbies, strengths and growth areas 鈥� and making real-world connections to learners鈥� profiles,鈥� she explained. Schmidt has been collaborating with XQ to bring teachers and high school leaders into the AI-for-learning product design cycle 

Looking Ahead

By this time next year, generative AI will likely , whether we鈥檙e ready or not. However, education systems and policies are incredibly resilient to change. The recent pandemic made that painfully clear as schools often went back to business as usual rather than embracing new learning models, such as awarding credit for content mastery instead of seat time (Carnegie units), a rigid system that鈥檚 been used for more than a century and . (XQ and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching have to address this problem.)

AI is already showing us how to make education more individualized and equitable. By encouraging tech leaders and makers to continue collaborating with educators, at events like in New York City next month, we can work toward a future in which all students can reach their potential 鈥� and where teachers can make the most of their talent.

Want to learn more about how to create innovative teaching and learning in high schools? Subscribe to the , a newsletter that comes out twice a month for high school teachers.

Disclosure: is a financial supporter of 社区黑料.

But looks can be deceiving. Most weeks, this school sends students to work in high-rise offices, tech firms or a coding center it runs downtown.

In fact, the building鈥檚 past history as a neighborhood elementary school may be the only reminder of the big, comprehensive and often unsafe public high schools from which it鈥檚 often a refuge. 

Offering a dizzying array of internships, college courses and dual enrollment opportunities, Building 21 challenges nearly all of the conventional wisdom about what an urban public high school should do.

Unlike most urban high schools, Building 21 is small: Enrollment is capped at 400 students, with classes of just 25 or fewer.

It operates under a complex set of that stress the importance of relationships. When conflicts arise, teachers must help resolve them quickly, interfering as little as possible as students work things out. The school was among the first in Philadelphia to introduce so-called , an alternative to traditional 鈥� often harsh 鈥� school discipline. Instead of a lecture or suspension for misbehavior, students often find themselves deep in conversation about what happened, talking with teachers, counselors and classmates to get to the bottom of a conflict and resolve it. These practices, the school maintains, also teach problem-solving skills.

In operation for a decade, it also boasts something most Philadelphia schools don鈥檛: a 94% graduation rate for the past two years. At last count, the district鈥檚 four-year graduation rate .

Nabeehah Parker, a 20-year veteran of the district, came to Building 21 in 2022 to run its partnership program. Her goal, she said, was to make it a place where students can have the same opportunities as students at selective schools.

To that end, the school offers a veritable revolving door of experts coming in to teach classes and students heading out for face-time with employers.

It features the kinds of risk-taking and experiences often reserved for students in elite schools. Yet it admits virtually anyone, with open-enrollment policies that match those of the city鈥檚 big neighborhood high schools.

Principal Ben Koch started out as a Spanish teacher here, building its world language program around a concept called 鈥�.鈥� Instead of memorizing vocabulary lists and conjugating verbs, students act out stories in the language they鈥檙e learning. The audience responds to the actors in a kind of interactive linguistic improv. 

鈥淚 saw that just take off,鈥� he said. Students took more risks, retained more vocabulary and learned to speak in full sentences. 

Simultaneously, he organized a class trip to Costa Rica, where students hiked the rainforest, ziplined, helped repaint an elementary school and worked at an elder care center. 

Closer to home, students learn bioscience through a mobile program sponsored by the Pennsylvania Society for Biomedical Research and game design with a teacher who created a mobile app to help schools track inventory. In a cosmetology class, teacher Samantha Bromfield focuses on ensuring employable skills, believing that 鈥渆veryone should know how to do a range of everything.鈥�

The school鈥檚 open-admissions policy is a draw for many families, said Parker, the partnership coordinator. The opportunity for any student to attend, no matter their grades or behavioral record, is 鈥渟omething that parents are looking for.鈥�

But it also means much of Building 21鈥檚 energy is spent getting students鈥� skills up to the level where they can reliably pursue their interests. 

That often takes the form of individualizing assignments and basically personalizing student performance levels. In an English class, all students are writing about topics they鈥檙e interested in, but one student may be tasked with writing a cogent essay based on a reading, while another may write one that does more with the reading, incorporating specific details or answering complex questions. 

鈥淲hat we’re trying to find is that sweet spot where you’re not ignoring the truth of what 鈥榰nfinished learning鈥� looks like in high school 鈥� and you want kids to find themselves and get engaged,鈥� said co-founder Laura Shubilla.

If some of that isn鈥檛 sexy or new, she shrugs it off. A lot of what works in education, including systemic differentiated instruction, simply isn鈥檛. 鈥淚 would say probably we’re more intentional than innovative.鈥� 

As a result, while the school gets a lot of visitors, it doesn鈥檛 often appear in the news. These days, one of the main things the school is known for in Philly 鈥� a district plagued with decrepit building conditions 鈥� is its three-month closure last spring after inspectors discovered . In May 2023, one day after it reopened, shut it down again, just hours after a big celebratory barbecue. 

鈥淔our o鈥檆lock in the afternoon,鈥� Shubilla recalled, 鈥渢he ceiling fell in.鈥�

A 鈥榖ackwards-mapped鈥� curriculum

The school offers four years of competency-based learning, in which mastering skills takes precedence over seat time. Since students progress at their own rate, each enjoys what amounts to an individualized education.

It turns the idea of grades on its head, offering students the opportunity to submit and re-submit work until it meets high standards. Assignments are graded on a 2- to 12- point scale. If a student hands in a writing assignment that鈥檚 adequate or only touches on a few competencies, it might earn an 8 or 9 or lower. If she wants to earn a 10 or 11, she can refer to a chart that lays out the skills associated with such a piece of writing: It must have a compelling hook and strong point of view, cite evidence and acknowledge other perspectives.

Earning a 10 or higher means it鈥檚 as good as something a college student 鈥� or at least a college-ready student 鈥� might produce.

鈥淲e did a lot of studying on what it takes to be successful in college and on a job,鈥� said co-founder Chip Linehan, 鈥渁nd we sort of backwards-mapped from there.鈥�

Hassan Durant, 17, a senior, said the curriculum is challenging but worth the effort. 鈥淚t pushes us to think harder and more on a college-based level,鈥� he said

Understanding how to move up the grading scale was difficult at first, but many students now welcome it.

鈥淎 lot of people that I know that feel like they should have scored higher go to the teachers and ask, 鈥榃hat can I revise? What can I work on? What can I fix and change to take this from an 8 and bring it up to at least a 10?鈥欌�� Durant said.

After years of traditional learning and report cards, he said it was difficult to get his parents to understand the subtleties of competency.

He recalled telling his parents, 鈥淚’m not really failing, and I wouldn’t say I’m passing, but I am getting the work done and doing what I have to do so that I can pass.鈥� 

Roots at Harvard, MIT

Co-founders Shubilla and Linehan created Building 21 after meeting at Harvard鈥檚 Graduate School of Education in 2011, where they studied with renowned scholar . 

Elmore pushed students to rethink everything. 鈥淗is question was always, 鈥榃hy does this thing called learning have to take place in this place called school?鈥欌�� said Shubilla. If not, he would ask, what would you replace it with?

She and Linehan soon realized that they had similar answers: Both believed school should start with an 鈥渁nchor learning site鈥� connected to opportunities elsewhere.

So they designed a school that both brings in experts from outside and gently pushes students into workplaces. Linehan likes to think of it as making the school 鈥渁s permeable as possible.鈥� 

Elmore, who died in 2021, also pushed students to confront their biases. More broadly, Harvard鈥檚 Graduate School of Education urged teachers to confront bedrock views about their own authority and interact more patiently with students.

鈥淭heir saying was, 鈥榊ou can’t transform the sector until you transform yourself,鈥欌�� Shubilla recalled.

Building 21 opened in 2014, and now operates two campuses, one here and another in nearby . Beyond that, its curriculum is open-sourced, readily accessible to other educators wanting to try their hand at competency-based learning. 

The school鈥檚 name is a sly nod to MIT鈥檚 fabled , which for 80 years served as coded shorthand for a center of innovation. After World War II, it became home to dozens of researchers and technologists, including MIT鈥檚 legendary , widely seen as the first group of computer hackers.

Mastering skills preoccupies much of the first two years here, but the final two take on a different cast, with juniors spending large chunks of the day connecting what they鈥檙e learning to their interests through internships and senior projects. 

Last spring, Durant, the senior, spent a lot of time downtown at , Building 21鈥檚 IT pathway program, to learn the Python computer language. He鈥檚 also in the middle of a paid 鈥渆xternship鈥� with , an engineering software company that specializes in infrastructure. The company 鈥� one of 83 outside organizations that partner with the school 鈥� sponsors five such positions each spring and summer. 

Last fall, Durant was also enrolled in a public speaking class at La Salle University, one of three colleges where Building 21 students can sign up for dual-enrollment classes. Building 21 also runs three dual enrollment classes onsite through Harrisburg University.

Like many schools that emphasize project-based and competency-based learning, it puts seniors through 鈥渃apstone鈥� projects that often summarize their learning, scratch an itch or answer a nagging question.

In one case, a student who wanted to start a theater program visited stages at nearby schools and returned to Building 21 with a detailed proposal to create a homegrown initiative, complete with budget, staffing projections and recommendations.

Another surveyed the African-American history curriculum and came away with a keen observation: When it came to Black Americans, it relied heavily on 鈥渢he oppression narrative鈥� of slavery, racism and subjugation, Shubilla recalled. 鈥淎nd her question was: 鈥榃hy is there not more Black joy in the curriculum?鈥欌�� 

Not only did teachers listen, they spent the following summer staring down the student鈥檚 complaint and eventually concluded that she was right. They redesigned it. 

One teacher that teaching about racial trauma opens a wound for many students of color that teachers often fail to consider. So the school added more readings and projects built around 鈥渆nlightenment and empowerment,鈥� such as a study of the crusading journalist and others.

Taken together, the experiences resonate with students, who mature quickly as they approach graduation.

Aaliyah St. Fleur, 18, a senior, admitted that she wasn鈥檛 really focused on the big picture until last fall, when she met a group of Black women doctors from the University of Pennsylvania Children鈥檚 Hospital at a medical conference. She now wants to be a neonatal intensive care nurse 鈥� or perhaps a gynecologist.

More importantly, she realized that if she wants to be a doctor, she has to get serious about school. 

鈥淚 was on my grades, but iffy about it,鈥� she admitted. 鈥淏ut then once I did the trip, I was like, ‘OK, my GPA has to be higher.鈥欌��

Most schools might not sympathize with a student realizing in the spring of her junior year that she must focus to get into medical school, let alone college. But Parker, Shubilla and others said she鈥檚 got time to begin building a transcript that will help get her there. Likely it will take a big investment in dual-enrollment classes come this fall, when she begins her senior year. 

No one understands that better than Aaliyah, who knows that her time in high school is short. 鈥淚’m actually paying attention.鈥�

Solving chronic absenteeism involves tackling big structural problems like transportation and infrastructure. But we also have to make our schools places where young people want to learn. Too many teens, in particular, had negative feelings about school even before the pandemic. Yale researchers conducting found most teens spent their days 鈥渢ired,鈥� 鈥渟tressed,鈥� and 鈥渂ored.鈥� Fewer than 3 in 100 reported feeling interested while in school.

Decades of research prove that students learn more when they experience high levels of academic engagement and social belonging in school. That鈥檚 why XQ developed grounded in the science of teaching and the importance of cultivating caring, trusting relationships within schools. These principles are being used to rethink the traditional high school experience in across the country to make learning more relevant and engaging for the needs of this generation.

Our partnerships are still new. But so far, we鈥檙e finding graduates from our first 17 schools have more interest in their classes and a stronger sense of belonging at school than their national counterparts. More than three-quarters of the XQ class of 2023 鈥� which includes 17 high schools 鈥� said they were at least somewhat interested in their classes. And 52% of the XQ class of 2023 felt like they belonged 鈥渃ompletely鈥� or 鈥渜uite a bit鈥� at their school, versus only 40% nationally.

I spoke with four students from XQ schools across the country to hear what makes a difference in creating high schools young people want to attend. They are: Evan Bowie, Class of 2024 from Ron Brown College Preparatory High School in Washington, D.C.; Karisse Dickison, Class of 2024 from Elizabethton High School in Elizabethton, Tennessee; Henry Montalvo, Class of 2025 from 颁铆谤肠耻濒辞蝉 in Santa Ana, California; and Lillian Roberts, Class of 2024 from Brooklyn STEAM Center. 

