01:00 AM EDT on Thursday, April 28, 2005

When the Met School, in Providence, opened in 1996, there was no high school quite like it, not here, not anywhere. But now there are 24 in such places as Sacramento, Indianapolis and Detroit, all modeled on this unusual institution, which Newsweek magazine calls one of the six best innovative schools in America.

The Met's proper name is the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Centers. It is the brainchild of educators Dennis Littky and Elliot Washor. The Met is neither a charter school nor a Providence public school. It is a public school funded by the state.

There are actually six Met high schools in Providence. Each has 100 students and its own principal. Four are on a new 10-acre campus on Public Street, behind Rhode Island Hospital. One is downtown, in the Shepard Building, and another is in the West End, at Peace and Dexter streets.

The Met is an alternative school, to say the least. It does without the standard structure of classrooms and periods blocked out hour by hour. There are no classrooms at all in the traditional sense. Instead, each student has an individual learning plan based on his or her interests. Teachers guide them and follow their progress. "I want them to know how to study soMething really in depth," says Mr. Littky, the school's larger-than-life director.

What looks like a loose kind of education really isn't. The students must rigorously follow a course of study. Taught communications and reasoning skills, the adolescents present themselves and their ideas in a polished way. And no one seems bored. The Met has the highest attendance rate in the state.

The Met does not cherry-pick gifted students. The student body is chosen by lottery, with 75 percent from Providence and the rest from other parts of the state. Many come from poor households. More than 80 percent of the students qualify for federal meal subsidies. The student body is 40 percent Hispanic and 30 percent black.

It costs the state around $12,000 a year to educate a Met student. This is close to the Providence figure, but is a far better deal because of the extraordinary results.

Over 94 percent of the Met students graduated last year (versus 57 percent in the Providence schools). Every graduate was accepted at college -- a higher college placement level than at Barrington High School.

Director Littky thinks that the key to the school's success is staying small. "The idea is you don't put a lot of adolescents together," he says. Also important is keeping the students engaged in their work.

The Met School has been the subject of considerable national and international attention. Last fall, 40 principals from the Netherlands spent a week studying the school. Forty more Dutch principals are expected to arrive on Monday.

Mr. Littky and Mr. Washor have founded a nonprofit organization called the Big Picture Company, with the aim of extending the Met model to other cities. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have given Big Picture $5 million to help build another 36 schools over the next five years.

The Met reminds us that urban education need not be a dismal failure. With energy and new ideas, poor minority students can excel. If only the state's educational establishment -- including the unions and the bureaucracies -- tried a lot harder to do such things.