It’s a school where knocking a hole in the classroom wall is really cool.A school where students spend two days a week out in the world learning and contributing, maybe figuring out where their lives are going. Manitoba’s first Met School, inside Garden City Collegiate, is a school-within-a-school where part of the plan is to knock down a big chunk of wall and connect three classrooms directly.

Met isn’t an acronym, it doesn’t stand for anything, it’s an innovative education movement that began in Rhode Island 15 years ago and has spread here, explained Adair Warren, principal of the Seven Oaks School Division Met School. The Met School has 40 students in grades 9 and 10 in three classrooms, and will expand in September to include Grade 11 and go to five classrooms.

It has elements that sound somewhat like multigrade flex programs, like off-campus classrooms, like work placements. But Met is its own package.

“One of the main differences is the internships,” said Warren. “The internships are what really set us apart.” First, students develop a resume and interview techniques, then undergo a 40-minute interview before starting an internship. Students intern Tuesdays and Thursdays with a business, community agency, or institution, not only working, but also planning and carrying out a major project that will benefit the host organization. The idea is to open up the world to students, show them how the curriculum connects directly to the real world, and help kids discover their options, said Warren.

Some of the students plan to go to university, some envision professional careers, some will work after Grade 12. Every student and his or her parents have to write letters describing their passions and interests, and why they believe a place in the school would be good for them, said Warren.

Grade 10 student Andrew Provenski said it’s a big change from a regular classroom, but a welcome change. “For science, I’ve done more hands-on work than I did my whole Grade 9 year,” he said. He’s gone to Ecole Seven Oaks Middle School twice a week since October, working with Grade 6 students in the morning, then working afternoons on the school’s major stage production of The Wiz. “I help build sets for the play” as his internship project, said Andrew, who wants to become a teacher.

Grade 9 student Ocean Breland is considering teaching or some form of working with kids. She interns at the Manitoba Children’s Museum, where her project is developing the curriculum aspects of the April school field trips program — a kid-friendly bugs exhibit called Attack of the Blood Suckers. Ocean said the group work at the Met School appealed to her. “I really liked the idea of the different type of learning,” Ocean said.

The Met School has three staff, all certified classroom teachers — who are all called advisers instead of teachers. “They don’t teach the students everything, they facilitate,” said Warren.

Adviser David Zynoberg is just fine with that title: “I spend a lot of my day one-on-one with the students — a lot of their work is independent,” Zynoberg said. “I’ll help them with their brainstorms.” Warren is making the rounds of the division’s Grade 8 classes to describe the Met School, which she said is open to anyone in Seven Oaks S.D.

During his speech, Obama singled out the Met Center in Rhode Island as an institution that offers the kind of individual instruction to students that will be used in the new program that he unveiled. He said: “That’s why we’ll follow the example of places like the Met Center in Rhode Island that give students that individual attention, while also preparing them through real-world, hands-on training the possibility of succeeding in a career.”

Click here to read the full transcript of President Obama’s speech.

Find out more at the America’s Promise Alliance website. Also, read General Powell’s recent blog post on the White House website.

Often described with terms like “urban blight” and “toxic environment,” the Hunts Point neighborhood in New York’s Bronx does, in fact, have its share of determination and positive impact.

One such example is the GreenFab educational program at Bronx Guild High School, which is designed to foster 21st-century skills in at-risk youth and prepare them for work force readiness in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM)-related fields, and primarily green collar jobs.

GreenFab evolved as a response to inner city students’ educational need for instruction that connects with them. The program draws on students’ environmental and economic conditions and problems as raw material from which to create an instructional program — and the staff doesn’t see the school as a technical or a job-training institution. “We’re a college prep school that uses real-world experiences to improve academics,” said Co-Director Jeff Palladino, adding that GreenFab impacts the kids because it exposes them to STEM subjects through real people who are actually doing the work. “They help our kids connect academic subject matter to real-life applications, experiment and create things, and solve problems that directly impact them, especially environmental justice issues.”

