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One of life’s most exhilarating moments, for any of us, is when you know exactly what you want to achieve and have the confidence and skills to make it happen. That is the bulls-eye that the Great Maine Schools Project’s Promising Futures program has in its crosshairs
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Searsport District High School and Central High School in Corinth are two of eight Maine high schools participating in the Promising Futures program. Funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and administered by the George Mitchell Institute, the project has bankrolled the schools with up to $200,000 each over five years with one goal in mind: to shake things up on behalf of all Maine students.
Understanding how this project came about requires a bit of a history lesson. In 1997, Maine’s commissioner of education, J. Duke Albanese, appointed a commission to examine the quality of public education provided to Maine’s 14- to 19-year-olds. The commission—which included two high school students, and 25 adults representing a variety of educational roles, locations, and types of school—spent six months mapping the current realities of Maine teenagers and their schools, creating a set of core beliefs, and gathering testimonies.
The commission unveiled the Maine Learning Results, a menu for the sets of skills and content standards that students needed to master in order make them competitive in a 21st-century economy. In addition, the commission report, called “Promising Futures,” detailed all the best practices in education, also naming some of the practices better left in the past. It was useful, practical, and utterly revolutionary—so much so that Albanese was asked to speak all over the world about the ideas set forth in “Promising Futures.”
While the report moved some Maine high schools to partial action, local high schools seemed too stuck in their ways to go very far down the reform road. Enter the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the richest foundation in the world, which gave Maine’s Mitchell Institute $10 million to create a project that would create a core of high schools willing to work toward the goal of making all Maine high school graduates college-ready.
“While not every student will choose to go on to higher education, it should be a realistic and achievable option for anyone who has earned a high school diploma,” says Albanese. “Right now, this is just not true for many of our high school graduates.”
Accepting this idea, says Albanese, can be difficult for people of past generations who were able to support their families on one income with just a high school diploma. Unfortunately, those days are over. Today, those who don’t have a secondary degree earn $1 million less over their working lives. At least some form of postsecondary education, Albanese says—whether it’s a four-year college, community college, technical school, advanced-training program, or formal apprenticeship—is increasingly becoming necessary to earn a living wage in our global, knowledge-based economy. Computers and technical advances have even transformed manual labor, such as grading a road or harvesting crops, into highly technical jobs. “The expectations for college, work, and military are merging,” explains Albanese. “All the requirements have become more sophisticated and elevated. Parents and kids need to stop thinking of high school graduation as an end point.”
When Searsport District High School (SDHS) signed on as one of the Promising Futures pilot schools, teachers and administrators realized if they were going to meet their goal of having all students college-ready, they needed to do some serious housecleaning.
First up was the issue of deciding what knowledge and skills were really important for today’s students to have to master. “We decided to draw academic lines in the sand,” says SDHS principal Gregg Palmer. “If it wasn’t top-notch, challenging, and universal, out it went.” Taking the Maine Learning Results as their guide, Palmer and his colleagues hammered out their own standards, a list of six to 10 ideas in every content area that all students had to grapple with and master.
The true test of will came in the spring of 2006, when the SDHS school board decided to scrap the traditional “credits needed for graduation” approach and voted unanimously to adopt these new standards as graduation requirements for the class of 2010.
Most high schools that adopt standards keep the time-worn tradition of acquiring credits as graduation requirements. For instance, most schools require four credits in English. To earn a credit, students have to put in 60 hours of “seat time” in a traditional classroom, making it seem as though time equals learning. With SDHS’s new learning standards, graduation will now be based on demonstrated knowledge instead of classroom hours. Why is this so revolutionary? “You or I could sit in a chair forever and not learn anything of significance. Or we could learn the greatest lesson of our life in three seconds,” explains Palmer.
“Standards measure learning in a straightforward way. You set a goal, and students learn through a variety of experiences. When they can demonstrate they know or can do it, they’ve met the standard. The key is that when you do away with seat time, the whole world becomes the classroom.”
At Searsport District High School, teachers are now concentrating on teaching different skill sets that are detailed lesson by lesson. Kids and parents know exactly which standards each lesson is addressing. This allows students and teachers to target the material that a student may not have understood the first time through without repeating the entire class. “Allowing the curriculum to be transparent and accessible actually motivates students,” says Marty Stamp, a Searsport teacher. Each standard receives a score so that it’s clear to both the student and their parents where the student’s strengths and weaknesses lie. “Within that knowledge,” Stamp says, “is both hope and power.”
Though Searsport’s standards-based system has been in place for only a few months, the early response has been encouraging. During fall conferences, parents were surprised and impressed by how specific teachers could be when discussing what their children had learned. “If there were any doubters beforehand,” Palmer says, “they walked out believers.”