Create Bonding Activities

has fewer than 200 students, but Henry Montalvo didn鈥檛 know most of them when he started there as a ninth grader. That small size helped him adjust to the Santa Ana high school, but he also credited bonding activities. One called Community Week provides an opportunity for students to celebrate, pause and reflect. Students create their own schedules based on available sessions. Montalvo said they may lead the sessions alone or partner with teachers for non-academic, fun classes on topics like putting on a thrift shop and even Pok茅mon card-collecting.

鈥淚t’s just basically a time to come together as a community,鈥� he said of the most recent event this past spring. 鈥淪ometimes you write a letter to yourself, and then they give it to you at the end of the year so you can reflect on it.鈥� 

Evan Bowie said teachers at , an all-male district school in Washington, D.C. that鈥檚 part of the partnership, also look for creative ways to help students bond. Students might be asked, for example, to stand or move their desks into circles and answer a question like, 鈥淲hat’s your affirmation today?鈥� Or, 鈥淗ow was your weekend?鈥� He said sometimes it can feel like you鈥檙e being put on the spot, but it works.

Bowie said if he answered with, 鈥溾�業t was boring.鈥� They’d be, like, 鈥榊ou got to give a real answer.鈥欌�� The upshot: 鈥淚t just pushes the student to think a little bit better.鈥�

Want to learn more about how to create innovative teaching and learning in high schools? Subscribe to the , a newsletter that comes out twice a month for high school teachers.

Seek Student Feedback

Check-ins like this can also happen more formally, as they do at the The program takes students from several local high schools for mornings or afternoons, five days a week, offering them concentrations in career pathways including cybersecurity, design and engineering, filmmaking and more. Brooklyn STEAM Center is in the Imagine NYC

Lillian Roberts chose culinary arts as her concentration. She enjoys how teachers meet with students quarterly. She said they ask how students feel about their classes, which includes 鈥渢he way they’re teaching, if you have any input.鈥� There are also student-led town hall meetings where students can give feedback anonymously on 鈥渢hings that you might not feel comfortable with.鈥�

Bowie said his teachers at Ron Brown College Preparatory High School also solicit feedback on a weekly or monthly basis, depending on the instructor. They鈥檒l ask questions like, 鈥淲hat went well this week? What can I improve on? What ways can you improve your grade?鈥� Bowie said students are also asked to rate the classes on a scale of one to five stars and provide suggestions for how to make a class better, such as including more hands-on activities or more Socratic seminars instead of written assignments.

Make Personal Connections

is located in northeast Tennessee, an area that has struggled for years with the loss of manufacturing and the opioid epidemic. It was selected as an XQ Super School largely because of its teens鈥� proposal for more student-centered learning to benefit the community.

Karisse Dickison, who graduated this year and is heading to college, described a close relationship with school librarian Dustin Hensley 鈥� who regularly talks to students about what they鈥檙e reading and their extracurricular activities. When Dickison helped start a group dedicated to ending gun violence, she said Hensley would ask her about related events in the news.

鈥淚t was just nice to have him reach out and make sure that I knew what was happening in the world,鈥� she said.

Bowie also valued a personal connection with English teacher Teresa Lasley, who encouraged him to apply to Georgetown University, where he鈥檚 attending this fall. He recalled her showing the class a video about how Black students didn鈥檛 feel welcome at the prestigious school. When he spoke with Lasley, he said she told him he doesn鈥檛 have to work extra hard to prove he belongs. 鈥淕oing to Georgetown means you’re adding more to Georgetown,鈥� he remembered her saying. 鈥淚t’s better for them than it is for you. You belong. You already have it in you.鈥�

He said that exchange allowed him to 鈥渂e seen,鈥� and that he鈥檚 witnessed similar exchanges between other students and teachers.

At Brooklyn STEAM Center, Roberts recalled one guidance counselor who reached out after he saw her crying. 鈥淎nd then we set up weekly meetings just to have someplace to talk about what’s happening,鈥� she said. But at her other high school, she thought guidance counselors seem to focus more on 鈥減urely more academic things.鈥�

Leave the Building

Students at all four schools experience internships, work-based learning and partnerships with community organizations, which they said make classwork feel more relevant. 

Montalvo said teachers at 颁铆谤肠耻濒辞蝉 helped him land internships at a congressional campaign and with a law firm. He said these outside experiences lead to presentations in class. At Brooklyn STEAM Center, Roberts earned an OSHA 10 as well as a New York Food Protection Certificate, and joined a class trip to Italy to study cuisine. 

Dickison worked on social media and advertising at a local nonprofit. Some classes at Elizabethton High include project-based learning, such as one in which students helped solve a cold case involving a serial killer (their work became the subject of the hit podcast this year). 颁铆谤肠耻濒辞蝉 also offers , which Montalvo said makes classes feel more interesting. In his first year, he recalled how he and another student in his English class interviewed local environmental justice experts about lead contamination and the lack of green space, then made a presentation to their school and invited the greater community.

All three students who graduated this year are going to college in the fall, and Montalvo plans to go to college after graduating next year; he wants to be a lawyer. In our senior survey, 72% of XQ students in the class of 2023 planned to attend college, illustrating a great example of students remaining engaged in school beyond their high school years. 

But a sense of belonging and engagement can only happen with student input. 鈥淪chool is about 鈥�飞颈迟丑鈥� not 鈥�蹿辞谤,鈥�鈥� Roberts said. 鈥淓verything is with the students. It鈥檚 not for the students. You have to do everything with the students in mind.鈥�

Disclosure: is a financial supporter of 社区黑料.

Yet, 41 years after 鈥溾�� caused widespread panic about our public schools, fewer than half of American students are graduating high school ready for college or career. U.S. teens than students in many other countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany, South Korea and Estonia. 

When young people are discouraged from pursuing a STEM-related career, they get locked out of , all of which come with salaries. And that means we all lose out 鈥� because the jobs needed to keep our country running go unfilled, and the inventions, treatments and technologies for our rapidly changing society go undiscovered. 

Our two organizations, and , are deeply committed to ensuring all students have access to joyful and rigorous schools where they know they belong and can succeed. Research shows those three qualities 鈥� joy, rigor, and a sense of belonging 鈥� will prepare them for the future, whether that鈥檚 STEM or any other pursuit. 

XQ partners with schools and districts to rethink the high school experience by making learning more meaningful and engaging through tools such as our Design Principles and Learner Outcomes. Beyond100K unites leading STEM organizations to co-develop and implement solutions to end the STEM teacher shortage by 2043, especially for those most excluded from STEM opportunities.

Sparking Joy in STEM

Guided by and insight from young people across the country, Beyond100K heard that to help spark the brilliance of millions more young minds, schools need to prioritize a focus on equity, representation, and especially belonging in STEM education. But that鈥檚 an increasingly difficult job.

Based on a recent conducted by Beyond100K, it鈥檚 clear that schools and educators are facing dueling pressures. They鈥檙e tasked with reshaping classrooms to foster inclusivity and joy while developing career- and culturally-relevant curricula. Simultaneously, they鈥檙e under heightened scrutiny due to residual pandemic learning loss, ongoing declines , and and teen mental health. 

Beyond100K interviewed educators who expressed concerns about the fear of repercussions for teaching about bias and inequity and the difficulty of creating classrooms of belonging amid pressure to focus solely on raising test scores. Identities of teachers were kept anonymous. 

One teacher noted that they are鈥渟cared to talk about the right thing, doing their own self-work to be able to talk about culture relative to their work鈥�.Regulations in states prevent teachers from having these conversations.鈥�

Yet a positive correlation between a sense of belonging in STEM classrooms and academic performance, retention, and persistence 鈥� particularly for Black, Latino, and Native American students. Similarly, students engaged in SEL programs improve and social well-being. 

Given that nearly 60% of girls and young women who were interested in STEM careers when they entered high school by the time they entered college, there is no question that developing a sense of belonging in the STEM fields is an essential element in nurturing learning environments that lead to STEM persistence. The rigidity of high school STEM education is preventing too many students from pursuing their dreams. 

We see an emerging trend: many teachers and other education leaders view joy, belonging and relevance not in conflict with academic rigor, but as the pathway by which academic success can be achieved. Evidence supports the idea that , particularly for students of color. 

The Beyond100K Foundational Math CoLaboratory, composed of partners from across the STEM learning ecosystem, has developed a of joyful mathematical resources and activities for educators and families to use in making math joyful for their students.

One Beyond100Kpartner, employs a student-belonging-centered science teaching approach in their Bay Area Scientists Inspiring Students program, where scientist and engineer role models bring real-world connections, diversity, and inquiry-based learning into school environments. Teachers observed that students who engaged with these career scientists demonstrated skills above their typical classroom level.

Eliminating Systemic Barriers in High School

Creating a greater sense of belonging is one way to encourage teens to enter STEM. But our young people 鈥� and our creativity 鈥� are also trapped by a structural problem. The American education system, as we know it today, was built around the Carnegie Unit, or 鈥渃redit hour,鈥� a concept developed in 1906 that defines the amount of time a student needs to devote to learning a subject and earning a degree. 

The Carnegie Unit made sense in its day, bringing order and even a degree of equity to a disconnected system. But that day has passed. There鈥檚 no need to limit math, science, English and other required subjects to 50-minute classes with no relationship to one another or to how learning relates to the world beyond the classroom. The Carnegie Unit as we know it today kills student curiosity, inhibits exploration and keeps educators from looking beyond the walls of their school to their communities and our world. Not to mention that clinging to a system that prioritizes time in the classroom over mastery of a subject is actually contributing to the inequity it was designed to prevent.

We are long overdue for It is time to redefine and re-credentialize what it means to be a high school graduate. It鈥檚 time to develop new ways to teach, learn, measure and recognize student achievement, knowledge and growth. We can and must offer young people more immersive, relevant, hands-on experiences that prepare them for a rapidly changing world. 

That鈥檚 our mission at XQ. When we launched in 2015 with an open call to design a transformational high school, 50,000 people signed up. Today, we鈥檙e working in about 60 schools. We have teamed up with school districts in , and the state of to transform high schools at the system level. Partnership is the common ingredient for these high schools and others like them. They鈥檙e forging ahead with new designs based on feedback from their local communities. They take the best ideas and visions 鈥� from educators, students, parents and other stakeholders 鈥� and turn them into life-changing progress for young people. 

Consider the , which is partnering with the computer engineering firm to offer students in the engineering and multimedia pathways an opportunity to take on industry-based projects and earn stipends for their work. Or the Purdue Polytechnic High Schools in Indiana, which resulted from a partnership between Purdue University, business leaders, the state and Indianapolis city leaders to increase the number of students from underrepresented backgrounds attending Purdue and going into STEM careers. PPHS students work on projects that combine math, science and other topics to solve local problems. PPHS has sent more than twice as many students to Purdue University as the entire Indianapolis Public Schools district, most of whom are students of color.  

These examples are only a small sampling of the national movement to transform high schools. XQ and Beyond100K are just two of many organizations engaged in this essential work. Let鈥檚 do everything in our power to give our high school students the tools, resources and inspiration to make that possible. Ensuring that STEM education in high school is inclusive, relevant, engaging and rigorous will help every learner achieve their dreams 鈥� and ours 鈥� in a changing world that will depend on their ideas.

Want to learn more about how to create innovative high school experiences in STEM and subjects? Check out The XQ Xtra, a newsletter for educators that comes out twice a month. Sign up .

Interested in how you can commit to ending the STEM teacher shortage? Learn more .

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In a recent robotics shop class the teacher was hard to spot among a sea of students working in small teams designing, coding and tinkering with their mechanical creations. Every student had a role, from shop foreman to time manager to cleanup crew. Allyson Ordonez, an 11th-grader, was a class ambassador, welcoming guests and showing them around the classroom.

鈥淵our normal classes 鈥� English, math, science 鈥� you learn fundamentals, but this class takes those subjects and combines them,鈥� Ordonez said. 鈥淢ath and science make up robotics and we use everything we learn from these normal academic classes and apply them to what we learn here.鈥� 

Ordonez sounded more like a seasoned engineer than a high school student as she showed off a small drone she was building and described the equipment. 

Edison attracts teens from all over the city thanks to its 13 career tracks 鈥� the most of any New York City public school. Students can earn college credits through a partnership with the City University of New York, take part in internships and work-based learning with companies like Apple and Google, and receive industry certifications. If students pass those industry-recognized exams, they can start working in technical jobs right out of high school 鈥� while also pursuing associate鈥檚 and bachelor鈥檚 degrees.  

