NETTIE E. LEGTERS
Johns Hopkins University

This chapter describes specific reform practices schools are implementing to realize
the vision for high schools in the United States set forth in Breaking ranks, a report
published by the National Association of Secondary School Principals. The first
section of this chapter reviews a general critique of public high schools articulated
in the 1980s and describes the reform practices that have emerged over the past
decade in response to this critique. The second section offers examples of schools
that have pulled together a number of such reforms into a comprehensive school
restructuring effort, focusing on one school in depth. The third section identifies
challenges schools can expect to encounter when implementing the set of reforms.
This section draws on the experiences of several schools the author and a research
team at Johns Hopkins CRESPAR have worked with since 1994 as part of the Talent
Development High Schools project.

The opening scene of the 1989 film Lean on Me is designed to shock. It
portrays a gritty urban high school filled with thugs, drugs, and overt
violence. The fast-moving clip ends with the hospitalization of a teacher who
tried to break up a student fight as the graffiti-filled hallways echo with a
student crying, "Somebody help!"

If you ask real urban high school students what they think of that scene
(which a colleague and I did in recent focus group interviews), most will say

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