Enter a typical high school, and the first thing you see is the front office, where the principal dwells and grades are stored. The front office also reinforces familiar hierarchy : principal at the top, teachers in the middle, kids on the bottom, sitting with hands folded at their desks. Now, imagine a school where the organizational structure is completely flat. At the New Country School in Henderson, Minn, there is no front office. Visitors are immediately embraced by an airy atrium that is the centerpiece of this one-room schoolhouse. And all around the room, 124 students sit at desks -- real office desks -- working at their own personal computers on their own projects. When Dee Thomas and her colleagues got together 15 years ago to design a new high school, they knew there was one thing that had to go: The bell. "You don't go into your job in the morning and say, 'OK, for the first 45 minutes of my job, I'm going to do the math part.' And then a bell goes off, and you do the social history part of your job. You don't do that," Thomas said. There are no teachers at New Country. Every few weeks, students must present projects they've been working on to the rest of the school community. To prepare for their presentations, they gather at tables in the middle of the school atrium and present their work to their "advisers." Kids at New Country test better than their peers on the state tests and on the pre-college ACT. The school sends 90 percent of its graduates to college. But that doesn't tell the whole story. New Country struggles to keep its seniors from leaving. The school's senior project is demanding -- 300 hours of work. But for some students, New Country offers a rare alternative, a choice they can't find anywhere else. And the school is constantly visited by educators from around the world looking for new ideas. That's the foundation of efforts to reform American high schools today -- that there's a need to experiment with an institution that is failing millions of students The following statements about New Country are all true except  _  .
New Country students sit in an open environment that looks a lot like a typical  office. Students consult with "advisers", who "teach" in the traditional sense. No bells in New Country, students choose how to spend their time. No traditional classes, students work on projects they select themselves.