Educators Blend Divergent Schools of Thought

New York University educational historian Diane Ravitch said she would be happy if "a new generation of educators figured out that nontraditional means of teaching can be merged with a solid academic curriculum," but she also said, "It would be a miracle."

Other experts are more hopeful. Hirsch, who conceived the Core Knowledge program that inspired Barbic, said those who think it has to be taught in a traditional way are wrong. "The logic was Core Knowledge has traditional content, ergo it must also have 'traditional' pedagogy," he said. "We don't specify pedagogy."

The conflict between project learning and book learning "is false," Blank said. "There is lots of content in the real world that young people can experience that will make learning meaningful. And nearly everything in the real world can be found in state standards."

Kenneth Bernstein, a teacher at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt who tends to be on the progressive side of the argument, said, "I have no trouble with people trying a variety of approaches to education. What is, in my opinion, most likely to make a particular approach successful is that the persons using that approach believe in it, get a buy-in from students and parents and not apply it rigidly when the needs of the students are otherwise."

More on the traditionalist side, Mark Ingerson, a teacher at Salem (Va.) High School, said he admired a teacher who, after teaching World War II, had his students visit and collect oral histories from veterans of that war. "This doesn't work well unless the students firmly understand the facts about the Battle of the Bulge, D-Day, Omaha Beach, bunkers and other specifics," he said.

Barbic said he and his teachers continue to merge the two approaches at his oldest school, the sixth through 12th grade southeast Houston campus, set up in portable classrooms on an old horse farm, as well as on two new campuses and a fourth soon to open. Community projects are still important at YES; Emily Venson, a teacher supervising a project on ethics, said her students pick topics of concern to the community, such as toxic spills or police brutality, then investigate, write and present a report.

At the same time, the school has achieved the highest level of Advanced Placement test participation in Houston by requiring that every student take at least one AP course and test before graduation.

Ismael Nieto, a 12th-grader at the school whose father is a carpet installer, had good scores on three AP tests last year and will take three more this year. AP U.S. history, he said, was "a lot of late nights trying to catch up with your reading," but his teacher, Kimberly Dolibois, broke the class into small groups that "worked together to make sure everyone in the group understood what we were reading." After AP tests are over this month, he'll tackle his ethics project.

Barbic said he does not think the school would have been able to combine traditionalism and progressivism so comfortably if he had not seen the best and worst of both. "There are still things we probably need to work on," he said, "but I think we have gotten to a pretty good place."