High School Road Trip – ��Ӱ��

Competency-Based Parker Essential School Succeeds by Doing More With Less

Greg Toppo — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 10:30:00 +0000

Devens, Mass.

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

She’d originally planned to learn and record four or five songs in eight months, but by early May she told a small crowd, “I chose, in a very Parker fashion, to do two songs, in depth.”

If a school’s 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.

A sign that greets teachers at the entrance to Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School. (Greg Toppo)

“I went into this having slightly unrealistic expectations of myself,” Collins told judges at her presentation, having predicted this time last year that she’d be “a rock star by May.”

Asked whether she considers herself a guitar player yet, she was unequivocal: “My idea of being a guitar player is ‘shredding.’ I’m not there yet.” One day, she said, she’ll be a rock star. “I’m gonna keep at it.”

‘We’re not afraid’

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’t assigned grades. Instead, they constantly revise their work, which teachers judge on a continuum from “beginning” to “meeting” expectations. Work that fails to pass muster doesn’t receive a traditional D or F. Students simply stay in the “beginning” 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’s head of school. By the end of the school year, he no longer hears new students talking about grades. “They are definitely motivated by ‘meets.’”

Everyone has chosen to be here. I think that's important.
Brian Harrigan, head of school, Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School

It seems to be working: Parker boasts an enviable college-going rate of 82.4%. And though it doesn’t offer a single Advanced Placement class, Parker’s pass rate on AP exams is among the highest in Massachusetts.

In its latest state report card, Parker’s 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’re late, forget an assignment or misbehave, said Deb Merriam, Parker’s academic dean and one of three original staff members. “At this school, there’s no sense that there’s something to lose.”

She added bluntly, “We don’t ‘do fear.’”

We don’t do fear.
Deb Merriam, academic dean, Francis W. Park Charter Essential School

There’s also no sense that adults fear kids acting out if they’re unhappy or bored, because so much of the school’s 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.

“Everyone has chosen to be here,” said Harrigan. “I think that’s important.”

Roots in Sizer’s work

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

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

Sabina Flohr, 13, studies near the entrance to Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School. (Greg Toppo)

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 “compromise” of the title describes Horace’s 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 “” such as “Student as worker, teacher as coach.”

The Sizers were among the school’s 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’s most innovative high school models — from California’s heralded to the national network of schools — were founded by his disciples.

‘Is this far enough?’

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’s lesson: studying and composing protest songs.

Teacher Lucia Starkey works with student Alex Olsen in an Arts and Humanities class. (Greg Toppo)

Within a week of picking up the instruments, they’d 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, “Is this far enough? Is this far enough? What do you want to do? Do you want to go forward?”

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 “they can all have that same common language, even though the kids are doing slightly different things.”

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’s 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 — 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 “a ton of revision, a ton of reflection” 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’s student body.

“We have a lot of parents whose kids have struggled in traditional districts come here for the support that the school offers,” said Sue Massucco, the arts and humanities domain leader. Parker’s ethos allows students to “come and be yourself,” she said. “If they want to wear a cape to school, they wear a cape to school.”

Senior presentations

Just as they’re spared letter grades, they also attend classes in groups that aren’t strictly age-segregated. Instead, they study sequentially in one of three “divisions,” 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 “gateway” 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. “They know themselves well,” she said. “They’re asked to reflect on their work constantly, starting from when they’re 12.”

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’s 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 — and it shows.

Ava Soderman (left) greets a classmate after her senior presentation on what it’s like to be a park ranger at Yellowstone National Park. (Greg Toppo)

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’t quite get around to earning her required emergency medical services and paramedic training. “If you guys know me, I don’t do well with needles and blood, and I pass out frequently,” she said. “So 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.”

The presentations are smart, often funny and deeply personal.

“By the time they’re seniors, they can hold a room,” said wellness teacher Kafi Beckles. “They can present, they can share their opinions, they’re able to have their own thoughts, not just regurgitate facts.”

By the time they’re seniors, they can hold a room.
Kafi Beckles, wellness teacher, Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School

Less is more

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

So there’s 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 “pretty good reason” to start anew.

