How does your model typically work with students with learning disabilities or students who are English learners?
White: I’ll start by addressing students with an IEP. The exciting part of that is we see kids that come in with IEPs and over time because of our nontraditional learning environment, we’ll see that they’re not requiring as many of the support services as they once did in a traditional middle school. The reason being is that there is that much more autonomy for our students to do their projects. And that’s what you’ll hear from a lot of our students. They describe their education experience as being engaged, and parents, importantly, are more engaged in education than they ever have been. We give students the end result and goal or the objective of the project, but within that they can shape the topic they’re researching, so they’re ultimately engaged because it’s a personal choice that they made.
For English language learners or first-generation students, it’s certainly a work in progress, but I feel that one of our assets is that we’re centrally located. We’re not in an area that’s quote-unquote claimed as an affluent area as opposed to a non-affluent area. It’s kind of neutral ground. So kids that are taking public transportation don’t feel like they’re traveling into one of the more affluent areas, and vice-versa. We’ve been able to maintain a socio-economic balance in our schools, and I feel that helps to provide a support environment for English language learners.
The other piece, and this refers to the non-ability grouping, which is a term that we use often in our schools, is that we obviously don’t offer APs for the reason that, in a traditional public school, if you pull out all those AP students and put them into separate classes then you’re kind of creating an isolated bubble. And then what kind of statement is that sending to the other students who aren’t in the AP classes? What does that say about what they are they capable of doing? Are they thinking, “Well, I’m not an AP student so this is where I belong. I’m not on the college track.” So we put all the students mixed together. Students can chose to do the honors option in a class—which does add additional weight to the GPA—but they’re all mixed in. So that has provided those first-generation students with motivation. When the English language learners are in the same class or the same group as students who might otherwise be on that AP track, that environment helps bring up the students who are ELs. We’re saying, “Here’s the environment that we want you to learn in, and we’re going to provide you with all the support we can to get you to that point.”
For students, what are some of the biggest challenges in a system like yours?
White: The traditional learning environment prepares kids for the first year of college. The High Tech High educational experience prepares students for the last years of college and beyond. If you think about more of a traditional college experience you may have had, you go to career services, you start doing presentations, internships, networking toward the end.
In a High Tech High experience, there’s not a particular focus on saying, “You’re going to be a computer engineer,” it’s more about something that’s becoming more popular in education now—the non-cognitives, the soft skills. You have SAT scores and grades, which colleges think are good barometers in terms of finding out where students are at content wise, but these non-cognitives are very important for success and grit and perseverance. And how do you measure those? There is research that suggests that students that have those, will be successful not just in college but beyond. The High Tech High experience really emphasizes those. Whether it be a student that’s just nervous getting in front of a group and they have to develop that skill set, to students who don’t just think, “I think I’m good at math so I should be going into engineering,” but rather, “I’m good at math and engineering and I want to be an electrical engineer because I’ve been exposed to it.”
When you go into a larger public college, that’s a legitimate challenge—when they go on to one of the 4,000 higher-ed institutions in this country. And some of those schools are closer to project-based learning than not, such as the liberal arts schools. But in larger public school settings, the student is going to have a transitional period, moving quickly through chapters, and taking memorization-based tests. But they get through it. That’s the feedback we get. They transition fully after the first quarter. They have a challenging piece of the transition back to traditional skillsets. They’ve gotten some it in the past but they don’t get as much as their traditional public school peers. It comes back around by their junior year.
I also believe in challenging our students in freshman year of college to go and talk to their professors about research opportunities over the summer, and they do, actually. It’s really cool. That’s just part of their process of education for them: This is what education is about. You go out into a lab, if that’s what you want to do, and we hear good news that our kids, earlier than the average students, are getting research opportunities or internships from the universities or colleges—even in traditional settings.
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