March/April 2002

One Kid at a Time: Big Lessons From A Small School

Dennis Littky and Eliot Levine

Every month, the Harvard Graduate School of Education invites a number of educators, researchers, community activists, and policymakers from across the country to talk about such topics as school violence, multiple intelligences, teaching science, and the politics of school reform. We are pleased to be able to provide you with an edited transcript of some of these talks.

Below is an edited transcript of a talk that took place at the HGSE on November 25, 2001. The primary speakers were Dennis Littky and Eliot Levine of the Big Picture Company, a nonprofit organization that researches new school models and trains leaders.

A nationally known reformer, Littky has been principal of two innovative schools. His work at Thayer High School in Winchester, NH, was featured in an NBC movie, "A Town Torn Apart." He is coprincipal of an innovative high school, the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center, or the Met School, in Providence, RI. The company has received a $3.5 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop 12 more Met Schools across the country over the next five years.

Eliot Levine is special projects director for the Big Picture Company. His book about the Met School, One Kid at a Time: Big Lessons from a Small School, was published in 2001 by Teachers College Press.

For easier reading, we have divided the transcript into the following sections:

Introduction by Ted Sizer, founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools
Discussion between Dennis Littky and Eliot Levine
Questions and Answers

You can also scroll right through the transcript without clicking on the above links.  

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Introduction: Ted Sizer, founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools

Places like the [Harvard Graduate] School of Education and think tanks and so forth have a lot to do with school reforms. We write about them, we stare at them, we dissect them and examine their entrails. We test them up and down, over and under.

Then there are some people who actually reform schools, who stick their necks out. The first time I met Dennis Littky was in 1983. I had just finished a large research project on American high schools and was making professorial lectures about it. After one of my talks, this character walked up and said, "You talk about it. I do it. You better get your butt up to my school." Not his precise language, by the way.

I did get my butt up to Thayer High School, which Dennis had taken over at a time of crisis and, by being very savvy and bold, had turned around. The school committee twice fired him. A movie was made about it and a book was written about it. What Dennis showed the school committee and all the rest of us was that the doing was possible. But it's more than just the doing.

Many of us who get into [reforming schools] tend to be a bit shy and tend to walk on tiptoe. But Dennis and his colleagues have persuaded me that you can't do it piece by piece. You have to see a school as a whole and make the decisive moves that are required. So we're gathered here tonight to honor scholarship in the form of Eliot Levine's book One Kid At A Time about the Met School, and to honor [Dennis's] activism. Dennis and his colleagues have one of the boldest, if not the boldest, public city school in the United States. Without further ado, my friend Dennis Littky.

Discussion between Dennis Littky and Eliot Levine

DENNIS LITTKY: You're going to hear about our school tonight and about Eliot Levine, who wrote the book about the Met. I also brought two of our teachers [to join the discussion] so we can look at what we're doing from different perspectives. What I'm looking for from you the audience is for you to think about your own dreams and your own passions--to ask whether you are carrying those out. Are you doing what you think you should be doing, what you really want to do, or are you going along some other path?

At the Met, we gathered together people who were really passionate about saving youth. You take a job because you're passionate about something. You're only going around once, and you take a job to follow your dream. I want you to think about that as you're listening here. But first I'm going to call on Eliot Levine to give us an introduction.

ELIOT LEVINE: Dennis talks about passion. When I started this project [as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard], I felt that a lot of the research that I had done was not stuff I was very passionate about, that it didn't have a substantial impact on anything. Then I heard about the Met school. I wanted to work with a program that was doing something significant to change public education. So I sent Dennis a letter. My first sentence, which he says was very smart, told him I could work for free for two years. He called me back that night.

I don't remember if it was Dennis or Elliot Washor, the other codirector of the Met school, who recommended that I write a book, but I protested vehemently. A couple of months later I realized there was enough there to give it a try. I spent two years watching what went on there, attending activities. Then I did more formal work--dozens of interviews with each of the principals and with teachers, parents, students, mentors. All the students at this school do intensive internships, so I interviewed their mentors and compiled some quantitative databases to look at actual outcomes.