Work Force Preparation
Some students are interested in creative technology, and some are interested in the environmental work, Palladino said, but the program provides numerous opportunities that can be customized to individual needs. “We want them to find their passions and run with them,” he said. “For instance, one of my seniors hopes to follow his passion for technology and create robots that will assist people with disabilities, people like returning war veterans who have lost limbs. He wants to get into the biomedical field through this interest.”

Laura Allen, president of Vision Education and Media, which heads up the GreenFab program, said she is struck by Bronx Guild High School’s knowledge of what its students need — and that its students aren’t on the same footing as typical middle-class kids. “Bronx Guild really tries, in innovative ways, to piece together a high school experience that can get these kids well on the road to being productive citizens,” she said.

Bronx Guild High School has a well articulated vision of learning through meaningful work, and work force preparation is a major thrust at the school. Students participate in off-campus internships, which may represent the most meaningful portion of their educational experience, and roughly 80 Bronx Guild students participate in GreenFab internships each year.

The student interns report to GreenFab for a special curriculum that includes elements of applied science, engineering and environmental studies with a focus on understanding the urban environment, said Corbett Beder, senior director of research and development at Vision Education and Media.

Four major themes run through the curriculum:

• sustainable design, using materials recycled from the local environment;
• electrical engineering;
• community advocacy in environmental understanding and sustainable living;
• computing and technology.

Through hands-on projects, students learn how to work with computers, and they design and build electronic devices that address environmental needs. Projects include building working model wind turbines and solar vehicles — things that can have direct impact on the environment. They also learn to apply things they create to help raise community consciousness about the environment and how human behavior can help or harm it.

“Many of these students are struggling to find a way to ‘do’ high school that’s going to be beneficial for them,” Beder said, noting that the program aims to show they will not only graduate high school, but also find jobs. Students are prepared practically for jobs in the new growth industries, especially green jobs, which are rapidly expanding despite the decline of older industrial businesses.

GreenFab in Action
Late last year, a 15-year-old named Jorge was hard at work inside a GreenFab classroom: After sketching a graffiti-inspired design for a neck ornament, he scanned and saved it in a graphics file format, and then imported it into Photoshop for some tweaking.

He then reopened it in Inkscape, software that takes the design and directs a high-tech laser cutter to burn the shape through whatever material its beam is trained on. In this case, Jorge used recycled Lucite.

The laser cutter, an item few high school students have access to, is part of the Fab Lab, an international project started at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Bits and Atoms. The Fab Lab aims to bring “digital fabrication,” the modern means of production, to ordinary people for solving community problems.

Before hitting the laser cutter’s switch, however, Jorge had to calculate size, scale and other factors to get to the finished product — something he was producing as a paid commission for a client. Later, he would write up his day’s work and submit it to the GreenFab student blog, a required part of the program that ensures students learn literacy skills alongside the others. That same day, other students used the laser cutter to produce a variety of items in the Fab Lab, such as elegantly designed cardboard placards to post throughout the community to raise environmental awareness.

The BankNote building is a massive red brick structure in the Bronx, and is a good example of an older industrial structure that’s been reinvigorated. Opened in 1909 as the principal plant of the American Bank Note Company, it laid fallow in 1985 when American Bank Note moved its operations out of New York City. However, it was recently rehabbed by sensitive and creative real estate developers, and is now the home of numerous community initiatives, including GreenFab.

The Fab Lab is part of Sustainable South Bronx, a community organization dedicated to environmental justice solutions. The organization’s Fab Lab coordinator Jon Santiago said the most important skill students learn in GreenFab is independent learning, and traditional academic settings in urban communities haven’t been the most conducive for inspiring youth to pursue careers as engineers, scientists or designers.

“With access to fabrication tools, the Internet and knowledgeable mentors, students are able to complete sophisticated projects that are usually only done by those with extensive preparation in science and mathematics,” he said. “Our hope is that these exciting projects, which are inspired through the lens of sustainability, will inspire them to buckle down academically so they can pursue careers in emerging green technology fields. Regardless of what career they pursue, their experience in GreenFab will be of tremendous value, as it will teach them how to teach themselves.”