In some ways, Edison鈥檚 offerings are similar to other innovative CTE models across the country that are applying the excitement and engagement of career classes to rigorous academics. But Edison is taking that a step further by giving students tremendous power in its redesign. 

Shifting to Career- and College-Readiness

Edison opened in the 1950s as an all-boys trade school. Today, it serves a diverse population of nearly 2,335 students. Principal Moses Ojeda is about as close to an Edison lifer as it gets: he graduated in 1993, later returning as a teacher before becoming an assistant principal and then principal in 2012. He transformed the school from the days of typewriter and copier repair programs to state-of-the-art offerings including robotics, automotive technology, graphic arts and cybersecurity. 

All of this stemmed from Ojeda鈥檚 early days as principal when a student asked him a question that would change the trajectory of Edison鈥檚 teaching.  

鈥淲e know we鈥檙e here for CTE,鈥� Ojeda remembered the student saying. 鈥淏ut why do we need the academics?鈥�

Ojeda asked the student, who was in the automotive track, if he had learned about Pascal鈥檚 law in his physics class. 鈥淎nd the kid was like, 鈥榊eah, I remember that.鈥� I said, 鈥極K, well, that鈥檚 your brake system.鈥� And I went across the room and made a connection to each academic area.鈥�  

Ojeda then turned to social studies teachers Phil Baker and Danielle Ragavanis to help students see the relevance of academic classes to their careers. 

鈥淔or them, CTE felt useful while academics too often left them wondering, 鈥榃hy are we learning this?鈥�” Baker said.

Ojeda supported Baker and Ragavannis in creating a Research and Development department to engage students in design thinking, including articulating what makes learning meaningful for them. The R&D department has grown to include teachers from every department working with students to figure out how to integrate essential skills into core academic classes. In this way, they鈥檙e applying one of the 鈥檚 crucial for innovative high schools: .

鈥淚n order to take on a project, teachers have to partner with one of the kids,鈥� Ragavanis said. 鈥淪tudents are fully at the table, and they have to be our equals, and in some cases, our bosses.鈥�

Edison was later selected for Imagine NYC 鈥� a dynamic partnership between New York City Public Schools and XQto design innovative, high-quality schools with equity and excellence at their core. Faculty members said brought additional support and resources to scale their ideas for making the academic courses feel as relevant to students as the CTE classes.

Mastering Essential Skills 

Driven by employer demand for 鈥渟oft skills,鈥� Baker and Ragavanis worked with student designers and teachers in the R&D department to establish 鈥渇ive essential skills鈥�: communication, collaboration, giving and receiving feedback, design thinking and professionalism. These skills reflect XQ鈥檚 and now guide the learning objectives in many of Edison鈥檚 academic classes. Research shows these outcomes, or goals, can help students succeed in college, career and life. 

English Language Arts teacher Jason Fischedick, for example, created a student-run community theater, which he called 鈥渢he most ambitious thing I鈥檝e ever tried to do in the classroom.鈥� Apart from selecting the four student directors, Fischedick ceded almost complete control of the process. Students were responsible for hiring a crew, casting actors and organizing and running rehearsals.  

鈥淲e鈥檙e on a time crunch and we need to figure out how to manage that time effectively to ultimately get a good product to show off,鈥� said 12th grader Colin Zaug, one of the student directors.鈥淚t鈥檚 all about teaching independence and preparing students for the real world. I don鈥檛 know how many of these kids will ultimately be actors, but it teaches time management and how to stay on task.鈥澛�

Baker said this is how the R&D department is modernizing Edison. 

鈥淲e鈥檙e trying to make a link between academic classes and CTE classes, and bridge the gap that existed between the two, and make sure that academic classes have a career-centered application to them,鈥� he said.

Baker said ninth graders in the R&D department designed the essential skills rubric for their grade so that regardless of what content classes students take, they all get the same immersion into critical career skills. Student voice is now so integrated into Edison鈥檚 core that teachers work with student designers to plan their units. And he said teachers are becoming comfortable with the language of career-centered learning and essential skills while students appreciate the engagement and develop a new level of confidence. 

Yordani Rodriguez, a 12th-grader, employed the essential skills in a number of leadership positions, from his work on Model UN to serving as editor-in-chief of the school鈥檚 literary magazine. And those are abilities that will serve him long after he leaves Edison. 

鈥淲hen you lead somebody and they look to you, you have to be sharp,鈥� Rodriguez said, noting these skills are always in the back of his mind now. 鈥淚 have to communicate, I have to take feedback and most importantly, I have to be professional.鈥�  

Rodriguez will be a first-generation college student when he enters Columbia University in the fall. Baker emphasized, however, that the essential skills will serve students wherever they go next. 

鈥淭his is the kind of thing that all of our students should be able to use no matter what they do in college or in a career,鈥� he said. 

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Making Time for Innovation

The R&D Department鈥檚 work touches students in every grade. Nearly 40% of 9th graders are involved in classes taught by R&D members, with plans to expand. In addition to essential skills, students also participated in using a . Thanks to word of mouth, as well as student showcases to exhibit their work, Baker and Ragavanis have grown their R&D department to include 18 faculty in ELA, math, and science, including new recruit  Fischedick.

鈥淭hey鈥檝e been letting me innovate every year and that鈥檚 why I joined this team because I鈥檓 someone who likes to try new things,鈥� he said. If something doesn鈥檛 work, he added, 鈥淭hat鈥檚 OK. I鈥檝e become more open with my classroom and what I can do in the classroom because I feel supported to do so.鈥� 

Edison’s lessons are now influencing broader change in New York City high schools. It is an anchor school among the 100-plus city high schools participating in , a bold new vision for career-connected learning. 

Edison students are also applying their essential skills off campus. Once a week, a group of them visit PS 175 in Queens. They lead 10-week cycles for students in kindergarten through 5th grade in more than 25 different courses, from cooking to robotics and Model UN. 

As with the other opportunities at Edison, Baker said students are getting a much deeper understanding of learning and careers by applying the essential skills outside of the classroom.  

鈥淚t鈥檚 been an incredible experience for our students,鈥� Baker said of the teaching opportunity. 鈥淭hey gain so much in terms of professionalism, confidence, and the ability to explain complicated processes to people, which is a really difficult skill.鈥�

Disclosure: is a financial supporter of 社区黑料.

That kind of itinerary would be nearly impossible for Gestel at any traditional high school, which is why she chose to attend A School Without Walls, a first-of-its-kind hybrid program in New York City that blends in-person and remote learning. 

鈥淚 do a lot of other stuff, so I thought it was easier than going to another school and being extremely exhausted and late with work,鈥� Gestel said. 

While hybrid learning might still hold negative connotations for many students and families after years of COVID-19-disrupted schooling, leaders at SWoW say their model reimagines the hybrid structure for a truly student-centered program 鈥� allowing students like Gestel to follow their passions while still mastering rigorous academics. It鈥檚 the first public school to win approval from New York State for a hybrid learning model.

鈥淭he hybrid schedule is really not meant for students who just don鈥檛 want to be in a building every day,鈥� SWoW principal Veronica Coleman said. 鈥淭he goal of the hybrid schedule is for students to have flexibility so that they do real-world learning.鈥� 

Learning Inside and Outside the Classroom 

SWoW launched in 2022 in partnership with , a nonprofit that supports a network of public schools that incorporate an expeditionary learning model through project-based curricula. It鈥檚 also part of Imagine NYC Schools, a dynamic partnership between New York City Public Schools and the to design innovative, high-quality schools with equity and excellence at their core.   

Through support and funding from New York City Public Schools, XQ and the , SWoW designed its program to emphasize 鈥� one of six research-based XQ . 

Students were deeply involved in shaping the school from the start. SWoW recruited 50 students from other schools across the city during its pilot year to serve as interns and test program ideas, provide feedback on what worked and what didn鈥檛 and help think through the school鈥檚 grading policy (an approach that鈥檚 been gaining momentum nationally, and which is also ). 

In place of traditional letter grades, teachers use narrative reports to guide students in developing seven competencies: collaboration, investigation, interdisciplinary connection, analysis, design, communication and reflection. Students receive quarterly progress reports and reflect on their learning through student-led conferences that occur twice yearly.   

鈥淲e鈥檝e really tried to amplify student voice and choice,鈥� Coleman said. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 the piece for us that feels like the focus and all of the other pieces fit into that being the center of what we鈥檙e really trying to do.鈥� 

Students learn in person at the Lower Manhattan campus two to three days a week. The rest of the time is a mix of synchronous and asynchronous online learning and real-world learning, including internships, fieldwork and early college coursework through the City University of New York. 

Every Friday, students and staff also meet in an auditorium to discuss what鈥檚 going well and share their wants and needs, from designing new clubs to giving input on school-wide policies and procedures. 

鈥淲hat I like about this school is that you can really communicate with them,鈥� Gestel said. 鈥淚f I鈥檓 feeling really stressed or overworked, they help me balance it out and help me organize.鈥� 

SWoW borrowed many of its principles from NYC Outward Bound Schools and expanded them within its model. These include 鈥淐rew,鈥� an advisory and community-building time with teams made up of a dozen or so students and an adult. At SWoW, however, Crew is more than an advisory period. It鈥檚 also where students earn their humanities credits by working on their passion projects 鈥� student-led and student-designed research projects that are the core of the SWoW curriculum.  

Passion-Driven Projects 

Students select a passion project based on a topic that is meaningful to them and their communities. is another . Working with their advisor, each pupil creates an individualized learning plan, setting project goals that align with New York State curriculum standards.  

In 9th grade, students research a service learning project that can address a broad range of issues, from youth homelessness to the environmental impact of illegal fireworks in New York City. In 10th grade, each student starts a passion project in earnest, formulating a research question through reading materials and interviews with experts in the field, culminating with an internship in the spring to put their learning to the test in the real world. All students will take on full-fledged independent projects by 12th grade and find an internship. 

鈥淭he goal is to build that agency and independence while the students are exploring something they are passionate about,鈥� Coleman explained.

For her passion project, 10th grader Gestel is exploring the lack of representation of different body types and skin tones in ballet and how to create a more inclusive dance community. Another 10th grader, Lily Paraponiaris, is researching film restoration and preservation. 

SWoW uses a case study framework to model for students what good research looks like. For example, in January they explored a unit on the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the country鈥檚 history of cobalt mining. In addition to earning their humanities credits, students also figure out the ingredients of high-quality research to apply to their own passion projects. 

Some students will devote much of their time at SWoW to their passion projects, diving deeply into a topic while exploring it from different angles and applying that knowledge through real-world learning in an internship. But some teens may take longer to land on a subject that is truly meaningful for them, and Coleman said SWoW makes sure that flexibility is built into the curriculum. 

 鈥淭he idea is that you go through that cycle of making and doing and reflecting, and that reflection can lead you to say, 鈥業鈥檓 done with this topic,鈥� which is totally normal for a teenager,鈥� she explained. 鈥淥r you can continue, but you continue in a way that requires a new avenue of research.鈥� 

Throughout their projects, students get regular opportunities to present their work to an audience, including an end-of-year presentation of learning, a resource fair where students have the chance to network with potential internship mentors and summer employers, and a mid-year presentation called roundtables where students share their passion projects with outside guests, sharpening not only their research questions but also their public speaking skills. At a roundtable in early 2024, one student gave a presentation exploring the rising cost of public transit fares while another investigated the fashion industry’s environmental impact. 

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Hybrid Learning Post-Pandemic

SWoW鈥檚 launch hasn鈥檛 been without bumps along the way 鈥� in part because another completely virtual program opened at the same time, causing confusion for students and parents. That program has since been renamed, but figuring out whether hybrid or fully virtual is best for individual students is still a question for families.   

Ava Smith, who is in her first year at SWoW, said she likes learning online, but ultimately, the school is not for her. 

鈥淚 just think I like traditional school more,鈥� she said. 鈥淚 like the schedule. I feel like here it鈥檚 very mishmashed, and here every day is different.鈥� 

The school has its own saying: SWoW is for anyone but not for everyone. 

鈥淚 think it鈥檚 been a struggle for us to find the right matches,鈥� Coleman said. 鈥淎nd I think it鈥檚 going to take a few more years for that to really settle, for people to really know what they are getting when they come to A School Without Walls and a sense that this is right for me and for my child.鈥� 

While some students like Smith might end up missing the traditional school environment, overall, SW0W students seem happy with the experience. Out of the 60 original 9th graders who started in 2022, 50 returned for year two, with 35 new students joining in 10th grade. 

