A School Where STEM Is King

A selective, specialized high school in Baltimore uses an interdisciplinary approach that enables students to experience STEM as a way of life.

By Andrew Trotter

Baltimore

A visit to Baltimore Polytechnic Institute creates a strong impression: This is a place for doers.

Teachers and students at Poly, as it is known here, seem to gather up knowledge and information because they have a use for it. A student is doing background research for her two-year project with local scientists on cannibalism among blue crabs. A group of teenagers searches the Web for a design concept to improve a robot they are entering in a contest. And an aeronautics class discusses the afternoon’s weather forecast—as measured from the roof of the school—as a factor in flying several radio-controlled model helicopters.

That focus on applied information is a clue to the bigger purpose at this public school on the northern end of the Baltimore school district: To be a caldron for the blending disciplines known as STEM—science,...