Ashley Lewis, a research associate with the Center for Children and Technology — an organization that tracks and evaluates GreenFab — observed that the program has been very rewarding for the students who enjoy science, design, hands-on projects and the connections to the outside world. “I think an integral part of the success is the relationship that develops with the instructors who provide a lot of individualized help,” she said. “The students feel as if they are being treated as professionals. It’s a very collaborative experience for them.” Learning is really an interdisciplinary activity, Allen said, and at GreenFab this understanding is “alive and well and in full implementation.”

“Getting kids on the path to effective learning starts with having them make things, and with the right strategies and hard work, this kind of out-of the-box, almost-too-good-to-be-true education is really possible,” she said. “I attribute our success to the fact that the staff is incredibly devoted to these students and making the project work. There are so many disenfranchised kids out there, and my hope is that this program can grow and we can find a way to impact more of them.”

Vincent Pero stretched out on the sprawling light green couch in his bedroom last week and plowed through “Pemba’s Song,” a 109-page mystery novel. His principal had quietly slipped the book on the 17-year-old’s desk the day before during study hall, part of a scheme among school staffers to feed his budding reading addiction. Next up is a 368-pager. And that is remarkable.

A year and a half ago, Vincent had landed at Indianapolis Metropolitan High School withdrawn and barely willing to talk to his teachers. His reading test results were stunning: He was at a third-grade level. He struggled to get through “The Cat in the Hat.” He was 15. It seemed impossible a year ago, but now Vincent is ripping through the “Twilight” series and seeking out books to read. He spent a recent lunch period writing a short story — for fun.

Indianapolis is filled with children who, like Vincent, have fallen behind for myriad reasons. About 4,000 of 10,000 eighth-graders tested in 2008 failed the ISTEP reading test, and one in five high school students won’t make it to graduation in four years. Vincent’s story is one of a boy who shrank into himself through the years as teachers pigeonholed him as a child who couldn’t learn. They didn’t put it that directly, of course, but he knew.

But if Vincent’s experience is a cautionary tale about how students come to the brink of dropping out, it also is a story of hope. His transformation shows what can happen when a teacher reaches through years of hardening emotion and somewhat improbably coaxes a kid old enough to drive to learn to read books his peers had long outgrown.

It didn’t take Vincent long after he started school in 1998 to feel that he was different. By first grade, he said, his teachers had flagged him as a problem case. At School 34 in Indianapolis Public Schools, he remembers being assigned his own special desk — in the back of the room, away from other students. When other kids gathered for lessons or got worksheets, Vincent stayed at his desk. He remembers rolling around on the floor, left to his own devices, while everyone else learned to read.

The school correctly diagnosed him with dyslexia, a learning disability that qualified him for special education classes. But even then, no one showed him how to make sense of the jumbled letters he saw. Vincent’s family members saw him struggling but found themselves unable to help. His grandmother hired a tutor, and he conquered some of the basics of reading. But in school, he didn’t improve much. He fell behind in every subject but was passed on each year to the next grade, each time into a special education class.

The adults tried to be discreet, but Vincent said he overheard conversations encouraging substitute teachers or others working with the class to not call on him to read. He felt stupid. In class, he tried to hide behind an open book and sleep.

Debrah Vawter, School 34’s principal, said she’s sad that Vincent recalls his experiences there negatively. She doesn’t dispute that he remembers the school that way, but she said that doesn’t sound like the teachers she has worked with there, whom she described as dedicated and caring. Vawter, who doesn’t recall Vincent specifically, said she never saw teachers isolating students or demeaning their abilities.

But she also said the school has since added better reading programs and intervenes more to help students who fall behind. In short, it would have been easier for a child to slip through the cracks when Vincent was there. “I was told I was a problem child,” he said recently, “so they didn’t teach me anything.”

