Dive Brief:

• Education Week profiles Cleveland’s MC2 STEM High School, an open-access school that has a 97% graduation rate, even though 85% of students live in poverty, and strong connections to the community.
• The project-based curriculum features guest speakers from science, technology, engineering, and math-related businesses and nonprofits in Cleveland, and students have the opportunity to take classes in the Great Lakes Science Center and General Electric’s Nela Park campus.
• MC2 struggles with funding, but its community partners have rallied to save it before, and part of their loyalty has come from embedding partners in the functioning of the school rather than simply accepting their checks. But developing partnerships that work for both sides is a challenge.

Dive Insight:

Magnet schools in many districts are selective, requiring students to prove their worth on standardized tests or through other means. In cities like Chicago and Boston, these selective schools have become dominated by the minority student population in their districts — wealthy, white students. MC2 represents a rejection of this inequity, offering an innovative curriculum that asks students to learn how to think instead of simply memorize.

In the years since No Child Left Behind created strict accountability requirements for student performance in reading and math, high-poverty districts, especially, have doubled down on skill drills and double periods of reading or math instruction, foregoing the scheduling flexibility that allows for project-based learning. Civil rights advocates have identified this as a key problem in the unequal education system offered to the nation’s students.