In a typical high school, teacher Luz Bracero might have paused before assigning students to paint their life’s journey on an urn. She might have considered, would this help students on the Regents exams?

In a typical school, Bracero might have felt a twinge of anxiety when a class discussion about the interplay between life and art veered to the Trayvon Martin case.

And in a typical school, Bracero might have cut short the time spent on Greek mythology to cover more material that could be on the Regents test.

But Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom HS in the Bronx is not typical.

It is part of the New York Performance Standards Consortium, a group of high schools that receive state waivers exempting students from nearly all Regents exams. The consortium has 28 schools and is in the process of increasing that number. All of its schools are in New York City except for one each in Ithaca and Rochester.

Consortium school students take only one Regents in English language arts and are exempt from the other four.

The exemption means more than an absence of tests, say teachers and administrators.

It changes everything.

Teachers can go more in depth, they say. Courses can be shaped around student and teacher interests, as at a college. And instead of facing a battery of Regents exams, students produce project-based assessments that can range from a 10-page literature paper to an in-depth science project. The assessments are judged by a panel of teachers and outside experts.

“It’s a different way of assessing,” said Avram Barlowe, the UFT chapter leader at the Urban Academy Laboratory HS on the Upper East Side, a consortium school. “It’s a different way of teaching and learning.”

The consortium model is drawing growing interest at a time of increasing public disenchantment with high-stakes testing.

This fall, the AFT awarded the consortium a $25,000 prize for Solution-Driven Unionism.

Back when the consortium began nearly 20 years ago, standardized testing was not as frequent or as high-stakes as today.

“Here’s a group of schools who found a solution before everyone knew there was a problem,” UFT President Michael Mulgrew said at an event in November to mark the AFT award.

Consortium schools are diverse, ranging from the selective Beacon HS on the Upper West Side to Urban Academy, a transfer school whose students may include some who struggled at other high schools. Fannie Lou Hamer draws students mostly from its area in the South Bronx and partners with the Children’s Aid Society to offer health and social services in the community schools model.

Despite the differences, the schools have common rubrics for evaluating their performance-based assessments and share a commitment to preparing all students for college.

Their success is evident in a report based on 2008–09 data. Although consortium schools have similar percentages of poor, special needs and English language learner students as city schools as a whole, they posted a significantly lower dropout rate as well as higher graduation rates both overall and for African-American and Hispanic students.

Ann Cook, a founder and leader of the consortium, said she is often asked whether the model could work on a large scale. “We have always said that joining the consortium should be an option for school staffs that choose to engage in the kind of work such a system requires,” she said. “It may not be for everyone. But it works masterfully for those schools that embrace its culture of inquiry, revision and performance assessment.”

The culture of inquiry was evident at Fannie Lou Hamer HS. When students turned the class discussion on art’s interplay with life into an analysis of the Trayvon Martin case, teacher Luz Bracero didn’t blink an eye.

Later, she said she understood her students’ point. “The Trayvon story does shape culture,” she said.

One of her students, Tiffany Febus, came to the school after having dropped out of 8th grade when school and her struggle with asthma overwhelmed her.

Now in 10th grade, Tiffany said the hardest part is writing papers. But teachers always help, and Tiffany seems confident about where she is headed.

To depict her life on her urn, she painted: A girl crying. Books. And a graduation cap and gown.