Published in the Back Bay Courant, March 17, 1998

Is there any hope for urban education?

There are some who argue that public schools are doomed to failure — particularly urban public schools, and even more particularly, urban public schools that serve poor and minority students.

Under this theory, public education can, at best, be mediocre. It may be able to manage the basics but the opportunities for excellence are rare.

Yet there are places in Boston that confound this notion, where grade school and high school education is creative and demanding and challenging. One such place is City On A Hill, a high school operating out of the Central Branch YMCA on Huntington Avenue.

Two English teachers from Chelsea created the school out of whole cloth just three years ago. Their notion was to create an academically demanding high school that stressed ideas of civic responsibility. They put in an application to the state and received one of the first designations as a charter school.

Charter schools operate very differently from traditional public schools. The principal difference is their independence. Much like private schools, they have their own governing board. Like private schools, they set their own school year, their own hours of operation and their own curriculum. Their staffing and administration is not governed by the labor rules that so frequently hinder experimentation at public schools.

Unlike private schools, however, charter schools are plainly public. They abide by state curriculum regulations. Admission to a charter school is through a lottery; there is no entrance exam. And, of course, students at a charter school pay no tuition.

The YMCA provides space for City On A Hill to hold classes. It started with 65 students and eventually hopes to have 220; 75 percent of its students are minority, more than 50 percent begin school reading below their grade level.

Like every independent school, City On A Hill has its own way of doing things. All students have to learn to swim. They wear uniforms and each week participate in school town meetings to debate the issues of the day.

Each year the entire school suspends classes so that students can participate in a three-week internship at jobs around the city. Students have worked for the New England Aquarium, Boston Medical Center and the Boston Herald; this year one student interned in my office.

Even more importantly, City on a Hill has developed its own culture of learning and espirit du corps. Touring through the school one is struck by the enthusiasm for learning that seems to infect its students. Talking to the students themselves, one is struck further by the comparisons they draw between City On A Hill and their previous educational experiences. Where once they felt betrayed by public schools, now they find themselves renewed.

The results have been impressive. Daily attendance is 95 percent. City On A Hill students are outperforming traditional public school students by wide margins on the Stanford 9 achievement tests.

City on a Hill is only a small part of a larger experiment in public education. It is an experiment replicated in other charter schools, like the Boston Renaissance Charter School in Bay Village and the Academy of the Pacific Rim in Hyde Park. It is also being replicated at pilot schools — in effect, city chartered schools — such as the Multicultural High School and the New School, both on Mission Hill, the Lyndon School in West Roxbury and the about-to-be opened Arts Academy. The Arts Academy, by the way, will occupy the old Boston Latin Academy building behind Fenway Park.

This is exciting stuff. These schools show the way to a new model of urban public education, a model that stresses independence over centralization, a model that could eventually make Boston's public schools a reason to move into the city, not out of it.