Coleman said those numbers, and what she hears from the students, prove this new kind of high school is needed 鈥� not only because of its small community, flexibility and the safe space it offers. 

“Their families are saying their student was at a big high school and experiencing anxiety,鈥� she noted. 鈥淎nd they like this model because of the individualization.鈥� 

Disclosure: is a financial supporter of 社区黑料.

But they can鈥檛 succeed if they aren鈥檛 treated like part of a greater community. This is why believes high schools deserve more attention and support to fully prepare every student for college, career or whatever comes next. Since 2017, we鈥檝e been working with dozens of schools and systems around the country to help high schools and their communities design learning experiences more suited to the 21st century 鈥� for example, by encouraging partnerships with local organizations so young people can see how their academics show up in real life. 

That鈥檚 how classes work at , the subject of a new documentary. 鈥�,鈥� directed by Lee Hirsch (of 鈥淏ully鈥�), follows students from ninth grade to graduation at this innovative Memphis public high school as they figure out how to sustain life on Mars and interview refugees for an interdisciplinary project combining history and English. 

Community partnerships are among six research-backed XQ developed for high schools to create engaging and rigorous learning opportunities. Like the , which we also introduced, these design principles were originally created for educators and communities involved in building or redesigning a school. But they are also very useful for parents and students who want to better understand whether their local high school is serving students as well as it can. Below are some questions to ask when visiting a school.

Educators interested in a detailed approach to the Design Principles can download c, a tool designed to gather and assess evidence about where they are on their journey to becoming the best high school they can be.

1. Are there high expectations and equal opportunities for all students, regardless of income level, race, ethnic group and special needs? Do the AP and honors classes resemble a cross-section of the community? 

These are signs of a , a set of unifying values and principles that give a school a sense of common purpose and a fundamental belief in the potential of every student to achieve great things. in Tennessee, for example, is committed to making students feel invested in their community. That investment shone through when one sociology class solved a murder, now the subject of a podcast series. When visiting a high school, it鈥檚 also worth checking whether there are opportunities for dual enrollment in postsecondary courses, which can benefit all students.

2. Does the school use an interdisciplinary curriculum 鈥� do teachers combine subjects like math, science, English and electives? Can students and teachers dive deep into topics with project-based learning?

These are examples of Research tells us that young people learn through the combination of what they encounter as learners, through curriculum, relationships, challenges and supports; what they do as learners, through their active commitment in producing and persevering; and how they make meaning of those experiences. Our schools can offer much more powerful ways of learning. For example, students built a hydroponic system through a science project at Purdue Polytechnic High School in Indiana. They conducted extensive research as they designed and constructed a method for growing produce sustainably and cost-effectively.聽

3. Does the school ensure all students have at least one adult who knows them well enough to provide academic and social support? Is there a system in place that helps students connect and check in with the adults so they feel safe, valued and seen?

Those are hallmarks of . The science of adolescent learning shows that learning is a social process, particularly during the high school years, and this aspect 鈥� when intentionally addressed 鈥� can result in a transformative high school experience. Schools that emphasize getting to know students, inside and beyond the school walls, set a foundation for trust that carries over into academic work. At in Oakland, California, co-founder Christian Martinez takes pride in building a place where the goal is to never let a teen slip through the cracks like he did at their age. During the college process, for example, staff guide and support students at every step, from having highly personal conversations about their choices to ensuring that they submit their applications on time.聽

Want to learn how to create innovative high school experiences like those at Crosstown High? Check out The XQ Xtra, a newsletter for educators that comes out twice a month.聽.

4. Does the high school support students to build their sense of agency and autonomy, and explore postsecondary goals?

Schools need to provide A student-centered school gives students a say in their learning. They can choose projects and topics and decide whether to present their knowledge as a research paper, slide show or even a documentary or podcast. Staff members should foster this environment, not feel threatened. The D.C. Public Schools recently published a booklet . It argues that student engagement is crucial when communities come together to redesign local high schools, as in thepartnership, because students have higher attendance and learning outcomes when they鈥檙e treated as partners in their own education.

5. Is the school partnering with local entities such as cultural institutions, businesses, nonprofit organizations, colleges and universities and health and service providers? 

These can take many forms. But at their heart, these powerful relationships create opportunities for learners to explore and envision their future and set goals toward making it real. At Florida鈥檚 in Seminole County Public Schools, students have numerous opportunities to work with outside organizations and leave the campus. Some of that activity slowed down during the pandemic 鈥� especially for those who are now seniors. 

Members of the class of 2024 wanted more outside experiences before graduating. They devised a plan: a trip later this spring to New Smyrna Beach, more than an hour away. But it鈥檚 not just a day at the beach, said one of the organizers, Daniella Mu帽oz. The students researched local nonprofits and got excited about . They鈥檙e planning a visit that includes a talk with an expert because it鈥檚 important 鈥渢o hear from someone who isn鈥檛 a teacher鈥� about 鈥渁 real-world problem,鈥� Mu帽oz said. They also plan to clean the beach, using gloves and other supplies provided by the environmental group.

6. Does the school review, reflect on and make decisions based on data that ensure inclusion and access to advanced courses? Does it use data to eliminate disproportionate remediation, disciplinary practices and other inequities?

Data is just one aspect of a high school that makes . Another example is breaking away from the traditional schedule of six or seven single-subject periods, each about 50 minutes long. 

The has an agreement with its district so students and teachers can easily visit local nonprofit groups and businesses and take classes at other schools and colleges. Junior Kate Ruel says she鈥檚 getting science credit this year for taking culinary courses at Kent Career and Tech Center. She also enjoyed visiting Dwelling Place, which provides support services and affordable housing, during a ninth-grade project on English, history, social studies, and science. 

鈥淚 found it really interesting and cool,鈥� she said. 鈥淚 was able to go out and talk to people.鈥� 

Surveys show students at GRPMS feel connected to their learning, and they’re doing better than their counterparts in the state and city on many measures.

This flexibility is why we argue high schools need a new 鈥渁rchitecture鈥� for learning without the Carnegie Unit, a century-old system that equates time with learning. When students and teachers are freed from earning credits based on seat time in single-subject classes, they can see how academic content is connected to the world around them and gain a fuller appreciation of what they鈥檙e learning. These experiences are important for teens in so many ways beyond school. Today鈥檚 high school students are the leaders, workers, doctors, inventors and teachers of tomorrow.

Disclosure: is a financial supporter of 社区黑料.

Rachel isn鈥檛 the only one challenged by this and other projects at Crosstown High. In the film, we see a teacher stumped by a student鈥檚 idea for making a hologram as well as candid conversations about the relevance of an interdisciplinary math and science project exploring how to sustain life on Mars.

This student-led, creative approach to teaching and learning is the goal at Crosstown High 鈥� a public high school built by parents, educators, teens and community members in Memphis as part of the Super School Challenge in 2015. This challenge spurred communities to create innovative high schools, by building new ones and redesigning existing models, that depart from the rigid, century-old model that鈥檚 no longer suited to today鈥檚 learners. 

As part of the challenge, dozens of community members came together and gathered input from more than 200 students to design and open Crosstown High. They wanted to create a school that would engage students in real-world, motivating projects that would make a difference and reflect the diversity of their historically-segregated city with equitable learning opportunities for all.

Years in the making, 鈥淭he First Class鈥� follows the founding cohort of students and educators from ninth grade to the triumph of their graduation 鈥� and all the challenges in between. Directed by award-winning documentary maker Lee Hirsch (of 鈥淏ully鈥�), we see learning in a way that鈥檚 rarely captured on film. No single principal or teacher is the sole superhero who 鈥渟aves鈥� the students. Instead, we see learning as it really happens: through ideas, collaboration, committed educators who genuinely care about students and 鈥渁ha鈥� moments.

As we watch the students and teachers at Crosstown High work through the school鈥檚 growing pains in the film, we see them taking obvious delight in their progress and personal growth.  鈥淭he First Class鈥� shows what鈥檚 possible when we put our heads together to create a new type of high school. Crosstown High鈥檚 journey will inspire educators and communities everywhere to look at the challenges facing students in their own high schools and start the conversation about how they, too, can rethink learning for teachers and students. 

XQ Institute is proud of Crosstown High鈥檚 story, and the incredible progress this community made since responding to our challenge almost a decade ago. We鈥檙e thrilled to provide this exciting documentary and related materials free of charge for educators, families, students, policymakers and other community members. Find everything you need to be among the first to , , and get inspired to rethink high school at .  

Want to learn how to create innovative high school experiences like those at Crosstown High? Check out The XQ Xtra, a newsletter for educators that comes out twice a month. .

Disclosure: is a financial supporter of 社区黑料.

High schools are essential to preparing young people for these challenges, regardless of whether their future includes college, career or a combination of postsecondary plans. But how can families and students understand how any individual high school approaches learning?

While districts and states provide a variety of data points, many agree these metrics don鈥檛 paint a complete picture and don鈥檛 necessarily mean students are well-prepared for postsecondary life. Helping all students reach their full potential requires passionate and inspired teaching and meaningful learning experiences that encourage them to think critically. Schools should also empower teachers as professionals. 

When those ingredients are combined, the sky鈥檚 the limit. As just one example, Alex Campbell鈥�s sociology students at in Tennessee solved a cold case with (and became the subject of the true-crime podcast series 鈥溾��). All high school teachers can tap into students鈥� natural curiosities in exciting ways that connect with the world around them 鈥� and prepare them for their lives beyond graduation. 

identified research-backed or goals, that recognize the full range of knowledge, skills, habits and mindsets students need to be successful in life. The framework guides educators to transform teaching and learning. They鈥檙e also helpful for families looking for ways to determine if a particular high school fully prepares all students for the future. 

Here are five things parents should look for in their kids鈥� classrooms to ensure they鈥檙e ready for the world.

1. Are students learning to be literate in the fullest sense? Do they know how to read information, understand it and apply meaning to it 鈥� with language, numbers, digital content and other subjects?

This is where the XQ goal, 鈥溾�� comes in. In addition to required subjects, such as English and math, students should learn how to interpret and use data, which is increasingly essential in many fields beyond the sciences. For example, at , one student 鈥嬧�媘ade a documentary about 鈥渇ood deserts鈥� 鈥� neighborhoods where residents have limited access to nutritious foods.

2. Can students think in ways that apply art, literacy, science, history, economics, math and STEM 鈥� and connect these disciplines?

This relates to 鈥�.鈥� The goal is to foster curious young people who are knowledgeable about the world: its history, culture, sciences and underlying mathematics, biology and cultural currency. They鈥檙e engaged participants vital to creating a more just and functional democracy.

3. Are students given opportunities to think creatively about subjects they’re passionate about? Can they also explore their interests in the 鈥渞eal world鈥� through internships or partnerships with local businesses and community organizations, so they can think about future professions? 

Students must be taught to be 鈥溾�� In our information age, students must learn to become sense-makers who can deal with conflicting knowledge and abundant data points. How do they know if something was generated by artificial intelligence? They also need to adapt to changing situations. For example, with XQ鈥檚 help, are redesigning existing schools with new approaches, like having students build their own businesses and applying the U.N.鈥檚 Sustainable Development Goals. 

4. Does the school foster collaborators who value the expertise of others? Are there group projects where students learn to be co-creators in what they bring and how they show up?

Successful high schools cultivate 鈥�,鈥� self-aware team members who bring their strengths to support others. At , students responded to a devastating storm that hit the Cedar Rapids region and destroyed up to 70% of the local tree canopy. Students contracted with local chainsaw artists to turn fallen wood into sculptures and used the funds to 鈥渞e-leaf鈥� the damaged tree canopy. 

5. Do students understand their own strengths and areas for growth? Is there an opportunity for them to reflect on their learning?

We want to ensure that schools are nurturing 鈥�.鈥� Any high school鈥檚 role is to foster a love for learning and the ability to keep learning. Students must become self-driven, self-directed, curious learners 鈥� about themselves and the world. Many great high schools have capstone projects where students present what they鈥檝e learned and then celebrate their growth and achievements. At student presentations showcase the projects and issues they鈥檙e passionate about, including climate change, immigration and gun violence.

