It used to be, when a new school opened, people assumed it would be a lot like all the other schools around it would look about the same, be run the same way and offer the same kind of program. The thousands and thousands of schools that appeared during the Baby Boom years after World War II are good illustrations of this theory. Despite the diversity of our country, schools built in one section of the U.S. looked much like schools in another. And of course the similarity carried over to their programs.
Now, in a few places, people have decided that a new school might be different -- in fact should be different -- from the other ones around. They've decided that a new school is an opportunity to experiment because, in a new school, you can build from the ground up. If you have a great idea, you don't have to work around the prevailing school culture and assumptions. You don't have to remake anything because you start with a clean slate.
The inspiration for the particular schools I have in mind, the Saturn School in St. Paul and the 49 schools belonging to the Saturn School Project in Dade County, Florida, came from General Motors' Saturn project, where labor and management threw away all their assumptions about how to manufacture an automobile and sat down together to design the process afresh. And it's another good example of how public education can learn from business.
St. Paul's Saturn School, a middle school that will eventually include grades 4 through 8, opened this fall and is the fruit of a four-way collaboration between the school district, the St. Paul Federation of Teachers, a local college and a number of high-tech firms. The students are an extremely diverse group from all over the city, and the school plans to accommodate this diversity in various ways. Each child will have an individual learning plan based on agreements between the child, the parents and the teachers. Students will work independently and at their own pace with computers. But they'll also spend a significant amount of time working on small-group projects, some of which will be computer based. Eventually, student portfolios, including group-made reports of these projects, will replace conventional assessments.
Saturn also uses the city as a classroom: Students go regularly to the science and arts museums, the downtown library and Y as part of their course work. Long-range plans call for close contacts between Saturn students and people in the community through mentorships, apprenticeships and the like, and this will carry individualizing the students' education a step further.
Participants in the consortium that set up St. Paul's Saturn School sat down together to hammer out the plan. The Dade County Public Schools and the United Teachers of Dade are calling on the entire country to collaborate with them in setting up the 49 schools in their Saturn School Project. And their latest request for proposal, which has an October 27 deadline, went nationwide with an ad in the New York Times. Here's the story.
Dade County, Florida, is already several years into a school restructuring program, a joint effort of the school district and the teacher's union, that has made the education pages all over the country. Dade County is also growing very fast, and a couple of years ago the school district passed a $980 million bond issue that will permit them to open 49 new schools over the next few years. Seeing this as another opportunity for school reform, they're calling for proposals on how to run each new school they open. The proposals are to include plans for improving student achievement and measuring and reporting on student progress, as well as schemes for running the school that involve sharing responsibilities and decisions among school personnel.
The Saturn Schools don't have to be similar -- in fact, the point of calling on people all over the U.S. to submit proposals is to get as much diversity as possible. School district and union people hope they'll be surprised by all the ideas they've never even thought of,
Dade County hasn't put any limitation on who can submit a proposal -- teachers, principals, people from universities and foundations are all welcome. But the proposers have to be ready to put their ideas to the test of action. In fact, willingness to go down to Dade County to plan, open and run the school you propose is a condition of winning. Winners -- teams consisting of a principal and a lead teacher each - will spend a year in Dade County refining and revising their ideas, filling in details and hiring their staff before opening their schools. -
St. Paul's Saturn School and Dade County's Saturn School Project are very different but they share a couple of important things: The people who conceived and run them know that reforming our schools means wiping the slate clean and coming up with better ways of operating schools and educating kids. They know, too, that this means taking a risk. And they're an encouraging sign of what can happen when school administrators and the people in the trenches join to do things differently.