An Urgent Need: Schools as High-Tech Institutions.

Our public schools are low-tech institutions trying to exist in a high-tech world. Unless they are modernized so they are competitive with the world outside school walls, it will be the demise of public schools as we know them.

School leaders must make it their priority to get their schools in step with the information decade of the 1990s. School administrators must have the courage and leadership skills to buck the status quo and update their schools.

Today's schools are caught in rapidly unfolding obsolescence. At a time when technology is profoundly affecting the nation and the world, most classrooms are devoid of these powerful electronic inventions, and where it does exist the technology typically is placed in separate computer labs.

While these labs serve as a good transition, they isolate the technology from teachers and students who should be using it as part of their daily classroom regimen. We can wait no longer to bring state-of-the-art technology and software to every teacher and every student in every classroom. The breathtaking speed of new technological developments demands school leaders take the risk to respond.

Since A Nation at Risk in 1983, the public has been clamoring for change in the schools. Disappointed, many now decry the ability of public schools to educate our young people. Consequently, more and more enterprises are arising to circumvent the public schools.

Whittle's Edison Project promises to replace public schools with newly designed, highly efficient institutions centered around a rich array of high-tech equipment. In California, critics of public schools petitioned to bring free enterprise to education by privatizing the public schools with voucher programs.

Many people still support the public schools, however. School leaders can meet their expectations by modernizing schools and equipping teachers and learners with the instructional systems they deserve. It is ludicrous to send teachers into outmoded classrooms without even a telephone and expect them to teach Nintendo kids. What other worker in America today has such limited resources? A supermarket checker has more high-tech support than a teacher.

A recent book I co-authored, How to Shape Up Our Nation's Schools, described how to transform entire schools into high-tech institutions. This year, we are beginning to establish several such model schools. This first step will need modifications and improvements as we implement it and learn, but at least our client teachers and their students will have access to modern tools. These schools, equipped like other businesses and enterprises in their communities, will be prepared at last to meet the competition from those who advocate privatization.

Given the blinding speed of change in our society, every school system in America should implement a plan to transform all their schools into high-tech institutions by the turn of the century-only six years away. A time-phased action plan to transform one-sixth of the schools each year for six years would update our schools by the year 2000 so they can function on the same playing field as other enterprises.

It's moving and shaking time for the leadership of all 15,000 school districts. I challenge my colleagues to seize the moment before it is too late. More than ever before in our history, the future of the public schools is in your hands.

The author, a former U.S. secretary of education, acknowledges the help of Donna L. Elmquist, executive vice-president in his educational consulting firm, in preparing this column.