Another tough playoff loss for the MCHS Cougars boys basketball team. We blew a six point halftime lead and a chance to retake the lead with 2:00 minutes to go in the game. A sad ending to what was a good season—and maybe could have been a great season.
After the game I had a talk with the coach, AD, and principal from the charter school we had just played—mostly about how broke they are and how difficult it is to afford athletics at a small charter school, and I was reminded of what it was like for us trying to have sports teams in the early days. Not that much has changed since then—the finances are still impossible—but now I’m kind of used to it. We were never supposed to have interscholastic athletics. It wasn’t in the original school plan and money was never budgeted for it. But the students wanted it. They demanded it.
There are now dozens of small charter high schools in L.A.—many of them have sports teams because their student demanded it—and, in a way, every one of these small learning communities is a direct descendent of Middle College High School, the original: New York City (the borough of Queens, Long Island City, to be exact), 1974.
It was an educational revolution for it’s time. Janet Leiberman, a professor at LaGuardia College envisioned what she believed might be a solution to the overwhelming problem of delinquency in the New York City schools. “Students at-risk” was the new term for an old problem. The dropout rate in the city was near 40%. Drugs were rampant. So were violence and apathy.
My wife and I were a high school student in New York at that time and we remember—most kids were just hanging out. School was where kids went to buy drugs, get high or get drunk, flirt with each other, and mess around. Very few teachers or students were engaged in anything educational. Everyone I knew couldn’t wait to get out of that place.
Most of the city’s public schools were warehouses, containment centers trying to keep adolescents off the streets between 8am and 3pm. Pedagogy was as dull as the flat gray walls of these places with most so-called teaching delivered on faded mimeographs. Those teachers who did take an interest in their students or even tried to engage them in some kind of meaningful learning were heroes.
The learning disabled often wound up as undiagnosed outcasts. Some of the brightest students went unnoticed or themselves became outcasts, trouble-makers screaming for a way out of the mind-numbing tedium of rote learning, relentless uniformity and standardization.
It was these students – “at-risk” with high potential, smart and bored, mostly working class and poor, and, in some cases, emotionally and socially troubled, who ought to have been preparing for college but instead were being disillusioned by school – who most concerned Janet Lieberman. Her solution, based upon a finding by the Carnegie Foundation:
- Remove these kids from those large secondary institutions where, according to Lieberman, “…restriction and frustration [from the multitude of rules] resulted in aggression.”
- Put them on a college campus because, according to Lieberman: “Fifteen year olds have more in common with twenty year olds than with twelve year olds.” It was her theory that high school students on a college campus would “subtly modify their behavior to be accepted by the college population.”
- Get them thinking about going to college. In fact, Middle College High School was conceived as spanning the high school sophomore year to the college sophomore year, and students could complete that goal at their own pace.
- Help teenagers realize that they belong in college by letting them take college classes while they are in high school; have them work toward a diploma and a degree at the same time. Provide them with tutoring and other supports so that they are likely to succeed in those college classes.
- And put together a high school program on that college campus that is engaging, with innovative pedagogy, imaginative curriculum delivered by teachers who really give a damn. Include an intensive counseling component and an internship program to help students value their education and to connect their learning with the world around them and, hopefully, with their career goals.
With $95,000 from the Carnegie Corporation and $48,000 from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Janet Lieberman and LaGuardia College President Joseph Shenker brought their first high school cohort of 125 tenth graders to LaGuardia in the fall of 1974.
High school classes were taught in college classrooms by what Lieberman referred to as “teacher-counselors,” subject specialists who took a strong guidance (and in some cases parental) role with a specific group of students. Teachers created interdisciplinary courses. They sought student input and feedback and encouraged students to be on a first name basis with them.
When students did not meet academic expectations, they were given non-credit – rather than the demoralizing F – and allowed to complete the requirements of the class at their own pace.
Students were counseled about their personal struggles and about their educational and professional futures, and given interest-based internships in the public and private sectors throughout the city.
Middle College High School was a place in which these lost souls could find themselves, in which they could ask and answer essential questions about who they were and where they fit in this crazy world.
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