It's easy to talk about quantitative outcomes like dropouts and attendance, and so on. But there are some other powerful social/emotional outcomes that this school works at as well. The Met has one-third the dropout rate of other Providence public high schools and one-third the absentee rate. It has one-eighteenth the rate of suspensions. It has the highest percentage of teachers of color of any school district in Rhode Island. (Our student body is about 40 percent white, 20 percent African American, almost 40 percent Latino, and about 3 percent Asian American.)

To sum up the book, the first chapter has in-depth profiles of three students I selected when they were juniors, and I didn't really know what was going to happen with them. In fact, one of them looked like he probably wouldn't be there when he was a senior, although it turns out that he did graduate. Then I discuss the Met's approach to learning--personalized learning, learning through interests, learning through internship. The last two chapters ask: Does it work? What are the issues around scaling up this model? Can we have more schools like this? Once we start them, will they survive? What are the structural obstacles to that happening, and what are people doing so far to address them?

In the process of doing my research about the Met, I've actually become a strong supporter of small schools. I've seen firsthand the power of this type of learning. Like many of us, through my own professional experiences and personal experiences, I've seen some of the inherent structural problems of large, impersonal institutions. In recent years, some great data has come out in support of small schools. A 1996 study from one of the federally funded national education labs that synthesized 103 studies on small schools concluded that they were superior to large schools on most measures and equal on the rest.

Many people have a sense that the reason we don't have small schools is that they're more expensive. We talked about economies of scale starting in the 1950s when we were making schools bigger and bigger. Now people are talking about penalties of scale, for example, higher levels of violence. The Met is a safe school, and safety is really at the top of most parents' agendas if you ask what they want for their children's schools.

The last few years have seen a tremendous amount of public and private support for taking large high schools and making them small schools. Although I'm most familiar with the Met, there are many models of effective small schools. The Coalition of Essential Schools that Ted Sizer founded is a thousand schools strong. Now many schools around the country are implementing a set of principles around small, personalized education.

The first thing I noticed when I got to the Met is that the staff was so passionate about everything. This might be the strongest lesson that we could learn. They don't necessarily succeed in everything, but they try. They take on a tremendous amount and have high standards for every single student. Not standards in the sense of curriculum frameworks, but rather looking at each kid closely and understanding what they're about, and trying to provide the personalized form of education that that student needs.

Two of the students in the first chapter of the book are good examples. A lot of people think the Met is a last-chance school, a school for kids who haven't succeeded elsewhere. But Julia--not her real name--is a perfect example of how that's not the case. She's a kid who was an honor roll student, white, from a middle-class suburb with highly educated parents. Even though she lived in a town with the highest-ranked public high school in the state, her parents decided to take on a commute to the Met. She came in with great skills. She did a series of impressive internships at bio-tech companies and at Rhode Island Hospital doing liver cancer research; she worked at an organic farm for her project, she did Outward Bound.

Julia was hard of hearing, which affected her socially. As part of her curriculum she took a number of courses at the Rhode Island School for the Deaf and learned about lip-reading and sign language, so that now even though she talks and doesn't usually use sign language, she can understand people better. All the different activities at the Met helped her come out of her shell. Julia eventually decided to go to a small rural college in Vermont because they had the same personalized approach to education as the Met, and that's what she preferred. I felt that that said a lot about her self-confidence.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is Cesar, who's one of the other students I profile in depth. He came to the Met having missed 80 days of school in eighth grade and had a D+ grade average. His father and his brother were in prison. He thought it would be a good school because he heard there were no classes, no grades, and no tests, and that sounded good to him. He had a lot of setbacks, a lot of fits and starts. He even started a fight with another student at the school and was one of the school's rare suspensions. But the school worked closely with him and his mom and ended up placing him in a special program in Colorado to finish his junior year with the hope of welcoming him back at the end of that time. As it turned out, he came back after three days. But they welcomed him back and are working it out. He's not a stellar student, but the point is that they really stayed with him, and he did a number of internships around his interests as well: cooking and hip-hop music. He turned into an incredible poet, a very passionate poet. This is a kid who had never read a book, never written a paper, before he got to the Met.

