HOW TO TEACH OUR CHILDREN HOW TO WELL

On a beautiful fall afternoon not long ago, all 120 eighth-grade students and four of their teachers at the Olson Middle School in Minneapolis, Minn., walked across a grassy playing field down to nearby Shingle Creek. For the past five weeks, they had been raising monarch butterflies--from caterpillar through chrysalis--and now 30 of them were ready for release.

Raising butterflies isn't all that easy, as the Olson eighth-graders discovered. Every other day, the students would gather milkweed pods for their charges to eat. They kept journals, which they took home to their parents for evaluation. They rushed in on Mondays to see how their monarchs were doing, but they also struggled with large issues when one of them died.

After the butterflies were relocated to long tubes of bridal-veil material, the kids gingerly placed them on sponges filled with honey and water, then took delight as the creatures learned to go to the nectar on their own. Two days before their release, the students ever so carefully attached tiny tags to their hind wings--tags that a University of Kansas professor would use to monitor their migration to Mexico.

Raising children isn't easy either, as we all know. The task becomes even more difficult when we don't give them the education they deserve. We send them off to school every day, hoping for the best but often settling for less. Teachers are usually overworked and underpaid. Public schools are often overcrowded and underfunded. We begrudge tax hikes for schooling, then bemoan low test scores.

Our concern for education, well intentioned though it may be, has lately manifested itself in an insistence on such standards as test scores or dress codes or class size. But like the tag on a wing of a butterfly, such mandates must be applied gently. Too much testing will cut into the work that teachers and students should be doing; uniforms should not stifle efforts to bring out the individuality in each student; a large class with an inspiring leader is far better than a small class with a mediocre teacher.

What makes a good school? There are no stock answers, like wardrobe or testing or size. But there are some universal truths. A good school is a community of parents, teachers and students. A good school, like a good class, is run by someone with vision, passion and compassion. A good school has teachers who still enjoy the challenge, no matter what their age or experience. A good school prepares its students not just for the SATs or ACTs but also for the world out there.

To better illustrate what makes a good school, TIME has chosen three as shining examples--two of them middle schools, the third a secondary school combining Grades 7 through 12. They were selected in part because middle schools are an especially tough test for educators who have to swim upstream against the changes of adolescence and the customary disappearance of parental involvement at that stage. These three have also succeeded despite a profile that seems to predict failure or mediocrity: a majority of minority students, limited resources and membership in a large school system. They, and thousands of other outstanding public schools we might have mentioned, are the good news in American education.