The End Of The Renaissance

By David Donavel

In the fall of 1989, after five years of thought and planning, a group of my colleagues and I took a major risk: We implemented a restructuring project in our high school. We called it the Renaissance Program, or RenPro for short.

Our study convinced us that school people need to take major risks if we expect to see the kind of sweeping changes that educators, business leaders, and politicians suggest are necessary to improve our schools. The days when it was sufficient to make small adjustments in the educational system are long gone.

RenPro reallocated time and staff across the school day and year. Instead of taking five or six courses at once, the 80 plus students who volunteered for the program took two 100-minute, 60-day courses at a time. Over the course of the 180-day school year, a student covered six subjects. For example, a 9th grader might have studied math in the morning and science in the afternoon every day from September to November, history and a foreign language every day from December to February, and literature and fine arts from March to May. During each cycle, teachers taught only two classes a day with about...