Lecture 19: "Experimental Schools"
Today, we will examine the creation of an experimental school system. Such a school system is important because the American school system has no means of experimentation. There is yet to be a means of getting any kind of systematic evidence concerning various reforms and their effects. So we just keep going on and on, and often experiments are discontinued, not because they haven't worked, but because there has been a shift in the political winds. We have fifteen thousand independent school districts, all of which are making their own judgments as they see fit, making it very difficult to get any solid evidence regarding what they are doing. The other side of that coin, of course, is that even when we do get systematic evidence, the results are not necessarily used. While I was delivering a PR speech at the Fleet Naval Command discussing what was new in education and training, I mentioned how the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics had absolutely cold, hard evidence that students are better off being able to use calculators at all stages of their mathematical calculations on exams. The hard-bitten officers and senior officers did not agree. These people said, "Well what happens if the calculator breaks?" I said, "Well, what happens when your car breaks?" He said, "I fix it." But there are a whole lot of folks out there who drive cars and don't have a clue about fixing them.
We feel very strongly about education and how we should change it. It isn't just a matter of evidence, it is a matter of the way we feel, and so even when you get evidence, and it isn't necessarily the end of the line. Therefore, more systematic evidence about what works and what doesn't is necessary. Take Microsoft for example. They will spend up to forty percent of their budget on research and development. I am proposing that we establish one percent of the school districts in every state as experimental schools. I define an experimental school district as a single high school with its feeder schools.
Experimental Districts would have local application for selection. In other words, no one would be required to be in experimental schools. You would have to apply to be in an experimental school. There would not be difficulty finding one percent of the school districts in the United States to volunteer to be experimental schools, and frankly, it's a ploy. If you force a district to be an experimental school, then they can get angry and complain that they were forced to participate, and everything that had gone wrong was because of the experiment. However, if its voluntary, then you'll see that you eliminate a lot of the garbage in terms of people who would really not object to the experimental schools, but would like a scapegoat if something goes wrong.
I would have a combination of both local and national experimentation. What I would like to do is have a national experimental school system. Part of the mandate of the national experimental school system would be to fund state and local experimental ventures. In our national experimental school system, about one half of all the experiments attempted in those schools would be part of the national program. But a quarter of it would be state, a quarter of it would be local, and all of that will be funded by the national experimental school system. In other words, if Lake Taylor High School became a national experimental school, then one quarter of its national funding would be for Lake Taylor to figure out its own experimental program.
Development of Experimental Districts:
Staffing, Funding and Participation
The experimental and developmental staff would be parallel with the regular staff. The school would have a regular staff that would be funded in the ordinary way. If experimental schools are provided more resources than other schools, then they should do a better job. If you gave more resources to a regular school, they'd do a better job, too. However, if experimental schools that do not have additional resources can figure out how to do a better job within the regular resources, then they can provide a model for others to follow. They will have parallel resources with a developmental and an experimental staff.
Experimentation and evaluation are expensive. For example, I would like to do a lot more evaluation on the results of our computer quizzes. I would like to know in a more systematic way whether people who take quizzes with computers do as well as they do on paper, how their attitudes compare, and if there is any difference in the amount of cheating. To do a good job of evaluation, though, is very expensive and we just don't have those resources. In an experimental school, you would have the resources for experimentation and development. It doesn't cost any more to teach the new curriculum once it is developed. But it requires a lot of money to develop a new curriculum, as well as the computer materials, the video materials, and the textbooks to support it. It also takes a lot of time and
energy that would be funded out of the experimental program.
The interface with the regular schools is a very important part of this. There would be voluntary participation. By that I mean that nobody would be forced to participate in an experimental school. If Lake Taylor High School became an experimental school, all of the faculty at Lake Taylor would be allowed to transfer out to other schools and would be guaranteed jobs. As much as possible would be done to make sure that the people who are there want to be there. The same would be done with students. Right now in PRIME, theoretically, the students are all voluntary. But at the moment, it really is not a fair playing field because we say, "Okay you don't have to go to Lake Taylor, you can go to another school but you have to provide your own transportation." In the experimental school
program we would provide transportation so that you would have a genuine choice that would not be punitive. We would work hard to get community application. A federal bureaucracy somewhere would not decide admittance, but instead each community could figure out what the pluses and minuses are for an experimental school, and decide whether or not they wanted to participate. My guess is that we'd have a lot more communities that would apply to have experimental schools than we would have experimental schools. There would be a large surplus of people wanting to get into the act. Teachers and administrators would be able to choose, and they'd have to volunteer for participation. The students would volunteer for participation, and the experimental schools would be paired with
the regular schools for the transfer of students choosing not to participate. You'd have a predictable school. In other words, it wouldn't be that you could just go anywhere you wanted, you'd have an assigned paired school for your voluntary participation and the costs would be borne by the experimental school systems. Bottom line is that we want only the people at the experimental schools who want to be there.
