EDITORIAL: We Should Be Thankful for This Guy - Dennis Littky

EDITORIAL: We Should Be Thankful for This Guy - Dennis Littky

Dennis Littky shakes things up. He causes trouble and maybe even chaos.

His mischief is legendary. They made a movie about his first efforts to reinvent education.

The White House has lauded his groundbreaking work.

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His endeavors to shake up education led to hundreds of new schools across the country, a new way of thinking about college, and closer to home, the creation of the Met Center Schools.

If you have been to the school in South Providence you think you have walked onto the campus of a college. It is a school where those students who did not fit in anywhere else come together to create something extraordinary.

He came up with "bad" ideas that could never be achieved, and then they somehow turned into brilliant successes.

The Met program includes personalized learning plans, family engagement, internship projects in mentored real-world settings, and portfolio-based assessments.  He has been doing it for decades. Places like the Providence Schools think it is a new creation and yet can't implement any of it. Littky did the improbable.

Littky created, with Elliot Washer, The Big Picture Company to help disseminate the Met Center model nationally. Buoyed by a $20M infusion from the Gates Foundation, the Big Picture network achieved significant scale: today, it boasts more than 220 community­ embedded schools, 111 across the US and 110 more throughout the world, including schools in India, Australia, and the Netherlands.

Not every school was a home run, and the test scores sometimes were miserable, but the environment was more of a setting of a corporate retreat than of the miserable urban high school model plaguing Providence and other cities across the country. His schools are fun, they are exciting.

About twenty years ago, Littky came up with another "stupid idea" and created College Unbound, an innovative non-profit college that continues to apply the core tenets of his philosophy: student and community-centered, student-driven individualized curriculum, cohort­ based, with credit for lived experience, and real-world embedded teaching and learning. CU focuses on adults who started college but didn't finish, helping them transform themselves, their families, and their communities.

It was another one of those outside-the-box concepts that many colleges and universities have now adopted.

When his CU sought accreditation, Brown, PC, and others opposed his new model and tried to block it. Now, many are adopting it — the tenant of giving credit to returning students for their non-traditional, non-classroom learning experiences in life.

His innovations were recognized by Fast Company.

The Met was cited by President Barack Obama as "an example to follow."

College Unbound was awarded The Innovative and Creative Program Award by UPCEA New England, and Littky was awarded the New England Higher Education Excellence Award.

Now over 80, Littky is winding down his career as we know it, but his impact is forever. A few months ago, GoLocal featured a Providence entrepreneur who launched a business that cleans sneakers. The store is cool, the business model is smart, and, of course, he is a graduate of the entrepreneurial program at the Met.

Thousands of Rhode Islanders, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions across the globe have had their lives transformed for the better by Dennis Littky.

We should all be thankful.