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One Place, 2 Divergent Schools: Many Milwaukee Students Attend High Schools Built From Scratch in the Last Few Years. Meet Two of Them- in One South Side Building.

Posted on: Wednesday, 14 June 2006, 03:00 CDT

By Sarah Carr, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Jun. 14--Jerris Vandenberg wanted to escape the crowding and occasional violence of some of Milwaukee's largest high schools. As a freshman at Bradley Tech, he'd been attacked in an isolated corridor by several classmates.

Shagufta Khan wanted to escape the daunting legacy of her siblings, academic stars at Milwaukee's Pulaski High School. She dreamed of crossing town each morning to attend Rufus King, one of the city's premier public high schools. But Khan's family wanted her closer to home.

These different paths took Vandenberg and Khan to the same school building on the south side, where they enrolled in two new, small high schools growing side by side -- the Professional Learning Institute for Vandenberg and the Ronald Reagan College Preparatory High School for Khan. Both schools, housed in the former Sholes Middle School building on S. 20th St., have big ambitions. But that is where the similarity ends. PLI emphasizes learning through projects designed and directed by the students themselves, while Reagan features highly structured classroom-based academics.

Thousands of Milwaukee students now attend high schools that, like PLI and Reagan, are literally built from scratch. The schools are more varied, student-focused and risky than the programs they have displaced. But many educators say the risks are worth taking, since the old model of large urban high schools failed far too many students. The biggest challenge, they say, will be to educate the community about the new options so kids get matched to the right program.

"We're moving from one kind of high school for all kinds of kids to all kinds of different high schools for different kinds of kids," said Marty Lexmond, the director of high school redesign for Milwaukee Public Schools. "This creates a huge communication challenge."

Although the schools of Vandenberg and Khan could not be more distinct from each other, together they illustrate the powerful changes transforming the high school landscape in Milwaukee and across the country, where choice, not uniformity, is increasingly the rule when it comes to high school.

Helping start anew

Vandenberg, now 18, left Bradley Tech after getting jumped in the hallway. He transferred to Milwaukee's Hamilton High School, where he did fine academically, but felt as if he had to walk sideways down hallways crammed with 2,000 students between classes.

One of Vandenberg's elementary school teachers, Cris Parr, was busy working to create a smaller, more intimate high school where all of the students could easily fit in one hallway. The Professional Learning Institute would not have many traditional classes, tests, credits or textbooks. Vandenberg, who wanted to be the first person in his family to attend college, decided to sign up.

As one of the first recruits, Vandenberg helped the teachers salvage furniture for PLI. He likes to point out file cabinets in the school's meeting room that he "Dumpster dived" for, the summer before the school started.

Finding furniture came more easily than grasping the academic structure of the school, though. At PLI, most of the traditional school subjects -- science, social studies, English, art -- are taught through student-devised projects. A student might spend an hour or two each day in more traditional elective classes, such as Spanish, or studying math through an online program. But a substantial chunk of most days is devoted to independent projects, such as one on personal finance, where a student might research and write about credit cards, negative and positive interest, and financial scams.

While project-based models are spreading across the country, particularly with the growth in charter schools, some remain skeptical. "It's something that might work with kids in an affluent suburb who in elementary or middle school or at home might have gotten a lot of exposure to basic skills," said Michael J. Petrilli, the vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, which is generally associated with conservative educational causes. "But for poor kids who come to school with limited vocabulary, who need a lot of help building up basic skills, this can be something that is difficult to make work."

But Ron Newell, the learning programs director for the Gates-EdVisions Project, who has written extensively on project-based learning, says "standards are still met, but in different ways than courses."

"Projects allow students to develop other skills that were missing in the book: Investigation, responsibility, self organization, problem solving, figuring out stuff for yourself."

At PLI, the teachers serve as content-area advisers whom the students turn to when they have questions in their area of specialty. The teenagers study at their own work stations, complete with individual computers and desk space much like traditional office cubicles. They earn course credit in different subjects largely through the time they spend and expertise demonstrated by working on the projects.

