R.I. education model devoid of classes has global following

 / Array
/ Array

Empowering students through real-world experience has been Dennis Littky’s goal for almost half a century.

As an educator, Littky, whom students affectionately call “Doc,” was recognized nationally as an innovator before he came to Rhode Island in 1993. CVS Health Corp. founder and former CEO Stanley Goldstein recruited Littky, then principal at the now-closed Thayer High School in Winchester, N.H., to bring education innovation to the Ocean State.

The result, the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center, opened its doors in 1996 with 50 freshmen. Then-housed in downtown Providence’s Shepard Building, its goal, said Littky, was to connect education and career preparation in an engaging way.

Since then, Littky, a co-director of the Met, has been fighting the perception of high school among adolescents as “boring” while confronting a high dropout rate of public school students.

- Advertisement -

Littky developed a curriculum devoid of classes, tests and homework, in which each student was paired with a single adviser for all four years of high school and spent two days a week working internships with local businesses, developing necessary skills for a successful career.

At first, there were plenty of skeptics, including educators he says laughed at his model.

But the Met thrived locally, expanding to a purpose-built Dexter Street campus in Providence. In 2007, a Newport campus was added. Statewide enrollment has jumped to 850, and each year the school receives twice as many applicants through the state’s anonymous lottery system than it can accept.

And over the past 20 years, the impact of its unique learning model has spread far from the Ocean State. There are 65 Big Picture Learning schools dotting the U.S. landscape and an additional 80 scattered among six nations; including The Netherlands, Australia and soon, India. Big Picture Learning is the nonprofit begun by Littky in 1995 to run U.S. and international Met-inspired schools.

WHY DOES IT WORK?

Why has the Met model succeeded where so many other public schools have not?

“The American model of education is at odds with some very fundamental knowledge … about learning and developmental psychology,” said Charlie Plant, a former Met educator who’s now a principal at MetWest High School, part of the Oakland, Calif., Unified School District and the first Big Picture Learning school outside of Rhode Island. “It was developed in the mid-19th century to serve a very specific time in history,” and is no longer applicable, he said.

“Big Picture schools offer the opportunity for staff to bring their passion to school and for both students and staff to be inspired – it’s got a life to it that’s constantly being renewed.”

Littky believes the internship-heavy curriculum helps find what students are passionate about early, allowing time to develop interests prior to college.

“Our job was to help kids find their interest,” said Littky, so “kids don’t sit in the back of the room and slip by. A lot of people are [now] seeing the need to get kids engaged and excited about learning.”

Consistent funding and support have also helped.

Met-inspired schools have benefited from $20 million provided from 2000-2010 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help grow the concept outside Rhode Island. Littky estimated Big Picture Learning’s annual budget fluctuates between $3 million and $5 million. Over the past two decades, he says, the nonprofit has taken in roughly $80 million from foundations, individuals and school districts outside of Providence.

In Rhode Island, the Met received $9.86 million in education aid from the state in the 2015-16 fiscal year, enough to cover 57 percent of its budget. The remainder is made up by district tuition, gifts and grants.

Ken Wagner, R.I. Department of Education commissioner, is not an advocate of the school’s lack of tests and homework, but nonetheless sees it as a school that was “ahead of its time,” due to its focus on career readiness, apprenticeships and hands-on-learning.

Many of the Met’s core principles, the internships, advisers and student-designed learning plans, were incorporated by the R.I. Board of Regents as requirements for all public high schools in 2003.

Frank Flynn, president of the Rhode Island Federation of Teacher and Healthcare Professionals teachers’ union, says the Met principles don’t work for every school or student.

The Met, he said, operates with a certain amount of flexibility that doesn’t exist in all public schools due to the different volume of students and structures for curriculum.

But “both systems do some things very well,” he said.

OPENING DOORS

One of the school’s defining characteristics is its diverse student body, of which 70 percent qualify for free or reduced lunch. Littky estimates the student body is 40 percent Latino, 30 percent Caucasian and 30 percent black.

Seventeen-year-old senior Jailine C. Mendoza of Providence chose to attend the Met because of a presentation school administrators gave at her middle school. She liked the idea of how the student was in charge.

“When someone tells you to do something, you’re going to be unhappy for the simple fact someone is telling you to do it,” she said.

Now interning at Boston’s New England Aquarium, Mendoza said her Met education opened many doors, not just those leading to business.

“Since 10th grade I’ve told my adviser what I want to do, instead of her telling me,” said 17-year-old senior Naffisatou Koulibaly of the freedom allowed Met students.

The Cranston native, now interning at Providence’s African Alliance of Rhode Island, said studying at the Met saved time.

“I’m interested in anything and everything,” she said. “If I went to a traditional high school, [a career] would be a lot harder to figure out.”

Senior Noah Salem, also 17, of North Providence, studied abroad in Egypt and founded KickVids, a video-production company.

“[High school] is a less-risky environment to change your passion,” he said. “If I decided to do something different, I’m no worse off than any other high school student; I may even be better off.”

To those skeptical of the no-class, no-test, no-homework environment, Salem said: “Take a look at my resume.”

Salem’s work includes founding KickVids in 2014, serving as video team leader at Brown University’s Space Horizons 2016, a workshop exploring inhabiting the moon, and a two-year youth filmmaking certificate from the Rhode Island School of Design.

But he knows the Met, like any high school, is just a beginning.

Asked how he would fare in the real world today, Salem said: “I could exist, but I would be very unremarkable.”

Steven and Raysa Prak, members of the Met Class of 2000, the first graduating class, live in Providence and own two Metro PCS franchises on Park Avenue in Cranston.