After fifth grade, it was clear Vincent needed something different, and his parents moved him to a charter school, Christel House Academy. Vincent and his father say he advanced some in his years there, and that one test pegged him at a sixth-grade reading level by the time he went to high school. But other tests — along with the reading levels of the books he couldn’t read — suggest it was still much lower.

The special education teacher at Christel House was nice, Vincent said. Still, he thought teachers answered math problems for him when he didn’t know the answers. Vincent felt like he had good experiences at Christel House, that he had learned something. He enjoyed being there, but he still could see that he wasn’t catching up nearly fast enough. One teacher pulled his classmates aside to tell them to ignore the fact that he couldn’t read, to skip over him when reading in a group. His friends later told him about the conversations. “I just wanted to be in the regular classes,” he said, adding that he felt different.

In seventh grade, Vincent begged to be allowed to go to regular classes for math. The third time he launched into the pleas, they humored him and sent him to regular math class. He understood the lessons, but when he went slower than other students, he was booted back to special education class full time. Carey Dahncke, the principal at Christel House, said Vincent came in far behind his grade level. He still was failing the Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress when he left but had closed the gap and was much closer to passing.

Dahncke said teachers worked intensively with him and that outside groups worked to bolster his social and academic skills. He advanced more than a year’s worth of learning each school year, Dahncke said. By the time he left, Christel House maintains, he was on the verge of being able to perform at a high level. Vincent left, though, feeling like he couldn’t learn.

And he had given up on school.

Vincent had tuned out by the time he arrived at Indianapolis Metropolitan High School. He took a standard battery of tests to figure out the appropriate grade level of work he should receive. The reading test showed him at a third-grade level. Shocking as that may sound for a 15-year-old, it didn’t alarm or even surprise Carlotta Kozlowicz-Cooprider, the administrator who oversees Vincent’s class at the Near-Westside charter school. Half of his classmates — sophomores in high school — read below an eighth-grade level. One-third read below a fifth-grade level. That’s half of the students in one school who are two or more grades behind.

Kozlowicz-Cooprider becomes frustrated when she thinks of all of the teachers along the way who could have intervened. Children who know they’re behind devise ways to hide their deficits, but Kozlowicz-Cooprider counts the teachers as complicit. Even beyond ignoring children such as Vincent, she said, many teachers will find ways to get students’ grades to a passing level and move them on. Award enough participation points and give grades for attendance and group projects and homework questions where the teacher helps on all the answers, and it’s not hard for anyone to pass. Even if the child can’t read. “They come from all over — township schools, IPS, other charter schools,” Kozlowicz-Cooprider said. “It makes me disappointed in our profession.”

Vincent wants all of the adults who wrote him off to meet the one who didn’t: Danielle Frank. He landed in her classroom last year, past the point where he gave up, past the point where he decided to ignore his teachers, past the point where he decided they didn’t care about him. Ms. Dani, though, proved herself different. She entered his life at a critical point. He was entering ninth grade — the year when children who become fed up with school most often drop out. And so, too, might have Vincent.

But Ms. Dani could empathize with Vincent. She, too, had dyslexia and had struggled to not get lost in class. She also wouldn’t cut him any slack. Even as Vincent struggled with Dr. Seuss, Ms. Dani refused to let him out of assignments to read high school books. Even as he made his way through “Goosebumps” books written for fifth- and sixth-graders, he dug into “The Scarlet Letter.”

Over time, teacher and student clicked. “She just wouldn’t give up,” Vincent said. “She said she had the same problem.” Ms. Dani worked with him one-on-one. So did his English teacher. At some point, Vincent crossed a line that too few of his classmates reach: He started to read for himself. He read because he discovered he liked it. He read because he realized books could transport him to different worlds.

He read to prove that he could.

The Vincent of today barely resembles the boy of two years ago, said his father, Todd Pero. He sneaks away to read, he cares about school and he recently earned the second-highest score in his class on a math test. “He shot way up,” his father said. “He’s reading all the time.”

