In a desperate effort to turn around Nanakuli High School, the lowest performing high school in the state, school administrators are taking a chance on an innovative, project-based school reform that has had success in dozens of low-performing schools across the country.

Administered by the New Technology Foundation, the school reform radically changes teaching practices through ongoing teacher development and coaching, requires students to earn college credit while attending high school and requires schools to offer a one-to-one student-to-computer ratio for hands-on, project-based learning.

It's a model that Nanakuli educators say will help them to reach their majority Native Hawaiian student population disillusioned by traditional classroom environments and monotonous book learning.

"There's a sense of urgency," said Lisa DeLong, Wai'anae-Nanakuli Complex Area Superintendent. "The scores have been improving but they started out very low. They show five years of steady growth but it's not anywhere near where it needs to be," she said.

Over the next four years, Nanakuli will implement the New Tech model. Both Kamehameha Schools and the Harold Castle Foundation will pay for most of the $450,000 cost.

In the age of No Child Left Behind, where standardized test scores are used to validate the academic effectiveness of public schools, Nanakuli High and Intermediate School has consistently landed on the bottom of the list.

Last year, only 11 percent of Nanakuli's students were considered proficient in math, compared with the state's average of 43 percent. Also, about 41 percent of students were considered proficient in reading, compared with 62 percent for the state.

STUDENTS IN NEED

More than half the Nanakuli students come from an economically disadvantaged home and nearly 20 percent of students are in special education.

Two-thirds of the students are Native Hawaiian.

Darin Piialoha, principal of Nanakuli High and Intermediate, returned yesterday from a trip to Los Angeles where a few dozen educators from the Leeward Coast went to see the New Technology model in action.

"One of the schools we visited, in the middle of Compton, 100 percent of the students were on free or reduced lunch, 90 percent of the kids were Latino. ... The schools resembled our schools on the Leeward Coast. It was like we were looking at our own kids," he said.

Los Angeles schools using the program showed a dramatic increases in standardized test scores, decreases in student suspension rates and increased academic performance.

For example, 63 percent of 10th-graders at Student Empowerment Academy, a model school on the Jefferson High School campus in Los Angeles, passed both math and English standardized tests compared with only 23 percent at their parent school.

Also remarkable, Student Empowerment Academy had a 2.3 percent suspension rate while its parent school had a 25.1 percent suspension rate.

Piialoha said New Tech's focus on students working in teams, developing oral and written communication skills and working on projects that address community and social problems got Kamehameha Schools interested in supporting the effort.

Shawn Kanaiaupuni, director of public education support for Kamehameha Schools, said the New Tech model of empowering students to take active roles in their learning was consistent with Hawaiian learning.

"When we started talking about New Technology and the possibilities of project-based learning, we felt it was so consistent with Hawaiian ways of learning and culture-based education," Kanaiau- puni said.

NATIONWIDE MODEL

Nanakuli's challenges are what got school officials interested in the New Technology School Model in the first place.

The model uses a project-based learning approach that encourages students to use their skills of inquiry to investigate problems, social issues and culture in their own communities.

It has been implemented in 42 schools nationwide and has successfully turned around some of the country's most challenged campuses.

The New Technology approach to instruction is completely different to what is currently being done in most public school classrooms, said Robin Kitsu, Nanakuli's curriculum coordinator and mass media teacher. It engages students and makes them want to be in school, he said.

"Traditional teaching is the teacher up front lecturing about the subject as the expert. But with project-based learning, the students come up with the questions, they do the research, finding answers and the teacher becomes a facilitator," Kitsu said.

FOCUS ON PROJECTS

The New Tech model is about allowing the curriculum to be relevant to the problems that kids are facing, he said. "When you talk to the kids who don't come to school or aren't progressing and ask them why, they tell us because it's boring," Kitsu said.

Paul Curtis, chief academic officer for the New Technology Foundation, said part of the implementation of this model at Nanakuli will involve training teachers to develop student projects that are aligned to content standards.

"We've identified a way to design projects around standards so that you see a direct impact on test scores," Curtis said. "At a lot of schools who say they do project-base learning, the projects aren't really tied to any standards. ... You don't see test scores necessarily improving," he said.

Most classrooms use projects at some point in the curriculum, usually as the culmination of a quarter or semester. But in the New Tech model, projects are the primary method of teaching, Curtis said.

"Students are expected to go from project to project to project," he said. "Teachers are trained to develop these projects so that they are rigorous and relevant."