Meet the Met, A School Success Story

With a radically different approach to education, this high school in Providence, Rhode Island is fast becoming a model across the country

by William C. Symonds

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When Chris Emery started ninth grade four years ago, he seemed destined to drop out. His parents were struggling to get by, and neither had much education. Chris hadn’t done well in middle school in downtown Providence, R.I., and was deeply disaffected. "School is miserable, and there is nothing else we can do," he recalls telling his friends. His ambition was to maybe become a cook.

But on June 9, Chris graduated with flying colors from a Providence high school known as The Met. He's so enthralled with science that he often stays up late to read textbooks. Though just 18, he's already logged endless hours in the research labs at nearby Brown University, an Ivy League school. And this fall, he'll head to Manhattanville College, where he plans to study neuroscience, on a full scholarship, no less.

COLLEGE BOUND.

Such apparently miraculous transformations are almost par for the course at what may be America's most unorthodox high school,formally known as The Metropolitan Regional Career & Technical Center. Co-founder Dennis Littky, an outspoken opponent of the nation's testing craze, has thrown out most of the things commonly associated with high school from required courses to regimented schedules. Instead, students are assigned to one "advisor," with whom they work for all four years. The advisor's job: to figure out what inspires and excites each student. Students then spend two days each week off-campus, exploring their passions in internships. It's an approach that Littky calls "educating one kid at a time."

The results have been stellar, even with a main campus that’s stuck in a former crack-house neighborhood and a student body comprised of mostly low-income minorities who failed at conventional schools. The Met now has 700 students, spread across six schools in Providence. Last year, a stunning 98% of its seniors graduated, and every last one got into college. Over the years, an average of 75% of grads went on to college right away, and of those, three-fourths are either still enrolled or have graduated.

Littky readily agrees that the Met isn’t a complete answer to America’s dropout dilemma. Instead, it’s aimed at kids like Emery, who simply don’t thrive in conventional schools with a class full of students and tests at the end. Indeed, as Met-like schools pop up from Oakland to Detroit, they're challenging popular conceptions of what the nation must do to meet the spirit of the No Child Left Behind Act. The law says that 100% of America's school children will perform at grade level, meaning all would graduate. The law's assumption is that this lofty goal can be met with a back-to-basics approach in which kids are constantly tested to make sure they have met standards specifying what they must learn.

PATIENCE.

Littky vehemently rejects this approach. He says many kids start the Met’s 9th grade with a 5th-grade education level. They didn’t make it in the prior nine years, he argues, so what’s the point of making them try again? Tom Vander Ark, executive director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s education initiative, thinks as many as 20% of all American high-school students may need a Met-type education. For the hardest to reach, "the Met is one of the most promising models yet developed," says Vander Ark, who since 1999 has given $14 million to the Big Picture Company, the Met's parent, mainly to help it roll out 54 clone schools by next year. (It already has 36 up and running in 16 cities.)

The Met is the brainchild of Littky and his long-time partner, Elliot Washor, who have near rock-star status among progressive school reformers.