Fair or Foul? Forecasts for Education.This fall The School Administrator invited an array of professionals from inside and outside education to discuss what they foresee in public education's future, with special emphasis on what school system leaders might face in their particular roles. Beyond that, we gave these prognosticators few parameters for this assignment other than to suggest they limit their field of vision to the next quarter-century. Among the intrepid forecasters who accepted this challenge and whose essays appear over the ensuing 35 pages of this issue are the following: three professionals who make their living in the predictions business (Marvin Cetron, David Pearce Snyder and Bud Hodgkinson), a pair of college presidents (Leon Botstein, Freeman Hrabowski), two who promote the private sector's interests (John McLaughlin, Chris Whittle), an executive search consultant (John Isaacson), a pair of systems thinkers (Sally Goerner, Lew Rhodes), respected names from higher education (Dale Mann, Joseph Murphy, Tony Wagner), a think tank president (Herbert London) and two educational leaders at the local level (Gerry House, Stephanie Pace Marshall). Several of their commentaries dwell on the present state and what that portends for tomorrow. More than a few discuss the implications of technology. One envisions a world without artificial boundaries between teachers and administrators. All see major hurdles ahead for our nation's public schools. An Educational Renaissance MARVIN J. CETRON KIMBERLEY CETRON Some time ago, Forecasting International set out to learn how our educational system could better prepare young people for the high-tech world ahead. In a study of 300 school reform programs, we quickly discovered that the most successful programs shared some key elements. Those features will guide school improvements in the next decade. Here are six of the most significant: * End of the Edifice Complex Think "school" and most of us picture a building. That is what American communities have always thought of. When we needed educational capacity, we built a new building. Add some teachers, textbooks and students willing to learn, and we have all the elements of yesterday's education. But whether it is one room in white clapboard or sprawling ivy-covered halls, a schoolhouse is only an edifice. It represents learning's past, as obsolete as McGuffey's Reader. What really makes a school is access to knowledge, and that increasingly means computers, the Internet, closed-circuit TV and all the other technologies that link students with information-- tools they will be expected to know how to use when they reach the workplace. The best schools today are fast becoming virtual wired centers of learning, able to tap information anywhere in the world. In this new environment, teachers are changing as well. No longer limited to chalkboard lectures, they are becoming facilitators, catalysts and monitors. They no longer try to pour facts into the heads of pupils who need only memorize them. Today's teachers help students master the skills of collecting, evaluating, analyzing and synthesizing information. They provide challenges, always looking for the best the student has to offer. By 2010, almost every classroom in the country will be tied to the Internet. In the most distant rural areas, students routinely will attend school by communicating over the Internet through wireless modems. For every student, all the world's information will be no more than a mouse-click away. Because of this, the skills needed by tomorrow's knowledge workers will grow from the day-to-day research that students carry out for their classroom assignments. The edifice complex will be a thing of the past. * Alternative Schools: Real Alternatives If traditional public schools don't work, one argument goes, maybe we should replace theta with something else. So we are setting up magnet schools to provide special courses for talented students, charter schools to experiment with new teaching methods and private schools to supply whatever brand of learning can win the support of devoted parents. Today, one student in four goes to an alternative school. Ten years from now, it could be as many as 40 percent. Republican presidential hopeful George W. Bush set this agenda when he gave public schools a deadline. Under his administration, failing schools in Texas would have three years to meet educational standards. After that, their funding would go directly to parents, who could use the money to send their children to any school they pleased--public, private or even church-based (so long as public funds did not go directly to support religious instruction). We expect future Democratic candidates to adopt much the same policy (if the teachers' unions who support them will permit it). As a result, the number of alternative schools in this country will explode during the next 10 years. However, this probably is not a revolution in the making. True, the best magnet, charter and private schools have raised educational performance, even among students given up by others as poor learners. Yet there is growing evidence that the average alternative school is no more successful than the traditional institution it replaced. Factor in the convenience of sending children to the nearest public school, and parents soon may wonder whether it's worth the bother to send their children elsewhere. Economic costs come with alternative schools. Every dollar diverted to them is a dollar lost from traditional public education, which in many areas is strapped for cash already. Alternative schools work only if we can raise extra money for them. In a time of tight budgets, that is not likely to happen. Alternative schools are an important part of American education. The best of them provide unique opportunities for learning and develop educational techniques that other schools then can adopt. Yet they are a supplement for traditional schools, not a replacement for them. We will not be surprised if the pendulum swings back toward public education within the coming decade. * Ability Grouping: Back to the Future Once upon a time schools sorted students according to their perceived ability. Bright students went to advanced classes. Slower learners went to their own less demanding classes. Bright students were not held back by their less capable peers, while lesser talented pupils could learn at their own pace. The majority received at least the chance of an education that would fit them for life on the assembly lines that many of them could expect to inhabit. Today, that system has been discredited as being unduly elitist at the one end and stigmatizing at the other. The best learning, modern educational doctrine holds, occurs when everyone studies together, regardless of each person's perceived talent. This way, the most capable students can learn responsibility and cooperation by helping others, while their less advanced classmates are carried forward by their peers. Other benefits also accrue. Howard Gardner's multiple-intelligence theory holds that students who perform well in a system that primarily tests verbal and mathematical aptitude will benefit from working with others who understand the world musically, kinesthetically or spatially. Heterogeneous grouping creates a environment in which everyone has something to give and to gain. Yet this "one for all, all for one" learning suffers from the same problems that inspired segregated classes in the first place. If the class moves slowly] enough to let the less capable students beep up, the bright students become bored. If it moves quickly enough to challenge the talented, then slower students cannot keep up. One way or the other, someone loses. Thus a new, more sophisticated version of ability grouping is spreading through the nation's classrooms. Students at either end of the spectrum learn pretty much the same material, but the advanced classes go into it at greater depth. Two science classes may learn the basics of geology, for example, but the faster class may get to read John McPhee's Basin and Range while the slower group works to master the text. In the end, everyone will have learned the essentials, something all too few schools can claim today. * The End of Social promotions The principle is simple: Students should advance based on their achievement. Social promotion may avoid stigmatizing poor students, but it undermines personal responsibility. It is not fair to students who work to succeed. It is not fair to students who still need to learn, who can only fail when they are sent on unequipped to the next level of instruction. It is not even fair to their future employers, who should be able to assume that a high school diploma represents skills learned, not just time served. We are not advocating a sink-or-swim learning system here. Promoting students for achievement mean more responsibility for educators and society, not less. To make this work, schools will need full funding for Head Start, so every student reaches school prepared to learn; a full range of high-intensity summer classes, so slower learners can make up time; tutoring for those who need it; remedial classes after hours; bilingual classes and English-as-a-second-language classes to bring foreign-language students up to speed in the only language that can give them full access to American society. Year-round schools, as controversial as they may be, have a strong advantage in this context: They typically recess for three weeks at a time, offering a perfect opportunity to give struggling students extra instruction. We can do many things to make sure the end of social promotions does not condemn students to permanent failure. Getting them done is one of the big challenges for the coming decade. * High-Tech Voc-Ed: Back to the Future II Not everyone goes to college. Not everyone wants to. Not everyone can afford to. In fact, fully half of today's students leave high school and go directly into the workforce. Too few of them have the skills they need to earn a decent living in the modem high-tech economy. For many of these students, vocational training would be far more useful than a college preparatory program. Many of them might even learn more of the core academic skills. Good evidence exists that some students learn better when they can see exactly how their classes apply to their lives than they do in the abstract when they are told, "Learn because it's good for you." However, we live in a new economy, and students need a new kind of vocational education. Yesterday's vocational programs fitted students for assembly-line industrial work. Those jobs are fast disappearing. Today we need computer programmers and people who can repair computers, medical technicians, anti-pollution workers and a host of other technologically sophisticated specialists. This is the stuff of tomorrow's voc-ed. The best high-tech vocational institutions are magnet schools in everything but name. Where other magnet schools offer special opportunities to learn science, art or acting, voc-ed schools build their programs around such practical skills as computer programming and auto repair. In states like Oklahoma, where 21st-century vocational programs already are being pioneered, students taking advanced voc-ed courses receive college credit for them. Providing comparable training for students throughout the United States will not be cheap or easy. Modernizing voc-ed means equipping schools with high-tech equipment and finding teachers with the skills to use it. But if we settle for anything less, we fail half of our young people. No country can afford that. * Life-Long Learning: Education for Young and Old Voc-ed for the young is just the beginning, however. The half-life of an engineer's knowledge today is only five years. In electronics, half of what students learns as freshmen in college is obsolete by their senior year. Almost anyone's job could be obsolete tomorrow, replaced by better computers or some other technology. Most of today's students will pursue no fewer than five different occupations during their working lives. This amounts to a prescription for constant retraining. Today, most of that training happens on the job, and it reaches only the lucky few. American employers now spend $42 billion per year on job training. Fully 96 percent of that comes from companies employing more than 300 people. Large employers almost universally regard training as the best investment they can make. However, by 2005, more than 80 percent of Americans will work for companies with fewer than 200 employees; small firms see training as an expense and they provide as little of it as possible. Only our schools can make up the resulting deficit. This means still more changes for our nation's school system. Tomorrow s schools will be open well into the evening, so adult learners can prepare for their next careers. In some vocational classes, adults and teens may well study together, mastering technologies that did not exist when the experienced workers last attended school. Local businesses may well help to design classes and provide teachers for them, ensuring that companies get the workers they need and students receive training that can earn them a living. Earlier generations saw voc-ed as a dumping ground for slow learners and unruly students. Today it is becoming the education of choice for