Slashdot Mirror
School's Out Forever at SV High Tech High
theodp writes "Touted as a model of successful education by the likes of Bill Gates, Silicon Valley's High Tech High just held its first — and last — commencement ceremony, graduating only 21 students in its brief history. Despite the financial support of the world's richest man, the charter school cited money woes as it voted to shut its doors. Adding insult to the poor HTH kids' injury, the local public H.S. district plunked down $8.6M to snatch up their abandoned school and will turn it over to a brand new crop of kids in the fall."
High Tech High is alive and well in San Diego County. They're now up to 6 campuses, I believe with one elementary middle school, one middle school, three high schools in south county and a new middle school and high school opening in North county this fall.
Their robotics team is very well respected and consistently performs well at national competitions. Their college placement rates are substantially higher than other local high schools. The failure of the SV HTH actually had more to do with administrative and personnel issues that were unique to the San Francisco campus. HTH continues to thrive and grow in California.
The servers were Linux-based, open source, and free software. The student equipment was Mac. Gates' money didn't come with Microsoft strings attached.
One of my children was a student at the school for three years, before leaving because it sucked big rocks.
My son attended HTHB (High Tech High Bayshore) for three years. Or, to be more clear, he attended the school that started as San Carlos High School as one of the first students, and continued after the school became first loosely affiliated with and then a part of the High Tech High family, becoming HTHB. I didn't pick the school for him; he chose it himself, because he really liked the idea of charter schools, and wanted to attend a small school.
So, the first year, the school had about 78 freshmen enrolled, which was shy of the promised minimum of 80 (and goal of 100). There was a lot of hassle about not quite having 80 students. The school was not well supported by the chartering school district. It was a lot like being at a startup -- we did without many things, everyone was very optimistic, people fullfilled multiple roles, etc. That first year, there were basically only 4-5 teachers total, and they were mostly pretty good. My son had a math teacher who was amazing, dedicated, intelligent, and very inspiring to her students. His physics teacher was also great -- really interested in the topic even though it wasn't what his grad work was in, great with the students. He was a little outspoken sometimes -- he and I got into it in email once over something really silly. My son's Spanish teacher was wonderful and devoted, had a student at the school. His humanities teacher was well, *okay* -- didn't seem on the same level with the other teachers, and sometimes basically taught wrong things. There were days when I thought, "I cannot believe I am trusting my son's future to a startup", but I dealt with it. That year, my son did independent study work to do two years of math in the same year -- he and a few other students were a year ahead of most of the student body. At that time, the school's model allowed for independent study, separate pacing, things like that.
The second year, the school was announced to be more closely affiliated with High Tech High in San Diego, but was not yet "a High Tech High school". The original principal had left the school and instead there was a guy who had been a middle school principal. My son and the other students a year ahead in math were initially independent study with assistance from the Really Great Math Teacher, but at some point, the administration decided that it was too much work for her, and instead put the new math teacher in charge of them. Well *that* guy wasn't a good teacher. In fact, he didn't help the students with their studies; it appeared he didn't have the math ability to understand what they were doing. He told them he couldn't give them tests because he wasn't able to grade them. He was A Bad Teacher, very erratic. Half way through the year, the school gave *that* up, too, and instead sent those advanced math students to take math at a local community college.
Other parts of the year were more uneven, too. My son had a great humanities teacher, but his (new hire) chemistry teacher quit after a few weeks, and the replacement sucked. He taught students the wrong constant for Avagadro's number, things like that. Further, the school had no lab equipment, so they weren't doing any lab component. My understanding is that at some point, it became clear that the course would not be "state-certified" (which means it can be used towards getting into a UC-system university) unless it had a lab component. So the teacher did a basic measuring lab. And then he did it again. And for the rest of the year, every few days they would do pretty much THE SAME LAB, so that they could say that students had X number of lab hours per year. Nothing else. At the end of the year, the administration actually admitted that the students had not learned any chemistry, and that they felt bad, and would try to have a better teacher the next year. They told parents that yes, they had known that the teacher *and many others* had sucked early in the year, but they felt it was only fair to give them a semester to "settle in", and then once that was over, it seemed difficult to repla