Dive Brief:
- After developing grassroots authenticity for its high school redesign grant competition, advertised like a reality TV show casting call, all eyes are on whether the 10 winners of “XQ: The Super School Project” will deliver success.
- In an in-depth look at the project and its prospects in EducationNext, some experts say the project is headed in a new direction after awarding $10 million prizes to each winner without prescribing design elements or outcomes — but others question whether the winners have the capacity to actually open a successful school and, perhaps even more challenging, scale their models.
- There is some criticism that the winning models aren’t a big enough break from traditional high schools and also that Laurene Powell-Jobs directed her money to the wrong end of the K-12 spectrum, but supporters say the widely publicized effort will at least bring attention to the need to reinvent secondary education no matter how the individual schools do.
Dive Insight:
Even outside of this grant program, which offered a massive infusion of cash to help get innovative school models off the ground, public and private schools across the country are experimenting with high school redesigns.
To name just a few examples: New Hampshire high schools have not been held to the Carnegie unit of tracking student progress since 2005, opening the door to models that preference competency over seat time. AltSchool and Summit Public Schools give students control over their daily activities through a fierce commitment to personalized learning, and many career-focused programs turn local business sites into their students’ classrooms.