Steven Prak’s path to entrepreneurship was circuitous, but he said the importance of time management was impressed on him during his first Met internship, where he took a three-hour lunch the first day and was fired.

“Reality hit me early, but reality helped me get where I am today,” he said.

Time management was invaluable when the Praks were employed by the Met as advisers to children with special needs while enrolled at the University of Vermont.

Able to look at the Met from both sides, Steven Prak said the best lesson he learned is that anything is possible.

Prak’s parents were Cambodian refugees, who, after arriving in the U.S., earned their living working in factories.

“I resented that, I didn’t want to work for anybody else,” he said of his Met-inspired, entrepreneurial drive.

Jesse Suchmann, of the Class of 2002 and Met Alumni Award recipient, found his way to the Met after spending his freshman year at Providence’s Classical High School, where he felt like a “a cog in the wheel, another kid in the machine.” He said the experience was “educationally stifling.”

Suchmann entered the Met interested in art and computers and his adviser guided him to a graphic-design career.

At the Met, Suchmann interned with a now-closed graphic-design firm, Second Story Graphics, Providence’s AS220 arts organization and RDW Group, a Providence-based marketing and advertising agency.

He’s now creative director at Edelman, a global communications firm.

The Met model works, he said, “because instead of trying to re-create the real world, or put [students] in a bubble, they put kids out there,” to learn from real-world lessons.

Met students must meet the same graduation requirements as all public seniors, including demonstrating proficiency in English language arts, math, science, social studies, arts and technology, complete 20 courses and two assessments. In addition, Met students must craft a 75-page autobiography, sit for the ACT college entrance exam and, at the end of each trimester, give oral presentations of their research to a learning panel made up of their adviser, mentor, parents and peers.

How do its best students compare when it comes to entrepreneurial skills with those from more traditional high schools?

Met students claimed the top four spots at this year’s Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship Business Plan Challenge Regional competition, beating out 26 other New England participants.

Warwick resident Ethan Chandler, a junior, won first place for his mobile phone app Jam Sesh, which connects musicians looking to play together. His distinction won him the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award and led to a spot in the national competition, where he came in 12th in the nation. Chandler’s win marks the fifth time in six years that the Met school was represented at the national competition and he is the fifth Met student to receive the Ernst & Young recognition.

Gabriella Martinez took first place in the elevator-pitch category for her custom-design sneaker business, Sole. Fellow Met students junior Owen Cuseo and 2016 alumnus Kevin Henkel rounded out the top four.

According to Patty Bamford, director of Met alumni support, 88 percent of the Class of 2016 enrolled in one of the following: a certificate program (6 percent), college (67 percent) or employment (27 percent) immediately after graduation. Thirty-seven members of the Class of 2016, 20 percent, were hired by their internship placements.

Littky’s co-director, Nancy Diaz Bain, said involvement with the Met does not stop after graduation.

While the Met does not use their alumni as a fundraising base, she said, they are working on a program, now in its “infant stages,” that would see more current students interning at alumni-owned businesses.

The Met has a database of 4,000 businesses that have either hosted a Met intern or are interested in doing so.

Beth Cunha, co-founder and executive director of Providence’s Center for Dynamic Learning, a youth career-readiness program, sent two of her children to the Met.

“I’m extremely grateful as a parent, an educator, a taxpayer and a community member for this school,” she said.

After a 15-year relationship with the Met, she believes it has impacted Rhode Island public education by showing a school can succeed using nontraditional methods.

“Some kids need structure in their learning plan, some need autonomy and some excel through inquiry-based learning. … We need to meet the needs of our children where they are, period,” she said.

The Center for Dynamic Learning has hosted Met interns since 2004 and currently offers three courses for their enrollment: introduction to theater, advanced manufacturing and an extended-day program.

For the past eight years, Jeni Mowry has overseen Met interns as manager of volunteer and customer services at Providence’s The Miriam Hospital. She says the biggest challenge with high school interns she manages is expectations.

“Sometimes the kids have a vision of what they want to do, but the reality is they don’t have the certification,” she said, though her experiences with Met students have generally been positive.

FLEXIBLE MODEL

Hanneke te Braake-Schakenraad, an educator from The Netherlands, developed a Met curriculum for Dutch students. In 2004, she visited the Met and, until her recent death, paved the way for Big Picture schools across The Netherlands, explained her daughter, Nele te Braake, a Big Picture coach with Vereniging Big Picture Nederland.

The Dutch team visited the Rhode Island school multiple times to see the model in action, but there was no formal training that took place.

“You can definitely see it is getting a little bit easier to convince people that education can exist in a different way,” she said of the Dutch Big Picture education movement.

Based on the same personalized, internship-focused model as those in California and Rhode Island, these schools prepare students for careers, said te Braake.

“Students that go to our schools are used to real-world standards and working with adults. They know what it means to be a colleague and can handle getting and giving feedback,” she added.

It is “not the norm,” te Braake explained, for Dutch Big Picture schools to be socio-economically diverse. Instead, they cater to students with autism, ADHD and dyslexia.

Big Picture schools are successful, she said, because the students are focused on creating a successful future for themselves.

Locally, Littky has no plans to expand. “We only expand when people ask us to,” he said.

He worries the Met won’t always be at the forefront of education innovation. The focus, then, he said, needs to be on improving the model in tandem with the evolution of education.

“If Rhode Island is going to be a hotspot for engineers because of General Electric, it’s part of our job to move some kids into that area,” he said. “Not only are they following a passion, but they’ll get a job for $100,000 at the end.” •

No posts to display