Larry Rosenstock taught carpentry for eleven years, after law school, in urban high schools in Boston andCambridge. He served as staff attorney for two years at the Harvard Center for Law and Education, and was a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education for five years. Rosenstock was principal of the Rindge School of Technical Arts, and of the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. He directed the federal New Urban High School Project, was president of the Price Charitable Fund, and is the founding principal of High Tech High in San Diego. Rosenstock’s program, “CityWorks”, won the Ford Foundation Innovations in State and Local Government Award in 1992, and he is an Ashoka Fellow.
High Tech High eliminates traditional boundaries between "technical" education (code for tracking low-income kids) and traditional college preparatory, liberal arts-style secondary education (typically provided to students from higher income backgrounds). In its place, High Tech High offers a highly stimulating educational environment that encourages students to immerse themselves in real-world career experiences. Instead of attending regular classroom lectures, taking tests, and turning in homework assignments, High Tech High students spend four years working primarily on individual and group projects that provide hands-on experiences, and are complemented by academic curricula. Students are assessed for their work in teams as well as individually. Nationally recognized as "the high school of the future," High Tech High serves as a public "learning lab" and hosts at least 1,000 visitors a year who are interested in learning about the model.
Rosenstock introduces innovations at the staff management level, as well as in the architecture of the school. He has persuaded the State of California to pass new teacher certification legislation, and as a result, High Tech High can now recruit and hire teachers like physicists, mathematicians, and computer technologists from nontraditional backgrounds. These accomplished professionals join High Tech High because it is a place where they can continue to be creative and at the same time teach and give back.
Perhaps Rosenstock’s greatest innovation is his vision for the curriculum. Prior to launching High Tech High, Rosenstock served for two years as the director of the New Urban High School project. This study involved a nationwide effort to find, describe, and design new models for America's high schools. Through this effort Rosenstock identified the core best practices from the highest-performing schools in some of the worst neighborhoods. Several core school-design principles emerged from this study, including: personalization–students learn better when teachers know them well; adult-world immersion, like internships and projects based in the community; and a common intellectual mission, by which every student receives an equal education without distinctions like "college prep" and "technical" (or vocational technical) preparation.
