News from Portland last week about the growth of the High School for Recording Arts network: the network, which started with a high school in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1996 and has since established schools in New York and Los Angeles (in 2007), has just been recommended for school board approval to open a new school in Portland, OR.

The basic mission behind the schools is to provide students with a learning experience that is applicable to their lives and that engages them in close relationships with faculty--with the end goal of preparing students to enter college or professional careers.

But the question is, do the so-called Hip Hop High Schools successfully accomplish this mission and help their students succeed in the work force, college, and life beyond high school?

The promo videos about the school paint a picture of an informal learning community centered on project-based learning instead of standard textbook type assignments, with music and hip hop at the core. No doubt the appeal of this approach is to attract students who might otherwise not find anything in school worth sticking around for, and to engage them in some form of educational enterprise--which surely must be better than dropping out.

It's a point of contention among educators whether this goal--just to keep kids in school at all--is important enough to justify curricular approaches that don't emphasize science, math, and reading as much as traditional schools.

There are respected educators who would argue that the bigger problem in middle and high school education these days is not how to keep those students engaged, but rather how to provide them with the cultural literacy and foundational academic preparation in core subject matters so that they can succeed in higher education and beyond.

From this perspective, a hip hop high school may be little better than allowing students to stay at home and watch MTV and BET if there is little formal academic education taking place. And it's questionable whether such education is occurring: in Minnesota's High School for Recording Arts (HSRA), only 24% of 10th graders passed the state's reading proficiency test and only 13% of 11th graders passed the state's math test.

But HSRA proponents would be right to respond that these figures are not measurably worse than comparable traditional high schools that supposedly adopt an academic mission--like nearby Humboldt High School, a comprehensive school that serves similar proportions of low-income students and students of color. At Humboldt, only 25% of 10th graders passed Minnesota's reading test in 2008, and only 7% of 11th graders passed the math test.

In other words, if Humboldt is the baseline for the kind of education St. Paul kids are getting, and HSRA isn't doing much worse, isn't it worthwhile that HSRA provides an option to area students that they can get excited about? These students may not end up going to college in droves, but that's true of Humboldt anyhow.

Bottom line, if HSRA inspires students to stay in school and earn a diploma at rates higher than counterpart schools, there has to be some value in that. Time will tell if the Hip Hop schools in New York, Los Angeles, and soon to be Portland do any better or worse.