What should educators in our public schools focus on? Depending upon whom you ask, you'll get widely different answers. Reading and math is one typical response. A return to the "old days" when California had a broad curriculum that included science, the arts, even shop is another. College-going skills. Skills to succeed in the world of work. 21st-century thinking skills has also found its place as a frequent answer. And, of course, high performance on the state's standardized tests is often an explicit or implicit response.

My own answer is somewhat different: keeping young people in school through a deep engagement in meaningful learning. Research shows quite clearly that every day spent in school gives a child or young adult a further leg up on the very things that make life as an adult rewarding: better income, better health, more civic engagement. By a kind of reverse logic, the opposites are clearly detrimental to individuals and to our society: more poverty, sick people with high-cost medical needs, and ill-informed citizens unable to engage in the basic processes of a democracy.

West Sacramento Early College Prep, a 6-12 public charter school, is a collaborative effort of UC Davis, Sacramento City College and Washington Unified School District that was created a little more than four years ago to focus on just this set of issues. It was also designed to serve students who have historically been underserved in our schools: students who come from low-income families, students who would be first-generation college- goers, students with a poor history of academic achievement and kids whose language at home is not English.

West Sac Prep is a program that features student-centered learning and teaching, and a curriculum rooted in projects that ask students to generate their own questions for intellectual pursuit, thereby requiring that they take a crucial responsibility for their learning. The school provides careful, frequent, and detailed guidance and mentoring by the students' teachers. And of equal importance, the teachers constantly promote the use – in the classroom and in their students' work – of the core skills of inquiry, careful reasoning, the use of data to support conclusions, and the art of scientific argumentation. At all stages of their time at West Sac Prep the students are asked to reflect on their own thinking about a problem and how they came to the answers they did. The teachers treat their students with respect; and, in turn, the students treat each other and their teachers in the same way, every day.

West Sac Prep is being considered for reauthorization by the Washington Unified school board, as required by California law once every five years. Recently, the California Charter Schools Association called for the non-renewal of 10 charter schools throughout the state, including West Sac Prep. Its analysis focused exclusively on test scores but ignored the other evidence of more telling successes we are having in the educational attainment of these students.

Students at West Sac Prep pass the mathematics and English language arts portions of the California High School Exit Exam at a rate higher than the statewide average. Many of them take dual-enrollment courses at Sacramento City College, earning – with few exceptions – A's and B's. The attendance rate is more than 97 percent, and none of our students have dropped out of school. And, following two years of declining scores on the California Standards Test, last year saw an 83-point jump.

But even more important than these quantitative measures, our students can tell you what science project they worked on last semester and provide the evidence for what they learned; they can relate their English assignment to their computer assignment to their science assignment and address the cross-learning that has occurred for them; and they can and do engage in deep discourse with one another and their teachers about today's issues and how they and their families are affected by them. All of our juniors have a plan for the next stage of their lives once they have completed high school. All will be college-ready if they choose that path.

There is no single answer to what makes a school great, or what teachers should do to make a school great. However, our experience and data tell us that, whatever else must happen, the art of learning – and the art of teaching – must be thought through, refined and articulated by student and teacher alike. We believe that West Sac Prep is an extraordinarily successful model of how this can be done.

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Harold G. Levine is president of the board of directors of West Sacramento Early College Prep school and dean of the University of California, Davis, school of education.

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