Preparing students for the future is no easy feat when so many industries, from STEM to manufacturing and media, are in a constant state of flux. But with a nimble approach to learning and foundational knowledge, high schools can help their students feel equipped to succeed on whatever paths they choose. Next month, we鈥檒l give more tips for looking at what a high school鈥檚 design says about how students learn.

Want to learn more about innovative ways of reaching high school students? Subscribe to the a newsletter that comes out twice a month for high school teachers.

Disclosure: is a financial supporter of 社区黑料.

The , which opened its doors in 2020 鈥� during the height of the pandemic 鈥� is the nation鈥檚 only high school focused on the integration of cyber technology and engineering into all academic disciplines. It is located in Huntsville, home to the Army Aviation and Missile Command and several major defense contractors.

A publicly funded commuter and residential 9-12 magnet school serving students from around the state, the Alabama School of Cyber Technology and Engineering offers free tuition for a diverse student body that is about 30% African American and 37% female. Some 120 of the 333 students live in the school’s dormitory. Students are charged only for the cost of food, which they split with the state. Local contractors help sponsor the school through donations.

The school is both college preparatory and vocational 鈥� aimed at readying students for well-paying careers upon graduation in high-demand, science-based fields, with the Department of Defense and with military contractors.

Underpinning the school鈥檚 focus is the urgent need for more American citizens to enter the national security workforce, because the country is falling behind technologically in several areas and U.S. citizenship is required to receive a security clearance.

The need is substantial. While China has four times the U.S. population, it has eight times as many STEM grads, and Russia has almost four times more engineers than the United States. And the problem will only get more pronounced as the need grows for a workforce that can develop new and increasingly complicated technologies that will be essential for national security.

鈥淢any of the proposed advanced manufacturing and technology solutions to workforce shortages (particularly automation) and manufacturing issues (including additive manufacturing, hybrid manufacturing and digitalization) require a higher level of baseline skills. To implement these solutions, individuals must be trained and able to work in teams that combine deep engineering expertise with data analytics and policy knowledge to enable innovation and transform the manufacturing space,鈥� the Department of Defense wrote in its on U.S. industrial capabilities.

STEM curricula focused on technical careers 鈥渕ust also be expanded into middle and high school education to attract and prepare candidates for advanced manufacturing at all levels 鈥� from engineering to the factory floor,鈥� the report said.

That鈥檚 exactly what the Alabama school is accomplishing.

During its first year, in 2020, the school had 70 students set up in classroom space at a local university. By the following year, enrollment had doubled. When the current school year started in August, the headcount was 333 students, with more expected in successive years as word spreads about the school鈥檚 focus and unique approach to education.

No formal entrance exam is required. Prospective students provide three years’ worth of academic transcripts, attendance sheets and disciplinary records, as well as recommendations from a current STEM teacher and another from a guidance counselor. They submit letters of interest from themselves and their parent.

Applicants from home schools or private schools additionally must provide results from a standardized assessment, such as the SSAT. But there is no minimum qualifying score for admission. Scores are one of many evaluation criteria and are meant to provide insight into the academic potential of incoming applicants. Students who advance in the application process also undergo a personal interview.

Once admitted, students are not allowed to fail their classes. Rather, they must master concepts to advance; they must repeat the class until they achieve proficiency. Proficiency is particularly important because higher-level math and science classes, with their keen focus on cyber technology and engineering, build on concepts from earlier courses. The school doesn鈥檛 use a traditional grading system; rather, teachers rate students on a continuum reflecting various levels of mastery of concepts, then correlate those to a 4.0 grade-point scale.

Students receive four years of instruction in math, science, language arts and social studies, but with cyber and engineering curriculum woven throughout. So, for example, in the first year of social studies, students are taught the history of engineering and technology. The second year is the history of cryptography taught through the lens of world events, such as World Wars I and II. By the third year, students are taught civics and economics, touching on cyber-related concepts like cryptocurrency and blockchain.

They engage in real-world learning through internships with defense companies such as Raytheon, a major corporate sponsor, which accepted 16 students from the school as interns this year.

Tailoring the education for high-tech industries and ensuring proficiency in concepts all along the way ensures that students are math and science literate but also well-rounded. Thus far, the results are impressive. Some students are receiving job offers upon graduation, while others have been accepted at top-notch schools like Georgia Tech, Vanderbilt, the University of Texas, Georgetown University, American University and the University of Southern California.

The nation is facing a sweeping talent gap in STEM that is a national security vulnerability. Alabama School of Cyber Technology and Engineering offers one powerful model for closing that gap while driving student achievement.

鈥淚 said, 鈥楯ust open up the door, I can get in myself,鈥欌�� Ellis remembered.

Prince finally relented, and Ellis wrote and performed in “Graffiti Bridge,” the sequel to “Purple Rain.” 

鈥淚t was just the experience of a lifetime.鈥�

Extra credit is a series where 社区黑料鈥檚 video team shares interesting tidbits that didn鈥檛 make the final cut. Watch the full documentary about Ellis鈥檚 school, which uses hip hop to engage who have struggled in traditional schools: Hip Hop Is Saving Teen Lives in Minnesota 

Just before the start of the new school year for D.C. Public Schools, dozens of people gathered under a bright August sun in the northeast neighborhood of Deanwood. They were there to celebrate the 50th anniversary of a local institution: H.D. Woodson High School. A prominent new street sign, reading 鈥淲oodson Way,鈥� was unveiled directly in front of the campus, forever enshrining a legacy. 

But this joyful event did more than just reflect on the high school鈥檚 storied history: it also set the stage for a bold new vision that鈥檚 reshaping the whole learning experience for both students and faculty.

The energy was infectious. A teacher鈥檚 choir performed and five decades of alumni, each displaying their graduation year on T-shirts, chanted school slogans. Speakers included a city council member, a founding teacher and a current Woodson student. 

鈥淲hat is the Woodson Way? We need to recommit to it,鈥� said alumni council member John Cotten, Woodson High School Class of 1981.

This past summer, Woodson was among four DCPS high schools selected for a multiyear partnership between DCPS and the that aims to make high school more meaningful and engaging for all learners so they鈥檙e better prepared for college and career. Woodson鈥檚 community united around a new theme for the school: cultivating and activating students鈥� passions so every graduate earns a career certification or an associate degree aligned with their interests. 

Launching a redesign effort in a school with generations of tradition like Woodson is not simple. Neighborhood high schools carry memories for residents and alumni, who recall athletic teams and veteran teachers. The tangible camaraderie at Woodson鈥檚 anniversary event reflects a commitment to meeting a changing world with new educational experiences while still holding on to the fabric that makes a school what it is. Woodson鈥檚 journey also carries four major lessons for other high schools and their communities.

A new video series from XQ follows the journey of the DC+XQ schools and features the stories of the educators and leaders rethinking high school across D.C. Learn about the goals of the partnership and follow along as new videos are released each month. 

1. Ground Your Goals in the Data

The DC+XQ partnership started in 2022. Participating schools create design teams and receive financial and professional support as they rethink learning from the ground up 鈥� hand-in-hand with their students and communities. Along the way, school teams meet with experts and visit other already deep in the transformation process.

The DC+XQ partnership also included a chance for schools to complete XQ鈥檚 , a tool that examines student transcripts to shine a spotlight on long-standing inequities. The EOA helps design teams figure out which students in their high school are more prepared than others for college and career, often due to inequitable practices, to avoid replicating the same patterns. A previous audit in Rhode Island led the state to enact higher graduation standards. 

In D.C., the EOA found that even schools with high graduation rates were not preparing all students for postsecondary success. To overcome these inequities, DCPS Chancellor Lewis Ferebee encouraged the city鈥檚 high schools to think big, without restraints. 

鈥淢y responsibility is [to ensure] that the schools know they can go as bold as they need to give students the schools and learning experiences they deserve,鈥� he explained. This could include changing traditional schedules and course offerings. 

2. Build a Coalition

Woodson was founded by Howard Dilworth Woodson, one of the first Black licensed architectural engineers in D.C. and a powerful advocate for extending city services to this far, northeast corner of the city. Before the school opened in 1971, high schoolers in the Deanwood neighborhood had to travel three to five miles to the nearest campus. Woodson formed a broad coalition that pushed the city to pave and widen roads, build a new seven-story building and launch a public school lovingly nicknamed the 鈥淭ower of Power.鈥� 

But the Tower of Power suffered neglect and eventual demolition (a new Woodson building opened in 2011). The neighborhood also experienced gentrification and displacement. Meanwhile, the world was changing. Today鈥檚 students need different things from high school than they did 50 years ago.

Current Woodson Principal William Massey knew all this when he raised his hand in March of 2022 to join the DC+XQ design journey. He assembled a core team of a dozen diverse stakeholders, including students, teachers and community members, to respond to data from the EOA about student satisfaction and success and to define a new shared vision. But Massey acknowledged he was 鈥渧ery protective of the process.鈥� He was concerned about how people in his school and neighborhood would respond to the phrase 鈥渉igh school redesign鈥� after DCPS had undergone previous waves of reform.

鈥淧eople often think it means something wrong is happening,鈥� he said. 鈥淪o someone is going to come in and shake things up via a mandate.鈥�

Amber Owens, a longtime teacher now in her fifth year at Woodson, was initially skeptical. 鈥淕reat opportunities often come to the schools, and they die or fizzle out, and we鈥檙e left holding the bag to keep it going,鈥� she said. 

Though Massey convened the core design team and began engaging others through school visits and focus groups, Woodson was not selected for the first cohort of DC+XQ last fall. (That initial cohort consists of and .) Nonetheless, Woodson was among three other schools 鈥� Columbia Heights Education Campus, Coolidge High School and Ron Brown College Preparatory Academy 鈥� given a 鈥渃ultivation year鈥� to continue developing their proposals and visions. 

In Woodson鈥檚 case, the review panel encouraged Massey to reach beyond his original redesign team and seek broader community engagement. Massey took that feedback to heart. With funding and support from DC+XQ, the school was able to hire Rachel Curry-Neal, a former educator, counselor and youth organizer, as a full-time in-house redesign director. Students, teachers, school counselors and union representatives all served on the hiring and interviewing panel that selected Curry-Neal.

3. Stick to Mission and Vision

Curry-Neal was able to focus 100% of her time on the school鈥檚 redesign effort, leading to increased participation in the process: the design team went from just one active student to two from each grade level. Curry-Neal also reached more adults. 鈥淧eople came to sit with her and talk with her,鈥� Massey explained. 鈥淪he was able to have more prolonged conversations and walk different school community members through the full journey.鈥�

Meanwhile, Woodson鈥檚 Parent Teacher Organization, which had been inactive since 2016, started meeting again in 2022 with 45 participating families. Curry-Neal attended their meetings to update families about the school鈥檚 redesign efforts and get input. The school continued collecting feedback through surveys, weekly meetings of the student government association and conversations with families and alums.

It paid off. In June of this year, Woodson was , along with the three other schools that had been given more cultivation time. Woodson鈥檚 new model is inspired directly by feedback from students, who shared that high school didn鈥檛 always feel relevant to their interests and hopes for life after graduation. 

The redesign centers on activating students鈥� passions and ensuring each student has a head start on their interests, which is why all graduates will earn career certifications or associate degrees. Students will also chart individualized paths early in their high school career, enabling them to take advantage of relevant internships, travel opportunities and apprenticeships. is one of XQ鈥檚 six research-backed for successful high schools where learning is more . 

The Woodson team鈥檚 experience showed the importance of another XQ design principle: . Having a clear shared mission gave diverse team members and stakeholders something to unite around. After joining the design team in 2022, Owens found the common purpose helpful when balancing competing ideas. 鈥淎s long as we understand the mission, getting input from others is not a scary thing,鈥� she said.

Ferebee said he saw a similar pattern in the other school teams that applied for DC+XQ. 

鈥淥nce we opened the door to the conversation around a community-driven process, I think people really welcomed that idea and understood that this wasn鈥檛 like previous efforts around high school that felt top-down,鈥� he said. 鈥淩edesign is about each school鈥檚 unique design and context and history.鈥�

We have more ideas for how to rethink high school. Check out The XQ Xtra, a newsletter for educators that comes out twice a month. .

4. Get Creative with Class Time

One of the most tangible new offerings at Woodson is the new Legacy, Leadership and Learning (or 鈥淟3鈥�) class. The Woodson design team developed this course, which is currently being piloted with all ninth graders. The school received approval from the district for it to count as an elective toward graduation. In the first week, students studied the poem 鈥淲here I鈥檓 From鈥� by Rene茅 Watson and used it as a prompt to write about their own communities of origin.