Come over to Parker. The care that's given to the students, and the way students treat each other — you don't need a splashy building.
Pam Gordon, parent and incoming board chair, Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School

But when people stood up and said a new building would improve the education there, she said, “I actually laughed.”

She tells people, “Come 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 — you don’t need a splashy building.”

Reinventing High School: 8 Common Trends at America’s Most Innovative Campuses

Greg Toppo and Emmeline Zhao — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 11:15:00 +0000

Just over two centuries ago, the first boys — yes, they were all young men — walked through the doors of Boston’s English Classical School, the first so-called “” in America, willing subjects in an experiment that revolutionized education as towns and cities rushed to open their own high schools.

English Classical and its imitators proudly proclaimed their ability to prepare students for new jobs in emerging, high-tech industries such as banking, manufacturing and railroads.

It’s just over 200 years later, and high schools have opened their doors to all teens, not just boys. But with technological disruptions daily changing our conception of what a well-educated young person looks like, Americans are again clamoring for innovative secondary schools that help them make sense of these changes. They’re looking, above all, for institutions that leave behind many of the traditions of the past in favor of offerings that promise to help their kids get a strong start.

Since last spring, journalists at ��Ӱ�� have been crossing the U.S. as part of our 2023 High School Road Trip. It has embraced both emerging and established high school models, taking us to 13 schools from Rhode Island to California, Arizona to South Carolina, and in between.

It has brought us face-to-face with innovation, with programs that promote everything from nursing to aerospace to maritime-themed careers.

At each school, educators seem to be asking one key question: What if we could start over and try something totally new?

What we’ve found represents just a small sample of the incredible diversity that U.S. high schools now offer, but we’re noticing a few striking similarities that educators in these schools, free to experiment with new models, now share. Here are the top eight:

1

They don’t worry about what came before.

In these places, high school looks almost nothing like it did for our parents or grandparents.

While the seven-period, books-in-a-locker high school, with its comprehensive curriculum, vast extracurriculars and Friday night football games is alive and well and available to most of the nation’s 17 million or so high schoolers, it is no longer the default model.

Instead, thousands of young people now attend high school each morning in facilities that more closely resemble workplaces, professional training grounds and research labs. Quite often, young people are in actual workplaces for part of their school day, either as apprentices or taking part in something resembling career tourism, trying out jobs to see what fires their imaginations and fits their tastes.

2

They focus intently on exactly what their students need.

Most of these schools are small by design, so the traditional mission of serving thousands of students with countless courses — as well as the requisite menu of after-school activities, such as sports, music, and drama — is out of the question.

In its place, many new schools now offer one key thing: focus. Intense, unrelenting focus.

Diana Pimentel (left) listens to an advisor as RINI classmates (from left) Veronica Benitez, Joslin Lebron and Edilma Ramirez tend to a mock patient in a prep session for a certified nursing assistant exam. (Greg Toppo)

At Rhode Island Nurses Institute Middle College in Providence, R.I., students show up for class each morning dressed in scrubs. They spend four years learning the bedrock values and basic skills of the nursing profession, earning college credit before they graduate.

The school’s laser-like focus is perhaps its greatest strength, said Principal Tammy Ferland, a veteran educator. “This is a health care program, a nursing program,” she said. “If you don’t want to be a nurse, if you don’t want to be in health care, then you don’t belong here.”

Students can still play sports or perform in the band — they just need to find those things at their neighborhood school or elsewhere —after they remove their scrubs.

Davere Hanson, a Harbor School graduate who now serves as a teacher apprentice at the school, stands next to its beloved simulator. (Jo Napolitano)

The same focus is on display at Urban Assembly New York Harbor School on Governors Island, a ferry ride south of Manhattan, where the East River meets the Hudson. Students must choose among eight maritime-themed career and technical education pathways before they close out their freshman year.

Clad in life vests, protective goggles and welders’ masks, students get a chance to earn industry certifications in marine science or technology before graduation — bona fides that help them enter the workforce or pursue further education.

Most of its students come to the program with an interest in marine biology research, environmental science and aquaculture. And while many pursue these fields, others migrate to ocean engineering, professional diving and even vessel operations.

3

They embrace internships and personalization.

Many of these new high school models focus less on one industry than on imparting what students need to know about the modern workplace more broadly, through intensive, often personalized, coursework and professional internships.