His school is marveling at the change, too. The boy who last year sat sullenly in his own shell now participates in class. One recent morning, he raised his hand to answer a question about a line in the play “Twelve Angry Men” in English class. The teacher called on another student, but Vincent persisted.

He raised his hand again a few seconds later and was passed over again. And again. The kid who a year ago kept his head down — who used to hide behind a book and sleep — raised his hand a fourth time. And, when called upon, Vincent shared his answer. Not only was he sharing, but his teachers wanted to hear from him.

Two periods later, he poked his hand in the air and pointed out to the math teacher that he had incorrectly written an equation on the board — a “less than sign” instead of a “less than or = to sign.” And Vincent was right.

On Wednesdays, he works at an internship in the school’s technology department, working with computers and even digging through technical manuals. When he graduates — which now seems likely — he plans to either study technology or animation or enlist in the Marines. “He was very negative about education,” Kozlowicz-Cooprider said. “Now Vincent has crossed. I think it’s that he found his voice.”

He has. And he wants people to know he’s not incapable of learning. Not like some always assumed.

As an English teacher, I agree wholeheartedly about virtual internships and learning from our youngsters ['Reverse Internships,' December]. I also had an idea for virtual internships after reading Dennis Littky’s The Big Picture, based on the work at Littky’s high school in Providence, Rhode Island. Thank you for your article. I have eagerly forwarded it to my school’s principal in the hope that he will start to connect alumni with current students. Your article might be the push needed to start the program.
Steve McCrea
Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Spirit’s Response:
Let us know if it works, Steve. And thanks for mentioning Dennis Littky. His Big Picture Learning program runs almost 70 schools throughout America, focusing on inner cities and underprivileged kids. They boast a dropout rate 40 percent lower than that of comparable schools.

The organization has recently branched out to include college students in an attempt to lower their dismal dropout rate: more than 40 percent, according to the American Enterprise Institute. Last fall, Big Picture started a program with Roger Williams University in Providence. Students in it work three days a week in area businesses. Your idea that this work-and-study method could apply beyond area businesses is right in keeping with our own thinking.

Download a PDF version of the letter in Spirit here.

Located in a south wing at Durango High School, an alternative education program stands apart. It has its own teachers, students and curriculum. Durango Big Picture High School, as the program is called, is more than halfway through its first year. Students work on projects, solve math equations at their own pace and help each other with problems both academic and social.

On Wednesday, a typical day last week, class began with teacher Manuel Sanchez - whom the students call “San-chez” - leading an exercise called “pick me up” after calling roll. Students introduced themselves, rated their mood on a 1-to-10 scale and, on this day, named their favorite breakfast.

Cayton Ferguson, a ninth-grader who skips down the hallways and favors black clothing, said she was “about an eight.” Her favorite breakfast: hash browns, preferably from Denny’s. Not everybody gave such a cheery report. One girl said she was a “one” - something about going to a psychologist.

Sanchez said he was about an eight. He told the students, “Those of you that are having a low-number day, remember, there’s people you can talk to.” Cayton, 15, who attended Miller Middle School last year, said the Big Picture school fits her learning style.

“I can’t take in information and put it back on paper,” she said. Big Picture also reduces the impacts of her attention deficit disorder, Cayton said. “I function normally in here,” she said.

9-R’s latest alternative Durango Big Picture High School’s lineage can be traced to Excel Charter School, an independent public school that in 2006 became part of Durango School District 9-R after suffering from low enrollment, high staff and student turnover and inadequate financing.

The district revamped the charter school into a program called Durango Academy. After months of intensive planning led by DHS Principal Diane Lashinsky, district officials decided to change tack again, adopting a new curriculum modeled on Big Picture Learning. The program was developed in the mid-1990s in Providence, R.I.

“What I like about the model is that the learning originates from students’ interests,” Lashinsky said. “So the students have the opportunity to take what they’re intrinsically motivated about and have that guide how they learn in high school.”

