PROVIDENCE, R.I. — When she wanted to be a detective, Carleen Mylers studied criminal justice and took a job as an investigator. When she thought she might become a lawyer, she worked in family court. Now that she has an internship in a local middle school, people are asking if she plans to go into teaching.
No, Mylers says. What she is actually doing is spying, using her observations as fodder for a novel.
"I look at the kids who are always reading, walking around with a book in their hands," Mylers said. "I know my novel will have a character like that."
For Mylers, 17, the diverse workplace experience is part of her curriculum at the Met School -- a thriving public high school here that caters to a largely poor and minority student population.
The 9-year-old Met School defies convention, with no letter grades, no required classes, and "advisors" instead of teachers who work with the same small group of students for four consecutive years. Instead of taking tests, the 580 students present "exhibitions" of their work.
With 100% of its seniors accepted each year to college, the Met's "one student at a time" approach to learning has caught the attention of educators around the country.
The success of the school also prompted the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to fund a nationwide network of similar schools known as the Big Picture.
Awards of about $15 million made the Big Picture Company "our largest alternative school grantee," said Tom Vander Ark, executive director of education for the Gates Foundation.
"There simply are kids that are wired differently or have had different life experiences. They need schools that are highly individualized and highly supportive," Vander Ark said. "The Met certainly is both. We take people there just to blow apart their preconceptions of how a school ought to work."
Among the 18 Big Picture campuses established in the last two years are schools in Oakland, San Diego, Sacramento and rural El Dorado, Calif. Dennis Littky, founder of the Met School and co-director of the Big Picture Company, said a school in Santa Monica also was under discussion.
The conventional U.S. high school, Littky said, is little more than "an early 20th century assembly line."
"The word most kids use when they talk about high school is 'boring,' " Littky said. "What a shame."