I want to say a couple of things in closing. First, it would be great, now that the Met is scaling up to 16 schools nationwide, if someone would do a similar study around the scale-up of this model to 16 schools. They have an incredible problem-solving culture, and it needs to be documented. I'm not eligible to do that as an outsider anymore because I was so impressed with what was going on at the school, I did what anthropologists call "going native." I now work for the Big Picture Company, the nonprofit organization that designed this school and is overseeing the scale-up of the schools.

DENNIS LITTKY: Let me tell you how we started this whole thing. I've been principal of two schools before: one in New York, one in New Hampshire, both very good schools. Kids were active, there was an advisory system, and the work was integrated. But it finally hit me that even though we helped the kids learn about the War of 1812 in a very cool way or we taught science in a way that engaged them, it wasn't enough.

Once we made the decision to start the Met, we asked ourselves: "What would you do if you were just given a child to educate. You surely wouldn't read textbooks with them. You surely wouldn't sit in the living room for 45 minutes and ring a bell and then go to the kitchen, do another subject, ring a bell, go to the bathroom and ring a bell. You wouldn't do that."

We started thinking, what do we know about how kids learn? We know they learn when they're interested in something, when they have a passion. I was going to a friend's house early in the morning and seeing his son, who was not a student at all, working. He had books out, he was doing all these charts--at seven in the morning. He was working on Dungeons and Dragons because that was his passion. He's a kid they thought had ADHD, but I saw him sit on that floor for six hours working on something because he had interest and passion.

The next thing is real work. Most of the work we do in school isn't real. So I said, "We're going to find kids interests and passions. We're going to find real work. And we're not just going to put 14-year-olds with 14-years-olds and 15-year-olds with 15-year-olds. We're going to find the adults out in the world who also have this interest and passion, and hook the kids up with those people. If a kid's interested in art, then let's find a glass blower out there to help a kid do glass blowing. The kid's interested in architecture. Great. Find an architect. Same thing with kids wanting to work with animals or in medicine. We're not training them to be an architect or to be an artist. We're just using their passion. We're using their passion to learn to read, to learn to write, to learn to think. Once I counted up all the hours we go to school from kindergarten through college. If we live to 70, we're in school 9 percent of our life, not counting weekends. So you better learn to love to learn and to continue learning.

The summer before I came to work with Ted, I traveled in many Third World countries, and I saw kids learning with their parents. There wasn't this crisis between teenagers and parents. And I said, "How can you change that power structure so the parents really have some control over the education of their kid?" Every one of our kids has an individual learning plan. Four times a year, the parent sits [with a teacher] and says, "You know, I don't think my kid's doing much of this." (I remember one mother saying, "I want my kid to be a doctor," and the kid says, "I want to be an auto mechanic." And Amy [the teacher] said, "Ooh, I've got four years to figure this one out.") It's a way of changing that power structure so that parents aren't just doing bake sales, aren't just coming for some nice meetings, but are really controlling the education of their child. They know their children. The teacher's first job is asking them about their kid. In our interviews we ask them, What are your child's interests, what is your child's passion?

That's why we set up this school of a hundred kids. Every teacher gets 15 kids and follows them for four years. One reason we got that ratio is that we don't have an art teacher: we use the Rhode Island School of Design's artists for that. We don't have a gym teacher: we use the karate place around the corner. Kids get credit for everything. It's not what you do from 9:00 to 3:00. You play ball for your church on Sunday, you get credit for that. You're going to a class after school someplace with your church, you get credit for that.

