Good high schools are defined by high achievement rates on state exams and AP tests. Good high schools get kids into college. Good high schools narrow the gap for students of color, encouraging many of them to take the most rigorous of AP and IB classes.

However, good schools can lack soul. Cliques are common. Truly inclusive communities are rare. Good high schools have racially integrated classrooms but socio-economically divided cafeterias. Although most good high schools send many kids to college, they fail to provide kids with a purpose for being there.

In Bellevue we have many good high schools.

Great high schools provide a rigorous curriculum that empowers students to solve problems they encounter in larger contexts. Great high schools give AP and IB exams, but those exams are secondary and are not necessarily the engine of the academic mission of the school. Great high schools have at their instructional core a responsibility to teach active and engaged democratic citizenship, empathy and compassion, service learning, racial literacy, and community leadership. Great high schools produce purposeful and thoughtful citizens. Lastly, great high schools usually achieve just as well or better on high stakes testing.

What do these schools look like? Check out High Tech High in San Diego or Lakeside Academy in Seattle. Usually, these schools are charter schools or private academies, but not always. In fact, many of the kids who struggle in the traditional high school excel in those that offer constructivist and discovery models of learning.

If President Obama is socialist, as some have claimed, Mike Riley was Lenin. He leveled the playing field. He used education as social uplift and brought equity, equality, and excellence to under-performing, tracked Bellevue schools.

But now the work is different. Sure, our kids can pass AP exams, but what’s the point if they can’t use that knowledge to make a difference?

Among other things, we need to place a higher emphasis on creative problem-solving and critical thinking. Our kids need to solve problems they’ve never seen before. They need to be asked to use their advanced math, science, and rhetorical skills in real-world, relevant ways.

We should resurrect the senior project as an interdisciplinary graduation requirement in which students solve real-world problems either in teams or individually and present their projects in public. We should genuinely empower student leaders in schools with policy decision-making responsibilities that go beyond pep assemblies. In short, we should return the schools to our students and empower them to make them into laboratories for their own learning.

Bellevue schools can and should be great schools. In order to do that we, as a community, need to redefine what an “education” means and what it looks like. Most importantly, we should demand our leaders show the political courage to create new pedagogies in our classrooms that do not erect altars to “the test.”

None of these reforms need more funding. They need more creativity—the very thing our system failed to teach us.

Paul Sutton lives in Bellevue.