It’s called the High School of the Future. But can it live up to its name?
ABOUT TWO DOZEN ninth and 10th graders sit around a U-shaped table, laptops at the ready. Kathy Lee, a veteran English and social studies teacher, is prepping them for an ambitious task: devising a plan for the next president’s first 100 days in office. If they do their part, Lee promises, she will do hers: persuading potential Democratic nominee Barack Obama to visit. “Oh, I’m going to get him here. Watch,” she says. “If you don’t ask, you’ll never get.”
After delivering this life lesson, Lee divides the class into two groups to brainstorm about immigration and education policies. The education discussion quickly turns personal. “You expect too much,” 15-year-old Ronece Jackson tells Lee. But there’s no way Lee is going to back down. “My job is to do for you what I did for my own kids,” she says. “I am guilty of setting extremely high expectations. … I’m supposed to challenge you like that.”
When Philadelphia’s $65 million High School of the Future, a partnership between the school district and Microsoft, opened in September 2006, the buzz was mostly about its technological innovations: a laptop for every student, smart cards to open lockers, an Interactive Learning Center in place of a library, and no textbooks to weigh down student backpacks. Certainly, the gleaming-white building with solar panels and rooftop greenery looks nothing like a grim institutional fortress. While its geometric portico and lawn front a street lined with decrepit row houses, windows allow the school’s pastel-tiled corridors to be flooded with light, the bathrooms are immaculate, and the cafeteria resembles a food court.
But educating these students -- most of whom are African- American and low-income -- will take more than computers and clean bathrooms. Personalized attention, project-based learning, and real-world experiences are all integral to the school’s approach. Teachers are rigorously screened for competencies, such as customer focus and dealing with ambiguity, and must be certified in at least two subject areas. Because Microsoft wanted the project to be replicable in other urban districts, students -- called learners -- are picked by lottery, with the proviso that three-quarters must come from the surrounding West Philadelphia neighborhood.
And this means that the school -- which each year admits a ninth-grade class of 170 and now, after attrition, has about 300 students -- has its work cut out for it. La Verne Wiley, the school’s chief learner/principal, says that, on average, the learners have reading and math skills two or three years below their grade levels.
“We’re a work in progress,” says Thomas Emerson, an English and social studies teacher in his first year of teaching. “We have a lot of very intelligent kids in this school. We have a lot of very low-performing kids in this school as well. They are exactly the same people.” The students here could be “very amazing,” Emerson says -- “if only we could unlock [their minds] and teach them what they missed from all those years when they just turned off.”
Interdisciplinary projects, together with laptops, are designed to turn them back on, but the transition has been difficult for some. “First, to be honest, I was a little frustrated because I was used to learning in one specific way,” says Iman Griffin, 15, a second-year learner. “Then, when that changed, it didn’t make any kind of sense to me. It took me a while to really catch up.”
Now she and other students talk excitedly about their projects. For Project Vote, Griffin says, she carefully tracked delegate counts on Super Tuesday, combining math with political science. She has also served as a guide at the Belmont Mansion, a onetime stop on the Underground Railroad, picking up lessons in history, speaking skills, and self-confidence.
Khalesha McKie, 16, proudly explains how she used a digital camera to capture images of overlooked trash for another project, Invisible City. She and her classmates have read The Grapes of Wrath to learn about the Great Depression and the importance of water, studied forensic science to explore identity issues, and translated the United States Constitution into simpler language. “[The teachers] let us rewrite all the amendments -- which was one of the best and worst things they could have done,” says Griffin. “Now we use amendments against them. If they tell us to do something, we say, ‘I have freedom of speech. I can talk about it.’ ”
THE SCHOOL DAY HERE RUNS from nine a.m. to four p.m., but the school also functions as a community center, open in the early-morning hours and in the evenings. Students without Internet access at home hang around to complete assignments. Parents can go online and check whether homework has been done. And teachers e-mail parents about students’ progress. Volunteer tutors and mentors provide help and encouragement, while both the nearby Philadelphia Zoo and West Park Cultural and Opportunity Center offer extra resources -- and an internship program is also in the works. The aim, says Microsoft’s Partners in Learning academic program manager Stacey Rainey, is to make education “relevant, continuous, and adaptive.” Those are buzzwords that even the students can recite.
That’s the ideal, anyway. In actuality, the school’s administration is in a state of flux (Wiley is the third chief learner in less than two years); tensions sometimes flare between the school district and Microsoft; and the lack of books, though it saves school-district dollars, can be a hardship for teachers and students alike. Without textbooks, says Emerson, “I have to spend my evenings at home looking up all the material I want the kids to use, [and then edit] it myself so it’s on their reading level.” Students, too, have complained that reading long e-books on laptops is less convenient and more taxing than reading the actual books. In response, Wiley says she is ordering texts for literature classes.
And all those laptops can be distracting. When I drop in on Kate Reber’s classroom of first-year learners, she is in the process of deleting games from one boy’s computer. Another student, instead of doing an exercise about alternate energy sources, is watching a video. Griffin explains the temptation she faces: “I do like using the computer, but I’m still a kid, and sometimes kids don’t have much self-control, and we do have Instant Messenger on our computers …”
After two visits, the School of the Future starts to seem like a figure-ground illusion -- an ambiguous image in which the shapes shift as you stare. With its light-filled hallways and ingenious projects, the school can seem like a beacon illuminating the mostly desolate landscape of urban education. But look again and you’re reminded of the imposing challenges it faces.
A “team lab” held one February afternoon in the Interactive Learning Center illustrates both perspectives. In small groups, first-year learners present public service announcements that they’ve crafted about global warming -- mélanges of video, digital photography, music, PowerPoint, and live performance. The spots demonstrate technological competency, environmental awareness, the ability to work in groups, and an occasional spark of humor. But there are also technical glitches and misspelled words. In the audience, one student falls asleep, his arm resting on his laptop; others laugh or chatter, despite a teacher’s repeated admonitions. A girl rests her booted foot on a boy’s thigh, and no one even notices amid the commotion.
It’s still too early to know whether the School of the Future is a useful template for other urban schools. Not until 2009, when in the 11th grade, will students take state-mandated achievement tests, one measure of their progress. And while each 12th grader must apply to college in order to graduate, how many will actually attend and earn a degree?
For 16-year-old Quasan Baker, meeting minority employees from Microsoft during a recent special program has solidified his goal of attending Penn State University and specializing in technology. Fifteen-year-old Quetta Fairy says she is determined to become a lawyer, “because I always argue my point. … I’m a great debater. You can’t tell me I’m wrong when I know I’m right.” If nothing else, it’s clear that the School of the Future is inspiring these kids with the confidence to dream about their futures. Emerson recalls a student who “fought with me day in and day out” until, on a whim, he asked her to serve as a prosecuting attorney for a reenactment of the Emmett Till trial, a famous lynching case that helped launch the civil rights movement. “From that day on,” he says, growing visibly emotional, “she has been engaged. Suddenly, I’m seeing she’s a smart, smart girl, and she’s taking a level of responsibility that reminds me of what I was like in high school. Just that one example is enough to make me teach for another 30 years.”