Now I'd like to introduce Shirley, who graduated last year and is now in college. She was an advisee [a student] of Amy's for her four years at the Met.

SHIRLEY: Good evening. Five years ago, when I was in eighth grade, I was sitting in class one time and a counselor came up to me and asked me what I was planning to do after I finished school--that was, if I did finish school. I told her I wanted to become a doctor or a nurse. She told me I should think about something simpler. She didn't think I was going to make it that far.

After she said that to me, I started thinking, why should I even finish school if I can't do that? So I started caring less about school and hanging out with the wrong people because I didn't know who I was anymore. I lost my dream. I didn't know what to follow. My sister realized I needed more guidance in my life and to find out who I really was. I applied for admission to the Met and I began the Met in my ninth-grade year. On the third day of school, [my teacher] Amy told me, "You're going to do great in this school." One reason I wanted to go to the Met was it was small. It had small classrooms and I had an opportunity to meet with my teacher one-on-one. When I went there, I realized that I learned about myself, about who I was, through these four years. In that first year, I built up the confidence that I could fulfill my dream if I really worked hard. I also learned about others, how to respect others' opinions, and learned about different aspects of the school and different things that are going on in the community.

One of the ways is through a program we call LTI: Learning Through the Internships. My first internship was at Rhode Island Hospital. I worked in the emergency room supply area where I learned about the different instruments doctors and nurses use. I learned how to set up kits that the doctors needed. I also learned about the different areas around the hospital and got a feel for what it was like to work in the hospital. If I did a kit that the doctor needed and messed up, it would be my responsibility. It was a great experience.

My second year I thought that maybe teaching was something I wanted to do, so I interned in an elementary school as an assistant for a Spanish teacher who taught all different age groups from kindergarten to fifth grade. I had the opportunity to teach them lessons on Costa Rica, taught them different Spanish vocabulary and songs. Again, it was my responsibility to teach them. Just being there, learning to take responsibility, to be organized, and knowing what to do, is one of the ways I learned.

I loved working with the kids, but I realized that classroom teaching wasn't what I wanted to do, but I liked [the connection to education]. So the following year I interned with a home school liaison, where we worked with parents and the students. We would go to students' homes, meet their parents, see if we could help with homework. I helped the [Spanish-speaking] parents communicate with the teachers, so they couldn't use say the excuse, "I don't know how my child's doing, because I can't communicate with the teacher because of the language."

Eventually, I realized that I wanted to stick with nursing, and that's something I feel like I really wanted to do. In senior year, I worked on my Senior Thesis Project, a long-term project every senior does to give back to the community. I started a Big Sister program, working with elementary school girls to help them build confidence as they entered adolescence, to support them and tell them that "if you truly believe who you are inside, you can do something great."

And after graduating in the Met I decided to go to American International College in Springfield, Massachusetts, for a four-year nursing program. I'm now in my first semester, and I think I'm doing pretty good. When I look back at the four years at the Met, I realize that I have learned more than I thought I did. When I started college I knew what a syllabus was, I knew what professors were going to expect from us. I knew what to expect. Through my internships I also learned about responsibility. The mentors want you to work as hard as they would. They want you to set high standards for yourself. The Met encourages you to stand up for yourself, have a voice anywhere you want. But I believe if I hadn't gone to the Met, and experienced the experience I had, I wouldn't be going to college or wouldn't know what I really wanted to do.

DENNIS LITTKY: What Shirley said was interesting in the context of all the talk about testing and accountability. We have real-world standards. In other words, if Shirley's work is not good enough for the people she's interning with, it's not good enough. Standards out in the workplace are much higher than the standards our state [education] department sets, and they're much more real. Now we'll turn it over to Amy, Shirley's adviser.

AMY: When Shirley came into this school, she had been pretty distracted by issues in her community like gang violence. She came to lead and facilitate school town meetings where students voted on issues they felt were important. She led a campaign to raise money for leukemia victims, getting the whole school galvanized behind her. So when she talked about going out into the community and taking up an issue that was important to her, she really did that. She walks the talk. She also was the recipient of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, which helped pay for her tuition. So let's give her a hand for that.

