Newark Center for Creative Learning – The School That Threw Out the Textbook and Never Looked Back

The small school on Phillips Avenue in Newark, Delaware, is likely unknown to most people in the state. It is tucked away in a neighborhood and has been doing things its own way since 1971. At any given time, it has about 80 students. There are no textbooks that drive the lessons. No schools that look like factories. There should be no race to the top of a list. Still, walking through NCCL School (the Newark Center for Creative Learning) doesn’t feel much like going to a school and more like running into an idea that has been around long enough to prove itself.

The school is for kids in kindergarten through eighth grade, and the class sizes are kept intentionally small. Because there are about seven students for every teacher, each child doesn’t get lost in the crowd. Teachers know their students well. That should happen more often, but it doesn’t.

What NCCL does differently isn’t exactly a secret, but no one in the country is talking about it either. The school’s philosophy is more on the progressive side. Students learn through fieldwork, hands-on projects, experimenting, and working together. There isn’t any squeezing of art and music in between the “real” subjects. They are a big part of how kids see the world. All kids get full recess, which, depending on how they feel about childhood, may seem like a luxury or a necessity to some parents.

People say this about the school’s culture: “Tell me, I forget. Show me, I remember.” This is an old idea. But the fact that a school in 2024 is still building its whole model around that idea instead of just writing it on the wall and moving on says something important.

There is a structured curriculum that includes math, reading, writing, science, Spanish, art, music, physical education, and social studies. It’s not chaos. It seems like the people who started NCCL knew that progressive education has a bad name because some people think it means loosely structured, weak, or light on academics. It looks like the school has been quietly disagreeing with that idea for decades.

Classrooms for kids of different ages are built in. Students of different ages learn together, which makes for a different kind of social environment than when students are put into groups based on their grades. For researchers, the question of whether that leads to measurable academic gains is still open. No matter how you measure it, though, the graduates NCCL talks about—creative problem-solvers ready for a complicated world—aren’t a bad thing to aim for.

Since it opened in 1971, the school has been through many changes in the way people learn. Classrooms that were open came and went. Standardized tests changed everything about school policy for a whole generation. When technology came along, it was either seen as saving education or destroying it, depending on the year. What NCCL did seemed to be pretty much the same. That level of institutional consistency is either very stubborn or very smart. Most likely both.

Newark is not a big city or state. The number of students at the school shows that—80 is purposely a small number. People who pay close attention to Delaware schools say it’s the first and only school of its kind in the state. That difference is important, but it also brings up a question that probably doesn’t have a clear answer: why hasn’t this model spread more?

There’s no need for the Newark Center for Creative Learning to try to be the biggest or most famous private school. Making sure that every child who comes through its doors actually enjoys learning is something that is quieter and, in some ways, harder. That seems like a pretty low goal. Also, most schools have trouble meeting this expectation consistently, no matter how hard they try and how much money they have.