growing numbers of motivated students in search of practical skills. Tomorrow, it will be a basic part of any school system. Optimistic Outlook All this sounds very promising. Effective reforms are possible, and we believe they will be accomplished. Thus future students will receive a sound education, suited to the high-technology environment in which they will be and work. After decades of failure, it seems too good to be true. Are we being too optimistic? We doubt it. We are not optimists. Neither are we pessimists. We simply go were the data lead us--and in this the data care clear: After long years of experimentation, America's educators have learned how to teach today's students what they reed to know. America's voters, the people who must pay for school reforms, now recognize education as the highest priority in our national life. If we are now optimistic about the future of our schools, it is because these facts make us so. Marvin Cetron is president of Forcasting International, 3612 Boar Dock Drive, Falls Church, Va. 22041. E-mail: margla@tili.com. Kimberley Cetron teaches in the Fairfax Caunty, Va., Public Schools and is a doctoral candidate in education at George Mason University. Maturing Technology and Our Economic Destiny DAVID PEARCE SNYDER The national debate--or rather argument--over education reform has covered a lot of ground since the National Commission on Excellence in Education blanketed America with six million copies of "A Nation at Risk" back in 1983. Local school systems have tried everything from back-to-basics to school uniforms, site-based management to smaller classes and outcome-based learning to corporal punishment, while installing computers in nearly every classroom and imposing tougher tests on students and teachers. For 15 years, real teachers in real classrooms with real students introduced tens of thousands of innovations in schools throughout the country. Individual schools and entire districts have adopted, to one degree or another, essentially every significant reform proposal that has been put forward. What's more, some of those local experiments have produced striking improvements in student performance. But the lessons learned from 15 years of experimental successes and failures have produced no significant systemwide changes in America's public schools and no significant improvement in the national achievement levels of America's 50 million public school pupils. Last June a plain-spoken Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan echoed the prophetic warning of "A Nation at Risk" when he told the Joint Economic Committee of Congress: "I am hard-pressed to see how we can maintain what is increasingly an intellectually based output system without a better education system." America's inability to initiate even one meaningful nationwide education reform over the past 15 years is widely regarded as a singular and troubling failure of leadership. Indeed, now that long-forecast shortages of skilled labor finally have appeared in the marketplace, the debate over why educational reform has failed--and whose fault it is--has pushed the debate over school reform itself into the background. Among those concerned with fixing blame for the unimproved condition of our schools, the usual suspects typically include teachers' unions, religious conservatives, "educrats," the mass media, inept school boards and the Reagan-Bush administrations. In fact, it was the American public who thwarted public school reform over the past 15 years--and what's more, they were right do so! Falling Wages, Rising Angst From the mid-1970s on, the American public had a much less sanguine view of the future than the conventional establishment vision of a high-tech, high-wage 21" century in which most jobs would require a post-secondary degree. By the time "A Nation at Risk" was published, average wages in the United States had been falling for 10 years by nearly 11 percent. More ominously, the biennial Labor Department long-range labor-market forecast for 1983, released a couple of months after "A Nation at Risk," projected continued declines in middle and upper-income jobs through 1995. In 1983, the Bureau of Labor Statistics forecast that the U. S. economy would create fewer than a half million high-tech jobs by 1995 but would add nearly 10 million low-pay, low-tech jobs, such as building custodians retail sales clerks, cashiers, office clerks, secretaries, waiters and waitresses and health aides. The BLS projections, which proved to be remarkably accurate, also correctly foresaw the elimination of millions of middle-income blue-collar jobs as well. By 1995, average wages in America had fallen 15.5 percent from 1973; male wages dropped 22 percent, while women's wages had declined just 7 percent. (Note: The gap between men's and women's wages shrank between 1973 and 1995, largely because the men lost so much ground, not because women s wages rose faster than men's.) Not only did average wages fall during the 12 years following the release of "A Nation at Risk," but the marketplace demand for college graduates declined as well. By the end of the 1980s, the United States was producing a quarter-million surplus baccalaureates a year, and the overreducated/under-employed college graduate became a stock character in American popular humor. By the mid-1990s, nearly half of 18- to 24-year-olds working full-time jobs in this country were earning less than a poverty wage. As a consequence of their low incomes and dismal career prospects, young people in America began to delay leaving their parents' homes, and millions of sons and daughters who left home subsequently returned, often bringing spouses and children (a phenomenon that demographers call the "baby boomerang"). At the outset of the 1990s, national surveys showed that more than half of all Americans felt that our best days as a nation were behind us (that is, the 1950s and '60s). Pollster Lou Harris in 1993 found that only 25 percent of Americans believed their children would be more prosperous than they (the parents) had been. Small wonder than the dire prophecies of "A Nation at Risk" had fallen on deaf public ears. Moreover, the decline in household income provoked a taxpayers' revolt that capped or reduced local revenues in large portions of the nation. This revolt effectively stemmed the flow of additional resources to the nation's schools at the very moment that the costly imperatives of new information technology, teacher training and swelling enrollments from the "Baby Boom Echo" became paramount. In short, even if Americans had believed in the necessity of educational reform, they were in no position to pay for such an endeavor. Moreover, information technology was not yet mature enough during the 1980s and early '90s to provide educators with truly productive new tools. It is the maturing of our information technology upon which the successful transformation of our nation's economy and our schools ultimately will depend. Lessons From History Economic historians have chronicled a number of past technical revolutions (steam and electric power, minted money, the printing press, the internal combustion engine, etc.) and have found it characteristically takes two human generations--roughly 75 to 80 years--for a new technology to evolve from initial demonstration to marketplace generalization. What's more, it typically requires two-thirds of those years just for a new technology to become useful, reliable and cheap enough to consistently generate a positive return on investment. Only after a half-century of marketplace maturation does a new technology become powerful enough to produce truly revolutionary changes in a nation's economy and society. An essential component of technologic maturation is the development of supporting infrastructures. For the steam engine, the enabling infrastructure was a network of inter-city railways. The critical infrastructure for electric power was a grid of power plants and transmission lines, and for the automobile, the infrastructure was a system of paved roads. For the computer, the infrastructure--or "info-structure"--is the Internet. In the mid-1990s, just as our new info-structure was adding color and graphics (the World Wide Web) and the computer was celebrating its 50th birthday, U.S. productivity improvement rates doubled, and wages rose robustly without inflation for the first time in 20 years. We now have sustained this superlative performance for nearly five years. A meta-analysis of the U.S. economy released by the Federal Reserve in April 1999 concluded that America has, in fact, passed through a threshold, or "inflection point," in multifactor productivity arising from new, formulaic combinations of human, financial and technologic resources that consistently produce superior sustainable results. An "Info-Mated" Society Since the 1950s, the computerized future has been commonly described as being "cashless," "paperless" and even "workerless." The principal perceived benefits of information technology involved eliminating the encumbrances and drudgeries of industrial era life and work rather than conferring new benefits or creating new value of its own. Recently, however, as the Internet has permitted organizations to connect their decision makers with more timely and more accurate decision-relevant information, employers have begun to more fully appreciate the potential economic value to be added to every aspect of enterprise by "info-mation." Just as the purpose of automation is to mechanically perform the simple, repetitive tasks required by physical production, the purpose of info-mation is to cybernetically perform the many repetitive tasks required of intellectual production, including data gathering, research, analysis, design, testing, evaluating and planning. And so, just as automated physical production required the development of tens of thousands of individual specialized industrial tools, such as materials handlers, metal-boring machines, pallet racks, polishers and sorters, info-mation now has set into motion the development of tens of thousands of individual, specialized information-handling tools. These tools range from single-purpose expert systems and statistical algorithms to process simulators and knowledge-management programs. The proliferation of these information-handling tools will, over the next 10 years, enable employees at all levels of all operations to quickly master the requirements of new jobs or the use of new equipment. Computerized "workday simulators" already are being used by employers to train new hires and screen new recruits in a growing number of fields (nursing, law enforcement, etc.). The computerized work-day simulators will be a commonplace component of Internet job markets, which will handle 75 percent of all U.S. hiring and recruitment within five years. Meanwhile, starting now and extending over the next 20 years, a growing share of all workplace positions will be supported by employer-provided, conversationally endowed computer persona loaded with job-critical data, procedural knowledge, expert systems and decision simulators. These chatty, informated cyber associates, programmed to be amiable, resourceful and trustworthy, will enable any individual with a genuine mastery of standard industrial era K-12 curriculum to perform most middle-income jobs in post-industrial America. If the historic model of techno-economic transformations accurately reflects our current moment in time, the United States has just entered the final phase--the constructive phase--of the Information Revolution. Ahead of us lie 20 years or more of rising productivity and prosperity, fueled by the rapid assimilation of matured information systems and services throughout every function of every private and public enterprise and into many aspects of community, social and family life. But this rosy scenario will come to pass only if we are able to equip all of our citizens with the capabilities and comprehensions to use information technology purposefully. It is now time to reform public education! We have argued and pontificated as long as we dare. Every semester that passes from now on without statistically significant improvements in student achievement and motivation will drag down current economic performance and jeopardize our long-term prosperity. Americans appear to understand this reality. Since 1996, education improvement has been the top U.S. voter priority, ahead of crime, the economy, drugs or taxes. Indeed, several national polls show that two-thirds of American voters want any budget surpluses spent on fixing Social Security, Medicare and education. Certainly the business community is genuinely behind improved educational achievement. If ever there were a moment to reform public education, this is it. So what are we all waiting for? A plan of action? A common agenda? A national program or set of standards? We've been waiting for that sort of top-down mandate for more than 10 years and it isn't going to happen. That's not the way this country was designed to work. The founding fathers set up the division of governmental authority in the Constitution so that the residual powers were reserved to the state and local governments to serve, in Thomas Jefferson's words, as "civic laboratories," to solve the problems with which progress would inevitably confront us. America is