There are many things I could tell you about Shirley, and they're all wonderful. She is a very driven person, and I learned a lot from her. That is part of what really attracted me to the Met--being able to get to know students as well as I did during my four years as an adviser there. But I want to take a step back and tell you a little bit about my story. Seven and a half years ago I sat in this auditorium every Wednesday night in Vito Perrone's class for the Teaching in Curriculum Program. I was doing student teaching and didn't know where I wanted to teach. I was to figure out what kind of school environment would feel right, that would really look at a student holistically and approach education in an innovative way. I didn't see a whole lot of models at that time. There were some exciting things happening here in Boston. I ended up at a school in Massachusetts that was quite traditional but happened to be in a place that I liked. So I moved there and took that job.

When I was at Harvard, we did a series of readings about innovative schools and I'd read about the Thayer School, where Dennis [Littky] had been principal. He had encouraged students to get out into the community. There was a profile on one particular student who had organized a whole barn-raising effort in the town. I became very interested in the school. So I went up to New Hampshire searching for Dennis, wanting to know more about what was happening up there. He wasn't there anymore, but a friend told me he was starting this school in Providence.

By this time, I was a second year teacher at this traditional school. Although I loved the students and was able to teach my two areas of interest, English and social studies, I didn't feel I had a chance to know my students and didn't feel challenged as an educator in the sense of really making a difference in their lives, or teaching information that they felt was relevant. I had some students who did beautifully, but a number of students were really just showing up because they knew they had to show up. They weren't engaged, no matter how creative I tried to make the projects and the assignments. So I looked into the Met, applied for and got a job, and really have found that the school has been the best match for me in getting back to my fundamental beliefs of what education is.

What really drew me to the school was the individual attention afforded students. The needs of each student are considered, and their learning plans are built around their educational needs, so no student is treated in the same way. And that allows students who come in who have been diagnosed with ADHD and have real challenges to form a learning plan that meets their needs better, that's entirely individual to them.

I also wanted to be at a school where students could follow their passions and be able to do work that felt relevant to them. The motto of doing work in the real world, to be able to work with a mentor and establish a strong relationship, to have real consequences for that learning--this was remarkable to see up close. To see students get motivated really convinced me that I was in the right place.

Finally, I was drawn to the Met by the small community. We've already talked about the fact that it's a small school, but it's also a community, a place where people care about each other. We start the day with something called "pick me up," which is a school morning meeting that everybody attends. It's a chance for students to talk about something that they're doing, that they're excited about. They can play an instrument, read a poem, perform. We also invite guest speakers to come in occasionally and share something that they're doing in the community, to expose students to what's out there. We also do morning announcements. If there's something that's happened at the school that we're struggling with, we'll talk about it and invite students to discuss it in small groups. So that grounds us, and everybody gets to know each other. Everybody sees each other first thing in the morning. And everyone in the school's on a first-name basis, including the teachers, who are called advisers. That helps us feel connected.

When I embarked on this journey four years ago to become an adviser, I had no idea what it would mean. What kind of job would this be, since it wasn't a traditional teaching job? It really is about being a coach, about being a facilitator, about being a generalist in terms of what you teach, about being a big sister, and being a counselor at times. So it really kind of goes much farther beyond a traditional teaching definition.