At Blue Valley Center for Advanced Professional Studies in Overland Park, KS, students spend about three hours a day working with professionals in one of six industries, from food science to aerospace engineering.

Housed in a light-filled, three story building that more closely resembles a high-tech office, the program enjoys support from the local school district, which created it as a half-day program that serves only juniors and seniors.

Blue Valley CAPS nursing student Sophia Cherafat (front left) talks to classmates (l-r) Reese Gaston, Sumehra Kabir and Jyoshika Padmanaban (Greg Toppo)

Students return to their neighborhood high school for required coursework. For accreditation purposes, the district treats the entire enterprise as a class.

“Blue Valley CAPS treated me like a working adult,” said alumna Sophia Porter, who now holds dual degrees in physics and applied mathematics and statistics from Johns Hopkins University and serves as a project manager and test operator for BE-4 engines at the Texas aerospace company Blue Origin.

At The Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center in Providence, students spend much of what would typically be class time working on personalized projects prescribed by advisors, who follow small groups of just 16 students throughout their high school career, intimately learning about their interests and academic needs. Students also spend much of their four-year career in a series of bespoke internships at local businesses, nonprofits and educational institutions.

Founded in 1996, The Met is renowned among a brand of progressive educators seeking to create small, personalized high schools around students’ passions and interests. “That’s what the Met taught me,” said Jordan Maddox, class of 2007. “Don’t really limit yourself.”

Maddox admits he initially didn’t quite know what to make of the place. “I remember telling my mother, ‘Mom, this is a daycare for high school students.’ And she was like, ‘Give it a chance. Give it time.’”

These schools also offer a kind of freedom and agency to students that would have been unheard of to their parents.

One Stone student Cadence Kirst shows off a handmade wooden game board for the strategy game Quoridor. (Greg Toppo)

At One Stone, a tiny private high school near downtown Boise, Idaho, students are deputized to run much of the operation, serving as officers of the board and filling two-thirds of board positions overall.

“A lot of people don’t believe that high school students can do meaningful, big things,” said Teresa Poppen, One Stone’s executive director and co-founder. “And I have always believed that they can do meaningful things when empowered and trusted.”

Or, as recent graduate Abella Cathey put it, “Being treated like an adult is what makes you act like one.”

4 They prepare young people for jobs in emerging industries.

Just as the first public high school offered to educate young people to compete in the high-tech industries of the era, the new breed of high school offers the same promise, only in medicine, aerospace and tech-assisted agriculture.

In Lodi, Calif., as the number of wineries begins to match its status as a major grape-growing powerhouse, the nonprofit San Joaquin A+ has partnered with the Lodi Unified School District and others to create an internship pipeline that gives students real-life learning and experiences across a variety of roles in the winemaking industry.

The partnership turns rural wineries into state-of-the-art classrooms where students spend time inspecting vines, cleaning storage tanks with pressure washers, and setting up tasting. In the end, they learn about the whole business: growing grapes, making wine and selling it.

Across the country, at Anderson Institute of Technology in western South Carolina, students from three districts now get real-world experience early on in their educational careers in preparation for jobs at companies like Bosch, Michelin and Arthrex.

Much like the Blue Valley model, students take core classes at their home high schools, and then commute to AIT to take classes like aeronautics, auto shop, and medicine. They work both in traditional classrooms and “labs” that mimic real-world work environments — an automotive garage, aerospace engineering lab or a surgery room.

“It’s all about giving kids a purpose in life,” said Don Herriott, a local business owner.

5

They’re rethinking what classrooms, campuses and school days look like.

In many new schools, such personalization takes place among new campus facilities, but in others, students navigate between several physical and virtual sites to attend class — sometimes all in the same day.

In Arizona, the 86 students who attend Phoenix Union City High School choose from a menu of some 500 options that include coursework at the district’s brick-and-mortar schools, its online-only program, internships, jobs, college classes or career training programs.

Yaritza Dominguez drives more than 3,000 miles a month working toward both a high school diploma and a dental assistant credential. (Beth Hawkins)

“The pandemic gave us an entree,” said Chad Gestson, until recently the system’s superintendent. “It enabled us to go to a system with no limits.”