designed to be reinvented from the bottom up. Civic Laboratories As already observed, U.S. schools and educators have been working away in their local civic laboratories for more than a decade, testing new curriculum content, trying dramatically different class schedules, reorganizing school structures and experimenting with new instructional methods and technologies. The successful innovations have been reviewed and reassessed in the course of more than 350 national panels, commissions and committees on education since the mid-1980s. The summary conclusions from this nationwide search for the future of education have been reported in such synoptic publications as What Works in Education (published in 1998 by the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies) and A Handbook for Creating Smart Schools (published in 1996 by the National Center to Improve the Tools of Education at the University of Oregon). Today, more than a decade of grassroots experimentation has shown that most reforms commonly promoted during the '80s and early '90s have little or no impact on student achievement. The good news is that we have a smorgasbord of consistently successful concrete innovations from which to choose, including project-based learning, team teaching, precision instruction, peer tutoring, integrated curriculum, computer simulations and Internet-based collaborations. Now is the moment for the leaders of Americas s civic education laboratories to begin selecting from the marketplace of documented successes those specific proven innovations they believe will make a comfortable fit with their school districts' teachers, staff members and individual school/community cultures. Administrators must become "edu-pre-neurial," first mobilizing in-house personnel and resources, then convincing parents and students, the business community and third-party funders that the innovations to which the district is committed have a proven capacity to achieve what all stakeholders now want: for every graduate of our public schools to be literate, numerate and articulate and to be able to apply those competencies to the day-to-day requirements of life and work in a high-tech future that all Americans, working together, are about to invent. In particular, the edu-preneurial leader must make it clear from the outset that the purpose of each individual innovation-each pilot test or skills-training program-is to initiate and routinize superior tools and techniques for adoption districtwide, for all students, as rapidly as possible. Most program innovations in public schools during the last 15 years have been targeted at special student populations--learning disabled, gifted and talented, economically disadvantaged, etc. As a result, the Economic Policy Institute reports that less than 60 percent of school operating budgets are spent on regular education today, down from 80 percent in 1980. Genuine school reform must be a rising tide that lifts all students, not just those with mobilized parents. Of course, a superintendent will draw fire for promoting innovations or changes based upon their proven superior performance rather than their political currency. But, in the contentious environment of this revolutionary moment in our history, superintendents are likely to be shot at-or sued-in any case. You might as well take the high round and accept the flak for something worth-while. To prosper in revolutionary times, you must be a successful revolutionary. By all accounts, we are in the middle of a genuine techno-economic revolution, the sort of watershed event about which historians typically write entire textbooks. Fifty years from now, whole history chips will be titled "High Noon for High-Tech in America," recounting how well, or how badly, the United States re-invented its principal institutions for the information age. For the reinvention of education, a crucial factor will be the ability of professional school leaders at the local level to wrest control of reform in their districts from the partisans and the ideologues and to take advantage of this crucial moment of technologic potency, returning prosperity and political opportunity. For America's public schools, at long last, the future really is now. David Pearce Snyder is principal partner of the Snyder Family Enterprise, 8628 Garfield Street, Bethesda, Md. 20817. The Uneven Spread and Blurring of Student Diversity HAROLD L. HODGKINGSON Most educational leaders realize that student racial diversity in American schools has increased, is increasing and will continue to increase. For the first time, the Census 2000 will track some of these changes by allowing people to indicate mixed racial/ethnic identity. (It likely will show at least three million youth in this country are of mixed ancestry.) Yet few educational leaders are aware that: * increased diversity is concentrated in a small number of counties and states; and * young people today are less conscious of "race" in making friendships, etc. The Nature of Diversity Two factors--immigration and differential fertility--serve to increase diversity. * Immigration. Nearly 85 percent of immigrants today come from non-European countries (mostly from Asia and South and Central America). * Differential fertility. The average black female gets pregnant 5.1 times over her lifetime and gives birth to 2.6 children, while the white female gets pregnant only 2.8 times and gives birth to only 1.7 children, not enough to replace the white population. (Indeed, whites in the world-only about 14 percent of the world's 5.9 billion people-are unable to maintain current population levels with current birth rates.) What this means for schools can be seen in the table below from Kids Count 1997. The table shows: * a decline in the number of white children will continue past 2005; * a large increase in the number of Hispanics over the next 10 years, making them more numerous than blacks, an irreversible change, given immigration and differential fertility; * smaller increases among the younger populations, including an actual decline in the youngest (preschool) children, all of which is white, plus the end of the increases that the U.S. Department of Education describes as "Tidal Wave 11," even though only five states have increases of 20 percent through 2007. By 2020, half of all U.S. students ages 0-18 will be non-white. By 2050, half of all Americans will be "minority." Hispanics and Asians will account for 61 percent of U.S. population growth between 1995 and 2025-44 percent Hispanic and 17 percent Asian. Uneven Spread But this diversity will be absorbed by a small number of areas. Only 300 counties of our 3,068--10 percent--will have the vast majority of these increases. Even today, only 10 states have 90 percent of the country's Hispanic population, and only three metropolitan areas--San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York-have 46 percent of all Asian Americans. California alone will add 12 million Hispanics and 6 million Asians by 2025, while Texas and Florida will add 8 million Hispanics. The vast majority of African Americans live in only 10 percent of the land mass--the south Atlantic states and the Mississippi delta. (Small immigration rates keep their future numbers down.) Even Native Americans will go from 2 million to 3.4 million by 2010, largely not by births or immigration, but because it is more socially acceptable today to claim that all or part of our heritage is Native American. The uneven distribution of these minority populations will create a new class of problems: Children in Maine and North Dakota in 2050 will live in a nation without a racial majority, but in their schools they will have little chance to interact with what we call "minorities" today. Diversity training is fine, but in about 35 states, school will have no one to practice on. This unevenness of diversity in our schools has yet to be seen as a major policy issue. Racial Identity and Diffusion The second concern is the most difficult. Although race has major importance politically, economically an historically, it is scientific nonsense. The U.S. Census is the world's largest public opinion poll. If you say you're black, you're black, even though the darkest 20 percent of the "white" population is darker in skin color than the lightest 20 percent of the "black" population. Every major magazine and newspaper has done articles on the large number of Americans of mixed ethnic ancestry, including celebrities from Tiger Woods (a Cablinasian-Caucasian/black/Native American/Asian) to Soledad O'Brien (black/Cuban/white). In fact, we always have "melted" by marrying someone of a different racial/ethnic background. Only about 15 percent of European Americans today are a German married to a German, a Pole married to a Pole, yet in 1900 an Irish-Italian marriage would have been considered miscegenation. Today, 35 percent of children of Hispanic immigrants are marrying non-Hispanics, while 50 percent of the children of Asian immigrants are marrying non-Asians, and half of Native American marriages are to non-Native Americans. The numbers are understated, but at least 10 percent of African-Americans have married non-Africans, including 3 million black Hispanics plus many whites. Several Jewish organizations have indicated their No. 1 concern is the number of Jewish children who are marrying outside the faith. Farmers sell the family farm because children no longer want to live that life. Diffusion is the order of the day. New Definition of Equity This is a curious time in American racial and ethnic relations. Race is as visible as ever in our politics and economics, yet the physical traits that represent race are blurring at great speed. The increase in diversity will be contained almost completely in only 300 of our 3,068 counties, and young people seldom behave as if race guided their friendships and behavior. A Gallup survey in 1995 shows that 80 percent of blacks said they had a good white friend in 1990 and 67 percent of whites said they had a good black friend. In addition, a recent survey by UCLA professor Alexander Astin showed that 75 percent of college freshmen did something social with a person of another race in the previous week. It may be time to consider a new definition of equity. Being black is no longer a universal handicap. More than 20 percent of black households now have a higher income than the white average. But being poor is a universal handicap. Now that racial integration is emerging as a mixed success, it may be time to turn our full attention to economic injustice. Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was a highly targeted program aimed at school districts with the highest percentage of low-income children, regardless of their race. (Like all federal programs, it has become a political cash cow, and today virtually every school district in the nation gets Title I money. Yet the original goal, like Head Start, was a form of economic desegregation.) Another example comes from the Kentucky legal case in which poor rural districts sued the state over their inability to spend as much money per student as Louisville could. The court agreed and ordered economic desegregation, an income floor under every single student in Kentucky schools, which provided a more equal chance for educational success for students in low-income districts, regardless of their race. The Hope Scholarships in Georgia are also organized in this mode of leveling the economic playing field. The Census 2000 will begin to present the true nature of racial mixing in the United States, and will likely reveal that economic differences between the richest and poorest Americans continue to increase. In hundreds of places, people of many races now live together in a community that respects them all. But I know no place in which rich and poor live together as neighbors. The ethical issues here are huge, but few would disagree with the idea that all children should be able to knock on the kindergarten door with a bag of assets that basically will be similar to all the others. Yet while racial lines are blurring and only 10 percent of our counties will cover most of the increased diversity by race, economic inequities are as clear as ever and are more evenly spread. America's schools are the key vehicle for restoring equity, and economic equity will become the only major target around. Harold (Bud) Hodgkinson is director the Center for Demographic Policy, 1001 Connecticut Ave., N.W., Suite 310, Washington, D.C. 20036.
Demographic Changes in Race/Ethnicity of Children: 1995-2005
1995 2005 Net Change
All U.S. Children under 18 67.7 million 71.9 million +5 percent
0-5 years old 23.6 million 22.9 million -3 percent
Ages 6-11 (elementary) 22.7 million 23.6 million +4 percent
Ages 12-14 (middle school) 11.3 million 12.6 million +12 percent
Ages 15-17 (high school) 11.0 million 12.6 million +15 percent
Children under 18
White 45.7 million 44.2 million -3 percent
Black 10.1 million 11.0 million +8 percent
Hispanic * 9.5 million 12.4 million +30 percent
Asian and Pacific Islander 2.5 million 3.5 million +39 percent
Native Americans 673,000 713,000 +6 percent
(*)Hispanics can be of any race, but about 80 percent say they are
white. The United States now has more than 3 million "black Hispanics."
Source: Kids Count 1997; Published by The Annie E. Casey Foundation,
Baltimore, Md.