The school is made up of advisories. So each student is part of an advisory of between 12 and 15 students, and the adviser stays with them for four years. As you've heard already, they do internships. It's the adviser's job to be in touch with the mentors and continually tease out the real work in those projects that they're doing that's academic. So their learning plans consist of all of the same academic goals that you would have at a traditional school, but they're all met through these real world projects. The adviser has to get really good at being able to figure out how a student could learn, say, some history in this project. How could they work on their writing skills through this project? How could they really develop their math skills through this project, etc.? So it's being a teacher in a contextualized way. Keeping in touch with the mentors is important, because that relationship is another adult relationship for the student. And those relationships can be very close and incredibly powerful for the student to make them feel that they play an important role at that site and that their work makes a difference, which is, as I said before, a motivating force. The adviser is responsible for facilitating the learning-plan meetings that the student has at the beginning of every quarter with their parent and their mentor, and that's where they lay out what their goals are going to be for the quarter. They also are responsible for getting the parent to come to the exhibition at the end of the quarter and to help the student prepare for that exhibition, where they have to stand up and show their work for the quarter and be able to defend it.

Additionally, advisers take on leadership roles through the school. The Met is non-hierarchical, so advisers really run the show. They run the meetings, they rotate responsibilities, they take care of various duties throughout the school, and they're encouraged to take on professional development in whatever way. We're really treated individually, so if we want to take a course, we're encouraged do that. If we want to work on public speaking, we are invited to go to conferences and give workshops about what the Met is doing. I've benefited tremendously from that. When I came to the school I had no idea that I would be interested some day in becoming a principal, and it was only by being in the school environment and seeing the model that was at the Met that I became serious about this job. And Dennis encouraged me to go into a program in Providence called Inspiring Principals Program, where I was able to do principal training on the job and get certification. So next year I'll be a principal for one of the new Met schools. I never dreamed that that would be me. I never imagined--especially when I think of the traditional principal role. It seemed unappealing. But at the Met, which is so small, it's a really different role. It's much more about inspiring staff, motivating students, creating a culture of hope and possibility, and really creating a strong community where there's trust. That was very appealing. So that's where my journey is taking me next.

I just want to end by saying that years ago when I was here, I got the chance to hear Paolo Friere before he died; he's the author of The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. He spoke right here in this room, and his words have stuck with me. He said, "Teachers need to get out there and create an environment in their classroom where students can completely unleash their curiosity and question everything." It sounds kind of radical, but the reality is that it's just embracing students' natural learning process. That is what drew me to the Met, that's what the Met is about. I just encourage you to think about that in your own life and the choices you make. If you're thinking about becoming a teacher and teaching in a school, look for places that are really trying to embrace that vision for students. Thank you very much.

DENNIS LITTKY: Somebody coined the term of our advisory, "relentless intimacy." When you have these 15 kids day-in, day-out, for four years, with always four or five of them being not right that week, it is amazing. But it is also hard. We're trying to figure out how to make the job easier because it is such an emotional job. You get involved with the families, you get involved with the kids, and we're trying to figure out how to support each other. You've got to be very brave to do it and got to be really willing to carry this out.

We're opening four new schools next year. One of them is in the worst part of Providence. We've built it so it's open to the community until 10 at night. There's a park and a gymnasium. It's our attempt to go beyond just the school. We are attempting to change the community. Now I'll introduce Wayne, who will talk a little about how he, too, will be a principal.

WAYNE: Howdy folks. The first thing I want to say about Shirley's Big Sister Program is that now that she's gone there have been other students who have picked this up. So part of her senior thesis project is a legacy.

Dennis also used the term "relentless intimacy." It's one of my favorites because it's true--it's not all easy. A lot of the issues that come into the classroom are the same issues we all know about. But often in a traditional setting we don't see intimacy, we don't get the opportunity to understand why a student might not necessarily be concerned with geometry on that given day. I had a student whose parents were both gravely ill, and my entire advisory knew about it. We dealt with it, talking about it, helping her get through it. And because of that, this girl was able to graduate from high school and get accepted to college. That's just one example.

I want to talk briefly about my own background. I am more closely related to Shirley in that I went to a lot of schools before I got to high school. I was just showing up, though I was good at quantitative reasoning. I went to a high school with 1,700 students. I had seven really good friends who would come by my house every morning and pick me up. We'd go to school, hang out, take the longest lunch we could, and walk home. It took four hard years in the U.S. Army to bring me back around to education. You know, it was either go to school or finish driving a tank down narrow alleys in Korea. The first A I ever got was in college. I was 25. So I took the long road.

