Common Intellectual Mission
High Tech High makes no distinction between "college prep" and "technical" education; the program qualifies all students for college and success in the world of work. Enrollment is non-selective, and there is no tracking at HTH. The curriculum is rigorous, providing the foundation for entry and success at the University of California and elsewhere. Assessment is performance-based: all students develop projects, solve problems, and present findings to community panels. All students are required to complete an academic internship, a substantial senior project, and a personal digital portfolio. Teacher teams have ample planning time to devise integrated projects, common rubrics for assessment, and common rituals by which all students demonstrate their learning and progress toward graduation.
Teacher As Designer
High Tech High teachers work in interdisciplinary teams to develop the program for 50-70 students per team. The schedule accommodates team teaching, common planning time, project-based learning, work-based learning, and other regular interaction with the outside world.
Personalization
Each student at HTH has a staff advisor, who monitors the student’s personal and academic development and serves as the point of contact for the family. Students pursue personal interests through projects. They compile and present their best work in personal digital portfolios. Students with special needs receive individual attention in a full inclusion model. Facilities are tailored to individual and small-group learning, including networked wireless laptops, project rooms for hands-on activities and exhibition spaces for individual work.
Adult-World Connection
HTH students experience some of their best learning outside the school walls. Juniors complete a semester-long academic internship in a local business or agency. Seniors develop substantial projects that enable them to learn while working on problems of interest and concern in the community. Earlier, in 9th and 10th grade as well as middle school, students may "shadow" an adult through a workday, perform community service in a group project, or engage in “power lunches” with outside adults on issues of interest. The HTH facilities themselves have a distinctive high-tech "workplace" feel, with windowed seminar rooms, small-group learning and project areas, laboratories equipped with the latest technology, ubiquitous wireless laptop access, and common areas where artwork and prototypes are displayed.
The design principles permeate every aspect of life at High Tech High: the small size of the school, the openness of the facilities, the personalization through advisory, the emphasis on integrated, project-based learning and student exhibitions, the requirement that all students complete internships in the community, and the provision of ample planning time for teacher teams during the work day. We discuss each design principle in turn below.
High Tech High has distilled the six NUHS design principles to three: personalization, adult world connection, and common intellectual mission. Responding directly to the needs of students, all three principles connect to the broad mission of preparation for the adult world. Moreover, all three call for structures and practices that schools do not now routinely employ. High Tech High has also created a more recent design principle, known as teacher as designer.
The roots of the High Tech High program and curriculum lie in earlier work of Larry Rosenstock and colleagues in the New Urban High School Project (NUHS), an initiative of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Vocational and Adult Education, 1996-99. The aim was to select, study, and assist six inner-city high schools that were using school-to-work strategies, such as internships and other forms of field work, as a lever for whole-school change. The findings were summarized in a practitioner’s guide and a high school planning guide centered on six design principles.
From January 1999 to the opening of the Gary & Jerri-Ann Jacobs High Tech High in September of 2000, Rosenstock and the founding group, led by Gary Jacobs, worked in tandem. Rosenstock located a site, prepared the charter application, hired staff, and oversaw the development of the program, while Jacobs and the business community took the lead in addressing issues of financing and facilities development.
In late 1998 the group voted to start a charter school and engaged Larry Rosenstock, then President of Price Charities in San Diego, as the founding principal. The founding group was clear about its intent: to create a school where students would be passionate about learning and would acquire the basic skills of work and citizenship. Rosenstock, a former carpentry teacher, lawyer, and high school principal who had recently directed the U.S. Department of Education’s New Urban High School project, brought a vision and a sense of the design principles by which this mission might be accomplished (see Design Principles)
High Tech High was originally conceived by a group of about 40 civic and high tech industry leaders in San Diego, assembled by the Economic Development Corporation and the Business Roundtable, who met regularly in 1996-98 to discuss the challenge of finding qualified individuals for the high-tech work force. In particular, members were concerned about the “digital divide” that resulted in low numbers of women and ethnic minority groups entering the fields of math, science, and engineering. Gary Jacobs, Director of Education Programs at Qualcomm, and Kay Davis, Director of the Business Roundtable, were key participants in these discussions.
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