I’m realizing that I think one of the terms that should be banned from the educational vernacular is "comprehensive high school." Somewhere, packed into that statement is the idea that a high school can be all things to all kids. To me, that’s where we get into trouble, especially in our cities.

There’s a lot of pressure to be all things to all students, especially as you try to build a reputation as a school. There are two examples I can think of with SLA that really speak to this. AP Classes and World Language classes.

Right now, AP courses are the rage, and while we’re starting to see some backlash, everyone wants schools to have AP courses. Jay Matthews at the Washington Post has gotten a lot of mileage out of his Challenge Index which is a way to rank high schools based around the number of students taking AP courses. So naturally, a lot of people, both prospective parents and district people, have wondered when we’ll start offering a lot of AP courses. And the answer is — senior year. Maybe one or two junior year. But the other answer is that we are a test where every class — every quarter — ends with projects. On a very basic level, AP courses — classes that by definition end in a test — run contrary to the rest of the curriculum at SLA. But there’s another reason that we can’t really offer them until senior year. We prioritize interdisciplinarity and community, so we stream our courses — having kids take their science, English and history courses as a cohort. It means students have fewer curricular choices outside of their electives, but the teaching is more cohesive across disciplines — and, with an inquiry-driven, project-based curriculum, students have more choices within each class. But offering tons of AP courses would make streaming impossible, and we believe that it is something that is fundamental to what makes SLA so special. And in a city like Philadelphia, with so many colleges around, I think having students have dual enrollment opportunities, taking courses at Drexel and other schools, means much more to colleges than AP classes will.

With World Languages, again, we have received a lot of requests to offer multiple languages, but we just can’t. One, as a small school, we’d be building departments of one or two teachers, and I don’t know if I think that’s a great thing to do. But also, with streaming comes a lot of scheduling mandates, and we would be de-facto tracking classes by language choice, and that’s not something we want to do.

But to say no to these things is to admit that we cannot be all things to all students. If a student’s biggest desire is to take French in high school, s/he shouldn’t go to SLA. Fortunately, there are other schools who offer French. And if a student — or a family — feels that the only way to get into college is with two dozen AP credits, they shouldn’t go to SLA. I’m o.k. with that, because I want to be very good at the things we do. And I want to find students who believe in our kind of education, and so far, we have.

But, for us, it meant having to admit we are not "comprehensive." We don’t offer everything because we can’t. And I believe most schools can’t. Just as Ted Sizer argues that "Less is More" inside the classroom, I believe sometimes that is true for the entire school as well. The choices we make have to mean something. When we create mission statements that are about more than educational platitudes, then those ideals have to exist in every classroom, and in every choice we make administratively as well.

I’m not saying that every school should stream kids. I’m not saying that no school should offer AP classes or only one language. Those were the choices we made and those choices have ramifications. We found what we valued and then we built a school around those values, even while understanding that that meant we may not be able to do everything people wanted us to do.

There’s no such thing as a panacea in education. Every choice creates opportunities, but it also creates limitations. Recognizing them and both embracing (fewer AP courses, mostly in 12th grade) and mitigating (dual enrollment opportunities starting in 10th grade) them is important as we think about what our schools can be.