When the opportunity came to come to the [Harvard Graduate School of Education], I said, "Well, if they accept me, I'll go." They accepted me; I went. I worked [on a project] at Charlestown High, which took me back in a sense to my own large high school. I realized that it wasn't necessarily teachers who were bad, though I had grown up despising teachers, educators, anything to do with school. But I got the idea that maybe it was institutional.

I saw a sign on at the student employment office: "Met School: Come work. Small schools, 100 students. Advisers." I don't think I can add too much to what Amy said, except that the pleasures far outweigh some of the frustrating moments. It has been amazing from the moment I walked in that first day--looking good, ready to be interviewed -- and as I walked down the hall there were different advisers doing different things with students. I walked by one classroom and someone said to me, "Parent, teacher, whoever you are, come on in and watch this exhibition." So I walked in and saw my first exhibition. I'm looking at my watch because I have eight minutes until I'm supposed to be interviewing. Everybody I spoke to was friendly, open, even without knowing who I was. There were no secrets, no closed doors. Students were the same way.

DENNIS LITTKY: What we're doing in the year 2000 is different from what we did in 1990. And I tell people that if a Met School looks the same in 2010 as it does now, something will be wrong. We're constantly changing, thinking about what the right philosophy is, what to do for the kids, and what that means. What keeps me going in all this is the fact that we allow students to follow their passions, to work out their stuff, to learn, to grow into this next level. I'll never forget my first year, when there was a student--a Cambodian young woman who had been a pretty poor middle school student--who came in and said she wanted to study death. Trying to be the cool principal that I am, I had to say "Yes." We told them they could study their interests. But she started visiting funeral homes and cemetaries, and it was all a little bizarre. Then we came to her exhibition. She had written 23 drafts of her paper. She won the exhibition. I asked the question, "Are you going to continue? Now you just spent nine weeks. Are you going to continue working on this?" She said her parents' first family--their children--all died fleeing Cambodia. She said, "My entire life, 98 percent of my thinking time, is about death. I have now cleared it out of my brain and I'm ready to move on." In any other situation, that child would be doing algebra and be doing this and be doing that without having a chance to work it out of her system. Now she's gone on and started studying fashion and retail in college. It's case after case that you see.

I'll tell you one other story and then I'll stop. A boy came to me. He knew I had traveled to Southeast Asia five years ago, and he said he was interested in studying Vietnam. I gave him some slides, some books to read, and he started getting very interested in it. As Shirley was saying, because the kids have a very flexible schedule, they can take a college class if it doesn't interfere with anything. So this boy took a class at Providence College on the Vietnam War--this was in the 11th grade. The next summer, he found there was a professor at Brown who was teaching teachers how to better teach the Vietnam War. There were 17 teachers and our 16-year-old boy who took the class. One day, as the kid is preparing his senior project, I asked where he got this interest. It turned out his dad was in the Vietnam War and would never talk to him about it. He had tried from the time he was six on, and his father would just walk away. So for his senior project he took his father to Vietnam. He raised $5,000 to do it. His dad was 18 when he went to Vietnam--the same age his son now was. They kept journals. His dad opened the drawer, brought out his awards, started talking about this. The boy did a website on how families and kids can start talking about the war. I really don't care what he knows about the Boer War or the War of 1812. He studied one war in such intensity and in such depth that that kid's going to be ready when he needs to move on and learn about something else.

Those are the kinds of stories that keep me going, and we have them every day. So let me end, and we'll have some questions.

Questions and Answers

AUDIENCE MEMBER: A question for Amy. Do you think you could have made more of an impact by helping reform the traditional school where you taught?

