Case Studies of Leading Edge Small Urban High Schools. Relevance Strategic Designs: 8. High Tech High School

This report is one of nine detailed case studies of small urban high schools that served as the foundation for the Education Resource Strategies (ERS) report "Strategic Designs: Lessons from Leading Edge Small Urban High Schools." These nine schools were dubbed "Leading Edge Schools" because they stand apart from other high schools across the country in designing new ways to "do school" while outperforming most high schools in their local districts. ERS found that Leading Edge Schools deliberately create high-performing organizational structures, or Strategic Designs, that deliberately organize people, time, and money to advance their specific instructional models--the set of decisions the schools make about how they organize and deliver instruction. They create these Strategic Designs through four interconnected practices: (1) Clearly defining an instructional model that reflects the schools' vision, learning goals, and student population; (2) Organizing people, time, and money to support this instructional model by (a) investing in teaching quality, (b) using student time strategically, and (c) creating individual attention for students; (3) Making trade-offs to invest in the most important priorities when faced with limits on the amount, type, and use of people, time, and money; and (4) Adapting their strategies in response to lessons learned and changing student needs and conditions. Using these strategies as their framework, ERS assessed case study school practices and quantified their resource use. They did this by creating a set of "diagnostic indicators" that describe how schools best use their resources for improving student performance. They are used throughout the case studies to illustrate resource use. ERS hopes that these case studies will serve multiple purposes: to generate ideas about implementing strategies in schools; to help develop new small schools and reform existing schools; and to engage colleagues, principals, and teachers in conversations about what is possible in their districts. Appendices present: (1) Resource strategies; (2) High Tech High sample student schedule; (3) High Tech High graduation requirements; and (4) High Tech High staff list. (Contains 15 notes and 6 figures.) [For the full report, "Strategic Designs: Lessons from Leading Edge Small Urban High Schools," see ED544382.]