Phoenix Union now operates four small high schools with specific themes, including law enforcement, firefighting, coding and cybersecurity. This fall, Phoenix Educator Preparatory welcomed its first students. It also operates standalone “microschools” housed in existing high schools — they include a program aimed at students working toward admission to highly selective colleges.

6

They redefine who high school is for.

Just as many schools now redefine what kind of space a high school should occupy, others are rethinking their customer base.

At Roybal Learning Center’s new film and television production magnet high school in Los Angeles, show business industry professionals last fall put up millions to launch a program to give Black, Hispanic and Asian students a pathway into good-paying jobs in the movie industry, helping them become “part of the machinery of storytelling,” said Bryan Lourd, an executive at Creative Artists Agency and the agent of actor George Clooney, a key supporter.

George Clooney, one of the actors behind the new Los Angeles magnet school focused on jobs in TV and film, took a selfie with a student during a visit last fall. (Getty Images)

The school plans to match students with mentors in the industry and eventually develop an apprenticeship program to offer early experience in their chosen field. The goal, said Deborah Marcus, who manages education efforts at Creative Artists Agency, is for graduates to not only land their first job on a crew, but their second and third as well.

7

They serve students of color in a more supportive way.

At New York’s Brooklyn Lab School, social workers visited nearly 100 homes to find students as absenteeism soared after the Covid pandemic.

More than three years later, each Lab School student now has a personal advocate, an advisor who starts each day with a non-academic meeting to build relationships and discuss health or current events over free breakfast.

Two teachers now lead each class, at least one of whom is special education certified, as the school adopts an all-inclusion-model.

Seniors Jayla Eady, Anaya Martin and Daniel Shelton reflect on their time at Brooklyn Laboratory Charter as they overlook the Manhattan skyline. (Marianna McMurdock/��Ӱ��)

Morning office hours and a six-week night school offer more chances for students to bridge academic gaps made worse by the pandemic. And teachers are paid to lead and attend professional development sessions. Roughly 80% are Black or brown, serving about 450 students who are predominantly Black, Latino and low-income.

“When you’re a school of this size, you have the ability to respond and cater to the community that you’re serving, and be more personable with the families that you meet, the people that you work with, and the staff that you hire,” said assistant principal Melissa Poux.

8

They cut through traditional structures to find what works.

Perhaps most significantly, many high school programs are finding new ways to serve at-risk students.

For many, what they need most is more time to grow. At New York City’s Math, Engineering, and Science Academy Charter High School, recent graduates are paid $500 to participate in a six-week “13th grade” Alumni Lab that offers resume writing, interview support and sessions exploring growth mindset, self-awareness and making goals — skills that help young people, particularly alumni of color, work through feelings of inadequacy, shame, or feeling like an imposter.

“Life has not gone as they were led to believe it would,” said MESA’s co-executive director and co-founder Arthur Samuels. “…You have all of these kids who are not tethered to any institution, but the institution that they are tethered to is their high school. We need to leverage that relationship.”

The program last spring wrapped up its third cohort, with 71% of participants matriculating back to college or into a free workforce development program.

Schools, Samuels said, “create this artificial bright line that happens on the day of graduation: June 23, you’re our kid. June 24, we give you a diploma and you’re someone else’s problem.”

Michael Jeffery and Cheryl Smith, recent Goodwill Excel Center graduates. (Courtesy of Goodwill Excel Center)

At Goodwill Excel Center Adult Charter High School in Washington, D.C., part of a network of Goodwill schools for adult learners nationwide, educators have compressed the traditional 20-week semester into a rolling series of eight-week terms. Coursework is based on competency, not seat time, and four assessments over the course of each term keep students on track.

But those who don’t succeed, even with individualized tutoring, can simply start over again at the end of eight weeks. Students with heavy work or family commitments can stay enrolled by taking just one class per term.

“We like to put high school dropouts into a box and say, ‘This is why they’re a dropout,’” said Excel’s Executive Director, Chelsea Kirk. “But we don’t ever think about what structures caused that. We don’t ever think about ‘How could a school change its structures to embrace people?”

— James Fields, Beth Hawkins, Linda Jacobson, Marianna McMurdock and Jo Napolitano contributed to this report.