Choice Reigns Outside the Public Sphere JOHN M. MCLAUGHLIN The greatest change for K-12 education in the coming quarter century will be a shift in emphasis from schooling to learning. Schooling--being present in a building for seven hours a day for 180 days with children of the same age--will give way to learning--the demonstration of mastery of specific objectives. Education will remain of paramount interest to our society, but there will be a wider definition of how that education can be achieved. Setting the stage for these changes are three significant developments at the close of the 20th century-charter schools, vouchers and home schooling. * Charter schools. Since Minnesota passed the first charter law in 1991, charter schools have become an important element of public school reform. Strong charter laws, which are found in the District of Columbia and about one half of the 36 states with charter school legislation, allow schools to offer a differentiated education product to parents and students on a voluntary basis. More states will pass charter legislation and weaker laws will be strengthened in coming years. Legislators see charter schools as way of encouraging competition, widening academic offerings and improving customer satisfaction. In essence, charter schools are one way to satisfy a demand for choice among consumers. No student is zoned or mandated to attend a charter school. Yet for those who elect to attend a charter school, the government pays the fee. In truth, charter schools are voucher schools. The only difference is that the money goes from the government to the charter school group and does not pass through parents' hands. * Vouchers. Charter schools are the precursor of vouchers, and vouchers will take a course similar to charter laws' political evolution. Torrid debate will take place in state after state with a wide range of voucher laws passed in the next decade. Initially aimed at the disadvantaged, voucher programs eventually will incorporate middle- and upper-income families. A marketplace of education providers will offer services and products to millions of voucher-holding students. Among those providers will be public schools, charter schools, religious schools (the separation issue will give way to the issue of choice), for-profit schools, tutoring centers and on-line schools. Traditional public schools will lose market share to a wider variety of competitors at a rate of about 1 percent annually. While public schools hold 89 percent of today's market, their share in 2025 will range between 65 and 70 percent. * Home schooling. Over the past 20 years, home-school advocates have established, or re-established, the primacy of the parents' role in educating their children over the state's role. Once the domain of religious fundamentalists, home schooling is becoming a mainstream option, with Catholic families making up the fastest-growing group. Some 1.5 million children now are schooled at home. While that number is slightly more than 3 percent of the 47 million children enrolled today in public schools, it represents more than 20 percent of non-public school enrollment. As technology increases the options and range of curriculum for home schoolers, their numbers will continue to grow well into the 21st century. Home schoolers are at the forefront of the buyers' market that increasingly will characterize K-12 education over the next 25 years. Parents will look to the marketplace to purchase the educational products and services that meet the needs of their children. * Structural issues. The three areas noted above are substantial platforms that provide the legal and statutory basis for a shift to greater market forces in education. As this shift occurs, the structure of schooling--the curriculum, assessment practices and scheduling-will change as will the accreditation standards for schools. A combination of consumer needs and technological capabilities will move schools away from mass production model toward a model of mass customization. Longer school days and school years might be an option for some, while shorter days and year-round schooling will appeal to others. Where one family might desire an Afrocentric curriculum while another family prefers a core knowledge approach, both needs can be met in a mass customized model Schools will become very customer-or ented. The current move to standards will continue to evolve until there are established and agreed-upon objectives and assessment techniques in all areas. These standards will form the common body of knowledge that will determine when a student has achieved certain educational benchmarks. In the next quarter-century, learning an a demonstration of mastery will become the primary objectives. The method schedule and location of learning will become subordinate to these ends. The stage has been set. While there will be no Berlin Wall-type of event signifying the end of one era and the beginning of the next, there will continue to be a shift to greater market forces and choice for families in the education of their children. The education of the public will remain a crucial priority for our national, state and local communities, but educating the public will no longer be synonymous with public education. Families will have a far wider range of education options from which to choose. John McLaughlin is president of The Education Industry Group, 1225. Phillips Ave., Suite 200, Sioux Falls, S.D. 57104. E-mail: john@edindustry.com Divorce or Remarriage of K-12 and Silicon Valley? CHRIS WHITTLE For the past decade, we have heard a lot of talk about computers in the classroom. School system after school system (including Edison Schools, which I lead) has pumped funds into technology, cumulatively totaling billions of dollars. A portion of the spending has provided teachers with their own personal computers--a good idea. Other dollars have paid for more work stations for school libraries, another good idea. But most of the funds have been invested in the placement of two to four computers each in a number of classrooms. Should you visit these classrooms without giving notice, in some you would find teachers and students using this new equipment. In many more instances you would find the computers sitting like silent sentries in the back of class while teachers and students do pretty much the same thing they were doing long before the digital age arrived. Why is this? Is it because computers don't hold great promise for education? No, they do. Is it because teachers are technophobic Afraid of technology. See lamer and Luddite. Contrast with technophile.? No, they are not. It is because in our rush to marry off the Little Red Schoolhouse to Silicon Valley we made classroom technology an end in itself, not a specifically designed tool for the teacher. It is as if we placed four computers along the wall of a surgical unit or behind the pilots in the cockpit of a commercial airliner or along the side of a typical business conference room. Would anyone expect such installations to be used frequently? Unless the equipment had been developed to help surgeons, pilots or business people better perform a specific function, all of these groups would correctly do with this technology what many teachers do-ignore it. So the bad news is that we have pumped untold billions into an execution that is not yielding adequate results. The good news is that the benefits of the rapidly emerging and magnificent digital world still lie before us, largely untapped. Though computers are now somewhat deployed in our schools for research and student information systems, in teaching and learning-what schools are really about-we have not begun to see the real impact of the computer age. When we do, it will greatly advance student achievement. Better Connections How will this unfold? Though flying a plane has little in common with teaching a class comparing the cockpit of a modern-day airliner with that of a plane from the 1950s may provide clues to how radically different the classroom of 2025 will be. The cockpit of old was literally hundreds of mechanical gauges completely disconnected from one another. (Think of those gauges as pencils, papers, workbooks, textbooks, chalkboards slide projectors and, yes, computers in the back of the room.) Today's cockpit is largely two or three computer screens. On those screens you can find all the same information the gauges once provided--just far better displayed, interpreted and connected. In addition you'll see new and important information that wasn't possible in the old mechanical format including weather radar, collision avoidance data and specific checklists for each function of a particular type of aircraft. Every aspect of the cockpit has been designed and integrated with one objective in mind: to help the pilot better fly the plane. Classroom technology of tomorrow should be similarly developed to help teachers and students do their jobs. Such resources would have a dramatic effect on the typical classroom in 2025. Let's imagine what one of those classrooms might be like. An Interactive Classroom It's 9 a.m. one day as Jim Cameron calls to order his 8th grade science class and the class of one of his faculty colleagues. Every couple of days these groups meet together in one of the school's three "amphi-classrooms" as a double class of students. Each "pod" of desks is slightly elevated from the group in front of it, allowing for better communication and viewing. Each student has a large keyboard and flat screen built into his other desk that easily connects to his or her files through school servers. A 6-by-10-foot flat screen display at the front of the class is used for video presentations to the class. "Students, as you know, over the past few weeks we've been working via the Internet with Dr. Sylvester, Edison's science specialist in Berkeley," Cameron announces. "He's here again this morning with a 10-minute presentation on gravity. Let's give him our attention." Cameron then plays the tape-delayed lesson that he previewed the night before in preparation for the class. The video lesson was specifically prepared as part of the science curriculum Cameron is using. It is not your 1980s vintage educational television--low-production-value talking heads--but a compelling, well-researched, well-produced segment complete with animation, quality sound and various "field trip" aspects. It ought to be this way. A substantial science research and production unit connected with the school's national headquarters backs up Sylvester. Cameron uses the video lesson because he knows it is far more effective than he could possibly be on a day-to-day basis. Following the 10-minute lesson, Cameron leads a 20- minute discussion with the students using the approach suggested by Sylvester's team. He then directs the students' attention to their terminals and asks them to spend the remaining 30 minutes on some interactive exercises on gravity, prepared and downloaded to each of their mailboxes by Sylvester's group. As the class works away, Cameron circulates among them, answering questions and giving guidance. As all this is happening, a server stores and interprets each student's work in an individual electronic portfolio for the teacher's later review and comment. "OK, students, you need to close your files as our time is coming to an end," says Cameron. "But before you leave, make sure you check your science mailbox tonight as we have about 20 minutes of homework on gravity that includes some research I want you to do at some interesting sites. If you could return the completed assignment to me before 7 a.m., I'll try to have comments on it during tomorrow's regular class." Cameron is referring to special "digital homework packages" that Sylvester's team has prepared and that students will access through their school-provided laptops. As with the in-class interactive work, the server will organize and interpret the completed student work. The students protest about the amount of work as they file out. (Some things never change.) Later that day, Cameron heads home with no paper in his briefcase--just his laptop. That evening he taps into the school network to see how the students are doing on their digital homework. Not bad, he thinks. Integrative Nature Aspects of what you have just heard occur in some classrooms today. Through enormous initiative, some teachers make elements of the above experience happen. But it is unrealistic for us to ask teachers to prepare 1,000 or so sessions of this nature every school year. No teacher would have the resources to do so. What will differentiate education's technological future from its past will be the integration of all the various elements noted above. When Boeing builds a cockpit, it does so as the system integrator. It doesn't make all the things that go into a cockpit, but it ensures they come together properly. So it will be with schools of tomorrow. Although average-size school districts will not be able to provide the required investment in research and development and design, they will reach out to national schooling companies, such as Edison, to play that role. These entities, using their scale, capital and expertise in digital and video production, will bring together all the specialties and disciplines required. This is not just talk. This winter, in at least three of our 79 schools, we are planning to test our first version of such a classroom experience. To bring it about we will be working with a consortium of curriculum producers, video experts, software providers, hardware manufacturers, professional development specialists and school schedulers. Our aim is not to bring more technology to schools. We're interested in making each class, every day, more effective for children and more satisfying for teachers. Chris Whittle is the founder of the Edison Schools, 521 Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y. 10175. The Incapacity of Our Talent Pool HERBERT I. LONDON The French poet Valery said, "The future isn't what it used to be." Alas, that is true in ways he never imagined. While most of the 20th century was obsessed with human plentitude and the belief there were insufficient job opportunities for the growing population, the 21st century will be based on a labor scarcity. For children of the Depression, this is an unprecedented historical moment. As my father used to say continually, "Thank God I have a job." Clearly, many firms are still downsizing. Jobs are being lost, and lives adversely affected. The 50-year-old employee released during a downsizing cycle is not unlike the security-conscious products of the Depression. He or she is part of current reality, a very sad part of it. But the emerging reality is strikingly different. In some respects it is like the 1820s with the construction of the Erie Canal and 1900 with the Panama Canal-periods when labor was in demand. Envision, if you can, the simultaneous construction of 20 Panama Canals linking one region of the world to another in a cyberspace autobahn, and you begin to recognize the potential market for labor in the future. Human capital will be the scarce and valuable commodity of the future, and skilled labor will command enormous wages. Aging Realities A demographic profile of the future makes that clear. Between 1995 and 2020, the over-65 population in the United States will increase by 60 percent, the 45-to-64 population by 34 percent and the 18-to-44 population by 4 percent. As baby boomers retire in unprecedented numbers, available jobs will increase correspondingly. Note that 87 percent of those eligible to receive Social Security accept reduced rates of compensation to retire at 62. And keep in mind that a healthy person at age 62 is likely to live at least another 20 years. Then consider that in the 1930s when Social Security was introduced, the average life expectancy was 62 and Social Security payments did not begin until age 65. The system appeared to be a low-risk, low-expense actuarial winner. To avoid imposing enormous wage taxes on Generation Xers to support the immense population of retiring baby boomers, the age for Social Security eligibility will rise to reflect current aging realities. Similarly, the most striking thing the government can do to reduce pressure on the system is to encourage older workers to remain in the workforce, by eliminating the earned income penalty on Social Security. The present threshold of $12,500 for workers over 65 simply forces more into retirement. Just as training is needed for the young, we must recognize the need for skilled employment for the elderly. The labor scarcity applies to young and old alike. For the economy to grow at 2.5 percent annually, the labor force grew at an annual rate of 1.8 percent. Extrapolating to the first two decades of the next century, labor growth is likely to decline to 1.1 percent, thereby dramatically affecting national growth rates just when pressure on Social Security and Medicare will be greatest. A Talent Draught At the outer edge of this debate is a lugubrious scenario in which the talent drought undermines our national economy and we lose our competitive advantage in technology. Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America, said, "This is like running our of iron ore in the middle of the Industrial Revolution." Despite impressive starting salaries, most young people steer away from technical fields. Although some analysts blame boredom on the job, I believe the true explanation lies elsewhere. After all, lots of jobs are fairly uneventful, and with average salaries for computer programmers hovering around $70,000, there ought to be many eager applicants on the horizon. The problem is all too many students who graduate from American schools are insufficiently grounded in the skills necessary even to be trainable to become computer specialists. It is no coincidence that U.S. technology companies have set up operations in India, Ireland and the Philippines to take advantage of skilled labor overseas. Also, some 15,000 foreign professionals under federal immigration law come here each year to engage in commuter-related employment, and industry leaders are lobbying to raise the immigration cap. If the global employment market addresses the U.S. labor shortfall, good jobs for Americans will become good jobs for foreigners. We are not building a skilled labor force for the future because we have allowed an inferior education system to ill-prepare our future employees. Microsoft has established a division to train recruits in skills that used to be part of the high school curriculum. The director of the Computer Task Group in Buffalo, a company that provides information technology specialists to corporations, admits she will train "anyone she can find." But how do you train computer programmers when much of the prospective employment pool already has been trained in incapacity? Rather than spend millions of dollars on training programs directed by the federal government--an effort that must fail because the prospective employees are not sufficiently educated to benefit from it--President Clinton would be well advised to urge the states to impose math and language requirements sufficiently rigorous to meet the demands in the technology labor market. Filling the Void As long as schools remain derelict in their duty to require demanding standards of academic attainment, the labor shortage will persist. It may be true many of a programmer's duties are not very stimulating, and that may discourage some young people from entering the field. But when one considers the opportunities that now exist and the relatively high salaries in the computer world, it is a shame our schools are not preparing students to fill the labor void. Imagine telling a student with no experience and limited skills that he or she can find a job that in a few years will be paying $70,000 per year. you might think the corporate doors would have to be reinforced to prevent a stampede. That such jobs go begging demonstrates that the U.S. educational system is not doing its job. If the United States loses its technological edge because of this labor shortage, the blame will not rest with business and industry, which has been sensitive to the supply and demand equation. Rather, fault will lie with an educational system that has been unable or unwilling to transmit the requisite skills to prospective employees in the advanced technological age we are entering. Return to Prosperity Where do we go from here? I, for one, don't despair, in large part because markets always respond to labor scarcity by putting a premium on human capital. And the knowledge explosion born by the Internet already is changing the educational landscape. But schools must respond to the opportunity and quickly. The next big stock market will not be in high-yielding corporate securities but rather in the human capital market, where the debt created by college loans and training programs can be converted into an equity in individual career futures. What is axiomatic about this is nation is that we have the capacity to adapt. That is as American as apple pie. As the world changes, we must adapt to prosper. That is not only the American legacy, it is our national prescription for success. Herbert London is the president of the Hudson Institute, 5395 Emerson Way, Indianapolis, Ind. 46226. E-mail: herb@hudson.org. He also is the John M. Olin professor of humanities at New York University. Core Strategies for Reforming Schooling JOSEPH F. MURPHY Between 1810 and 1920 the American system of public schooling was completely overhauled. Fundamental shifts occurred in the three central elements of schooling--how we think about learning and teaching, how we organize and manage schools and how schools relate to their larger environments. For nearly all of the 20th century, schools built from these 1890-1920 blueprints remained largely unchanged. By the mid-1980s, however, a second revolution in American schooling was being trumpeted. The foundational pillars laid down in the early 1900s in response to the evolution from the agricultural to the industrial world came under scrutiny as we moved from the industrial to the information era. Emerging from this analysis has been the construction of a different scaffolding on which schooling in the 21st century likely will be built. As with the earlier revolution, this new architecture is a compound of how we think about learning, how we organize schools and how schools relate to the larger world. New Views on Learning On the first issue, some evidence exists that a more robust understanding of the education production function is being translated into new ways of thinking about learning and teaching. The strongest theoretical and disciplinary influence on education--behavioral psychology--is being pushed off center stage by constructivist psychology and newer sociological perspectives on learning. Underlying this change are radically different ways of thinking about the educability of children. Those at the forefront of transforming schools that were historically organized to produce results consistent with the normal curve--that is, to sort youth into the various strata needed to fuel the economy--see education being transformed to ensure equal opportunity for all learners. At the center of this newly forming vision about learning for tomorrow are fairly important changes in assumptions about intelligence and knowledge. The prevailing conception of knowledge as an external entity is breaking down. A new view, one that holds that knowledge is internal and subjective, that it is closely connected to the learner and the situational context, is receiving serious consideration. Learning is seen as a social phenomenon and considerable attention is devoted to the social origins of cognition. New views about what is worth learning also characterize emerging perspectives on the core dimension of schooling. The traditional emphasis on acquiring information is being replaced by a focus on learning to learn and on the ability to use knowledge. New perspectives on the context of learning are also being developed, directing attention to active learning. A century-old concern for independent work and competition is slowly receding in favor of more cooperative learning relationships. Student-centered pedagogy will be more heavily underscored in 21st century schools. The model of the teachers as content specialists who possess relevant knowledge that they transmit to students through telling is replaced by an approach in which teaching is more of a guiding function. The student becomes the primary actor. Substantive conversation replaces conventional classroom talk and didactic instruction. Learning is seen as the construction of understanding, and teaching is viewed as facilitating this development. The focus is on learning, not on the delivery system. Views of Organization Increasingly we are realizing that the existing managerial and organizational structures are failing, that the reformers of the last century have produced bureaucratic gridlock. Many conclude that the existing bureaucratic system of administration is incapable of meeting the needs of the public education system in the 21st century. The current management and governance system has come under sharp criticism from various corners: * those who argue that schools are so covered with bureaucratic sediment that initiative, creativity and professional judgment all have been paralyzed; * reviewers who maintain that the current administrative structures are distorting the educational process and interfering with learning; * analysts who believe that bureaucracy is counterproductive to the needs and interests of professionals within the schools; * educators who suggest that bureaucratic management is inconsitent with the sacred values and purposes of education; * scholars who view bureaucracy as a form of operation that inherently forces attention away from the core business of schooling; * analysts who hold that the existing organizational structure of schools is neither sufficiently flexible nor robust to meet the needs of students in a postindustrial society; and * reviewers who believe that the rigidities of bureaucracy impede the ability of parents and citizens to govern and reform schooling. This tremendous attack on the bureaucratic infrastructure of schools has led to demands to develop new blueprints and alternative methods of operating that are grounded on new values and principles. Concomitantly, new forms of school organization and management are emerging. The basic organizing and management principles of schooling are giving way to more pro-active attempts to govern educational systems. In addition, there is enhanced attention to issues of social capital. The hierarchical, bureaucratic organizational structures that have defined schools over the past 80 years are giving way to more decentralized and more professionally controlled systems that create new designs for school management. Inside these new postindustrial educational organizations are important shifts in roles, relationships and responsibilities. Traditional patterns of relationships are altered, authority flows are less hierarchical, role definitions are both more general and more flexible, leadership is connected to competence for needed tasks rather than to formal position and independence and isolation are replaced by cooperative work. Furthermore, a traditional structural orientation is being overshadowed by a focus on the human element. The operant goal is no longer maintenance of the organizational infrastructure but rather the development of human resources. Developing learning climates and organizational adaptivity are being substituted for the more traditional emphasis on uncovering and applying the one best model of performance. Environmental Relationships Many analysts of the interface of a school with its larger environment argue that the public monopoly approach to education that defined schools for nearly all of the 20th century will not work well for the next century. Many chroniclers of the changing institutional arrangements envision the demise of schooling as a sheltered government monopoly heavily controlled by professionals. In its stead, they forecast the emergence of a system of schooling and improvement designs driven by economic and political forces that substantially increase the saliency of the market and the viability of forms of direct democracy. Embedded in this conception are some interesting dynamics, many of which gain force from a realignment of power and influence between professional educators and consumers. The most important is that the traditional dominant relationship--with professional educators on the playing field and parents on the sidelines acting as cheerleaders or agitators or, more likely, passive spectators--is replaced by rules that advantage the consumer. Four elements of this emerging portrait of transformed governance for consumers are most prevalent: choice in selecting a school, voice in school governance, partnership in the education of their children and enhanced membership in the school community. Central to all four is a blurring of the boundaries between the home and the school, between the school and the community and between professional staff and lay constituents. Collectively, these components suggest that in the 21st century, we will have more locally controlled and market-anchored conceptions of schooling. Joseph Murphy is a professor of educational leadership at Vanderbilt University's Peabody College, Box 514, Nashville, Tenn. 37203. The Future of Schooling: More of the Same? DALE MANN "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Thomas Watson, chairman, IBM, 1943 "There is no reason why anyone would want a computer in their home." Ken Olson, president, chair and founder, Digital Equipment Corp., 1977 "640K ought to be enough for anybody." Bill Gates, co-founder, Microsoft, 1981 "The best teacher has always been a person, not a machine." William L. Rukeyser, author, "Computers' Role in Education," the Web site of "Learning in the Real World," 1998 That all of those luminaries are wrong ought to sober anyone who wants to think around the corner. Who has been more eager to change? Isolated farmers or insulated teachers? Compare agriculture at the turn of the last century with the current American reality--genetically engineered seeds, computerized combines, microcropping determined by geopositioned satellites, soon, cloned livestock. It's not farming, it's agribusiness and it literally feeds the world. Think about the transformations in health care, in commerce, in transportation, in communications. The first Internet computer (the "IMP") was built by UCLA in 1969. In September 1999, the amount of telecommunications e-traffic worldwide exceeded the amount of telephone traffic. Outside of schools, the pace of change whipped by technology is staggering. Now think of schools as they were at the end of the 19th century and as they still are at the end of the 20th century. The late president of the American Federation of Teachers, Al Shanker, used to observe that schooling was the last unreformed institution from the last century that we are about to trundle, unreformed, into the next. Why? Mark Twain as right: Education and schooling are not the same things. The larger even of education is learning and not necessarily coupled to public places or professional roles. Schooling is the institutionalized provision of teaching in hopes of learning. Children attend school and teachers present instruction. And, in the telling phrase, administrators "keep school." Two-income families guarantee a steady demand for the school's custodial service. The political clout of organized teachers guarantees their continued dominance of the reality