Re-Designing Education

Just a block away from Independence Hall, a small high school has started a quiet educational revolution. The Charter High School for Architecture and Design (CHAD) offers a unique curriculum in the spatial and visual arts and taps cognitive capacities that are rarely explored at the high school level. CHAD both integrates the study of space into traditional high school subjects and ventures into new territory with imaginative courses in drafting, visual arts, and architectural design.

CHAD has succeeded in stimulating interest in professional design careers among inner-city young people, and particularly racial and ethnic minorities who are underrepresented in the design fields. But more broadly, CHAD bestows upon students - even those who express little interest in a design career - gifts of confidence, ability, and discipline that they cannot easily find in other Philadelphia secondary schools. A look at CHAD’s seven-year history reveals how the school leverages its limited resources to make a significant impact on its students. It also shows how an ambitious curriculum and engagement of local professionals can go a long way toward improving students’ educational experience. 

From the Ground Up

CHAD was conceived in 1999 by the Philadelphia chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in conjunction with its hosting of the 2000 national AIA convention. Since the mid-1990s, each AIA chapter representing the national convention host city has conceived and executed a “Legacy Project.” Philadelphia’s Legacy Project set an impressive long-term goal: the creation of an independent, non-profit charter school. Later AIA ventures—like the establishment of an Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture by the San Diego AIA or the creation of a foundation by the Las Vegas AIA that will improve the design of Nevada’s ever-proliferating public schools—have followed a similarly ambitious vein.

To achieve its goal, the architect-members of the Philadelphia AIA enlisted the help of individuals from other professions—primarily contractors, lawyers, and planners. That multi-disciplinary team received a charter from the School District of Philadelphia in 2000 and established a board of directors that now runs the school. John Claypool, the current Executive Director of the Philadelphia AIA, says that while the AIA retains only one spot on this board, “We AIA members still see the school as a creation of this architectural community and are constantly working to make it better, with mentor programs, fundraising, or other assistance.”

As a result of the support of the AIA and others, CHAD has grown to over 500 students. However, despite the fact that charter schools in Pennsylvania are open to any state resident, CHAD is overwhelmingly attended by inner-city, poor African Americans: 86 percent of students are minorities, including 72 percent who are African-American, and only 3 percent of CHAD’s population comes from Philadelphia’s suburbs. CHAD’s racial composition bears little demographic resemblance to the design professionals that some of them may one day join. Architecture, for example, is dominated by white males: 89 percent of registered architects in 2004 were white and the same percentage were male, according to the AIA. John Claypool comments, “Encouraging the growth of CHAD is one of the most powerful ways in which we architects can bring diversity into the profession.” If the design professions are to remain vibrant, they must continue to attract diverse talent, and the expansion of CHAD’s model can help the professions accomplish this important goal.

A Focus on Design

A significant percentage of students choosing CHAD believe they may want to be architects or designers. In the first few years of CHAD’s operation, only 10 to 20 percent of the students followed this route after graduation. Now, Principal Peter Kountz says, about 40 to 50 percent of entering students have a strong interest in design, and according to Stephanie Schoening, the director of student and academic services and a longtime teacher, “about a third of the graduating class will make architecture or design a career.” A mentoring program with local design professionals and various extracurricular activities encourage students with such career interests. But Schoening and Kountz are both careful to emphasize that CHAD does not aim merely to create designers. As one teacher noted, “Educating people about architecture and giving them new ways to think about their world is just as important as creating architects.”

Whether incubating professional designers or furthering design appreciation, the CHAD curriculum has one common underlying theme: design. Students take a double-length design studio every day, during which they are critiqued by their peers and teachers in a manner similar to critiques in college-level architecture studios. Freshmen must take drawing courses, and all students participate in exhibitions twice a year. Students have collaborated with institutions as diverse as the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City and the Rural Studio in Alabama. They have also participated in the planning process for award-winning local projects like the Penn’s Landing Forums.

A large part of CHAD’s draw is that it allows students to exercise “intelligences” that traditional American secondary education often fails to cultivate—an educational idea that resonates with Harvard Professor Howard Gardner’s theory that individuals can learn in many different ways and should strive to understand the learning style that suits them best. The visual-spatial style of learning associated with architecture and design is incorporated even into traditional academic courses. Former CHAD teacher and curriculum designer Alex Gilliam argues that this can stimulate students’ imagination and intellect in surprising ways. He offers an example: “I once assigned a project, based on Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, in which students were required to design the backyard of the movie’s protagonists in a way that would attract one of five birds, as part of the protagonists’ imagined psychiatric rehabilitation. Students had to study their bird of choice carefully: its behavioral characteristics, its diet, its environmental needs, and its flight patterns. I believe that in tackling biology and psychology through design, students internalized more than they would have in a traditional classroom setting.”