The goal is to introduce all new students to the history of Woodson, D.C. at large and the Deanwood neighborhood. They鈥檒l leave the building to meet community members who already work in their area of interest. The design team believes this class will help students explore their interests and future ambitions, whether college, career, military or otherwise. 

At a symposium for the end of the course, ninth graders will present a passion project to an audience comprising members of the Woodson school community and beyond. Students will select from one of Woodson鈥檚 three career academies 鈥� IT, engineering, and finance 鈥� that will shape the rest of their time in high school. 

鈥淸L3 is] a very innovative idea of bringing together students who are currently on campus with alumni to get pride and purpose while also pursuing career passions,鈥� Ferebee said.

Owens, who was hired as the inaugural L3 teacher, plans for alums to come in and help first-year students learn Woodson traditions. 鈥淭hese people will actually make this course so much better,鈥� she said. 鈥淢any hands make light work 鈥� I make sure I let the village come in and help raise these kids.鈥�

In an example of youth voice and choice at work, Wynnter Price, an 11th grader at Woodson, helped design the class and hopes to join as a guest speaker. Even though she鈥檚 too far along in school to take the class, she is proud to have built something to help future Woodson students succeed. 

鈥淢y ninth grade year, I wish I had a class that navigated the ways of high school,鈥� Price explained. 

As Woodson celebrates half a century of tradition, its faculty and students are collaborating with community members past and present to better serve the young leaders of today. Cotten, who came up with the idea of renaming the street 鈥淲oodson Way,鈥� addressed the crowd at the August anniversary event.聽

鈥淲e always have to evolve and reinvent ourselves but stick with traditions that got us through the first 50 years,鈥� he said. The high school鈥檚 redesign journey is a meaningful start to the next 50.

We have more ideas for how to rethink high school. Check out The XQ Xtra, a newsletter for educators that comes out twice a month. .

You can follow Woodson鈥檚 journey on and or learn more about . 

Disclosure: is a financial supporter of 社区黑料.

In 1906, the Carnegie Unit, or credit hour, was introduced to standardize U.S. public education. It defined the precise number of minutes students needed to learn a particular subject and the number of 鈥渃redit hours鈥� required to earn a high school or college degree. To be sure, at the dawn of the 20^th century, this served an important purpose 鈥� standardizing an entirely unstandardized education system. 

Today, the Carnegie Unit has infiltrated almost every aspect of American schooling. It defines how many minutes one must sit at a desk in a classroom or in front of a digital platform to learn. It shapes how schools and teaching are organized. It determines what is and is not assessed. It defines graduation requirements and dictates how schools are accredited. And it prescribes what goes on a transcript and influences who receives financial aid. In essence, the Carnegie Unit isn鈥檛 just hard-wired into the system; it is the system. And .

For students, this model of schooling exacts a heavy toll. Young people consistently report feeling they are in an intellectual straitjacket: given schedules, told what classes to take, stuck in rows of desks, handed textbooks that lack relevance to study subjects that are disconnected from the skills they need to succeed. For many students, school isn鈥檛 engaging or inspiring 鈥� it is something to endure.

Students Deserve Better

The overwhelming majority of American high schools are organized in lock step around the Carnegie Unit. Yet are ready for college or a career. Thus most young people start their adult lives behind and will have to spend some, if not all, of their time trying to catch up. 

The consequences of this reality 鈥� precipitous decline of economic mobility 鈥� are unambiguous. For Americans born in 1980, just 50% earned more than their parents, compared to 90% for those born in 1940, . The 鈥淎merican Dream鈥� .

Compounding these challenges is the unprecedented, painful disruption of COVID. The most recent report from the 鈥� the long-term trend analysis for 13-year-olds 鈥� gave us a window into just how much our students fell behind: Reading scores dropped below pre-pandemic levels, and math scores plummeted to where they were three decades ago.

This cohort of students is now entering high school. If there was ever a moment to press for meaningful, lasting transformation, it is now.

High School Is the Fulcrum for Change

When high school learning improves, K-8 is pressed to raise standards to prepare students for more engaging, relevant, rigorous curricula. And post-secondary completion improves as well. Over time, these benefits compound, leading to better learning outcomes for students K-16, stronger communities, increased economic productivity and greater civic engagement.

That鈥檚 why the and the have embarked on a partnership to catalyze high schools that develop the rich tapestry of skills students need to succeed in school and life and enable learning to happen anywhere. Put differently, we are intent on building a new educational architecture that shifts the sector to a truly competency-based system and away from time-bound conceptions of what knowledge is and how it is acquired.

A growing number of states and local communities are embarking on this work 鈥� establishing competency-based education models, offering flexibility for what counts as 鈥渃redit鈥� and reimagining how credit is awarded. New Hampshire鈥檚 鈥溾�� law empowers students to earn credit wherever the learning occurs. Texas, Missouri and several other states allow schools and systems to request waivers from seat-time mandates. And states like Rhode Island and school systems like Phoenix, Washington, D.C. and Tulsa are designing more rigorous, engaging and relevant models for high school learning.

Learn more about what educators nationwide are doing to rethink high school by subscribing to The XQ Xtra, a newsletter for educators that comes out twice a month. .

A New Architecture for High Schools and Communities

What will it take for all students to receive the high school education they need? We are convinced it requires a new set of building blocks, which together form the foundation of a new educational architecture: 

• Clear and persuasive learner outcomes; 
• Well-articulated and specific competencies to guide teaching and learning; 
• Powerful learning experiences inside and outside of the classroom aligned with those outcomes and competencies; 
• Much richer models of assessment 鈥� rooted around a competency-based student performance framework 鈥� that students, parents and educators can use to accelerate learning; 
• New kinds of transcripts that codify and make legible (to post-secondary schools and employers) what young people know and can do; 
• Support for aspiring and incumbent teachers to help them enact new roles; and 
• Designs for schools that are not tethered to minutes spent at a desk but focus on developing the knowledge and skills young people need for success in the 21^st century. 

State leaders, in particular, have essential roles to play. Here are three major ways they can reshape the high school landscape:

1. States should incentivize communities to redesign their high schools and invite key stakeholders to be directly engaged. 

In Memphis, a parent named Ginger Spickler saw an XQ billboard inviting communities to enter a high school redesign competition. She called a meeting with dozens of parents, educators, business owners and civic leaders. Together with hundreds of students, they created a blueprint for the school that their community needed. 

The result was , which opened in 2018 and takes a project-based learning approach in all of its classes. The result? More than 95% of its inaugural cohort graduated on time, compared to 80% in the surrounding school system. And its class of 2022 outperformed their peers across Tennessee and the nation in meeting college readiness benchmarks on the ACT in English, reading, math and science. 

To be clear, high school redesign cannot be limited to doing this work one school at a time 鈥� nor require creating schools from the ground up. That鈥檚 why XQ is to redesign 64 schools and is working with to expand the high school transformation work system-wide. And it is why Carnegie launched the to engage school systems across the nation.

2. States must catalyze high school learning that is engaging, rigorous, relevant and experiential. 

Young people need learning experiences that are multi-dimensional, project-based, high-interest and relevant to their lives and aspirations. Learning experiences need to be authentic, not made-up school tasks. They should build students鈥� academic content knowledge as well as other essential skills and competencies, like critical thinking and collaboration, at the same time. And they need to be rigorous, challenging every student both inside and outside the classroom and the traditional school day. 

One method to catalyze these kinds of learning experiences is for states to create innovation grants (what we call 鈥渃hallenges鈥�) for teachers, schools and community organizations. This enables them to plan together and deliver transformative learning experiences that build explicit competencies necessary for success in post-secondary school and the workforce. To provide guidance, XQ and Carnegie are creating a toolkit for educators and curriculum makers that articulates what these should look like. Our goal is to spur both the supply of new curriculum products and demand from students, teachers and families for high school learning that is different and better.

3. States must help change how we assess and credential student learning. 

Traditional math classes today, such as Algebra 1 and geometry, are often taught in monolithic ways. Students who fail a course typically have to repeat it entirely, even if they only struggled on a few topics. That鈥檚 a tremendous burden on teachers 鈥� and heartbreaking and discouraging for students. 

With badging, courses are broken down into smaller components and designed to align with each student’s personal learning journey. Students have more agency over how their learning is organized and the path they take through content toward mastery. That makes math much more manageable, helps young people grow confidence, and will lead to greater achievement in the long run. 

XQ is with and a network of math pedagogy, assessment, policy and instruction experts. Three states are piloting this effort: Idaho, Illinois and Kentucky, and they鈥檙e each doing it differently. 

In Kentucky, badges will align with a traditional Algebra 1 curriculum, allowing students to demonstrate mastery of these concepts at an individualized pace.

In Idaho, badging will help provide an alternative to Algebra 2, giving students the option to take badge courses associated with different programs of study, allowing them to graduate with the particular math skills most important for their college or career of choice.

We are also tackling the urgent need for better, more useful forms of educational assessment. In March, to design, pilot and introduce new tools that reliably measure the essential affective, behavioral and cognitive skills necessary for success in school and the 21st century economy. In essence, the initiative aims to replace many of the assessments that have been in use for decades with a much better and different set of tools. 

With leaders across the nation, we aim to build a blueprint for what it will take to shift away from the Carnegie Unit, engage key stakeholders in school redesign, focus high school learning on essential learner outcomes, prioritize rigorous, project-based learning experiences, and assess performance with smarter, better tools. 

We have more ideas for how to rethink high school. Check out The XQ Xtra, a newsletter for educators that comes out twice a month. .

This article is adapted from 鈥� State Education Standard (May 2023), published by the .

Disclosure: is a financial supporter of 社区黑料.

Simultaneously, philanthropist Andrew Carnegie hoped to kick-start the expansion of higher education by donating $10 million to bankroll pensions for college professors. This posed a parallel dilemma: How to decide whether a scholar had put in enough time to earn the annuity?

Thus was born the wonky educational anachronism known as the Carnegie Unit, brainchild of the trustees of the . A certain number of hours spent in a high school classroom added up to a credit, the trustees decided in 1906. A set number of credits earned a diploma. So quantified, the diploma could be used as the entrance ticket to a college or university, where Carnegie Units would add up to a degree 鈥� or the right to retire.

Carnegie Units went on to become the central currency of a dizzying number of aspects of education, ranging from what subjects students are exposed to to how states allocate school funds. But it was quickly understood that while the units were good for, say, establishing whether a public school had delivered its pupils enough hours of teaching to earn its taxpayer dollars, it was not particularly helpful at signaling what a student had learned during those hours in class 鈥� now, 117 years later, better known as seat time.

Some innovators, like the leaders of the Phoenix Union High School District, are experimenting with ways to leave the Carnegie Unit in the past. Students at PXU City, a Phoenix high school without a building, can create their own personalized educational experience from a menu of 500 options, including classes at any number of high schools, college courses and job training programs throughout the city. 

The experiment came to the attention of Carnegie鈥檚 present-day leaders, who are engaged in their own effort to replace their turn-of-the-century units. The person tasked with figuring out how better to quantify what students have learned, and how the schools of the future can help them realize the historical promise of social and economic mobility, is Tim Knowles, the foundation’s president and former director of the University of Chicago Urban Education Institute. 

Knowles recently talked to Beth Hawkins about a pilot project to reimagine seat time that includes the Phoenix district, the possible benefits of freeing teachers from unit-driven bell schedules and how to transform entire school systems. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Tell us about the Carnegie Unit, what it is, how it wove itself into education鈥檚 very DNA and why it鈥檚 time to step away from it. 

In 1906, when the Carnegie Foundation created the Carnegie Unit, it suggested that a college degree should be 120 credits. Today, it’s 120 credits. It’s become the bedrock currency of the educational economy. It’s infiltrated everything. It’s how we organize high schools and universities, how we think about assessment, it’s instrumental to accreditation, to who gets financial aid and who doesn’t. It defines the daily work of teachers and professors. It is the system.

What it is, fundamentally, is the conflation of time and learning. It’s the suggestion that X number of minutes equals learning. The problem is, that it basically ignores everything we’ve learned in the last 100 years about what knowledge is and how it’s acquired. We’ve had neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists and psychologists and learning scientists come along and say, “People learn through solving real problems, they learn from peers, they learn from mentors, they learn in apprenticeship, they learn from experience.”

