.7 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.

	What would the experimental school need to be exempt from in order to succeed and survive?	Answer Here
	Mrs. Adams would like to see an experimental school Chicago where she lives. Seeing that the population for Chicago, like most major cities, is very diverse ethnically and culturally, and that the students would have to apply to go to the experimental school, what problems might Mrs. Adams face when presenting this proposal to her school board and state board of education?	Answer Here