of classroom instruction. School change no longer takes decades, but integrating technology into the classroom remains a big hurdle. Will teachers allow it to happen? Will the public pay for it? Will school leaders expand their vision from "schooling" to "education"? Michael Sullivan, the executive director of the Agency for Instructional Technology has remarked, "(L)earning need not be school-based. ... schools must reinvent themselves as institutions with a far greater purpose or cease to exist." Adding purposes to the already goal-overloaded school may make less sense than joining others in transforming learning. A Vexing Task Every time we hear "education" and think "school," we are minimizing the prospects of improvement for children. There are a lot of educators--the TV, newspapers, parents, religious and cultural institutions, video games, sports and peers. Other countries have ministries of education that bracket all the educators. The United States has a Department of Education that stops at schools. We need to add a learning focus to the teaching focus. The frontal act of instruction, the vexed business of trying to guarantee that children learn particular things is very difficult. (Ask any teacher; ask any taken-over school principal; ask any state commissioner.) What if we added to our intensity about teaching children, the mission of facilitating learning, wherever it happens. It might be more possible to encourage learning than it has been to force teaching. Second, we need to add learning technology to teacher talk. Where learning technology is used appropriately, clear evidence of its power exists. In a recent study funded by the Milken Family Foundation of a six-year, statewide initiative in West Virginia, one-third of the gains in children's reading and math scores attributable to the school were associated with learning technology. That only happens where computers are concentrated in a critical mass, where they are distributed into classrooms available to the children (not in "labs") and where the learning technology initiative is sustained politically and economically over several years. Third, we need to add homes to schools; we need to add parents to teachers. In 1966, James S. Coleman undertook a massive study to determine how much of children's achievement was associated with the school and how much with what Lawrence A. Cremin, the late president of Teachers College at Columbia University, called "the other educators." It turns out that only 30 percent is due to school characteristics and the other 70 percent is from the family, the media and the peer group. Telecommunications is literally perfect for school-home-school connections. If e-mail can bring commerce to customers, why can't e-learning bring teachers to parents? If children learn from the TV and movies because they are captivating and fun, why can't we put the final stake through the heart of the "learning should hurt" crowd? Why can't we make our peace with what coaches and early childhood educators have always known: Play is a child's work? Several groups are putting the Digital Revolution in the service of learning and others are trying to make good on the learning promise of "serious play." The earliest and best documented of these efforts is the Lightspan Partnership Inc. of San Diego. Five schools in the Adams 50 District in Westminster, Colo., used the Lightspan Partnership's CD-ROM "curriculum of the home" plus Sony's low-cost PlayStations to connect homes and schools, parents and teachers. Student performance in reading, language arts and mathematics in the schools using Lightspan exceeded student performance in the control group schools. A Democratizing Impact Finally, we need to capitalize on this historic moment. Ready or not, learning is moving to the learner. The late futurist Herman Kahn maintained that the future could be understood only in terms of trends that were long term and manifold, that is, powered by multiple, independent but convergent forces. The Digital Revolution and its consequences for the transmission of knowledge is such an event. Whether or not schools help, telecommunication has and will move learning to the learner. In the earliest times, boys went with their fathers to learn to hunt. The artists of the cave walls moved learning inside. The creation of the common school still required learners to go to the site of learning and to be dependent on the knowledge masters. As long as learners have to go to the learning site and the learning master, they will be dependnet and that dependency makes them vulnerable to the politics (and ethnic and class and gender) prejudices of the masters. Digital communications bypass that transaction and may transform that politics. With the Internet, learning goes to the learner. This is the "4 Any's Future"--Any Learning, Any Time, Any Place to Any One. The democratizing impacts of that reversal are only dimly perceived. And the consequences for bricks-and-mortar knowledge citadels have not begun to be imagined, although they are probably captured by the observation of technology as train--you will be either on it or under it. Dale Mann is a professor of education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and managing director of Interactive, Inc., a learning technology consulting firm, at 326 New York Ave., Huntington, N.Y. 11743. A Web View: Education for an Integral Society SALLY J. GOERNER Over the last 30 years, divorce rates, violence and materialism have gone up while participation rates, test scores and public trust have gone down. Most reformers who try to tackle these trends have approached education as if schooling were broken but, in fact, turmoil in schools reflects turmoil in society at large. For educators to understand what needs to be done in schools, they must first understand what needs to be done in society. This requires understanding the larger change in which we are currently involved. I believe, as many do, that we are going through a cultural transformation similar to the one 400 to 500 years ago when the medieval world ended and the modern world began. This time modernity's "machine" metaphor is being replaced by a "web" view of the world. Today's transformation, like the last, is taking place in all aspects of society--from economics, politics, spirituality and science to family and education. Here I introduce the concepts of integral society as the culture that will replace modernity and integral science as the scientific shift that supports and explains this change. (For details, see my book After the Clockwork Universe: The Emerging Science and Culture of Integral Society.) The emergence of integral society has major implications for virtually every aspect of education, from pedagogy to community relations. My job, as a scientist who studies nonlinear dynamics (chaos), general evolution theory and other branches of what sometimes is called "the new science," is to integrate ideas from these fields so you can see how a web world works. This integration adds a practicality and a profundity to the web vision that only a few people yet understand. Before discussing education, however, notice that the basic web view is already with us. Computers connect us and a global economy makes us all interdependent. Awareness that we are inextricably entwined with the natural world now pervades society. Web thinking also shows up in: * Holistic alternatives in health (integral medicine); * Efforts toward sustainable communities and economies; * Hope that the World Wide Web will one day serve as the vehicle for a global civil society; * A renewed sensitivity to spirituality now defined in broader and more tolerant terms; and * Efforts toward more meaningful, integrated and empowering education, which also teaches the social skills and environmental respect needed for a sustainable civilization (integral education). More examples of web thinking will appear as they are driven into being by the many failures of the modern world--pollution, overpopulation, frenzied lives, fraying social fabric, meaninglessness, alienation, violence, greed, corruption, economic instability and institutionalized deceit. Mechanistic thinking is increasingly seen as narrow, misleading and often destructive. One need only think of economic theories that promote layoffs or health theories that neglect prevention to see the problem. Clearly, simplistic machine-age prescriptions have led us down a cultural primrose path. Handling issues in a more integrated way is crucial to making our society sane and sound again. Practical Benefits Unfortunately, knowing that mechanism is flawed is not enough to solve our problems. Web thinking already is considered more complex and holistic than its predecessor, but what exactly do we need to do? This is where integral science comes in. Every field in science--anthropology, biology, economics, math, neurophysiology, physics, etc.--is undergoing a similar web change. Science is expanding and views are changing because modern electronics allow researchers to explore more complex causality. Popularized names for these changes include chaos, complexity, gaia, self-organization and the new biology. Beneath these is a remarkably coherent and understandable view of how webs work that applies as readily to human organizations as to biological ones. For integral society to become sound, everyday people will need to discover the practical implications of this integral science. The unifying theme of integral science is (unexpectedly) a new theory of evolution. Instead of a story of struggle and selfish genes, evolution is reconceptualized as an outcome of self-organizing forces--pressures, interdependent dynamics and energy flow. This broader theory of evolution, called dynamic evolution, explores standard cycles of growth and development that play out in all webs, including human societies. It shows how the mind is a natural part of evolution. Among its other unexpected discoveries are: * A physical basis for the importance of cooperation and diversity; * An increased appreciation of evolutionary cycles; * New laws governing organizational growth and development; and * New rules for evolutionary competence (that is, survival) with a particular emphasis on learning in human societies. Profound Implications Integral science and dynamic evolution radically change the context of educational reform. They have implications for curriculum because so many scientific images are altered. They have implications for pedagogy because, as brain research now tells us, children learn best in collaborative, problem-solving teams with lots of hands-on experience, real-world motivation and emotional support. (They support the many educators who already recognize that the old competitive educational atmosphere and formal, memory-based testing Are generally destructive to learning.) Integral science also has profound implications for community structure and the kind of citizens we want to produce. It explains why a fine-grained social fabric--that is, one made up of strong families, neighborhoods communities and local economies and one that embraces diversity--is crucial to maintaining safety, social intelligence and societal strength. It also adds clarity and common sense to what has become a Tower of Babel of social and educational reform. Suddenly one can see, for example, why collaborative learning fits with multidimensional learning and greater community integration. One can see why all these are necessary to produce the creative, collaborative, thinking citizens that are crucial for prosperity in the high-value economy that is also in the offing. For educators, the three key lessons of dynamic evolution are: * Collaboration as the central path of biological evolution and the best way to thrive. Schools, businesses, communities, families and societies are all collaborations. For these to work, children and adults alike must learn the skills and appreciate the importance of being part of a collaborative web. Collaborative webs give each of us the support and motivation we need to live meaningful, unique lives in a way that serves self and others, a phenomenon I call "interdependent individuality." * Connective tissue as the bonds that keep collaborations working. Our society has placed such a high value on growth that we have forgotten that connections are what hold all organizations together. A sound social fabric is like a lace tablecloth, filled with small and intricately entwined circles. We must learn to reconnect from the grassroots on up because when connective tissue fails, collaborative webs fail. * Ongoing learning as the central strategy of evolution and the cornerstone of human societies. The two key lessons of evolutionary learning are: (1) There are no final truths, only the pursuit of better ones; and (2) Pursuit of better ideas requires that we cherish differences, collaborative synthesis and critical thinking an questioning. A Logical Change Albert Einstein once said: "You will never solve a problem by using the same kind of thinking that created it in the first place." So it is for society and education today. We need to develop the thinking and practices that will allow us to survive and thrive in an increasingly interdependent, global human and biospheric web. Our schools are perhaps t e single most crucial place for this development to happen. A mechanistic won view cannot support it, but integral science can. Sally Goerner is director of the Triangle Center for the Study of Complex Systems, 374 Wesley Court, Chapel Hill, N.C. 27516. Putting Union and Management Out of Business LEWIS A. RHODES The year is 2009. Picture the heads of AASA and the combined NEA-AFT meeting at a reception, toasting the end of their organizations as they had known them 10 years before and the success of an improved way of running schools that few reformers at that time could have imagined. Back in 1999 they also had come together at a meeting where they shared their gripes about the daily plight of their members in their different worlds of work. The more they talked, though, the more they noticed how similar these supposedly different roles in supposedly different settings were. Just a decade earlier, those at the top--superintendents in the "world" of the district, teachers in the "world" of the classroom--were told by theorists to empower those within their system (teachers, for the superintendents; students, for the teachers). They were asked to relinquish old, controlling ways of working before they had a full complement of alternative strategies in place for achieving the necessary results. Both superintendents and teachers were driven by a personal need to make a difference and an organizational responsibility to produce tangible results. Each was controlling a system whose outcomes reflected on both their personal images and their organizational accountability. To meet these commitments, educators were asked to trust that the newly empowered had the will, capacity and innate motivation to do a good, ever-improving job. But back in 1999, a solid foundation of experience to support that trust was missing. Past practices within the education community had not supported either teachers or students as co-producers of academic achievement. Opportunities to demonstrate trustworthiness were few. Finally, they had noticed that teachers and administrators were hired for what they already knew and were expected to deliver it effectively to the unknowing. Learning from the job was not an expectation built into either of their roles. If it happened, it happened on their own time. Meeting the New Paradigm What was happening here, they wondered at the time? And why was it happening? Why were parents and policy-makers similarly demanding of them: "Change it all (the whole school system and its parts), do it all a the same time ... and do it now." Looking back a decade, with the luxury of hindsight, it