In its time, the Carnegie Unit was an incredibly important reform because it standardized an utterly nonstandardized educational sector. But it crept into the core DNA of educational practice and didn’t evolve or adapt in the face of a significant amount of empirical knowledge about how human beings actually learn. That’s problem No. 1. 

No. 2 is that it inhibits educational innovation. Competency- or mastery-based education has existed, arguably, since and . But it’s existed at the edges. It’s never been central. We can all point to schools that are breaking the boundaries of what learning should look like, how it鈥檚 organized, how it鈥檚 structured. While those examples exist, they’re often led by extraordinary teachers and school leaders. We haven’t figured out how to take it from the margins to the mainstream. That’s a problem.

The third thing is perhaps more existential, and that is the absence of social and economic mobility in our nation. This is not to suggest that education isn’t an essential solution to addressing social and economic mobility, it’s just that it鈥檚 not nearly powerful enough an engine for doing so. The Carnegie Unit is, in my view, partly responsible for that. In the 1950s, over 90% of young people would [end up] better off than their parents. That number is basically cut in half now. We’re going in precisely the opposite direction, and underlying that are some really fundamental inequities, which are exacerbated by race and by class. 

If we want to radically increase economic and social mobility, we need to reimagine what learning is, and really take into consideration what we know about the context in which people learn. Young people need to be engaged in much more experiential, hands-on solving of real problems and applied work. 

Why is the Carnegie Foundation the organization to take this on?

It’s been a narrative in the organization and beyond for decades. One of the questions was, what are you going to do about assessment, because if you are going to take on the future of learning, then you have to be thinking about the future of assessment. That led us in the last year to a deep partnership with ETS, which is the largest assessment company on Earth. It’s very good at determining reliability and validity. 

If we believe that learning, wherever it takes place, is important, then in order for that to take root at scale, we need to persuade parents first that the learning their young people are experiencing outside the schoolhouse is valuable. And is legible to the postsecondary sector if you’re applying to college. And legible to employers if you’re going more directly into the workforce. Everybody intuitively knows there’s enormous amounts of learning there. We need tools that can validate that learning. 

We’re going to build assessments to assess the skills, not the disciplinary knowledge, that we know are predictive of success. Things like your ability to collaborate, to communicate, how hard you work, are you persistent, your creative thinking, your critical thinking. The aim with ETS would be to get to the point where every young person in America doesn’t just graduate from high school with a transcript that has grades and attendance and test scores, but a skills transcript as well.

The wonderful thing about Carnegie, it’s got this incredible responsibility to be a place that looks around the corner. It did that in 1906, for really important reasons. It created Pell grants for really important reasons. It established standards for medical schools, engineering, law schools. It’s done these things at certain times in its history that really needed to happen, because there were gaps. And it’s positioned in a way that it can take a slightly longer-term view about where we need to get.

In Phoenix, a driving factor behind the district鈥檚 decision to move away from the Carnegie Unit more quickly and widely than it had planned before the pandemic was teenagers. Students who weren鈥檛 in high school when COVID hit had no expectation of a bell schedule. 

At the heart of accelerating learning is ensuring young people are leaning in, are engaged, are inspired and are working on problems that they think are actually useful 鈥� whether it’s useful for their own trajectories, pursuing a track that is orienting them to a particular profession or sector, or more here and now. One can learn a great deal about democracy by actually practicing it, or identifying an issue that you care about and learning how civically to engage in a way that can draw attention and potentially movement regarding that issue. 

So, yes, engagement is an instrumental variable in all this, and, as you are pointing out, teenagers have already spoken. We know they’re not engaged. There have been some systems around the country that have made marked improvements in high school completion, but there are many where 50, 60 or 70% of students are biding their time. Getting through. If we’re losing 30 or 40% of our young people before they’ve even had a shot, then we’ve got to take a step back and ask what might work better, what we need to do differently. And that’s not a small incremental step, like providing double blocks in math or high-dosage tutoring. There’s something much more fundamental involved in reconsidering how we think about time and learning. 

The other thing about teenagers is that when you create opportunities which are highly engaging, and you enlist their agency in learning, you really just have to get out of the way. Versus in a set of circumstances that may feel to them far more compliance-oriented, where they’re doing seven periods for 40 minutes or 42 minutes between bells with a two-minute passing period, with seven different teachers every day who may have so many students that they can’t even learn their names until the end of October. If you turn that on its head, young people are going to rise and surprise us. 

There was a survey of high school students nationally during the pandemic, and almost to a person they said they wanted to come back to school 鈥� not surprisingly. But not all of the time. I don’t think that was a statement about not being interested in learning. I think that was a statement about not wanting only that form of learning all the time. Valuing the community that school creates, valuing the fact that there are some domains of expertise and disciplinary areas where they need to be in classrooms with amazing teachers, but also recognizing that, “Wait, I’ve been learning independently. I’ve been pursuing things I’m passionate about.”

If we could scaffold that systematically with opportunities for apprenticeships, for internships, for community embedded work, I think it’s safe to say not only would we be hewing much more closely to what empirical evidence says is the best way to learn, but we would be in a situation where the young people were much, much more interested and excited about what they were learning.

Let’s talk for a second about the obstacle that is adult time. I’ve talked to so many people in education who say, Yeah, that’s great. But we’d have to fundamentally reorganize how the adults use their time.

We would. By saying we’re taking on the Carnegie Unit, we are not saying we’re going to have eight periods a day in 10th grade and then we’re going to layer on a whole other set of things. So how we organize teacher time, and the role of the teacher, has to fundamentally shift. 

But teacher pipeline issues are real. Schools are struggling to find really exceptional people who want to spend their career teaching. Embedded in rethinking the use of adult time is the opportunity to rethink the role of teachers. There are few people who want to have the same responsibilities on the first day of their professional career as they do on the last day of their 35th year. 

If we could turn the teaching profession into something where you’re teaching in teams, for example, or where you may be teaching in the morning and then advising groups of students through the afternoon as they engage in activities in their communities and with postsecondary institutions, the job could become much more attractive and interesting to a much wider range of young people over time. Adult time is a predicament, but it’s also an opportunity.

You mentioned a skills transcript. That got me thinking about how many people you’re dangerous to if you’re successful. So many things are proxies for whether a person has a skill set. The college degree is a proxy: We assume that because you made it through this filter 鈥� which might be meaningless 鈥� you are going to be valuable to this endeavor, this institution, this company. But we don’t actually know whether you come with the requisite skills.

Right. We’ve had a very fragmented K-12-to-postsecondary-to-employment path, replete with assumptions. If you go to an elite private or highly selective public college, whether by virtue of where it is geographically or by nature of how you get in, there all kinds of assumptions that you’re going to come with these other things that we care about, in addition to whatever’s on your transcript, like your grades and your test scores. But that’s a pretty crude measure of whether you do. So there is a threat to the established pathways. 

We could credibly determine whether a young person has a set of skills wherever those skills were developed. If I’m living on the south side of Chicago, and I take my two siblings to school every morning, and then I get to my high school on time at 7:30, I do my homework, I perform well in the traditional ways, I participate in afterschool activities and I work, those are skills that that are invisible, or less visible than the proxies you were suggesting. Or whether I was lucky enough to be born in a situation where my parents were taking me to rarefied places every summer, or putting me in rarefied summer camps.

Part of the agenda is to make the education sector a more vital engine for individuals, no matter their backgrounds, to be able to succeed in a post-affirmative action world. A skills transcript would provide elite schools with a different kind of visibility on every kid. It wouldn’t have to have anything to do with race per se, but I would hope it would help make visible the skills and dispositions young people bring, even if they’re growing up in really underresourced places. 

Devil’s advocate. When the pandemic forced schools away from seat time, lots of people said, 鈥楬ey, wait 鈥� maybe we could just have asynchronous learning. I wouldn’t have to report to a building anymore.鈥� Or the variation we鈥檙e hearing a lot about now, the four-day week. In blowing up seat time, temporarily or permanently, did states just leave the barn door open?

The conditions under which they blew up seat time during the pandemic are slightly anomalous. I wouldn’t compare what we’re trying to do to that, because we’re certainly not of the view that people should be socialized in front of a laptop. But I’m sympathetic to the accountability side. Whether we have the existing system or a fundamentally transformed one, it’s going to demand that we know how young people are performing.

None of what I’ve been talking about should suggest we no longer believe in algebra or reading. There’s things that we really do think young people benefit from learning. How they learn those things is an open question. If we are in a period where people are questioning the power of our educational system and asking questions about how we might empower it further, it has to be undergirded by accountability systems that are credible. And fair. Otherwise, you’re right. It could be a slippery slope. 

What are you learning so far?

Our agenda, which we’re working in partnership with XQ on, is in short: establish proofs, create places where this is happening, build evidence for improvement. Develop policy and national discussion about transformative learning opportunities. And then think hard about the postsecondary piece. Unless the work we do in high school is relevant, legible and understandable to postsecondary, it could falter. 

There are learnings from the people who’ve been doing this for a long time, sometimes in quiet opposition to the systems in which they sit, sometimes with some support from the state within which they sit. They are there, and it’s important to recognize and acknowledge that there are educators across the country who’ve been doing this with young people from all kinds of different backgrounds.

One of the [trends] in the educational system at the moment are these things called portraits of a graduate or portraits of learners. They’re everywhere. One of the things we did with ETS was look carefully at all the ones that we could. They’re interesting, because they represent an American consensus about what the purpose of schooling is. They are really focused on skills. Often, they’ve been developed with lots of parent voice and teacher voice and student voice. Red and blue, left and right, communities, in spite of all our polarized hype, are saying there are a set of things that we want for young people. That should make us optimistic, if we can leverage that. 

The other things that that you will hear is, A) they haven’t really made a big difference, and B) we have no way of measuring the things in them. The problem is the Carnegie Unit problem. They haven’t cracked the Carnegie Unit, they haven’t cracked this architecture of learning that we’ve established. We have to do that. We want our young people to be able to think critically, and we don’t really know how to measure that. How do we measure that they鈥檙e civically involved? 

Disclosure: The XQ Institute, which has partnered with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to explore alternatives to the Carnegie Unit, provides financial support to 社区黑料.

This is not an imaginary scenario 鈥� these lessons and activities are happening at real schools around the world. And the lessons their students are learning, both formal and informal, as they follow their own curiosity, are invaluable as they grow as stewards of our future. We can see it in how two schools, in particular, approach climate change.

set out to build the most sustainable school on the planet. Indonesia is an archipelago with 180 million people living in coastal regions. It faces the imminent threat of rising sea levels and is no stranger to weather-related disasters. Green School Bali is a much-needed inspiration for environmental education far beyond its borders. Students at this international school actively learn about sustainable agriculture, renewable energy systems and ecological conservation, applying fundamental literacies such as critical thinking and writing. They demonstrate what it means to be .

A continent away in Hungary, addresses similar concerns in a different way by focusing on alternatives to dangerous, unsustainable agricultural practices. The school opened a vegan cafeteria that supplies delicious, locally-sourced food for school lunches and the public. Students have a voice in the menus, are involved in the food planning and learn valuable lessons about supply, demand and food sources. By providing families and community members with tasty vegan food, the school encourages the community to lower its meat intake, thus decreasing the need for unsustainable farming practices. 

I saw this all first hand last year, during a 12-month transformational journey exploring innovative educational practices in 34 countries on six continents. I approached this exploration as a life-long educator and co-founder of , a diverse-by-design high school in the heart of Memphis, Tennessee. Here, students use in all of their classes to make education more meaningful, often in collaboration with nonprofits and researchers.

For my tour, I wanted to see what commonalities exist among innovative schools worldwide. I also wanted to see how world events like political shifts, war, youth movements, human migration and climate change affect teaching and learning.

As an educator committed to preparing students for an uncertain future in a swiftly evolving world, my main focus was learning how schools across the globe approach similar goals: namely, how they’re helping students become generous collaborators and original thinkers 鈥� all while mastering foundational knowledge and fundamental literacies. These guide teaching and learning at Crosstown High and in other innovative, student-centered . 

For more ideas on rethinking the high school experience, read The XQ Xtra 鈥� a newsletter for educators that comes out twice a month. .

Student-Led Innovation Creates Sustainable Schools 

Around the world, schools embody the same learner outcomes we use at Crosstown and other XQ schools to prepare students for these immense challenges. 