AMY: What school you choose to teach at is really a personal decision. I'm glad I started at the traditionally structured school that I did because when I got to the Met, I knew I was in the right place. I think there are great things to be done in traditionally structured schools, and I wouldn't discourage anyone from trying to initiate reform whatever way you can. I found it difficult at the school where I was. It wasn't a place where I could grow, where I felt like I was going to make enough of a difference institutionally. I felt bad about leaving my students, but you have to weigh that and make a decision that's right for you about where you feel like you can make the biggest change. The Met model now has been embraced nationally and is being replicated, and it makes me feel like the difference is happening on a much wider scale than I ever imagined when I started. I came into the school almost from its inception, and it's been amazing being part of something that I could help create. So I guess I would say consider taking risks.

ELIOT LEVINE: Somebody's got to do that work in big schools. But I've seen too many very excited young teachers go into a setting and in three years they look like everybody else. They either struggle and become who they don't want to become, or they get out of education. So it is important to find the place--and this is easier said than done--that can support your values and your interests, because otherwise you're not going to last. As a young teacher, you are not going to change a big high school or a school that's not moving. That's just not going to happen. And that's partly why there's tremendous power in the principalship, and that's partly why we're doing a lot of training, you know. Seven years down the line, you become a principal, you say, "I want to go back to that school, and now I can have the power to really make something happen." But it's unrealistic to think you as a young teacher are going to change that school.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Given the fact that your school is very nontraditional-- it's got no grades, no traditional academics--could you speak a little bit more about what you do to help your graduates get access to traditional universities? I ask the question in the context of many other schools, and high school teachers and principals who want to adopt nontraditional, innovative practices, but are afraid that if they do they may compromise the chances of getting their kids into college

ELIOT LEVINE: Well, Ted and Nancy [Sizer, founders of the Parker Charter Essential School in Devens, MA] can talk about that, too, because they have a non-traditional school and have managed to get their kids into every good school around. It's not as hard as people think. Colleges are a business. It's more a question of finding the right matches and getting the kids to stay in school. Unfortunately, you hear the data from schools about who goes to college but you don't hear how many kids stay in college.

I don't think it's really that hard. We develop a transcript. We have those five goals, and the admission officers like to count things. They also like to [interview] students.

DENNIS LITTKY: I don't think anyone's mentioned tonight that 100 percent of the graduates of the Met--the Met has had two graduating classes so far, and every single student has been accepted to college.

NANCY SIZER: I would just add that we have really reached out to colleges in educating them about who we are. So we have our own college fair every year where we invite colleges to come and visit our school, see our school in action, and talk with our students in small groups. And that's made a huge difference, because now when we call the colleges, we actually know the admissions officers. We know whom to ask for and they know our students. They've met them. And we actually have the students prepare portfolios to have ready for that college fair, and that's helped.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: How do you find mentors and internships for the students?

AMY: We have created a database. So any time a student makes a call, even just to explore the possibility of working with someone, it gets entered in the database and we collect all the information of who's out there and what they're willing to do. Are they willing to have a student come just for an informational interview, are they willing to have a student come for a "job-shadow" day, and would they be willing to be a potential mentor? It is challenging, but we've actually been really surprised at how many people want to take that role on and are really kind of flattered to have the opportunity to teach what they know to a high school student and take someone under their wing. We've certainly had people who were really not suitable mentors and so we have shifted the student out of the internship. But overall, I would say, you know, we've been pleasantly surprised at how people rise to the occasion, take an interest in the student, and are willing to invest the time.

Time is the key issue because if they're busy at their jobs, it's tough for them to spend the amount of time to educate the student about what they're doing. So we're really explicit about that when we set up the internships with the potential mentor, really giving them a clear idea of what kind of a commitment and how much time a week it would require and what our expectations would be. We've even developed a videotape that we have potential mentors view if they're trying to decide whether they really want to do this.

ELIOT LEVINE: You find that so many of these people are dying to work with the kids and to work with a kid that's passionate about the same thing they're passionate about. And they don't have to take them home at night. [Audience laughter] We also honor them. Any mentors that take our kids for four years get an honorary teaching degree at graduation because they are teachers.