"Every student who comes in is totally blind" to the program's structure, says Parr. "Some students are going to find it's not for them. They need the structure they get at a regular high school. They need worksheets in front of them. They need books in front of them."

"We've had some kids who've left and gone to more traditional schools because they just want that superstructure," Parr adds. "There was this one kid who just did not want people in his business. He wanted to melt in. So he went to Pulaski."

Vandenberg, a senior in his third year at PLI, is still adjusting. "To tell the truth, I'm still trying to get used to it," he says. "There's still days when I sit down and for half an hour am trying to figure out what I want to do."

A structured environment

When Khan was looking into high school options as an eighth-grader two years ago, she doubted that a project-based school such as PLI would be good for her. "I wasn't really self-motivated when I got out of middle school," she said.

Khan was also turned off by the "huge school" atmosphere at a place like Hamilton, where she worried she would be "one in a million." She received a brochure about Ronald Reagan (then called Town of Lake), promising rigorous classes in a small-school environment.

The school's founders had the ambitious goal of creating a "Rufus King of the south side." (Rufus King is considered by most people as one of MPS' strongest high schools academically. It turns away many applicants every year.)

Rick Marino, a parent who spearheaded efforts to create the school, sold the concept to the School Board partly based on his observation that of the 19 children on his south side block, only five attended MPS schools.

Like Rufus King, Ronald Reagan uses a curriculum known as International Baccalaureate, a highly sequenced program aimed at giving students exposure to the subjects and intensity they will encounter in college, particularly in their final two years of high school. Ronald Reagan won official accreditation as an IB school just a few weeks ago.

Khan did not know exactly what IB meant when she signed up for Ronald Reagan, but she sensed that it was "a big deal." And now that she is finishing her sophomore year, she likes the program for its depth, and for the fact that the "classes are very set."

The school uses block scheduling, meaning the classes last for well over an hour and on alternating days Khan gets a heavy dose of traditional subjects, such as chemistry, Spanish II or United States history. The intense focus is important to Khan, who dreams of becoming a doctor.

It's harder to swallow for some of her classmates, who complain that the school lacks a variety of courses, such as photography or home economics. "My elective this year is, like, pre-calculus," one student jokes.

Another high school Khan had considered, called Veritas, has more "fun" classes such as clay sculpting, she says. But Khan decided they were not worth her time.

Broad latitude

At 9 a.m. one spring Monday, Vandenberg tries to figure out what to do with his day, with his week, and with the academic quarter, which just began.

He sits at his work station with a screensaver of the Daytona racetrack in front of him. Vandenberg thinks he will become a teacher, but race car driving and mechanics are other fascinations.

"I know what I need to do, but I can't decide what to do first," Vandenberg says.

After a few minutes of conferring with Parr and staring intently at his computer screen, Vandenberg starts writing a review of a classmate's senior project, a health and safety fair for elementary school children. The theory is that the students can learn from analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of other people's work -- much as they would in a workplace. He gives a detailed critique, including a suggestion that the videos shown were too fast for the children to follow.

Students at PLI must earn a specific number of credits in such core areas as social studies, science, math and English, so they have to devise projects that hit on a broad range of areas, or take elective courses to fill in the gaps. But they have broad latitude in terms of what topics they focus on specifically, so a student might write two in-depth papers on World War II, for instance, but not touch nearly as much on the Civil War. PLI students become resourceful enough to find information quickly, though, argues Parr. "They know where to find it in half a minute on the Internet," she says. "Other kids have memorized dates, and can say who the president was in 1952, but our kids can find it in 30 seconds."

Vandenberg next starts work on a research paper, the final assignment of his own senior project. He created a "young men's group," advertised in a Milwaukee recreation booklet. The group of about a dozen met each Thursday afternoon throughout the winter and spring to discuss such issues as violence, relationships, and school and career goals.

For the research paper part of the project, Vandenberg needs to put together tables and graphs looking at the graduation and crime rates in Milwaukee, to show the context of why his group's discussions were important. But he also must describe the personal relevance to his own life and career ambitions.

"I need to demonstrate heightened personal qualities and depth of work," says Vandenberg, who nearly always hands in high-quality work, no matter when he starts. "Have I done that, Cris?"