The first Big Picture school, known as The Met, enrolled mostly at-risk African-American and Latino students who did not fit in conventional schools, the organization says on its Web site.

Many local Big Picture students also seem to have struggled in regular schools. Tajid Person, a 15-year-old freshman, said he almost failed out of Escalante Middle School last year. “I do not do so well in traditional school,” Tajid said. “Big Picture is more hands-on, and I’m more of a hands-on learner. I like it here a lot.”

Some Big Picture students simply prefer the self-paced learning style. Jasmine Neves, 16, a sophomore, said she did well at DHS last year. But she switched to Big Picture because she wanted “something different.” “I wanted something that would challenge me, let me go at my own speed,” she said.

Lashinsky said the Big Picture model works for “anyone that wants to learn in a different kind of environment.” “The original Big Picture schools (were) targeted initially at students who were not successful in school,” Lashinsky said. “But that’s not specifically the population we’re targeting, and we’ve also found in other schools around the country, it’s not only for that population.”

Nationwide, Big Picture schools enroll 9,000 students, and an additional 7,000 attend them in other countries. Durango Big Picture enrolls 47 students in ninth and 10th grades, a fraction of the 1,393 students at DHS and short of the 60 or so school officials had hoped for. School officials plan to add 11th and 12th grades over the next two years, becoming a four-year high school by 2011-12.

It will be years before data emerges about Durango Big Picture’s college placement rate. But nationally, 95 percent of students at Big Picture schools were accepted into colleges in 2006-07, Briana Masterson, spokeswoman for Big Picture Learning in Providence, said in an e-mail message. Of those, more than 60 percent have completed a degree or remain enrolled in higher-education institutions.

Three 9-R teachers work full time at Big Picture, in addition to a DHS special-education teacher who helps at Big Picture. The program was budgeted at $421,000 this year but likely will spend less because enrollment fell short of the budgeted amount, said Laine Gibson, 9-R’s chief financial officer.

All Big Picture students are expected to intern with local employers two days a week. On Thursday, Cayton paged through the company’s Web site in the marketing department at ProfitStreams in Durango while Internet radio played in the background. The company, a spinoff of Mercury Payment Systems, provides restaurant reservation systems and other high-tech tools for businesses. Cayton has created two animated help videos for ProfitStream’s customers as part of an internship.

Some students have not yet found internships, but it’s not for a lack of effort, said Alain Henry, a Big Picture administrator. “Those students that are not in internships currently all have struggled for a variety of reasons,” he said.

In one video Cayton created, titled “How does search-engine marketing help your business?” an animated man and woman discuss how to get businesses noticed by search engines such as Google.

Walker Thompson, who leads ProfitStreams’ Durango office, called Big Picture a “killer program” because it exposes students at a young age to the business world. “There are so many opportunities beyond the classroom,” he said.

Kricket Lewis, who works with Cayton in the marketing department, said the freshman is learning real-world skills. “It really is how we work,” she said. “It’s collaboration, it’s communication, it’s problem solving.” Cayton had a bit of a leg-up at ProfitStreams - her mother, Rhonda, works in sales - but she said she enjoyed the laid-back office culture. “It’s work and play,” she said. “It’s awesome.”

Different requirements The school district is eager to publicize Big Picture as students and parents choose schools for 2010-11. Besides DHS and Big Picture, families in Durango also can choose Animas High School, a charter institution that opened in August 2009 with 77 freshmen. Like Big Picture, AHS - which is not part of the school district - offers a project-based curriculum paired with internships, small class sizes and close student-teacher relationships.

Students at Big Picture do not receive traditional grades. Projects they complete are rated according to whether they exceed, meet or fall below expectations. Those ratings in turn are converted into class credit and a GPA for the purpose of college admissions. “We were looking for a truly different way for students to be able to go through school and still be able to meet the rigorous 9-R graduation requirements, but to be able to come at those graduation requirements in a completely different way,” Lashinsky said. Next school year, if repairs can be completed in time, Big Picture will move to the 9-R building at 12th Street and East Second Avenue that once housed Excel.

