Education Week - September 21, 2016 - 6

XQ SUPER SCHOOL WINNERS
The 10 projects named last week are:

Ten High Schools Win $100 Million
Contest aims to fuel
schools' redesigns
By Catherine Gewertz
Ten teams across the country have
won a collective $100 million to create
new high schools or transform existing ones in one of the nation's biggest
school-redesign competitions.
Each of the winners of XQ: The
Super School Project will have
$10 million over the next five years to
undertake ambitious projects centered
on innovative, engaging approaches
to learning. All projects serve student
populations that are predominantly
low-income and/or part of a racial
minority group. The 10 winning teams
were announced last week.
The contest was announced last
September by Laurene Powell Jobs,
the widow of Apple co-founder Steve
Jobs. It was originally a $50 million
competition, but the award pot mushroomed to $100 million in response to
the deluge of 696 proposals, according
to an XQ spokeswoman. Prize money
comes from the Emerson Collective,
which Powell Jobs established to work
on education, immigration reform, and
other social-justice issues.
A key tenet of the competition was
to create a vision of high school that
drew heavily on the wants and needs
of students themselves. To gather
those views, the XQ team conducted a

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nationwide bus tour, making stops to
talk to teenagers, as well as teachers, parents, principals, and others
interested in reimagining secondary school. XQ assembled a panel
of advisers unusual for its range:
It includes cellist Yo-Yo Ma, Colorado state Sen. Mike Johnston, and
science educator Bill Robertson,
known as Doctor Skateboard.
The XQ project is one of the biggest
monied contests for school redesign.
The largest is still the 1993 Annenberg Challenge, which handed out
$500 million in grants to school districts and partnerships to undertake
reforms in 18 sites across the country.
Grants ranged from $1 million to
$53 million.

Beyond 'Pockets of Innovation'
Foundations have long sponsored
initiatives to rework high school, from
the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's
investments in small high schools to
the Carnegie Corporation of New
York's ongoing support for high school
improvement. The Carnegie Corporation outlined 10 key principles of
strong high school design in its 2013
report "Opportunity by Design" and
committed $40 million in grants for
projects guided by those principles.
President Barack Obama's administration, too, has gotten involved in
trying to improve high school. In November 2015, when the White House
held its first summit on "next genera-

tion high schools," the administration
announced that it had corralled
$375 million from the public and private sectors for various types of high
school programs.
But no one knows better than high
school reformers that making profound change in that institution can
be rough going.
Warren Simmons, a senior fellow
at the Annenberg Institute for School
Reform, which ran that challenge,
said the XQ project is a valuable way
to revisit ideas about school design
periodically with changing student
populations, needs, and technology
in mind.
But he cautioned the winners to
heed the experience of earlier reformers. Without deep changes in the
district, state, and national systems
in which schools are embedded, such
as accountability, testing, and teacher
contracts, even the most creative and
valuable school designs could end up
as just "pockets of innovation," Simmons said.
Without those changes, new
schools "either have to exist outside
the system to survive, or they get
derailed by systems that weren't designed to sustain and support them,
because the current structures and
policies are inappropriate or ineffective in sustaining the new designs,"
Simmons said.
Library Interns Teresa Lewandowski and
Laura Zollers contributed to this report.

Powderhouse Studios | Somerville, Mass.
This new school will ditch traditional
class schedules. Students will become
"investigators," working in teams with
adults on real-world projects. Each team
will have a curriculum designer, social
worker, and project manager.
Brooklyn Laboratory Charter
High School | New York City
This new charter school will focus
on delivering college-prep studies to
"complex learners" not well served by
typical public schools, such as those who
are learning English, have disabilities, or
are over-age and undercredited.
Design-Lab High | Newark, Del.
This charter school, which opened in 2015
for grades 9 and 10, will expand to include
grades 11 and 12. It uses a student-ledproject approach, with 9th graders acting
as apprentices on cross-grade teams,
and assuming more responsibility as they
progress through school.
Furr High School | Houston
This former dropout factory will redesign its
learning approach to feature student-led
projects addressing real-world problems,
and to give the students "a sense of hope
... that they can be change agents in the
turbulent worlds from which they come."
New Harmony High | Venice, La.
This new school will exist in multiple
sites, including a barge in the Gulf
of Mexico, on fishing boats, and
in science labs. Study will be built
around the theme of rising sea

levels and how they affect the Native
American Houma people.
RISE High | Los Angeles
This new school for homeless and foster
teenagers will be located in the offices of
shelters and other service providers. It will
offer flexible scheduling and 24/7 online
access for students, as well as wraparound
services to support their physical needs.
Summit Elevate | Oakland, Calif.
The Summit Public Schools charter
network will open a new school focusing
on preparing students for college and
contributing to society. All students will
leave with transcripts that prepare them
for "any four-year college or university,"
says a proposal summary.
Vista Challenge High | Vista, Calif.
This is a project to redesign a
2,200-student high school. With its
partner, Digital Promise, the Vista Unified
School District will create a "learning
positioning system" to help students
track where they are in their study.
Washington Leadership
Academy | Washington
This new charter school aims to replace
lectures and worksheets with online
modules, holographic field trips, and
virtual-reality studies that students
use at their own pace.
Grand Rapids Public Museum High
School | Grand Rapids, Mich. This new
district school will use the artifact
collections of a local museum to explore
questions about culture and history.

Using Basic Classroom Materials to Inspire
The Next Century of Innovators
Join us for an exploration of how
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STEM-oriented lessons focusing
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Explore real-world learning
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practitioners in the field.
FREE WEBINAR
WEDNESDAY
SEPT. 28, 2016
2 TO 3 P.M. ET
www.edweek.org/go/webinar/
RealWorldLearning

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*	 TONY CASTILLEJA JR.,
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*	 JENNIFER STOTTS, STEM
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MODERATOR
*	 HOLLY YETTICK, director,
Education Week Research
Center

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Education Week - September 21, 2016

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