High Tech High evolved by learning along the way

Part two of a three-part series. Read part one here. Part three examines achievements and what the future holds.

The High Tech High charter application, submitted to the San Diego Unified School District in the fall of 1999, was approved by the Board of Education in early 2000. Founding HTH principal Larry Rosenstock recalled little dissension, saying SDUSD’s then superintendent Alan Bersin, who had close contacts with San Diego’s business and civic communities, was very supportive.

A school site was found at the Naval Training Center, now Liberty Station, in Point Loma, that was rented on a monthly basis in early 2000, giving the founders about six months to prepare the facility for its planned opening that fall.

School design, stagnant for nearly the past century, was considered by the group to be an important visual representation of the school’s founding principles.

After deep renovation that included tearing down most inner walls, the 38,500-square-foot building showcased a striking, new design for an educational facility, one that was awarded a 2001 Educational Design Excellence Award for its unique use of space and light.

Features include lofty ceilings and expansive open spaces with overhead walkways, abundant use of glass for transparency and openness, teaching clusters, gallery spaces, studios, comfortable furniture in meeting areas, movable walls for flexibility, outdoor learning spaces, and other design features consistent with the original vision of providing new ways of teaching and learning.

Jed Wallace, head of the California Charter Schools Association, praised High Tech High for utilizing space in more productive, and even less expensive, ways. This model, he said, is changing the way people think about school facilities.

“High Tech High is developing award-winning school buildings at a fraction of the cost of traditional schools,” he said, crediting the freedom charter schools have from construction restraints that limit school district creativity. “Those restrictions result in very uninspired designs that are not efficient use of space, facilities or funding.”

Designing the plane while flying it

Before the school had even opened, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation offered the High Tech High organization $6.5 million in July of 2000, to replicate the school’s design at 10 schools nationwide.

Founder Gary Jacobs remembered telling the Gates people, “We have no staff, we have no facility yet, we have no students, we have no results.”

“But they said, ‘Based on your design principles, we’d really like to work with you anyway, so here’s the money.’ So we were sort of designing the plane while flying it.”

Jacobs and the other founders soon realized that high standards and quality would be difficult to ensure at schools across the country, at such an early stage of the charter’s development. The Gates Foundation agreed with the decision to concentrate on schools in San Diego County, and has since given them additional millions to further their efforts locally.

Attracting students was the next priority. Organizers actively recruited at middle schools for students entering ninth grade in the fall of 2000. As word spread, High Tech High found itself with about 3,500 applications for 150 spaces, Jacobs said.

No criteria were used for admission other than proportional representation by zip code. Jacobs said the application was one page, and there were no filters. “It’s always been a straight lottery system,” he said.

Today, the system remains the same. The school uses census data to see where kids reside and accepts a proportional number of students from each neighborhood, to ensure equal opportunity and diversity of cultures and backgrounds. About 15 percent of students are admitted from outside the San Diego Unified School District.

“We’re looking for a cross-section of socio-economic backgrounds and academic backgrounds,” Jacobs said. “No test scores. We don’t look at grades either.”

“A zip code based lottery always assures us that we are always reflective of the broader San Diego community,” Rosenstock said. “So we’re diverse and we’re integrated.”

In the fall of 2000, the new High Tech High opened its doors with 100 ninth-graders and about 50 10th-graders, to much fanfare and wide acclaim.

There were some setbacks and disappointments though. There was turmoil with the property at the Naval Training Center, complicating plans for expansion of school facilities. Adjustments in class schedules were made in the first years, and the team-teaching philosophy needed refinement.

Teachers didn’t always work out. The first year, the school hired 12 teachers and only six remained by the end of the year. “One math teacher just drove away for lunch one day and never came back,” Jacobs said.

Then there were parents who objected to the new educational model and worried they were taking too great a chance on an untried, untested idea. Despite the pressure, Rosenstock never wavered in his vision for the school.

“We had some parents early who said they didn’t feel comfortable with the way [we] do math,” Rosenstock said. “And I said, ‘We didn’t knock ourselves out to make a smaller version of the other 187 schools in San Diego.’

“But all that went away when our kids started getting into top colleges. The amount of parent anxiety just plummeted.”

