What Makes a High School Great?

In the past decade, many schools have started requiring community service. The César Chávez High School for Public Policy pushes that idea all the way to Capitol Hill, which, fortunately, is within walking distance. In addition to a rigorous college-prep curriculum, students work as interns in Congress, at think tanks and advocacy groups in Washington. As seniors, they write a thesis on a public-policy issue and give a presentation before an audience that forces them to defend their stand.

The school is the brainchild of Irasema Salcido, who emigrated from Mexico as a child and now holds a master's degree from Harvard. "I saw that the young people who live here were not included in the world of policymakers," says Salcido, who had been an assistant principal at another public school. "But who better than these students to develop policy changes that would affect the quality of their lives, in terms of poverty, unemployment, crime?"

Chávez now has 500 students, the majority from low-income families. They're budding activists like 17-year-old Eusevia Valdez, who had no idea what public policy was when she enrolled in the fledgling charter school as a freshman. Four years later, she not only understands public policy, she lives it. She wrote her senior thesis on flaws in immigration laws, something she understands from personal experience. Her parents are legal immigrants and she was born here, but the family has struggled to bring her older siblings to the United States from their native El Salvador. Her oldest sister was 21 before the paperwork was approved and, as a result, has been refused permission to immigrate. Her years at Chávez, she says, "taught me to fight for what I believe in."

Celebrate Liberal Arts

Practi—al concerns-like helping kids figure out a—career path-were not on the minds of the founders of Tempe Preparatory Academy in Arizona a decade ago. Instead, they created a charter school whose goal is to turn out students engaged in "the lifelong pursuit of truth, goodness and beauty," according to the school handbook. For 330 students in grades 7 to 12 that means providing a strong foundation in the arts, science and the humanities. The curriculum is based on the Great B—oks concept-the basis of Western Civilization, starting with the Greeks. "We don't want kids to specialize," says Daniel Scoggin, CEO of Great Hearts Preparatory Academies, the organization behind Tempe and two other similar schools in the Phoenix area. "We want them to get a broad, well-rounded education." All students take music, art, drama, math and science, languages (including Latin or Greek or a modern language), English and history.

Tempe's rigorous program impresses other educators. "It feels like a private prep school," says Stephanie Saroki, education analyst for the Philanthropy Roundtable, "but it's free and available to kids living in a lower-middle-class area." The school is so popular that there's a lottery for admissions. The education is a hard six years, but worth it, says senior Joseph Irvine, 17. "They don't just feed us information," he says. "They teach us how to learn." Irvine recently put that spirit to good use for the school. There are no computer courses, so he proposed an independent-study project on programming in his sophomore year. He spent that time creating a software program for the admissions lottery. The school used Irvine's program this year to select the incoming class at Tempe Prep and the other Great He—rts schools-a very practical benefit of a lofty goal.