鈥淐hange starts with an idea, an intention or a problem to be solved,鈥� said Green School Bali Principal Sal Gordon. School educators tasked their students with researching the greatest environmental impacts on their local school community. Through an extensive study of numerous factors, students identified automobile traffic on campus as a leading contributor. With the help of engineers, chemists and automotive experts, students developed a process to convert school buses from diesel to cooking oil for fuel, which they collected from local restaurants. 

Each week, students in the 鈥淕rease Police鈥� procure the oil from a 15-mile radius of the school for refinement and use as fuel, providing a greener alternative to school transportation. Through this kind of project-based learning and hands-on experiences, they gain a profound understanding of the interconnectedness between their actions and the environment. 

The school鈥檚 entire facility encourages this type of learning. Each open-air classroom is constructed of bamboo and thatch, with tables and chairs made locally from sustainable products. Students also manage their own lush gardens at each grade level that provide food for school lunches. They eat fish grown in the student-managed aquaponic system and eggs harvested from the fifth-grade chicken coop. 

In Hungary, REAL School Budapest Founder Barna Barath intentionally designed the vegan cafeteria to serve as a living example of the school鈥檚 purpose. In a traditional school system, a common purpose is to prepare students for postsecondary opportunities that provide individual prosperity. At REAL, the purpose is to live a purposeful and fulfilling life for collective prosperity. Students and parents invest in that vision for the betterment of the community. REAL鈥檚 educators are creating a community space and showing what it means to be learners for life and generous collaborators.

Connect Student-Directed Learning to Academic Standards

Educators at schools anywhere can prepare students for an uncertain future, specifically where that uncertainty relates to environmental change. A key takeaway from the two schools in Indonesia and Hungary is letting students take the lead in their learning. In each case, students investigated problems and found solutions, resulting in deep learning. There are many examples of schools doing similar work in the U.S. At Crosstown High, science teacher Nikki Wallace lets students take the lead by connecting them with local researchers through powerful community partnerships. 

We need to think big. Assigning simple projects around collecting plastic bottles or bags isn鈥檛 enough to move the needle on the environment and won鈥檛 truly engage kids. Even though Indonesia has specific concerns about rising sea levels, schools anywhere can 鈥� and should 鈥� engage students in learning about and studying the effects of droughts, heatwaves, floods and storms that result in crop failure and food scarcity. Here are a few steps to get started:

• Get students to think audaciously about solving local problems. What鈥檚 the big issue facing their neighborhood, town, county or state? How can they learn about it? Who can help them uncover solutions? For example: What is the condition of the local water source? What in the community is impacting local water? Who in the community can share expertise around this issue? 
• As they problem-solve, consider all connections to academic standards. How do research and problem-solving by students connect to the learning standards in your state? This is the crucial jumping-off point for connecting 鈥渁cademic鈥� knowledge to 鈥渞eal world鈥� solutions. At Crosstown High, we鈥檝e done an in-depth study of human migration involving people who immigrated to Memphis. This project closely relates to the standards covered in our history, geography, sociology and psychology courses. 
• Get outside the box. Keep asking, 鈥淲hy?鈥� and push your students to think bigger and broader before zeroing in on the small tasks. At Crosstown, our students conducted an in-depth project on how life could exist on Mars. This encompassed everything from food sources, water, breathable air, transportation and architecture. They used persuasive writing and research 鈥� touching practically every subject area.

Unlock Students鈥� Passion and Curiosity

Helping students find the urgency and passion in learning, and the joy of finding a solution, are key components to solving increasingly urgent local and global issues. But they鈥檙e also the ingredients we need to make learning, in general, more engaging and relevant to high school students. Our high schools can and should do a better job cultivating students鈥� natural passions and curiosities, helping them discover how their unique gifts, talents and interests help them meet the challenges of an uncertain future. Understanding their place in that future builds the confidence needed to be a change-maker.

Luckily, students are naturally forward-focused. They constantly think about what life will be like when they grow up. We can improve the high school experience by activating their natural curiosity and augmenting it with essential skills such as critical thinking, creative problem solving, information gathering and collaboration.

All of these skills are necessary for college, career and the real world. By combining passion, urgency, curiosity and essential knowledge and skills, our students can grow into the superheroes our planet needs to lead urgent and necessary change on the local, national and global stages. Schools around the world are setting examples, and we can, too. 

Want more ideas for making your high school more student-centered? The XQ Xtra is a newsletter for educators that comes out twice a month. .

Disclosure: is a financial supporter of 社区黑料.

Imagine a high school class where students use 3D modeling software to create blueprints, gather around a mixing board to produce a song or turn their custom artwork into streetwear. These experiences are far from what we see in many traditional high school classes. 

Innovative educators are using to make their classes more engaging and relevant. More than an academic buzzword, PBL involves students in their learning by embracing real-world issues with hands-on solutions. It also gives them a taste of life beyond classroom walls, especially when a school works with community partners in business, academia or the nonprofit sector. 

Educators at XQ high schools engage students in meaningful PBL year-round. They鈥檙e among schools nationwide where educators enrich and strengthen their approaches to PBL by embracing , one of the six research-based for successful high schools. Learning becomes more when students take what they鈥檙e studying at school into the real world, seeing how academic concepts apply to places and people they know. 

Here are 10 examples of projects to inspire educators and community groups for the upcoming school year. 

1. Nurture Entrepreneurs

in Oakland, California offers students the opportunity to do long-term internships, particularly during their junior and senior years. Students can spend a month working with tech companies, local businesses, the courts and nonprofits in the Bay Area. When the pandemic posed challenges in arranging internships, Dean of Students Christian Martinez organized a two-hour class on Mondays and Tuesdays for seniors to gain financial literacy. He focused the class on the stock market, and encouraged students to develop brands and messages that resonated with their identities, cultures and histories. He ensured the course aligned with the state’s content standards, emphasizing research and evidence-based learning. Martinez said he came up with his idea for the class after seeing how the seniors didn鈥檛 seem excited about school when they came back in person during the pandemic. 

His students learned graphic design with software programs. They also had to pitch their ideas to community members, incorporate feedback and articulate the story behind their brand through presentations of learning. 

Martinez said he leveraged a grant from Nike to give each of his 16 students $500-$1,000 to have their hoodies, T-shirts and tote bags printed nearby. They then sold the clothes at Latitude鈥檚 big celebration of learning in the spring of 2022. Their brand names included 鈥淐ruzando Fronteras鈥� (crossing borders), 鈥淭ruth and Lies,鈥� and 鈥淗umble Beginnings.鈥� 

By the end of the spring semester, Martinez said, 鈥淚 saw the spark that I needed to see from them for them to end the year in a place where they feel successful 鈥� regardless of whether they go to college or work.鈥� 

2. Make Music

The Memphis Artists United Project served as a powerful platform for collaboration in the fall of 2022 between eight talented musicians from Memphis, Tennessee and the students of music production class, led by teacher Ty Boyland. Together, they embarked on a musical journey to create “,” a song addressing gun violence with a bilingual verse by a talented 12th grader, shedding light on the impact of guns within the Latino community. The song got attention from local media and at youth conferences, leading to conversations about how young people experience violence and what solutions they can propose. Also at Crosstown High: science teacher Nikki Wallacemakes some powerful community partnerships by working with local researchers.

Want more ideas for rethinking your high school? The XQ Xtra is a newsletter for educators that comes out twice a month. .

3. Start a Small Farm

At in Endicott, NY, students designed a greenhouse in their math class, building scale models. The winning model is now flourishing in a garden with multiple raised beds, small fruit trees, native berry bushes, a fence and an underground water reservoir that redirects runoff from nearby tennis courts. Principal Annette Varcoe said the students collaborate with a local farmer who encourages their understanding of agriculture, farming and the marketplace. 

In July of 2023, students added a trellis arch for climbing beans. They also harvested zucchini, cucumbers and rhubarb. Some cooked rhubarb pies in their caf茅. Five 12th graders received internships and mentoring from Kathy, Dave and Eric’s Flavored Coffee Company. Students conducted surveys to determine which baked items to make and sell in the caf茅. They are now working on an online ordering system and backend software to track sales and inventory for the 2023-24 school year.

4. Collaborate with Artists

Members of 鈥檚 class of 2022 responded to a devastating storm that hit the Cedar Rapids region in August 2020 and destroyed up to 70 percent of the local tree canopy. Students contracted with local chainsaw artists to turn fallen wood into sculptures. They auctioned the work for Trees Forever, a public-private partnership dedicated to 鈥渞e-leafing鈥� the damaged tree canopy. Over the three-month project, students had to engage and organize artists for the carving effort, obtain permits from the city government, generate publicity through the local media, and execute the sculpture auction. By the end, their 鈥淪plinters鈥� project raised $25,000, nearly four times the students鈥� original goal of $6,000. A majority of the funds went to , with the rest paying the local artists for their time and skill. Student-led projects with community partners are the defining feature of Iowa BIG鈥檚 design.

5. Let Students Choose Science Projects

Student voice plays a significant role in projects at in Tennessee. For one project, students selected genetic diseases and conditions to study, then interviewed researchers, teachers, health professionals and those affected by these conditions. They created infographics to share their research, which were printed and displayed in the science wing to inform staff and students about genetic conditions.

6. Build a Community Garden

In partnership with the Houston Parks and Recreation Department, in Houston, Texas created community gardens in the adjacent 900-acre Herman Brown Park and later on the high school鈥檚 campus. The gardens now house more than 100 fruit trees throughout the school grounds on more than two and a half acres, providing many spaces for students to learn about the natural environment and contribute to the community. The school鈥檚 Career and Technical Education program has an educator in charge of coordinating community partnerships in agriculture, food and natural resources.

7. Build a Hydroponic System

At in Indiana, students built a hydroponic system through a science project. They conducted extensive research as they designed and constructed a method for growing produce sustainably and cost-effectively. The students then identified how to use those vegetables to address real-world community needs, such as providing healthy lunches to community members in food deserts. Students at this network of high schools work on projects with community partners throughout the year.

8. Make a Micro Museum

At in Sanford, Florida, students constructed a series of mobile micro museums to take around their community, educating residents, tourists and younger students about the history of the city of Sanford and Seminole County. Students met with historians and exhibit curators from the Sanford Museum to learn how to conduct primary research, preserve artifacts and build interactive designs. The year-long project started with design thinking for students to find out what elements of their community residents wanted to learn more about. Then, they built their traveling exhibits on topics such as natural history, agriculture, sports and media, and industry and technology. 

鈥淚n an age where history is more controlled than ever, it was amazing to see the students really become energized knowing their local history and how it connected with their own studies,鈥� said Sanford Museum Curator Brigitte Stephenson. 鈥淚t showed not only the power museums have, but also how important it is to have various ages give their input on how history is presented.鈥� Currently showcased at the Sanford Museum in commemoration of its 65th anniversary, these micro museums will travel to elementary and middle schools, downtown businesses, Seminole State College and the Seminole County Administration Center.

9. Explore Local History with Artists

The partnered with , a local arts nonprofit for young people, allowing 10th graders to take a nine-week course led by Diatribe artists, focusing on the history of housing inequality in Grand Rapids. They learned about red-lining 鈥� the practice of excluding certain groups, such as Black people, from particular neighborhoods 鈥� and its long-term negative impacts. Students toured various neighborhoods, explored the city鈥檚 gorgeous, dynamic and learned how discriminatory housing practices have shaped their city’s look and feel. 

But, typical of the school鈥檚 approach, the course was more than just lessons and field trips. Students discussed what they learned and grappled with their reactions by creating poetry, story-telling and spoken word pieces. Teachers wanted students to understand how historical events like the Civil Rights Movement were experienced nationally and within the Grand Rapids community.The partnership with The Diatribe fit closely with GRPMS courses, which aimed to blend history with social justice and English language arts in a way that makes the past feel relevant to students鈥� lives. 

10. Make Green Alleyways Possible

Students at in Santa Ana, California, partnered with the local architectural firm to think about a new green alleyway project for the city, working alongside professional architects to model and learn the ins and outs of drafting tools. 颁铆谤肠耻濒辞蝉 became so adept with project-based learning that its school board and the approved four PBL courses that will count towards California鈥檚 鈥淎-G鈥� subject requirement credit. The four courses are now available as an elective to all high schools across the Santa Ana Unified School District, the sixth largest district in California 鈥� showing how community partnerships and projects in one place can inspire more schools to try them.

Share examples of how your high school uses project-based learning with community partnerships with #rethinkhighschool on social.

Community partnerships are just one way to rethink high school. For more, check out The XQ Xtra, a newsletter for educators that comes out twice a month. .

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