One accepted only top students, and its test scores were high. The other took mostly neighborhood students, including those who struggled, and its scores were low.
Jasmine Thomas picked SLA because she "thought it would be kind of cool to go to a place where you built it from the ground up," she said. Thomas, 18, just earned her diploma and said she is thrilled with her high school experience.
Recent High School of the Future graduate Lafayette Marshall isn't so sure.
"We were promised so much," Marshall said. "It was supposed to open up the world for us. Everyone was going to go to a four-year college. But it didn't turn out like that."
A mandate for change
Small schools flourished under former Philadelphia School District chief executive Paul Vallas, who created 25 schools, each with no more than 700 students.
Of the district's current 63 high schools, 32 are small, enrolling about a quarter of the 48,000 total high schoolers. The rest attend large neighborhood high schools.
At the outset, High School of the Future's mandate was to transform the high school experience.
It wasn't just a shift in technology for the $63 million school, built at the edge of Fairmount Park with technical assistance from Microsoft Corp. There were no letter grades and no central curriculum - teachers were free to match their lessons to students' interests.
High School of the Future opened without the academic admissions criteria the other schools used. As a result, many students came with gaps in their reading and math skills.
Vallas gave the school a wide berth, and the district handpicked an experienced administrator.
But things did not turn out as planned. The founding principal left after a year. Vallas departed, too, and his successors have shown less support for the school's new methods.
