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A Big School Divides to Go for High-Quality Work

Type: Example from Schools Author(s): Kathleen Cushman Source: Performance. No. 17, January 1995.

Piner High School
1700 Fulton Road
Santa Rosa, California 95403
(707) 528-5245

Joe Sewell, Principal
1,635 students in 9-12; 78 staff
26% minority students
75-80% go on to higher ed
Member of California's 1274 Restructuring Schools Network
Small city high school near San Francisco

Turning a typical city high school into five small 'learning communities' has energized students and staff and reoriented classwork around meaningful community projects.

An air of purposeful chaos dominates one wing of Piner High School in Santa Rosa, California this week. Scattering and clustering in intense concentration around computer terminals, scanners, and stacks of research, 250 kids of various ages are comparing notes on geography, economics, law, and cultures as if their lives depended on it. "Our teams are racing each other to Tierra del Fuego," one girl explains. "We've got to make sure they know how to deal with anything along the way."

To an outside observer, the ten-day simulation project looks less like school than like the work of a sophisticated software firm. But at Piner, which organizes its 1,635 students into five autonomous "learning communities," it is just another way to get students to work cooperatively, to actively discover what they need to know, and to relate their learning to the world around them.

Such outcomes are so important, this school believes, that it has entirely reorganized itself in the four years since it adopted the philosophy of the Coalition of Essential Schools. "We were a completely typical American high school - neither Palo Alto nor Oakland, says principal Joe Sewell. "We were reeling from rapid growth; Santa Rosa is more city than suburb these days. The school felt increasingly anonymous; you could walk from one end of this campus to another without anyone greeting you by name. What's more, we knew our students weren't being prepared for the world they'll have to live in."

The bold moves Piner took to remedy that situation make it anything but typical today. Every Piner student now joins one of five minischools that shape their own themes, strategies, schedule, and governance.

In the Center for Technology, Environment, and Communication (C-TEC), for instance, students pursue their studies by working with any of several ongoing scientific investigations in the community and at nearby universities. Three other Piner learning communities - the School of the Humanities, the Piner Academy, and Fulton Valley Prep - place students in weekly volunteer service where they can explore new fields or learn leadership and teamwork skills.

Virtually all the units stress interdisciplinary, project-based studies, with strong links to real-world applications. In fact, almost half of all Piner students experience some off-campus learning, with around 100 community mentors advising them.

By the students' own accounts, the approach has succeeded. Piner consistently boasts the lowest dropout rate in the district. And kids who once slid by unnoticed now burst with new ideas and pride. "It's harder, but it's much better," says Rebecca Van Asdlan, a senior in the School of the Humanities.

More Than 'Getting By'

"Back in junior high we would just read the history chapter and answer the questions at the end," says Audra Antognini, a senior in the Piner Academy learning community. "Here we have to actually do the research ourselves." In a recent unit on war, her class read All Quiet on the Western Front and John Hersey's Hiroshima; then each student analyzed the significance of a specific historic battle and presented it to the class. "You have to get a C or better even to get a grade," Audra says. "They don't let you just get by."

"It's a different way of thinking," says Cari Leamon of the Integrated Math Project, a curriculum developed at the University of California's Lawrence Hall of Science, which she takes as a junior in the Fulton Valley Prep mini-school. "I had taken Algebra 2 twice and failed it; but now I have a 4.0 math average."

Many Piner seniors must complete a major independent project before graduation, and frequently these arise from their service learning experiences. Jeremy Wade developed an interest in medical science, for instance, by working in the city's public health office, where he surveyed how tobacco advertisers target teens. Now he is combining math science in his senior project on genetic engineering. For his weekly service learning project, Juan Tapia rides with the sheriff on his rounds; he has researched the history of juvenile justice, and plans to go on in the field of corrections.

The Measure of Quality

Given California's chaotic testing scene, reliable statistics on student performance since the changes are hard to come by. The state's new performance-based assessments (known as CLAS) are mired in controversy and will not even be given this year. But several other measures of quality reveal key improvements in the past several years:

• Piner's restructured offerings were some of the first non-traditional courses in the state to receive the University of California's coveted "A-F" accreditation, which denotes academic rigor and content at a college-prep level. In fact, in the three years since Piner launched its innovative ways, the number of seniors meeting all the A-F requirements rose from 118 to 162 (39 percent of its graduating class).
• The number of students who go on to four-year colleges has steadily risen in the same period. The highly regarded Santa Rosa Community College, a low-cost feeder school for the U.C. system, enrolls about half Piner's graduates.
• Merit scholarship awards by dozens of organizations to Piner graduates nearly tripled in three years, from $326,000 in 1992 to $981,000 in 1994.
• Parents, students, staff, and administrators share decisionmaking on Piner's governing council.

This campus feels different now - at once more personal, more serious, and more fun. "Many kids and parents resisted the changes at first," says 30-year veteran Kathy Juarez, who teaches in Fulton Valley Prep. "But that has changed as they begin to experience the new excitement that is showing up in kids' work." To watch Piner students gather - in classrooms, in courtyards, and around library tables - offers incontrovertible evidence that she's right. Their faces lit with pride, these young people are speaking about work that really matters, both to them and to their community - and they know it.

Student Work Shows the Difference: Some Projects from Piner High

Monique Dugars is one of many C-TEC students who work on the Groundwater Monitoring Project, a field study begun in 1991 to determine the impact of gravel mining on the Russian River aquifer. The Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, to whom the group reports its finding, has estimated the value of the project to the county at $500,000.

Lee Homesley, a senior in the Humanities mini-school, is directing and producing George Axelrod's play "Goodbye Charlie" in a local church hall, with proceeds to go to the church's hunger relief project.

Matt Sandoval is one of ten students who organized Spanish lessons twice a week in three area elementary schools. The students develop their own 30-minute lesson plans, speaking Spanish during 90 percent of their instructional time.

Based on political, geographical, and cultural advantages, Kevin Izard and his classmates in Piner Academy's humanities class set about, in small groups, analyzing which spot in the world is best to live in. Each group then published a magazine and made an oral presentation to support their choice.

Seniors in Fulton Valley Prep, participated in a mock trial of a white security officer charged with beating a black suspect, adapted from the Constitutional Rights Foundation state mock trial competitions. Students took on many roles, writing pretrial motions and opening and closing statements. Lawyers from the Sonoma County Bar Association served as judges.

C-TEC senior Deanna Clark has joined an archaeology project through Sonoma State University, investigating ground near the Oakland freeway that collapsed in the 1989 earthquake.

For his senior project Wade Wilson is building a device to measure whether low-level radiation from electro-magnetic fields has a mutating effect on e. coli bacteria, an original project he developed with his father, a microbiologist.

Students worked with the city Department of Public Works and the region's Water Quality Control Board to engineer a test site analyzing "non-point-source pollution" in Santa Rosa, then produced brochures and TV spots to educate the community about the hazards of run-off contaminants in their storm drain systems.

In a five-year project with biologists at the University of California's Bodega Marine Laboratory and Reserve, students collaborate on field research into wetlands habitats and the endangered species they support.

Performance
Progress Reports from the Coalition of Essential Schools
Number 17, January 1995
Editor: Kathleen Cushman

A continuing series describing areas in which Essential Schools are demonstrating significant progress toward change using the Nine Common Principles.

This resource last updated: May 14, 2002

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