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April 2013 www.sname.org/sname/mt (focus on education) that mechanics training was almost too easy to achieve for the student body, and the entire program was ele- vated to a very rigorous college preparatory program. e program includes high levels of original research and applied technology development, using the mari- time environment as the research and testing ground. Programs range from on-water research projects to freshman year full-size cardboard boat design, con- struction, and operational evaluation. Today, MAST is one of the top high schools in the nation with very high graduation rates and impressive university education success rates. While MAST attracts high-achieving county students, who are recruited by military and marine academies, only a small percent- age of the students actually enter the maritime industry. e majority attend (often with scholarships) non-mari- time universities. However, most students acknowledge that the maritime setting enabled them to learn more, learn it faster, and learn it with more fun than any other educational setting they can imagine. ey also recog- nize that their already-developed skills in research and problem solving resulted in a seamless transition to the university environment. Recognizing this level of success at the high school level, a small educational organization in Monmouth County, New Jersey, started experimenting with these concepts at the fth to eighth grade level. is orga- nization, Navesink Maritime Heritage Association (NMHA), originally focused on maritime historical and cultural preservation. To support this mission, the decision makers at NMHA decided to organize a boat- building festival, where families could build a simple canoe in a weekend. is program quickly started to focus on boat construction with fth to eighth grad- ers and then assisted area children in building their own canoes. e children then used these canoes on the water during a week-long summer River Rangers? river exploration program. This program has been rened over the last 10 years and has provided hun- dreds of middle-school students with the opportunity to build their own tools; to learn from their mistakes; to experiment; to learn about STEM issues without real- izing it; and to learn that the world is not prepackaged but is lled with surprises that most adults never have experienced. While NMHA runs River Rangers for area children, the same program has been adopted by the Red Bank Charter School for its students. While simple in concept, the educational factors previously noted apply to this program as they do in a maritime academy. e real question is: How young should children be to take advantage of marine high- performance education? Meanwhile, some 10 years ago, Murray Fisher, a for- mer member of the Waterkeeper Alliance, started to wonder about these maritime high-performance issues, and received permission to experiment with them in a failing high school in Brooklyn, New York. His eorts resulted in the formation of the Urban Assembly New York Harbor School. Initially, the program consisted of a separate school within a failing high school in Bushwick, Brooklyn. After a few years, the maritime approach started to signicantly im prove educational eectiveness and graduation rates rose rapidly?from 23% in 2003 to 86% by 2012. Undoubtedly, this level of success is related to talented teachers and administrators, but these results could have never been achieved if the students were not moved to new and much more eective educational set- tings, approaches, and opportunities. e rapid educational improvements have resulted in an even more significant change for the Harbor School, in the form of a campus in the heart of New York Harbor on Governors Island. is move coincided with ever-increasing graduation rates, test scores, and uni- versity and maritime employment successes. To some extent, the school has become a victim of its own suc- cess, where higher-achieving New York City students are starting to clamor for admission to this eective high school. e mission to elevate lower-performing students can become suppressed. Murray Fisher and his legion of maritime education supporters are well aware of this, and he admits to pondering the question: How can we apply the high-performance benets of maritime education to grade schoolers? MTGayle Horvath is a mathematics teacher, educational expert, and a manager of school services at the New Jersey Charter Schools As- sociation. She is a founder and current board member of Navesink Maritime Heritage Association. Students in the marine systems technology class. Photo by Harbor School sta. High Performance in Education continued