Memorizing the quadratic formula is a valuable lifelong lesson with practical everyday applications.
Said exactly no high school kid ever.
But show that same algebra student how she can determine the number of downloads of her app needed to stay in business, and at what price, and the quadratic formula might suddenly seem a little more powerful, and definitely relevant.
The Iovine and Young Academy at USC was founded with the mission of addressing the marked change in the profile of students everywhere — how they, as digital natives, acquire and utilize information — as well as the growing gap between educational institutions and the needs of the employers.
This can be a model replicated in cities across the country, including New York. Like higher education, traditional public schools often struggle to connect students’ lessons in the classroom to the real world, and to careers that are exciting and meaningful to the students themselves. More importantly, in many cases, educators find themselves working against traditional ways of teaching that haven’t considered the now-critical need to quickly and effectively respond to the technology-driven shifts in how and why we work, and the rapidly changing opportunities available to our students upon graduation.
Reinforcing connections to what matters to the students is at the heart of a new approach to learning in this new partnership within the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Our school, set to open its doors in fall 2022, will regularly ask students to explore the intersection between areas such as finance and design, math and marketing, science and storytelling, and culture and innovation, and instill creative confidence as they learn to embrace risk, even temporary failure, as essential tools for bringing their dreams to life.
This isn’t a charter school; it’s run by the district. Built on a campus in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, the model for this new school rests on the premise that public education has to change to prepare students for a 21st-century economy. It is our goal with this and subsequent efforts to make the style of education most often found at private schools available to children in public schools.
By locating the campus in a neighborhood with predominately Black and Latino children, we stand a better chance of helping students who may have never met a Google engineer, an Apple designer, or a leading medical researcher to see that they have the same potential to invent or be part of The Next Big Thing.
Though we are piloting the effort in Los Angeles, we believe this approach is scalable. Marquee names are not essential to the hard work of bringing the campuses to life. What is needed is the extensive and potentially untapped networks of business and creative resources that can be found in cities across the country, and a commitment by civic and business leaders to work with local public schools in their own cities.
New York is an ideal fit. The city’s public schools serve overwhelmingly non-white students, and 75% are from families struggling to make ends meet. And, like Los Angeles, New York is a magnet for talented leaders, entrepreneurs, creatives, and researchers across many fields and industries. With these resources, one can imagine high school programs built from scratch around the idea of developing the skills and attributes that would allow students to begin addressing issues in areas such as health care, media, finance and more.
A traditional high school day consists of six or seven distinct periods. When the bell rings, students spend the next several minutes rushing to their next class and forgetting what they just learned in the last one. We can probably all agree, life is a lot more like those brief, chaotic passing periods than the neat, siloed structure of a classroom. Imagine if students were encouraged to think about how to apply what they learned in their last class to the lesson in their next.
The leading companies in the world are moving away from having tech teams in one building, business and finance in another, and the creatives in still another. Unified approaches to new, collaborative ways of thinking and doing are emerging. Moreover, we now understand that true innovation isn’t possible without incorporating voices represented by diverse cultures, perspectives, backgrounds and life experiences. If we are successful in creating learning environments that facilitate, support and honor all of these values, the only question remaining to be answered is who will receive the greatest benefit: the students, or the society that will be so immeasurably enriched by their contributions.
Beutner is former superintendent of Los Angeles Unified School District. Iovine is co-founder of the University of Southern California’s Iovine and Young Academy. Muhl is founding dean of the USC Iovine and Young Academy, and incoming president of the Berklee College of Music.