“Big Picture is definitely not a school for every kind of learner, for every kind of student,” Lashinsky said. “It’s designed to meet a specific need for a specific type of learner, and we think we have a good number of those in Durango.”

A nationally recognized charter school operator will open a secondary school in Detroit in the fall, marking the first of what advocates hope will be a wave of new, high-performing charter schools coming to the city.

YES Prep, a Houston charter operator that boasts a 100 percent college attendance rate, pledged to duplicate its success here at a former Detroit Public Schools building on the city’s northwest side. It’s a partnership with New Urban Learning, which runs University Prep Schools in Detroit.

When University Yes Academy opens in the fall, students will attend school from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and at least one Saturday a month. By eighth grade, students will be on the college prep path and by high school, students will be taking Advanced Placement courses.

The announcement Wednesday is the culmination of an effort by two of Detroit’s most influential charter school backers to open or expand enough charter schools for 25,000 students to attend within a decade. Doug Ross, founder of the U Prep schools, and Steve Hamp, founder of Henry Ford Academy, formed the nonprofit More Good Schools to try to woo some of the nation’s best charter school operators to the city.

“We believe this is a significant event in the city’s educational history,” Ross said Wednesday of the school’s opening. “This will open the doors to many other such nation-leading schools to come.” The Wayne and Joan Webber Foundation donated $5.8 million to renovate the former Winship school, 14669 Curtis. Bay Mills Community College will authorize the charter.

The tuition-free school is accepting applications for 125 sixth-grade slots. The school plans to add a grade each year and hopes to eventually have 775 students in grades six through 12. Youth in Detroit “deserve the option to attend college and have rigorous academics in front of them so they are prepared to be successful when they do get into college,” said principal Agnes Aleobua, a 1999 Cass Tech graduate who has been training at YES Prep in Houston.

Ross is optimistic about the goal of bringing the 25,000 charter school seats to Detroit. He’s working to lure nationally recognized charters, such as KIPP and Green Dot, to give parents more options of high-performing, safe schools.

“This fight over whether charters are a help or a hindrance has been resolved,” Ross said. “… We’ve reached a point where we are now saying whoever can provide Detroit children with good learning opportunities ought to do it.”

It’s halfway through first period, and 10th-grade students at Frances Perkins Academy in Brooklyn are in science class—not in school, but on a specially outfitted bus parked outside.

The monitors above the microscopes flash into focus and the students are suddenly animated. “There’s something moving!” “They’re just crawling around.” “That’s crazy!” “Do we drink this?”

“Those are protists,” Ben Dubin-Thaler tells the students. “And no, we don’t drink this. This is puddle water I gathered in the Bronx.”

Dubin-Thaler, or Dr. Ben as his students call him, is the founder of the Cell Motion BioBus, a high-tech, carbon-neutral laboratory housed in a retrofitted 1974 San Francisco transit bus. On this particular Friday last November, Dubin-Thaler is leading four classes of 10th graders in a microbiology lab.

A scarcity of scenes like this one in public schools has led to the mounting concern of parents, teachers and lawmakers about the state of math and science education nationwide. Just before Thanksgiving, President Obama gave a speech addressing the country’s poor academic performance, quoting statistics that put U.S. 15-year-olds 21st in science and 25th in math compared with their peers around the world.

In that speech Obama also announced the launch of the Educate to Innovate Campaign. The effort proposes to elevate U.S. math and science rankings in the next decade by allocating hundreds of millions of dollars to the recruitment and training of new teachers, updating technology in schools, and developing interactive learning content. Along with a range of other planned programs and events, these initiatives are aimed at getting kids interested in and excited about math and science, inspiring the kind of awe that the BioBus elicits among many of the students that climb on board.

Dubin-Thaler established the BioBus in 2007 with money from his savings as well as donations from friends and family a few weeks after receiving his PhD in biology from Columbia University. Now the BioBus is in the final stages of attaining nonprofit organization status, and provides hands-on science education to more than 10,000 students a year in New York City and the Midwest.