"Yes," she replies, jokingly adding: "As long as it's after 10 a.m."

Looking at the clock -- which shows that the hour of 10 has passed and lunchtime is rapidly approaching -- Vandenberg begins outlining in earnest.

Nearby, a different story

Downstairs, the pace of Khan's day is defined for her.

In Spanish class the students review the plural conjugations of verbs. The teacher announces that there will be "una prueba" (a quiz) next Monday on the forms of the verb "decir," which means "to say." The students study the different forms of decir. Then, they translate a list of questions.

Khan, whose family immigrated to the United States from Pakistan when she was 5, answers some questions so quietly that no one can hear her. She describes it as her least favorite class because of a cluster of rowdy students who do not always pay attention.

Khan figures that every school must have at least some students who do not work hard, and holds it against her less-motivated peers rather than the schools. "I think it's just because they don't want to succeed," she says. "They are like, 'I want to be a rapper,' but don't understand how tough it is to actually be that. I know if they tried and wanted help they could get it. They just don't want to."

At exactly 10:25 a.m. the bell rings, signaling the end of Spanish. The students pick up their backpacks and books and head off to their next class.

In algebra, the students learn the quadratic formula and factoring. They graph polynomials and review local maximums and minimums. At the end of each problem, the teacher neatly erases the chalkboard and starts anew.

Art history uses Munch's "The Scream" to examine "the fine line between madness and genius." The teacher talks about painting faces, noting that "precision calls for the space of an eye between the eyes." For an assignment, the students must draw 30 mouths, 30 eyes and 30 ears.

Even detention is planned out and structured down to the minute. Students are forced to watch a Richard Simmons exercise video.

Despite their vast differences, both PLI and Ronald Reagan high schools face the challenges of defining and selling their programs -- not just to prospective students, but also to colleges and potential employers.

Vandenberg plans to study psychology and education next year at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He has strong academic credentials, but PLI teachers have to work extra hard to explain their students' performance to colleges since the credits, courses and transcripts are all non-traditional. Parr said the school initially struggled to explain the system to Alverno College this winter, although Alverno also has a non-traditional curriculum.

To Robert Blust, the dean of undergraduate admissions at Marquette University, non-traditional models are fine if the school can describe a student's performance within the context of peers. "As long as the high schools are able to give us good information about what we are looking at, I don't think that it's a disadvantage," he said.

But he added that it takes time for new high schools to develop a relationship with Marquette. "There are a lot of new schools coming online, and I'm hoping students are really well-prepared for a place like Marquette," he said.

Petrilli at the Fordham Foundation said: "I strongly support the idea of choice and charter schools if parents think the model will work with their child. On the other hand, parents should know this isn't something that is going to work for every child and might put kids at a disadvantage when they get to college if they haven't had a core grounding in a broad curriculum."

While Vandenberg is bound for UWM, Khan wants to attend Alverno College on her road to becoming a doctor. One of her classmates points out that it's easier, in some respects, for high school students enrolled in well-defined programs, where the school culture, reputation and traditions are already established. But more depends on the ability of families and students to make good choices about which high school fits them best than it did 25 -- or even five -- years ago.

Khan does not think she would have thrived in a "hands on" environment. But for Khan, holding her own with a 3.8 in the structured environment of Ronald Reagan has pushed her to set higher goals for herself.

Expanding horizons

"When I was little I wanted to be a beautician," Khan recalls. "But when I came here I was like, 'I'm a lot smarter than I thought.' "

Vandenberg, who received the national President's Service Award this spring, says he might be more advanced in a few academic areas, particularly math, if he had gone to a more traditional high school. And a student could graduate from PLI without ever having learned much about some subjects that are staples in other schools, because so much of the curriculum is determined by the students themselves.

But he's convinced his choice was a good one, and doubts he would have retained much outside of the hands-on environment of PLI.

"I don't believe I would have been any smarter of a person if I'd gone to Hamilton or Tech," he says. "I would have been sitting back and listening to what the teacher said, and then getting up and leaving."

And, he says, forgetting.

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Copyright (c) 2006, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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Source: The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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