was obvious that two new bodies of knowledge had become part of the public consciousness. One body of knowledge was about the nature of learning, the other about the nature of organizations that connect people to produce common results. One raised questions about accustomed roles, the other about accustomed relationships. From the first, superintendents and teachers understood that a child developed his or her capacities to learn from the interactions adult built into the environment. The school's product, they realized, comes to them as a bundle of capacities already partially assembled and with batteries included that drive an installed-at-the-factory learning engine with the capacity to run itself. The teacher's job was to create those interactions that increasingly developed that capacity. The second new body of knowledge was more challenging; it raised questions about their members' relationships in support of that critical teaching-learning interaction. From research on how effective formal and informal organizations internally connect themselves to accomplish common purposes came the understanding that "relationships rule." Both organizational and personal success was determined by the extent to which relationships among the organization's parts provided the interaction needed to support their continual learning and success. Seeing What Exists Then they had an epiphany. AASA and NEA-AFT leaders realized that effectiveness of the whole system and each of its parts was a function of the nature and quality of those relationships. The industrial era practice of thinking about management and labor as adversarial components had produced what, in living systems, would be called an "auto-immune disease." Parts of a body attack each other and eventually contribute to the destruction of the whole. But what could leaders of these educational associations do about it? They were confronting a belief embedded in the larger society, which seemingly threatened the self-interest of their paying members. It seemed impossible to build into the work of schools the time and support for a different relationship between those at the bottom and those at the top. Their epiphany took final form as they noticed that the words "top" and "bottom" only referred to the pyramid-shaped organizational chart they thought had represented the actual school district. This useful map for determining how to allocate resources couldn't portray the actual relationships required to connect those resources to results. For example: * If a school district organization were a pyramid with teachers at its bottom, then teachers would not be faced with the conflicting daily knowledge that it is their continual interaction with the individual student that most influences the quality of the entire system's efforts. Much union organizing seemed to have been the consequence of others ignoring this continual teaching reality. * If a school district organization were a pyramid with superintendents at the top, superintendents would be able to control what they command. Their visions for creating quality learning opportunities for all children in their districts would be accepted and followed now, not someday in the future. But the system everyone thinks they've plotted on the district organization chart doesn't respond the way it is supposed to--if in fact it were a pyramid. Those who sought top leadership jobs because of a commitment to making more of a difference in the learning of more children find they are just as powerless to control the quality of this pyramid's results as when they were teachers. Clearly, the pyramid paradigm was masking the potential of each part of the school system to contribute maximally to success. But something had to serve as a frame for understanding and then acting on. Something had to frame the fundamental interactions necessary to support the work of learning and teaching that produces results. Back in 1999, it wasn't even possible to find agreement among those who talked systemic change as to what that sustainable system was--the classroom, school building, district or state. Building upon what the two new bodies of knowledge told them about the nature of learning, teaching and leadership already in their school communities, it became apparent that the school district was only a sustainable "container" that could support most of the critical interactions necessary to develop a child's individual capacities. And in 1999 most major reform efforts were designed to either get the district out of the schools or the schools out of the district. A Herculean Task Putting aside the old map and working from a more believable sense of the lay of the land, AASA leaders and their counterparts at NEA and AFT had begun to see exciting possibilities for connecting existing resources to the daily interactions of students and teachers. They could see that the task ahead was herculean, but it's remarkable what can be done when all your old answers no longer seem to fit. They agreed they had to create a different answer--one that could continually increase the effectiveness of schools' daily interactions with children and at the same time develop those schools' capacities to continue to improve. It could not work unless it met all of these internal and external criteria: * Focus on the needs of school children; * Tap resources that would not diminish current services to children; * Be part of everyday school operations, not an add-on; * Engage and interact with present classroom, building and district operations by providing a safe way to question practices, purposes, assumptions and beliefs, and from there try new approaches, learn from what doesn't work well and try again; * Enable curriculum design and delivery to be interactive, continuous and developmental by anchoring it in classroom experiences; * Allow the need for solutions to current problems to serve as the impetus for ongoing professional development; * Sustain the district as the unit of change and feed development of its continual knowledge base for serving all its parts; and * Tap informational technology's potential for reshaping the school system by changing the communication interactions between its parts. Use it to support new work patterns, roles and relationships among practitioners with common agendas; provide access to information and other resources at the places and times needed for timely classroom and building use; and facilitate tradeoffs in resources that permit the start of solution strategies before all the right parts are in place. With the growing knowledge they were developing back in 1999, the AASA and union leaders realized the only way that requirements as fundamental as these could be established was from the inside out as people developed new beliefs and assumptions from their daily experiences. Even if their experiences seemed to deny it, people had to act as if the parts of their system were as interdependent as they now could understand they actually were. Scaffolding Change Working from their new sense of the human resources they represented and how much they needed each other, AASA and union leaders searched for a way to simultaneously improve how today's practitioners met the immediate needs of children while directly improving the school system's capacity to support tomorrow's. They found a metaphor for their task in two seemingly different areas--engineering and cognitive science. Architects put external structures, or scaffolds, around a building so work can go on within it while it is being improved. Those who study the way humans learn use the same concept to describe the teaching support that gradually fades away as the learner gains competence and confidence. This metaphor made sense. But how could they help school districts create an infrastructure scaffold over the present work of schools that would enable them to function as if they were the connected system they already had the potential to be? Change From Inside Out They soon discovered two resources that had never fit into the total process of making a daily difference for children. Almost every school system had two rich pools of human resources that had not been able to contribute their experience and expertise to directly support daily learning and teaching. In fact, they were frequently bypassed because they were considered to be the enemies of effective changes. These were the staffs of the central office and the unions. Back in 1999, greetings such as "Hi, I'm from the central office (or union) and I'm here to help" always produced a snicker or an "Oh yeah?" chuckle. AASA and union leaders developed a functional way to redeploy the time and resources of central-office and union staffs and align them in support of the teaching process as a whole, not just the isolated individual teacher at the critical interactive end of the process. First they made these two groups accountable for a capacity-building scaffold that fit over and involved the daily work of everyone in a school system and community whose actions were intended to make a difference in the learning lives of children. Then they anchored this temporary supportive infrastructure at the school site where it provided each teacher with an enhanced capacity to respond more appropriately to each child's learning needs. Regardless of their personal experience, expertise and training, each teacher had timely access to critical information about that child and collaborative support for understanding and then acting on it. Justin-time learners had access, for the first time, to the full resources of the just-incase school system. Until they began to o this, it had never occurred to them t that this was the fundamental way that hospitals were organized to support the continual diagnosis and prescription required for each person's needs to be individually met. One wouldn't send their children to a hospital that treated eve one the same. Why, they wondered, ha schools been held to a lower standard The scaffolding infrastructure provided experiences out of which schools developed that same core capacity. Back to the Future Now in the year 2009 they lifted their glasses to toast the new public school systems that had emerged from the experiences of adults discovering they really could have an impact on the learning of all children. And they toasted the elves for helping their own members change what in 1999 had been the playing field for power battles. No longer did a concern for who had the power over resources serve as a focus for their relationships. Now, the source of their new interconnectedness was their mutual understanding of o has the power to effect positive results. They now could see they had made it possible for school districts to become learning organizations by enabling them to act as if they already w ere an organization of learners. Lew Rhodes, an educational consultant and former AASA associate executive director, can be contacted at 814 Lamberton Drive, Silver Spring, Md. 20902. A New Story of Learning and Schooling STEPHANIE PACE MARSHALL Several years ago, Dee Hock, former chief executive I officer and creator of VISA, challenged me with this question: "If anything in the world was possible, if there were no constraints whatever, what would it take to design the world's premier system for learning and what might it look like?" I have thought about this essential question a great deal over the years, and my response now is a conceptual one: I propose a new story of learning and schooling. I leave to those more operationally adroit the challenge of creating the structures and processes that might bring the ideas I offer to life. So rather than forecast or extrapolate from current conditions where public education might be in 25 years, I simply have "invented" a conceptual framework for a new story of education by offering some alternative beliefs, assumptions and principles for creating sustainable learning communities that nurture the intelligence, imagination and creativity of the human mind and spirit. I cannot view public education as an enterprise isolated from the needs of the human condition. To me, the kind of educational system we create is the direct result of our beliefs, assumptions and knowledge of human learning and the kind of mind we want to nurture for the future. A Human Context Public education cannot serve the needs of future generations unless the kind of mind we nurture develops our capacity to become more fully human and sees as its work the creation of a compassionate and sustainable world that works for everyone. Devoid of a compassionate and sustaining human context, public education cannot serve the public good. As a consequence, I believe we must transform the current paradigm of schooling that created structures that stifle the needs children have for meaning and sense-making, for reflection and complex cognition, for exploration and discovery, for risk, adventure and surprise and for integration and connection with the natural world into a vision of education that creates whole, healthy and vibrant learning communities that liberate the goodness and genius of all children for the world. It is our work, as prophets and pioneers to create a generative paradigm of learning that invites not only the fullness of our intellect but the fullness of our imagination and the fullness of our spirit. Global Understanding This vision is premised on several beliefs: * Human beings inherently possess goodness and genius; * Liberating the goodness and genius of children is essential to our sustainability; and * The fundamental purpose of education is not to credential vocational knowledge and skills, but to build the capacity of each learner to advance the human condition. It is my belief that the current structures of schooling, grounded in false and disabling assumptions of human learning, are not capable of reigniting the power, courage and imagination of children for the world. They are not big enough to enable children to respond to their real questions about life and they are not "spirit-ful" enough to enable children to see how they "belong" to the world and one another. In order to create a compassionate and sustainable world, a new global consciousness must become manifest, and this can only come from a paradigm of generative, not prescriptive learning. It is this paradigm that grounds the design of a new story of teaching and learning. What is the new learning paradigm and how does it differ from the paradigm we live now? Sights and Sounds What might happen if he beliefs, assumptions and principles of this new story were made manifest in learning community? What would it look like if this new covenant for learning were enacted? Let's visit a new learning community. As we enter the building, we see open learning space. No bells are sounding. Clusters of students, teachers and community members are working together, and intergenerational learning is prevalent. The curriculum is integrative, inquiry-based and problem-centered, so we see groups of students (of multiple ages) engrossed in highly sophisticated and complex problems that actually affect the community in which they live because that is where the problems came from or surfaced. Using multiple resources, both human and technological, they have been analyzing current research and sharing it in an electronic dialogue with teams of students at other learning centers within and outside the community, as well as teams of experts at national and international research centers. All are working on the same problem. Their integrative and interdisciplinary approach to problem-sensing and problem-finding reminds us more of expert learners who are drawn to principles an patterns than novice learners who are drawn to linearity and algorithmic casuality. The final resolution of each student team's work will be compared with the experts' recommendation and will be presented to the