A young teacher’s implementation of a simple-to-use e-portfolio program is helping to reform a troubled East Coast high school. With test scores dipping, dropout rates spiking, and disciplinary problems multiplying, student motivation was in short supply at Hope High School in East Providence, RI, when, in 2002, the state commissioner of education stepped in to stop the slide. After months of planning, the state reorganized the school into three smaller, semi-independent “learning communities,� each with a reduced student body and its own principal. All three communities would operate in the same building, and each would maintain a partnership with a local college or university.

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