.3 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.

	Why would it be important not to provide an experimental school with more resources than a regular school or vice versa?	Answer Here
	How can Mrs. Smith, a member of the experimental mathematics team for the Pughsville Public School system work with the regular mathematics teachers in this system in order to provide them with feedback and get their feedback?	Answer Here