Other Winning Equations
The Innovators: Some problems call for unique solutions.
Here, a few ideas that work.

May 16, 2005

There are many ways to make a high school great. NEWSWEEK's Best High Schools List uses one measure, the number of students who take AP and International Baccalaureate (IB) tests. But innovative educators across the country are creating hundreds of new ways to meet the particular needs of their students. Only one of the schools below, Wilson Magnet in Rochester, N.Y., made NEWSWEEK's List, but all are leaders in their own way. What these schools have in common are dedicated educators who look, listen and find unique ways to help their students learn.

A Real-World Education

School and real life shouldn't be separate worlds. That was the vision that led Dennis Littky and Elliot Washor to start the Met Center in Providence, R.I. (officially the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center), in 1996. Littky and Washor thought they could get students at risk of dropping out to embrace education if learning wasn't confined to the classroom. Their idea has been so successful that there are now two dozen other schools around the country modeled on the Met and more in the works, thanks to funding from the Gates Foundation. Students at the inner-city school learn through internships and quarterly assessments called exhibitions. "We concentrate on our kids' being doers and talkers," Littky says.

April was exhibition time and junior Noam Bar-Zemer took an hour to detail an internship at a packaging firm, a comparative-religion course at Brown University, work with a children's theater company and his senior thesis and college plans. Instead of conventional courses, he wove a discussion of math, science and even environmental policy into his talk. Bar-Zemer's parents sent him to four previous schools of all types but he either turned off or failed. Close to 40 percent of Providence's public high schoolers dropped out last year, and Bar-Zemer says he could have been one of them. At the Met—housed in six subschools around the city but counted as a separate district—just over 5 percent of the school's more than 600 kids left during the same period.

With Jay Mathews

© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

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