Program, Staffing and Organizational Development
Now what would be the program of this school? First of all, there would be these experimental national curriculum elements. Take, for example, the program that we mention a lot of times in here: reading. There is a lot of controversy on how to teach reading, and there are some people who feel strongly for phonics, and other people who feel strongly about whole language instruction. The evidence is that if you pay attention to reading, reading will improve, and for most kids it doesn't make a difference which method you choose. Right now we don't have a very good way of choosing. In our national experimental schools, we would develop new curricula concerning the environment, new curricula concerning global studies and concerning health and nutrition so we would have lots of different kinds of curriculum elements to be developed and supported.
We'd also have experimental staffing patterns. We would have things like differentiated staffing, opportunities for mentoring with part-time and volunteer roles, all part of experimental staffing. Remember we had a whole lecture in here about the teacher and his or her staff. My vision of teaching in the future is that the teacher is a senior honcho with a lot of folks helping. The idea that the teacher is the bottom level of the food chain doesn't appeal to me at all because I see the teacher as a very senior person directing a variety of resources to maximize learning. Take for example this idea of part-time and volunteer roles. The typical school hates part-time people because it is messy to administer part-time people. Take for example the idea of a local artist or sculptor teaching a class in the high school. I don't want that sculptor to have to teach full-time or not at all. I think it would be really cool for that person to come in and teach sculpturing to one or two classes a day and do the job. First of all, that would be good financial support for the sculptor and it would also benefit the kids while allowing the sculptor time to do his own work, too. But right now if a sculptor wants to be a teacher, he has to be a full-time teacher or nothing. That is not a good trade-off. I see this as one of the major experimental elements: helping teachers to learn how to work with a staff. I think we need to experiment with different kinds of teaching teams and different ways of people working together. I would even like teams across grade levels. We need teaching teams across grade levels, within disciplines, across disciplines and across schools.
We need some experimental organizational patterns as well. We need to figure out if the way schools are currently organized is the ideal way. For example, Lake Taylor is a school of about 1800 kids. Would it be better if we were to divide those 1800 kids into four houses so that the kids would have a reference group of about 500? One of the things we are doing organizationally at Lake Taylor is we have developed instead are clusters. So we have groups of about one hundred kids that are sharing all of their classes together and all of the same teachers so that the teachers and kids get to know each other very well. We're trying to figure out a way for those kids to move from grade nine into grade ten together. We have many problems organizing that, but it is one of the things we are trying to do in terms of experimental organizational patterns.
Organization, Scheduling, and Instructional Patterns
I would like to have national experimentation, state experimentation and local experimentation. These experimental organizational patterns are one of the major elements of the national experimental school system.
The length of the school day and school year is another kind of organizational pattern. If I had my way, schools would open at about seven in the morning and stay open until about ten at night. That would be my ideal school. Kids would come and go, and teachers would come and go. Some teachers would come in at eight and leave at five, and some teachers would come in at one and leave at ten. Some teachers would come in at eight in the morning and leave at ten at night, but take four or five hours out in the middle of the day. There is nothing sacred about having everybody at school on the same schedule. I think the school serves the society better with that kind of flexibility where people can come and go with flexible schedules.
I would also have year round schools, and I would have seven weeks off for everybody. I'd have one week's vacation every thirteen weeks - twelve weeks of school then a week's vacation. In each of those twelve weeks I would have nine weeks of regular school and three weeks of either remediation or enrichment or vacation. Everyone would be there for the four nine-week programs, then both teachers and students would be there typically for three of the four three-week programs, and everybody would have one of the three-week times off. So everybody would have four weeks of vacation plus an additional three weeks sometimes.
We need experimental instructional patterns. We need to try different kinds of things and see if they work. I'd like to find out, for example, whether there is some benefit in having some large group instruction in high school. If you have five hundred kids taking US history, might it be useful every once in a while to put the five hundred kids in an auditorium and do something with all five hundred? Might it be useful just in terms of instructional resources? Every time I have one class with all five hundred, I am saving twenty hours of instruction in terms of what it would take to teach those kids twenty-five at a time in twenty classes. So I have one teacher instead of twenty. That means I have nineteen hours of teacher time that are now available to do something else. Maybe a combination of large groups and small groups so that sometimes teachers would be dealing with groups of ten to twelve instead of always dealing with groups of twenty-five. We need to experiment with different kinds of instructional patterns. That is hard, and teachers are not familiar with that idea; they are not prepared for it, so if you were going to do that you would have to have kind of a developmental staff development and support and experimental resources to help them.
