According to U.S. News & World Report’s latest survey, Open World Learning Community is St. Paul’s best high school, and Minnesota’s 18th best. No. 3 last year, Mahtomedi Senior High swept the state.
Before Your Humble Blogger tells you why this is six different kinds of vindication for the 210-student school and for a particular type of educational philosophy, she must pause to note that what was known back in the day as the St. Paul Open School is her alma mater.
Best-schools lists are typically greeted with equal numbers of laurels and brickbats. Because readers love lists, they drive traffic and newsstand sales. But because “best” is highly fungible, they can also be infuriating — particularly for law and business schools and other institutions of higher education that live or die by rankings.
U.S. News’ first three high-school ratings packages, published in 2007, 2008 and 2009, leaned heavily upon the number of students taking challenging — and expensive to provide — Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) courses and tests. And so they were dominated by wealthy high-flyers: Minneapolis’ Southwest, Edina, St. Louis Park, Mound Westonka, Lakeville South and so forth.
Retooled methodology
The magazine put the project on hiatus for a couple of years. When it brought the ratings back last year, it was with a new methodology. U.S. News first looked at a school’s overall test scores compared to state averages, and then adjusted for student poverty rates and number of special-ed and ELL students. Finally, it looked at IB and AP participation and exam-passage rates.
Meanwhile, in part because of the leadership of now-Education Commissioner Brenda Cassellius, Minnesota school districts were increasing access to the more rigorous coursework on the theory that it would create downward pressure on schools to have kids ready to enter the more challenging courses.
The upshot: In 2012, the usual suspects got some surprise companions near the top of the list, such as St. Paul’s Higher Ground Academy and Minneapolis’ Patrick Henry.
School once slated for closure
Which brings us back to Open World Learning, where 83 percent of the student body is economically disadvantaged and more than 70 percent are members of racial and ethnic minorities. Equally significant, not long ago the school — which had endured a revolving door in the leadership department — was slated for closure and its lower grades eliminated altogether.
The community wasn’t having it. Open has always inspired fairly fanatical devotion among its faculty and alums, who include a number of folks who went on to become prominent school innovators. Wayne Jennings and the Center for School Change’s Joe Nathan had leadership roles during my time there, for instance.
Open was started in 1971 by a group of parents who were unhappy that schools did not give students any role in designing learning or pay much attention to them as individuals. It was called experiential education. It was St. Paul’s first magnet school.
And of course it was a very “Free to be You and Me” era. For a little while students would toss out their curiosities — bread-baking! Mayan architecture! tie-dying! — and staff would scramble to create offerings to post on a big menu they rewrote every morning. (One of the first tweaks: Kindergartners can’t read schedules.)
Emphasis on learning by doing
By the time I enrolled the grown-ups had come to their senses and classes rotated less frequently. But the emphasis on learning by doing persisted, as did a collective distaste for standardized testing — we were never reprimanded for skipping school on test day — and an emphasis on more holistic evaluations.
I had a chance to visit last fall as part of the school’s 40th anniversary celebration along with Jennings and some other former faculty and alums. Today’s Open World Learning is more orderly and without question provides a better education.
(Along with a ton of really good questions about schools and public policy, my student tour guides slipped in a couple of ego-crushers: “When did you retire from teaching?” and “What was it like to be alive in the ‘70s?”)
Today, the school uses an Expeditionary Learning model based on Outward Bound’s wilderness inquiry. This year, for example, the courses somehow all lead back to the Mississippi River, located across from the school’s new Kellogg Avenue digs.
Cross-pollinating courses
So the AP biology, environmental science, literature and other courses that helped the school make U.S. News’ ranking cross-pollinate, acquiring relevance, spark critical inquiry and in general drive higher-level thinking.
AP statistics? That gets a boost from the school’s “fraquetball” league, in which teams of students and teachers wielding ping-pong paddles ricochet balls through an obstacle course of hallways and stairwells. The statistics recorded by the league’s students rival Major League Baseball.
I visit a lot of schools. And I see the program's influence in a lot of places, from open schools in other districts to schools organized around project-based learning.
Congratulations, Open World Learning Community.