The vision behind the High Tech High journey

Part one of a three-part series. Read part two here and part three here.

It started with a simple thought – then another, and another … until ideas coalesced into a transformational new model for public education, all centered around an over-riding theme: We can do better for our children.

The concept for High Tech High, developed by a group of 40 of San Diego’s brightest business, industry, education and civic leaders, was a radical departure from traditional public education systems and has since been recognized nationally as one of the most remarkable success stories in charter school history.

The founding group of 40, which met regularly for about 18 months in the late 1990s, consisted of individuals from large companies like Qualcomm and General Dynamics, as well as members of the Economic Development Corporation, the Chamber of Commerce and other prominent San Diego agencies and organizations.

Members had shared concerns: how to overhaul a public education system that they believed was failing to provide San Diego employers with successful, well-educated high school graduates. In particular demand were promising candidates for the high-tech work force in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics – commonly known today as STEM.

“Back in 1999, the economy was going well, and companies were having a hard time finding qualified workers,” said Gary Jacobs, one of the group of 40 who represented Qualcomm. “There was a general feeling in the business community and the university community that kids coming out of high school, while good at memorizing facts, weren’t very good applying what they learned.”

Jacobs, who would go on to become a key player in the formation and development of the High Tech High organization, was working at the time in Qualcomm’s Human Resources department and was involved in promoting science and mathematics education in schools, when one day he was asked to attend an upcoming education coalition meeting in someone else’s place.

“And the rest, as they say, is history,” he said.

Over the course of those few years, this founding group of visionaries would question almost everything that was sacred in public education, including the way instruction was delivered, how teachers were trained and certified, and even how classrooms and buildings were designed.

Jacobs said this effort was the beginning of a centralized business response in San Diego to the problems facing public education.

“The civic community and the business community in San Diego were frustrated because of its lack of return on investment in the traditional system,” said Jed Wallace, former chief operating officer of High Tech High who now heads the California Charter Schools Association. “So they decided in the late ‘90s – way ahead of other communities, by the way – to make a different kind of school. That’s how High Tech High got started.”

The group tackled such thorny questions as identifying the kinds of skill sets students needed, what qualities were missing in high school graduates, and what could be done to make learning more relevant for future careers and 21st-century jobs.

Project-based learning would put students into real-life scenarios that applied learning directly to workplace skills, advisers would counsel students in small groups of mixed grade levels to prepare for college and beyond, expectations for success would be raised, and all students would be actively engaged in their own education.

Beginnings

After deciding to open a new kind of public high school within the San Diego Unified School District, the group debated the issue of governance structure – specifically, whether the school should operate as a charter or under SDUSD’s pilot school language.

Larry Rosenstock at the time was head of Price Charities, a public foundation formed by local philanthropists Sol and Helen Price to improve conditions for those living in low-income urban communities. Central to Rosenstock’s and the foundation’s efforts was the City Heights initiative, where schools had been granted special dispensation to operate as San Diego Unified pilot schools.

The pilot program meant teachers remained unionized, but seniority rules and other restrictions were waived. In contrast, charter schools are granted greater freedom in employment practices, as well as curriculum decisions, instructional practices, governance and finance.

Rosenstock said he was invited to speak to the founding group about methods for creating autonomous public schools in California.

“I went to that one meeting, and then they voted to create a charter school,” he said.

Jacobs said the decision to go charter was about increased levels of autonomy and “the ability to really control our destiny.”

“It’s governance, finance, pedagogy, personnel, facilities,” Rosenstock said. “That’s the guts of the thing.”

And immediacy. “The beauty of the private sector is that the private sector has a sense of urgency that I wish the public sector had,” he said. Although still a public school, a charter school, Rosenstock felt, provided that sense of urgency.

The group didn’t set out to alienate San Diego Unified’s teachers union. Marc Knapp, the president of the San Diego Education Association at the time, was a member of the founding group and took an active role in discussions.

But when the vote came to form a charter school, Knapp walked out, Jacobs said. “Had the union stayed in, we would have worked with them because they were a part of the group.”

Rosenstock described Knapp’s exit as “a Khrushchev U.N. kind of moment.”

Yet, Rosenstock said the group returned to Knapp, after receiving hundreds of applications, many from teachers at San Diego Unified, for 12 teaching positions that first year.

Jacobs and Rosenstock said they offered SDEA a deal that would have allowed teachers to work at the new charter school for three years without losing seniority rights or benefits, under the same provisions the SDEA president is given.

“He goes on leave from the district, but the union pays the district back the full cost of his salary and benefits and everything else,” said Jacobs, whose proposal to SDEA was that the new charter school would reimburse the district “dollar for dollar” for the cost of the teachers.

“They had an executive meeting that night and voted unanimously not to accept that proposal,” Jacobs said. “So we’re a non-union shop at this point.”

The first employee

After the charter decision had been made in December 1998, the next step was finding a full-time employee who could take charge of the project and open the school by the fall of 2000.

Intrigued by the challenge, Rosenstock met with Jacobs, who by that time had taken a leading role in the endeavor, and asked what the odds were for the school’s success.

“I said I think they’re 50-50, because we have no principal, no faculty, no students, no facility and no money,” Jacobs said.

Unfazed, Rosenstock said he wanted to be the founding principal of the newly created High Tech High. Jacobs remembered saying, “Great. That makes the odds 90-10.”

“We scratched out my contract on a piece of paper in three minutes,” said Rosenstock, whose extensive background and experience in education included running the New Urban High School Project for the federal government, working as an attorney for the Center for Law and Education and as a faculty member at Harvard University, and serving as a high school principal and teacher for many years, including 11 years teaching carpentry in Boston’s public schools during the height of desegregation.

Rosenstock’s work with the U.S. Department of Education from 1996 to 1999 resulted in six high school design principles, adopted and simplified to three for the High Tech schools:

• Personalization, which gives students individual adult attention and allows students to pursue areas of personal interest
• Adult world connection, which places students into real workplace environments
• Common intellectual mission, which prepares students for college and career with rigorous coursework needed for high school graduation that meets all admissions requirements set forth by the University of California and the California State University systems

As Rosenstock worked the curriculum and instruction side of the equation, Jacobs focused on raising money for the project. Charitable donations from a number of organizations, including $500,000 from Qualcomm, weren’t enough.

After considerable thought, Jacobs and his wife Jerri-Ann decided to offer $3 million to help start the school, which would be named the Gary and Jerri-Ann Jacobs High Tech High School.

The partnership between Jacobs and Rosenstock turned out to be serendipitous, and Wallace said his five years working at High Tech High were “a thrill of a lifetime.”

“My role in general was to take the incredible vision and ideas and culture that Gary and Larry had laid out and to find real specific ways to make those dreams a reality,” Wallace said. “They were the dream-weavers.”

Wallace described High Tech High as “a model where pedagogical vision, which was Larry Rosenstock’s vision, met community resources, the Jacobs family.”

“Do you need to have someone of Larry’s unbelievable caliber?” he said. “And do you need to have a private philanthropist with Jacobs family resources? No. But you need to have great pedagogical vision, and you have to have one way or another to access funding, either private or public.”

Wallace said charter school organizations across the state and nationwide are finding creative ways to bring together those two key ingredients. “But High Tech High certainly did it in style with Larry Rosenstock and Gary Jacobs.”

End of Part One of a three part series. Part Two discusses next steps for the founding group and what makes the High Tech model unique.

Marsha Sutton is a freelance education writer who has been covering education issues in San Diego County for the past 14 years. She can be reached at SuttComm@san.rr.com.

Tags: high school, SDNN

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