Technology, Finances, and Guidelines
We also need experimental technologies: everything from Internet to PowerPoint presentations to computer-generated images to video and self-instructional materials. One of the issues is the fact that schools have not even got their budget together to buy the technology. Let me tell you the story about Ruffner, which is the technology school in Norfolk. It is a middle school that is very technologically oriented. When it opened three or four years ago, it was really state of the art in terms of all the new technology. The teachers went there and they didn't know what to do with all this technology, so maybe ten percent of the technology was used. The other ninety percent just sort of sat there and collected dust. Meantime, we've been kind of training the teachers and teaching them how to deal with the technology. Teachers, they're smart, able and competent people, they just didn't have a clue about the technology, so it took awhile and they are now getting organized. Guess what? The technology in Ruffner School is now hopelessly outmoded. So the Norfolk public schools had a choice. Notice this ugly choice. They could either upgrade the technology at Ruffner, which was now obsolete, or they could put the first round of technology at a place like Lake Taylor that has no technology. So which is better? Let your whizzy-bang school become obsolete, or bring another school on-line a little bit. The choice was made to upgrade the technology at Ruffner. I happen to think that was a good choice because someone somewhere has to learn what it's going to take to keep schools up-to-date with technology. It means that after you've had this huge investment in technology, you have to expend about thirty percent a year of that huge amount to keep the technology up-to-date. Anything else is unrealistic. I would rather have Ruffner become a model including upgrading their technology regularly and letting some folks get some notion of what is involved to make something like that work, even though in the meantime you have Lake Taylor sitting over there that doesn't have a clue in terms of any technology. This is one of the reasons we need experimental schools to show the way, and this is why when you get an experimental school like Ruffner in a school system like Norfolk.
Let's look at the cost of the experimental school system. I estimate to finance one percent of the schools in the country it would be about a billion dollars a year for direct support and administration. A billion dollars a year really isn't much in the grand scheme of things. Another billion dollars would allow us to develop experimental curriculum. The first billion is for things like the buses to take people to other schools if they need it, to actually give the schools that parallel staff, and to work with the development, experimentation and evaluation things. That's the first billion. The second billion dollars is to develop a national curriculum, a new curriculum in whole language learning or a new curriculum in global studies or whatever. Then a third billion dollars for the application of educational technology. What kind of experimental school system would we have if they couldn't model the kind of technology that we would like to have in all the schools over time? Three or four billion dollars a year would be the cost of this kind of national experimental school system. It would be well worth it.
Now what kind of guidelines? Well, I'd like these schools to have a minimum of a twenty-year mandate. The reason for that is one of the problems with experimentation in the past has been that anytime the wind blows, someone gets mad at the experiment and pulls the plug so you never learn anything. However, if you have a twenty-year mandate and the experimental school has a really lousy program that no one likes so all the parents in the experimental school system send their kids to the paired schools, and then they'd have to build new facilities over in the paired school. Fair enough. Do whatever it takes, but the experimental school will go on even if nobody is home, and we are going to pay to do that because we want to make sure that there is continuity in the experimentation. But that
would be an absolute extreme. Now I am not expecting to give an experiment and have nobody participate, but in the extreme I'd rather pay for that and let the experiment go on than pull the plug even if it is a bad experiment because sometimes it is not a matter of being a bad experiment it is just temporarily in hard times. We would have the local and state financial support continued at the same level. We'd have the experimental costs born by the experimental school system. We'd have the local and national experimental school boards for governance. So in other words, you'd have a national school board to direct the national experimentation and the local experimental school board to run the local experimentation.
Challenges Facing Experimental Schools
You'd have experimental commissions to oversee the specific coordinated initiatives. We are not creating new bureaucracies here; you bring specific people in to do specific jobs. There would be no guarantee what you did in the experimental school would hook to anything. If you are going to be highly mobile then don't be in the experimental schools, send your kids to the ones nearby because we don't want to have to worry about whether what we are doing in the experimental schools connects to what is currently being done. So you attend the experimental school on your own, at your own risk. The experimental schools would of course be exempt from local and state regulations, and the local and state initiatives for experimentation would be funded. There are lots of problems. Trust is the biggest one. To have representative school populations is tough, too, because if you are going to have a national experimental school, you'll need to have rural and urban populations, you'll need multi-ethnic populations, you need all sorts of ways of balancing the population, otherwise when you get done with the experimentation you don't know whether it can be applied. Another problem is that I am not sure if we are spending enough on education now, and if we say the experimental schools can't spend any more than the present schools, we may be precluded from experimenting with some stuff we need to. We'll have to look at that as time goes on. We are going to have a tough time with community involvement, but I want to work at that. I think that even though the experimental schools will say that they have enough resources and enough regulatory input, I am not sure that will actually happen, that they won't feel independent. They may be independent, but if they don't feel independent then they won't feel strong enough to try things. It is going to be tough evaluating those programs and finding out what actually worked. Ultimately, it is going to be real tough to find a way to apply what we have learned in the experimental school system to the regular schools. So these are real problems and they're there and they will go on. The experimental school system would not solve it.