On a recent trip to New York City, a group of Uni faculty members visited a number of the city's top high schools and realized Uni has room to improve — and a lot to be proud of

By Emma Anselin
Gargoyle assistant editor
Posted Friday, April 21, 2006, The OG, features

Welcome to Stuyvesant High School, one of New York City's finest educational institutions. The building boasts over 10 stories, many of which are reserved for individual deparments. The halls are filled with stacks of The New York Times. Recently the escalators (that's right, escalators) have been in disrepair, forcing students to rely on manual labor to transport their brains up 10 flights of stairs.

Stuyvesant is one of the high schools that a group of Uni faculty members visited the last week of March, along with Hunter College High School, Bard High School Early College, and The Beacon School.

Director/Principal Kassie Patton, who organized the trip, was accompanied by counselors Lisa Micele and Sam Smith and history teachers Billy Vaughn and Jenny Kim. In addition to visiting local high schools, the group attended a conference at Columbia University given by the National Association of Laboratory Schools (NALS). Their experience in the Big Apple not only revealed some policies that Uni may learn from, but also exposed the true uniqueness of Uni's academic environment and student body.

“I have never attended that conference [NALS] before, and since it is the national meeting of lab schools, I thought it was important to see what it was all about,” says Patton.

Though the conference was the initial reason for the trip, participating faculty chose to take advantage of their New York City excursion to investigate some of the city's laboratory schools in person.

“I wanted to visit the Hunter College High School because they are the only school I have found in the country that is just like us — a public high school for gifted students that is affiliated with a college, but not governed by the education department,” Patton says.

Other schools were added to the list based on their experimental curriculum, competitive admissions, or merely celebrity status in the case of Stuyvesant, which has been rated the best high school in New York City. Unfortunately, Patton had to delay her departure for the trip and was only able to visit Stuyvesant.

“It's important for us to learn about practices at other schools so that we can continue to grow and improve,” says Patton.

In addition to more general observation of school policies, each faculty member focused on issues related to their respective disciplines while visiting the institutions. Smith and Micele met with school counselors, and Vaughn investigated the history departments.

“I have never taught in another high school other than Uni, and I wanted the chance to see up close several schools that are peers of Uni in the nation,” says Vaughn. “I also wanted to meet other social studies department heads to develop contacts so we can exchange ideas in the future.”

Kim also visited history classes but primarily explored admissions testing. According to Kim, admission to these competitive schools rests on “just one high stakes test,” much unlike Uni's multi-faceted application process.

Despite their labels as laboratory or competitive high schools, each institution that the faculty group visited was different, both in comparison to each other and to Uni.

“Hunter College High School seemed to have a similar academic culture like Uni, although much larger in number of students and teachers,” says Vaughn.

He describes Bard Early College High School as “very much like a typical public school” and Stuyvesant as “very very large and not much like Uni at all.”

“The Beacon School was an amazing left-wing alternative school,” he continues, “but with very different goals and kinds of students than Uni.”

In fact, one resounding similarity among each school was their more diverse population than Uni, largely due to the New York City setting.

In spite of such differences, many schools displayed policies and traditions that Uni can glean and learn from.

“Hunter … has no bells — students and teachers start class when they are supposed to without that obnoxious ringing,” says Vaughn. “The students were very mature in their desire to get to class on time.”

Bard High School, which offers two years of high school and two years of college at Bard College, especially opened teachers' eyes to the possibilities for connecting with the University of Illinois.

“Uni High is always looking for venues to increase our affiliations with the university,” says Kim, who hopes that future students will have more opportunities to take U of I classes.

Kim is currently compiling information and faculty perspectives from the trip for a presentation to the entire Uni faculty later this year.

“We hope to learn what other schools do in curriculum, admissions, etc. that is good or not so good,” says Patton.

Overall, the faculty came away with a sense of how exceptional the Uni community truly is, even in comparison to the slightly daunting resources and infrastructures of some of New York City's best and brightest high schools.

“We're not Podunk anymore,” says Kim. “The teachers here might be hard, but they care, and we can, it's so small.”

In fact, the New York City experience largely enhanced many teachers' appreciation for the small size of Uni's student population. In schools such as Stuyvesant, with10 stories and 10 times the enrollment of Uni, students do not have nearly the same individual attention and first-name basis with teachers that Uni Highers take for granted.

The New York City excursion also reinforced the exceptionality of Uni's non-AP standards and flexible curriculum.

“[New York City faculty] were so impressed we could get that bureaucracy out of our minds,” says Kim.

Even though many of the schools that Uni faculty visited were labeled laboratory schools, they were still forced to abide by strict AP requirements that Uni teachers can disregard.

“I think that we learned that Uni is, indeed, unique, and that we do many things well,” says Patton. “We have a lot to be proud of here.”