What’s different

When kids are forced to listen to lengthy lectures, sit behind desks in rows crowded into dull classrooms, and follow dry textbook lessons that offer no practical application for the material being taught, it is no wonder there is a decline in student engagement and achievement, say High Tech High founders.

“A lot of kids get turned off by that and just aren’t interested in their education any more,” Jacobs said. “Because we’re so hands-on, because we’re project-based, our kids are very much engaged in their education. And when they’re excited about doing it, they want to learn more. That’s the big difference.”

At traditional, comprehensive high schools, even academic powerhouse schools like Torrey Pines High School and La Jolla High School with their many Advanced Placement and Honors classes, it’s easy for kids to lose their way and disengage from their education, he said.

But High Tech High, founded to combat student disengagement and low academic achievement, works by offering personalized, project-based learning combined with limited lectures and traditional Socratic methods – described by Rosenstock as “an integration of head and hands.”

“It’s behaving like a journalist, behaving like a scientist, making documentary films, building hovercraft and submersibles, getting patents,” he said. “There’s an integration of secondary and post-secondary, because a high school diploma is insufficient in today’s world.”

There are other, notable differences.

“We don’t have a guidance counselor who’s got 400 to 500 kids,” Jacobs said. “I saw my guidance counselor the first day of school and the last day of school. And unless I made trouble, I never saw them in between.”

At High Tech High, Jacobs said each faculty member serves as an adviser to 10 to 15 students across grade levels. “So the 12th-graders can pass the culture of the school down to the ninth-graders, and 11th-graders can see what the 12th-graders are going through with their college applications,” he said.
Small class sizes contribute to the intimate feel of the school, he said.

Each high school graduate must complete the full list of the “a-g” requirements set forth by the University of California and the California State University systems. Only 38 percent of California’s high school graduates meet this requirement, Rosenstock said.

Rejecting a mushrooming trend in traditional high schools, High Tech High schools offer no Advanced Placement classes. Jacobs said the school does not believe in “the wide breadth but no depth” approach that results in students memorizing facts, taking a test and then forgetting what they’ve learned.

Students are not penalized for not having AP classes on their transcripts, because founders spoke at length with college admissions officers in advance, to explain the High Tech philosophy and to understand what qualities and coursework colleges want their applicants to have. Colleges merely expect students to take the hardest classes their high schools offer, and most now realize that graduates of High Tech schools are well-prepared to succeed in college, Jacobs said.

Teachers

Teachers team-teach and know what their students are learning in other classes. They collaborate on curriculum development and integrate assignments to make lessons more relevant, Jacobs said.

Since the early years, the organization has had very low teacher turnover, he said. This, despite some unusual hiring practices that include being reviewed by students.

Potential teachers are asked to teach for a day, so both the teacher and the administration can evaluate one another. “Students then interview them during the lunch period, and the student responses are part of the hiring decision,” Jacobs said.

Although teachers are paid slightly more than they would receive from their home districts, they are under a one-year contract and have no tenure. “And we have been known to relieve teachers in the middle of the year if they aren’t getting the job done,” Jacobs said.

Merit pay can be offered, and teachers in high demand, such as those who teach math and science, may receive a higher salary than teachers of other subjects.

Jacobs said teachers are eager to join the organization. “Because we’ve established this culture of [students] wanting to learn, our work environment for the teachers is very different than a traditional work environment,” he said.

Jacobs said High Tech teachers aren’t required to be certificated in the traditional manner, pointing out that there’s little evidence of a correlation between certification and quality teaching. The school looks for teachers with deep content knowledge who are passionate about teaching, regardless of whether they have a certificate.

In 2004, the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing granted High Tech High the authority to train and certify teachers, making it the first public school system in the state to be given this authority, said Gary Larson, of the California Charter Schools Association.

“That’s really significant because it gives teachers the opportunity to go through a certification program essentially being immersed in a specialty program rather than being immersed in a more generic approach,” Larson said. “You are getting your certification while being immersed in a High Tech High philosophy.”

And the organization now has its own Graduate School of Education that opened in 2007 that’s been approved by the state and is in the process of becoming accredited, Jacobs said.

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.

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