Queens School of Inquiry

We are pleased to present our proposal for the new Queens School of Inquiry—a partnership of Queens College, Region 4 and CUNY’s Early College Secondary School Initiative.  We aim to make higher education more accessible, attainable, and affordable to students from Queens.

We recognize that the most notable feature of our school is the inclusion of a significant number of college credit courses in the regular curriculum sequence. However, this is not the only factor that makes Queens School of Inquiry special.  We plan to create a school with an atmosphere of high expectations, where students and teachers are held accountable, parents are empowered to participate, college faculty are active members of the school , and local community members lend a voice in the mission of the school. The ultimate goal is a school that re-examines and reshapes traditional views of middle school, high school and college education through highly interactive, self-managed, inquiry-based learning.

While we believe that an early college secondary school is a very ambitious undertaking, our common planning work--involving many hours of thinking, talking and, occasionally, arguing--has confirmed our conviction that is a very worthwhile project and one that we are prepared to bring to fruition. The proposal is the result of many months of work that began when Queens College submitted a preliminary concept paper to the Early College Initiative at the City University of New York in June of 2004.  Since then our conversations have included college faculty members and administrators, school leaders, new school developers, teachers, parents, students and other educators grappling with the questions of how best to enable ‘at-risk’ populations to succeed in higher education. 

Three specific planning events had a significant impact on our thinking about the new school and are worthy of mention here:

Many of us traveled (with our colleagues from other CUNY colleges) to visit University Park Campus School at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.  While there, we had an opportunity to meet with college faculty, high school teachers and high school students and to learn first-hand of the challenges and opportunities resulting from a deep University-school partnership. Additionally, we sought input from UPCS parents. Their voice has added a valued component to our on-going planning process.

In early December, we had an opportunity to develop our own ideas at a two-day planning retreat. On that occasion, we spent a good deal of time identifying the academic and personal characteristics that we believed to be essential for outstanding college achievement and worked backwards from those characteristics as we planned courses for each of the grades our school will house.  We benefited from grappling with theses issues in conjunction with those engaged in similar planning at York College and City College.

Throughout this planning work, we have received extensive advice, support, and encouragement from experts who have worked with high school students in the college environment.  The recent research forum on the topic of “College in High Schools: For Whom and for What?” presented by the University’s College Now Program helped us clarify our thoughts about the best means of supporting students as they enter the college world.  What was dramatically clear on that occasion was that CUNY’s early college effort is being built upon a remarkable record of collaboration between the University and the public schools and that it enjoys the full support of the leadership of the University. 

Through the deep connections and collaboration forged between Queens College and the Queens School of Inquiry, we will create a school that: (1) supports students’ acquisition of broad and deep content area knowledge as defined by the New York State Learning Standards, (2) enables them to acquire up to two year of fully transferable college credit, (3) challenges them to become metacognitive and committed learners  and (4) nurtures their emotional and intellectual development into strong, successful, and self-confident adults who contribute to their families and communities. We hope you will be as excited about this new school as we are!