All of the equipment on the BioBus is research grade and has been donated or attained through equipment grants. Dubin-Thaler tries to target the BioBus to schools that lack the resources to offer quality lab experiences. For many of the students at Frances Perkins Academy the BioBus offered an opportunity to use a microscope for the first time. “As a school that doesn’t have a science lab, to have something like that come to you is really awesome,” says Erica Tunick, the teacher who joined her class for the lab. “Unless you’re a really fancy private school, you’re not going to have the equipment like they have on that bus.”

The high cost of equipment is just one of the many economic challenges the campaign is trying to address—a challenge that Dubin-Thaler says mobile labs like the BioBus are uniquely suited to meet. “The BioBus is a ’shared facility’ that provides students with access to equipment that is not affordable by any one school,” Dubin-Thaler says. “Professional scientists maintain the equipment on board the BioBus, making sure that the science stays at the cutting edge, whereas teachers often do not have the time or proper training to maintain high-tech equipment in their schools.”

Using computer equipment set up with the central microscope, students can take photos of the microbial protists they have found and produce a video of the moving organisms. For teachers such as Tunick this is one of the most valuable parts of the experience. “We took all these movies and pictures and we now have this great library of material that I can use to supplement our lessons,” she said.

A half hour later, the 12 students from the first class leave the bus, and Dubin-Thaler and his assistant for the day, Ric Becker, hastily set to work preparing for the next group. Between sessions Becker turns off all the microscope lights and monitors. “We run on solar energy, so we have to be careful,” Becker says.

A wind turbine is attached to the front of the bus and solar panels line the roof. Inside, three microscopes are set on a metal-partitioned table against the right side of the bus. Computer monitors stretch out above each microscope. The floor is blue rubber, and moving toward the back there is a very narrow passageway leading to an area resembling a classroom, with three rows of blue vinyl-covered, cushioned benches and a large computer screen centered on the back wall.

“It’s certainly not a replacement for brick-and-mortar labs,” Dubin-Thaler says. “But it’s another layer, and I think a really important layer. Students can see scientists and be taught by scientists and think about what it would be like to study science in college and maybe even in grad school.”

Beyond the onboard curriculum, Dubin-Thaler hopes to expand the BioBus project to be a networking resource for students. On his travels, Dubin-Thaler has been compiling lists both of students interested in science internships and of researchers who want to mentor high-schoolers. No matches have been made yet, but Dubin-Thaler had two high school students work with him last summer, one of whom helped design a an experiment performed by the students at Frances Perkins Academy.

Overall, Tunick was excited about the way her students responded to the material. “I watched them ask questions, I watched them be engaged when they ordinarily aren’t,” she says.

In January the Awesome Foundation—a Boston-based organization that awards a $1,000 grant each month for the pursuit of an awesome idea, which they define on their Web site as, “novel and nonobvious, evoking surprise and delight. …that perfectly reflects the essence of the medium, moment or method of creation”—opened a chapter in New York City, and awarded its first grant to Dubin-Thaler. He plans to use the money to build a laser tractor beam on board the BioBus, offering another technically sophisticated way for students to experiment with cell motion.

In the attempt to find new, cost-efficient ways to improve science education, the BioBus may offer a glimpse of the future. “The BioBus provides a platform for teacher training; it gives students the opportunity to envision themselves as scientists by practicing cutting-edge science; and it gives scientists an accessible and effective path for performing outreach and initiating mentorship relationships,” Dubin-Thaler says. “It intrinsically gets students, teachers and scientists excited about doing science, and the BioBus breaks those stereotypes people have about the scientist as [some] old geezer in a sterile room laughing maniacally over his evil creations.”

In her book, Jacobs names Big Picture Learning schools as ‘heroic’ schools, “schools that counter all conventional schooling not for the sake of experimentation but out of good sense and for the ultimate clients - the learners (67)”. We are proud to share this recognition of the sincere goals behind the BPL learning design!