Denise Scott Brown, a prominent Philadelphia architect and one of the school’s most ardent supporters, also believes in this method: “CHAD succeeds, through its studio curriculum, in teaching by project.” Even the school’s “Spanish teacher seems to have a wonderful time teaching the students a new language by integrating design,” she adds. School administrators hope that students who have not found academic success in traditional high schools, which emphasize linguistic and logical-mathematical ways of learning intelligences, will feel more confident with such visual and spatial teaching techniques and can translate that confidence to other aspects of their lives. Perhaps as a result of CHAD’s innovative offerings, student attendance and the graduation rate both hover at an astonishing 95 percent.

Meeting School Needs

Another principal attraction of CHAD is its small-school experience. In 2002, the School District of Philadelphia had 38 public high schools with an average size of over 1,500 students. CHAD, with a population of around 500 students, has proven to be one of the best-performing, safest, and most popular schools in the District. Its success has confirmed what studies have shown all along: small schools increase student participation, have high graduation rates, and provide a safer environment. Recognizing such bene-fits, the District has announced an initiative to create 28 new small high schools by 2008, an initiative that aims to lower the average to less than 800 students per high school. Moreover, the District is considering reducing its average class sizes, which are nearly a third greater than CHAD’s average class size of 25 students.

While it is easy to commend CHAD’s many successes, the school must still improve in certain important areas. Like the adolescents it educates, CHAD is undergoing many changes and seeking ways to best articulate its identity. For one thing, the school needs more space to expand. Because CHAD is a charter school, it must maintain a policy of open admission and must sometimes accept more students than it has space for. Nonetheless, the school requires that interested students complete a formal admissions process, including an application, the submission of a portfolio, and an interview with the faculty. While CHAD cannot reject applying students, administrators can suggest that they may find a more suitable fit elsewhere. Principal Kountz says that the school must be careful to manage its numbers: “We got very large this year, with a hundred more students than we can handle. It’s important for us to pay more attention to the number of admitted students so we can preserve our high standard of education.”

To accommodate its student body, CHAD recently purchased the historic building in which it is located—an acquisition that, according to Christopher Lee, a local real estate lawyer with Jacoby Donner and the chairman of CHAD’s board of directors, has “given CHAD the opportunity to imaginatively envision how to enhance the educational experience of the students.” Despite getting favorable financing terms for the acquisition, however, CHAD cannot yet occupy its entire building because it must lease parts of the building to other tenants to keep up with monthly mortgage payments. This is symptomatic of a more general funding problem faced by CHAD: because it is a charter school, CHAD receives only a limited amount of support - less money than it spends per pupil - from the Philadelphia school district, and must rely heavily on private donations. The combination of public and private support has so far proven insufficient to relieve the school’s indebtedness.

As a result of its tight quarters and low funding levels, CHAD lacks a fully-equipped science lab, a vibrant athletics program, and a space large enough to gather the entire student body. When Edmund Bacon, the former Executive Director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, recently donated his book collection to CHAD, the school had no library in which to put it. Although by no means solving the space shortage, some creative suggestions have been put forth. One has been to maximize the utility of the rented parts of the building by luring new tenants whose activities complement the school—a music studio, for example, or after-school programs. Another solution may be to “borrow” space in nearby facilities: already, students have used the storefront window of a nearby architecture firm, Venturi Scott Brown & Associates, for display space.

The Path Forward

Despite its problems, CHAD hopes that it can one day serve as a model for other schools. Administrator Stephanie Schoening says that “creating a model curriculum is one of our major initiatives: we have polled students, parents, and teachers and are retooling the curriculum for the 2006-2007 school year.” Principal Kountz adds, “We’re not ready to be a perfect model, but we’re working pretty hard to make that happen.”

In the meantime, some technical high schools have expanded their design curriculum, and at least one other high school devoted primarily to architecture and design has sprung up independently of CHAD. This school—the Design and Architecture Senior High School (DASH) in Miami—differs from CHAD in that it is set up as a public magnet school, not a charter school, which means that students are chosen primarily based on their artistic abilities. Like CHAD, DASH attracts primarily Hispanic and African-American students. It offers courses in architecture, fashion, entertainment technology, interior design, industrial design, fashion, and communications. CHAD board chairman Christopher Lee notes that CHAD and DASH maintain communication, and that the CHAD board is always happy to get more people thinking about the ideals of CHAD’s founders.

High schools that focus exclusively on design are helping visual learners and creative thinkers achieve greater success in the classroom. They are serving as learning laboratories for budding designers and architects. They may very well be reshaping secondary education altogether—and reshaping it in a way that will not only benefit the students receiving the education but also the professions they may one day join.

American Institute of Architects, Philadelphia Chapter

Charter High School for Architecture and Design

Design and Architecture Senior High School

School District of Philadelphia