Like a Sponge

In this season of Like a Sponge, we explore how high schools need to change. Learn how practices rooted in equity and rigor benefit all students. What does it mean for a school to become trauma-sensitive? Or anti-rascist? Or to help teens try a career path? See how these big ideas play out in real schools.

What does it take to turn around a high school with lagging attendance, low test scores, and few resources? Some educators might say, “baby steps.” Instead, North Edgecombe High School launched a radical rethink of the whole student experience, all guided by a design thinking process led by the students themselves.

In search of relevant learning, many traditional high schools are adding internship programs and capstone projects to their curriculum. This innovative Rhode Island high school built its entire curriculum around each individual child’s curiosity about the future. Listen in as one girl, who had lost her way in a traditional high school, found her North Star.

A charter school in Philadelphia rethinks their policies and practices to strip out bias. In Texas, one highly effective teacher transforms her students’ learning liabilities into super powers. In both schools, ordinary educators are finding extraordinary success in questioning old assumptions that leave some kids behind.

One Massachusetts’ charter school had a culture of high behavioral expectations to match their high academic expectations. The only problem? All those rules were actually getting in the way of learning. Learn how this school transformed their culture, policies, and practices by reframing the invisible forcefield that influenced it all: the mindset of the adults.

From the outset, Grayson High School, located just outside of Atlanta, GA, looks like a typical American high school: big football field, bigger pep rallies. But it also offers a program that enables kids to time travel into their imagined futures and sample dream careers. Grayson Tech has 12 pathway programs that teach everything from culinary arts to music tech. For students, it’s not just vocational training — it’s a path to finding their purpose.

No fancy campus. Few extracurriculars. No football stadium. This small early college high school defies a lot of the myths about what high school is supposed to be. Instead, they succeed at the very thing so many high schools claim is their primary goal: to help students get into college and succeed once they get there. Their secret to college prep? Start college now.

No matter whether you’re measuring by student satisfaction or test scores, most American high schools don’t have great outcomes. This has led some to declare that this centuries-old mass institution is broken. Actually, say experts, it’s working just the way it was designed to work. And that’s the problem. 

In this season of Like a Sponge, we explore how high schools need to change, and the ways some educators are rethinking assumptions and remaking their schools to actually work for students.

We want our kids to be confident learners. We tell them to “speak up in class” and “fake it till you make it.” What about that old-fashioned virtue, humility?  New research suggests it may be the key to learning.

We all want to give our children the best we can. To how much we care. But research suggests that a more lasting gift parents can give their children is the personal experience of giving back.