Next, Searsport took aim at numerical grades. “Explain the difference between an 83 and an 84,” asks Palmer. “Sometimes someone will say, ‘one point.’ I love that,” Palmer says. “It proves the point that no one can identify any substantive difference. With 101 options in a traditional system, you’re inviting inconsistency.” The new grading policy at SDHS is a hybrid of the college GPA and the school’s new standards assessment. With only seven options, ranging from 2.0 to 4.5, Palmer claims the new assessment is much more accurate.
Even the most accurate grading system may not show the most essential skills of all: the ability to collaborate with a diversity of people and adapt to new experiences. Through SDHS’s new sister school relationship with the Urban Assembly for Law and Justice in Brooklyn, students learned the answer to this question: What do kids from a small, rural seaside town have in common with city kids whose school is in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge? “They have found out that many things about their external lives are very different and that it is hard to get past that at times,” Marty Stamp says. “However, when they try, they find that they really do have much more in common than they thought.”
Each student is permanently paired with a student from the sister school for four years to make lasting bonds that the program leaders hope will last beyond graduation. Twice a year—once in Brooklyn, once in Searsport—the students in the exchange stay in each other’s homes and spend time in each other’s school, taking classes with them. Other activities build the relationship. When in New York, kids from both schools attended a formal dinner with casual conversations with international lawyers; after that, a Yankees game. When the Urban Assembly for Law and Justice kids came for their first visit in January 2005, the students went snow tubing—a first for many of the “city” kids. Touring the University of Maine and a hayride were on the agenda for the fall visit. And this year, Searsport District High School and the Urban Assembly for Law and Justice have one more piece of common ground: sponsoring law firms. Cravath, Swain, and Moore sponsors the Brooklyn school, and now Searsport has the sponsorship of the law firm of Drummond, Woodsum, and MacMahon. The Portland-based firm is one of Maine’s most prestigious, and they recently signed on to the tune of $15,000 over three years, as well as making their attorneys and their entire firm available to work with the partnered students on mock trial exercises.
Waterproof boots and sample vials are the gear science students at Central High School in Corinth have been toting each spring for the past three years. These students are hip-deep in the Salmon Recovery Project. Their classroom is the Kenduskeag watershed, a real-world lab for chemistry and biology students where they are challenged to design and carry out vital data-gathering investigations.
The project, concocted by former Central High chemistry teacher Ed Lindsey, is a coalition including the Maine Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, and the Penobscot Nation. The 40-mile-long Kenduskeag Stream was once home to a large population of Atlantic salmon, but decades of soil runoff and industrial pollution have driven their numbers down dramatically. The coalition believed Central’s students could have a hand in turning the trend around. The first year, juniors and seniors from Lindsey’s chemistry class were trained in scientific data collection by Mark Whiting from the Maine DEP. That spring, they set out in teams to collect samples and data from five different points on the stream. Back in the classroom, students created experiments and tests to refine their data. Sounds like a job for science professionals? Yes, and Central’s students rose to the challenge, submitting data to the state that, according to Great Maine Schools coach and project facilitator Gerry Crocker, “was quite accurate. The students took their work very seriously, knowing that the state did not have the resources to conduct these collections and that the resulting database would have real value.”
This hands-on project may do more than just help bring back the endangered salmon. It may bring back another vanishing group: kids who complete postsecondary school or training and return to their home communities. According to Duke Albanese, “place-based learning creates a connection between communities and schools. When students feel they are doing relevant and valuable work, they are more likely to return home after college and work on solving their communities’ problems.”
Being involved in relevant experiences that truly make a difference can light a spark in a student’s ambitions. “One recent graduate continued to work with the project that first summer, learning GIS mapping and working with the Atlantic Salmon Commission to arrange our data so that it could be easily integrated into the Atlantic Salmon Commission’s existing computer database,” reports Lindsey.
The project was so successful that, in its third year, Crocker and science teacher Shawn Kimball decided to try the freshman class’s hand at data collection. Working with Al Wanamaker, a University of Maine graduate student in climatology, the entire ninth grade was able to be part of an on-site research team. “The students absolutely benefit from working with real scientists and knowing that they are doing the real work of scientists,” says Crocker. “They gain confidence in their abilities, and it does help them see the idea of college as less foreign.”
Searsport District High School and Central High School demonstrate the variety of creative approaches used by teachers and administrators in the project. While the reforms are varied, the Promising Futures schools are looking for the same results: graduating college-ready students.
The Great Maine Schools Project is only in its third year and results are promising. Kids are going on and persevering in college. According to data from the National Student Clearinghouse, 70% of Searsport District High School graduates immediately entered college in 2005. This is better than the national average of 40%, reported by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, and 51% across Maine, as reported by Lynn Miller, a University of Southern Maine professor working with the Southern Maine Partnership.
The evidence so far shows that students who emerge from these transformed schools are better prepared, thus more likely to stick with college—exactly the sort of employees businesses in the 21st century will need to survive. “The most exciting development in reform is the changing mindset,” says Duke Albanese. Will the rest of the state follow? That’s the million-dollar question, literally, with future salaries and Maine’s long-term economic well-being on the line.
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