ABSTRACT
Museum schools are a hot topic. A host of local and national initiatives are encouraging new kinds of long-term collaborations between museums and schools. The New York City Museum School (NYCMS) is "linkage" in the extreme, an intense collaboration that requires museum and school professionals to share responsibility and equal accountability for the students' total education. NYCMS was conceived and designed collaboratively by representatives from Community School District 2 of the New York City Public Schools, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, the Children's Museum of Manhattan, and the Jewish Museum. NYCMS embodies the idea of an integrated curriculum while maintaining the rigors of discipline-based education. NYCMS models the pattern of learning practiced by museum professionals—learning that is intellectually rigorous, uses authentic and primary resources, and requires scholarly training, an innate sense of curiosity, and the ability to synthesize and evaluate information from a variety of sources.
