Meet the Met, A School Success Story

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A TV movie was even made in the early 1990s about Littky's controversial, but successful efforts to turn around a failing high school in New Hampshire. So in 1995, Rhode Island Education Commissioner Peter McWalters asked Littky if he and Washor would build a new school and gave them free rein to design it.

The Met's radically different structure—no classes, kids heading off in vans to internships, adults and kids on a first-name basis—can be shocking to visitors to its main campus in Providence. But the real secret to its success may be how it approaches students. One key: patience. Given these students’ rough backgrounds, they need a lot of coaching, not just on educational subjects but on how to get along in school and life—the need to get up on time, attend class, not act out. So the Met gives them a second, third, and even a fourth chance. "If you expel them the first time they act out (as many urban schools do), you're going to have a very high dropout rate," says Eliot Levine, a PhD psychologist who's written a book about The Met and now works as an advisor there.

HOOKED.

Chris Emery is a perfect example of how such patience pays off. When Emery showed up at the Met four years ago, "He wasn't serious at all about the academics," recalls his advisor Carlos Moreno, a huge, friendly man who left a budding business career to teach at the school. So Carlos helped Emery get an internship at a commercial bakery. Every Tuesday and Thursday, Emery would head out to Pastry Arts in nearby Central Falls, where he learned how to mix batter and make cheesecake and tarts. Back at The Met, Emery was hardly a model student. "He was carefree, and I had a couple of discipline issues," recalls Moreno. "One time he went after a student with a pair of scissors," after that student had threatened to cut Chris' long hair. Moreno stepped in before the situation got out of hand. "And sometimes he would randomly leave the building," says Moreno.

But things changed once Emery became a sophomore. While working as an intern in the Met's kitchen, he became interested in the impact food has on health. He decided to compare the healthy food served at the Met with the nearby Wendy's, a favorite student haunt. Soon, Emery was immersed in research on lipids and fat molecules. His primary conclusion, which he then presented to fellow students: Wendy's food had a lot more fat and sodium than the food at the Met, which was not only healthier, but free to students. Emery was so persuasive that some Met students and faculty—including Moreno—stopped going to Wendy's.

By then, Emery was hooked. "When I woke up in the morning, I didn't want to go into the kitchen anymore," he recalls. "I wanted to do research. I loved science. It was so much fun." That was the moment Moreno had been waiting for. Figuring it was time for Emery to move on to another mentor, he called an old frat buddy who was earning a doctorate at Brown. Eventually, that led to a brief meeting between Emery and Leigh Needleman, a young Brown scientist working on her doctorate in neuroscience.

WANTED: GOOD PEOPLE.

Understandably, Needleman was skeptical. But Emery asked complicated questions, and understood her answers, she says. So Needleman decided to give him a chance, and soon Emery was helping set up her lab experiments. Then she let him work with the lab's ultra-expensive microscopes, used to zoom in on neurons. "He was using equipment that most college students never touch until they become grad students," she says. She encouraged him to take Brown's introductory neuroscience course, where he pulled a B, despite his shaky academic past. Emery, whose parents didn’t go to college, now dreams of earning his own PhD.

While not every Met student is smart enough to be a neuroscientist, Littky has managed to maintain the school’s impressive graduation and college-going rates even as it expanded to six publicly funded Met campuses in Providence.