local city council, which will vote on whether to accept the recommendation for implementation. The council's assessment to the student's work will become a part of each student's portfolio and learning log. Students are intensely engaged in what they are doing. They serve as mentors and tutors for each other both on and off campus. Personalized learning and inquiry plans with specific outcomes enable each to learn at his or her own rate and in his or her own way. Learners have been taught not to seek the one right answer; rather they seek the best and most effective resolution to the problem at the time because they know they will revisit this question again and again as new information is gained. The learning environment has been designed to engage the student fully. The flow and dynamic of engaged learning is pervasive and contagious. Lines of hierarchy have been replace by circles of relationships. Students can access the depth of a subject without permission and can do so with others. We pass teams of teachers who are designing integrative curriculum frameworks for the group of student for which they share responsibility. Teaching teams have been given authority and accountability for all decision affecting teaching and learning. This is a place where significant learning standards are collaboratively established by faculty, students, administrative support teams, parents and the community, but the means to achieve them are not prescribed. Potential, creativity and self-renewal are clearly prized. Choice has replaced control. Order comes from a core identity, a clear and shared vision, explicit values and an abiding belief held by all its members that each member of the community must and will contribute to its growth and sustainability. We could live into this story, if we choose, not tomorrow, but by 2025. A Malignant Shadow The attributes of the current culture of schooling--rapid information acquisition, dis-integration of knowledge, independence and competition--reflect our societal ambitions and predispositions. Schools, in fact, have executed the current cultural norms, values, priorities and reward structures (of most developed nations) quite well. This "success" has been at an enormous human and environmental cost, however, and the result has been the emergence of a global mind focused on capitalism, consumption, competition, acquisition and winning. The deep systemic problems that are now casting a malignant shadow over the global community, and our own society and institutions, will not be resolved until we recognize and reconnect to what we have lost: * The acquisition of wisdom and the power of discernment; * Compassionate use of knowledge; * Integrative ways of knowing and sensing; * Concern for human and community prosperity and moral action in the world; * Commitment to ecological sustainability and the acceptance of nature as a sacred dimension of our lives; * Willingness to engage slowly, around issues of long-term consequence; * Deep awareness of and appreciation for our connection to the web of life; and * The understanding that real learning comes slowly, through the construction of meaning, the recognition of patterns and the creation of relationships. These attributes of a generative learning paradigm create a framework for a new epistemology, a new pedagogy and a new learning community-all of which offer the possibility to invite the creation of a new global mind, one capable of creating a compassionate and sustainable world that works for everyone. Twin Challenges Poised at the juncture of the new millennium, we confront two life-defining challenges: * How to solve the deeply human problems facing us as a global civilization--problems for which our current system of education does not provide congruent context, vibrancy, practice or affirmation; and * How to create learning conditions that liberate the goodness and genius of all children for the world. The promise of this time in human evolution is that by unleashing the unprecedented capacity and power of the human mind and spirit for the world, we set in motion the possibility of inventing a world that works for everyone. Stephanie Pace Marshall is president of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, 1500 West Sullivan Road, Aurora, Ill. 60506. Current Story Culture of Acquisition, Independence and Competition 1. Learning is grounded in an epistemology that honors the objectively verifiable, the analytical and the experimental; views empirical observation as the most important skill; believes that the acquisition of factual knowledge requires the disengagement of the learners' emotions in pursuit of objective truth; believes that subjectivity endangers the pursuit of objective truth and that holds to the premise that no relationship exists between the knower and the known. 2. Learning is an incremental process of acquiring information. 3. Intelligence is a defined and fixed capacity. 4. Learning is credentialed by the amount of time spent acquiring information 5. The purpose of schooling is to rapidly acquire information, cover content and reproduce facts; cleverness is the appropriate aim of learning. 6. Prior knowledge is unimportant and a detractor to future learning. 7. Content segmentation is the more efficient and effective way to learn a discipline. 8. The rigorous evaluation of learning can only be objective and external; only that which can be quantitatively and easily measured is true knowledge. 9. Competition and external rewards are the most powerful motivators to learning. 10. Schooling represents a necessary "rite of passage"; what happens in school prepares one for life. 11. Personal inquiry and the exploration of questions that matter take too much time from the prescribed curriculum. 12. Emotions, passion and the "spiritful" dimensions of who we are is "permitted" if these aspects do not significantly derail the objective. 13. Effective learning requires chronological age peers to be placed together. New Story Culture of Inquiry, Interdependence and Collaboration 1. Learning is grounded in an epistemology that affirms integrative ways of knowing; believes meaning and connections are constructed by the learner; affirms the power of relationships and community in learning; believes the learners' passion and love are essential for deep learning; understands that relatedness and engagement are at the heart of learning and that there is a profound connection between the knower and the known. 2. Learning is a dynamic process of constructing meaning through pattern formulation. 3. Intelligence is learnable and the potential and capacity for learning are inexhaustible and expanding. 4. Learning is credentialed by demonstrations of understanding at any time. 5. The purpose of education is to acquire wisdom through the reflective and often slow exploration of essential questions. 6. Prior learning is essential to future learning. 7. Concept integration is the most meaningful way to understand the unity of knowledge. 8. The rigorous and meaningful evaluation of learning must include qualitative evidence of understanding, be self-correcting and be demonstrated in settings that are in the real world. 9. Collaboration, interdependence and internal rewards are more powerful motivators for learning. 10. Learning is continuous lifelong engagement; what happens in a school is life. 11. Personal inquiry and the exploration of deeply human questions are the means through which children acquire the knowledge and skills they need to construct meaning. 12. The total engagement of the learner enables the construction of meaning. 13. Engaged learning requires an intergenerational community learning together. A Simple Choice: Change or Boil To Death GERRY HOUSE Frank Merlotti of Steelcase Inc., a Michigan-based company that makes high-performance office furniture, describes in the following way why his company is always trying to do better: "We kept saying we were the best. Then, we started thinking, maybe the best time to try something different is when we're on top rather than waiting until we are in trouble and then trying to claw our way back up. We talked about the old frog syndrome: If you throw a frog in a pot of boiling water he jumps out, but if you put a frog in a pot of cold water and heat it slowly, he'll sit there and boil to death. We didn't want to get boiled." Those of us responsible for leading educational change in the 21st century understand very well that the waters of public opinion, as they relate to public education, are at the boiling point. And we are trying desperately to save the lives of tens of thousands of employees who still don't realize they're in hot water. For centuries people believed Aristotle was right when he stated that the heavier an object, the faster it would fall to earth. All it would have taken was for one brave person to take two objects, one heavy and one light, and drop them from a great height to see whether or not the heavier object landed first. But no one stepped forward until nearly 2,000 years after Aristotle's death! In 1589, Galileo summoned learned professors to the base of the leaning Tower of Pisa. Then he went to the top and pushed off a 10-lb. weight and a 1-lb. weight. Both landed at the same time. But the power of belief in the conventional wisdom was so strong that the professors denied what they had seen. In his book, The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli said, "There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things." If you have been a superintendent for more than 24 hours, you recognize the absolute truth of this statement. Resistant Personnel Changing beliefs, behaviors, practices and processes that schools have cherished for decades, sometimes even centuries, is difficult, messy and complex. It is also essential to the well-being of the students whom we serve and the future of this nation. Our choices about school reform are limited and simple: Change or boil. Yet guiding teachers, principals, central-office staff and board members to this reality often seems impossible. Our predicament reminds me of the story of the man and his wife who were shopping in a mall. The man picked up a shirt with a label that said, "Shrink resistant." He asked his wife what that meant. "It means," she responded, "that it will shrink but it doesn't want to." School system employees will change, but they certainly don't want to. However, as superintendents we have a professional and moral obligation to help our staffs understand that while change may be difficult for them, maintaining the educational status quo is fatal for the millions of students who rely on the public school system in their communities to open the doors to prosperous and productive futures in a techno-information age driven by microchips and fiberoptics. Our children live in a fast-paced, action-packed, Nintendo-dominated world where they create their own rules, compete against themselves and constantly reinterpret their reality in order to win. Most of us grew up in 4 calm, orderly, structured world of Monopoly, where we learned definite rule and were branded cheaters if we did not play the game accordingly. If you cut your teeth on Monopoly, you must make a determined effort to learn how to reach children coming of age with Nintendo. Worldwide Competition Too many of our teachers and administrators are still preparing students for the U.S. manufacturing economy when they live and work in a global information society. The era into which we continue to rush headlong is a technological one whose major product is information. Those who do not possess the skills necessary to function in this new information economy will find themselves locked out of ever attaining the American dream. Our children's competitors are not just other students nationwide but technologically literate young people in Taiwan, Belgium, Korea and every other developed nation. For today's young people, learning and retraining will be a lifelong experience. Their educational foundation must be built on excellence, not mediocrity. Otherwise it will crumble beneath them leaving their futures and ours in ruins. In this information-based, global economy, the wealth of the nation is measured more in terms of the knowledge and skills of its workers than in the number of its industrial plants or the abundance of its natural resources. The ability of public schools to graduate young people who can read and understand sophisticated materials; write coherently; speak clearly; input, retrieve and analyze information; and apply mathematical skills to solve problems will determine the extent to which our nation can compete in the international marketplace. Those of us who have committed our lives to public education are struggling to create a new map that will allow whole systems of people, not just those in a few schools, to make the quantum leap necessary to equip all graduates with the behaviors, skills and knowledge to meet the demands of the technoinformation age. We cannot take our children where they must go by tinkering around the edges of the old system. Everyone responsible for the education of children must make the paradigm shift that will enable us to recreate every school into the kind of student-centered, high-performing educational community that has traditionally been available for too few young people. If excellence is not the standard for all students, early in life, those chosen to have large futures will be separated from those chosen to have small ones. The public schools of this land were not created to train some to rule over others, but to prepare all to fully participate as fellow citizens and workers in a prosperous, democratic society. Six Prescriptions From working in Chapel Hill, N.C., a small, affluent, suburban district, and in Memphis, Tenn., a large, poor, urban one, I have learned some lessons about the changes that need to take place for the systemic improvement of our schools. * Lesson 1: Systemic reform is the hardest work you'll ever do. Perhaps this story told by a former president of Southern Bell best illustrates this point: "Lawrence of Arabia once accompanied some Arab chieftains to Paris for peace talks. They were awed by modem wonders they had never seen ... especially the faucets in their hotel. These men of the desert were fascinated that water could be made to flow by just a flick of the wrist. "When Lawrence escorted them back to the Middle East, he found that one man had removed a faucet and brought it along ... fully expecting water to flow out of it in the Arabian desert, just as when it was hooked to the plumbing system of the Paris hotel." Building a system of beliefs, behaviors, policies and practices necessary for systemic school reform is a great deal more difficult than designing a system that will allow water to come out of a faucet every time you turn it on. * Lesson 2: What works in other systems won't necessarily work in education. An experienced principal, John Marlowe, in an article titled "Six Easy Lessons," wrote: "It is a tragic injustice that the public at large compares schools to some idealized model of private industry. ... Business people say, 'The thing that goes on in schools would never happen in my business.' Ignore them as politely as you can. They do not know what they are talking about. Just because everyone has an appendix doesn't mean everyone knows how to perform an appendectomy. "Imagine how CBS would make decisions if the network had a citizen group that had to approve anything that appeared on the Geraldo show. Imagine Toyota waiting for state funding. Ford would be in even more trouble if the company had to chaperone company dances and discipline drunk cheerleaders after a company picnic." Everybody in every walk of life thinks he or she can fix education better than educators themselves. This may well be our last chance to demonstrate that we can do well the job we were trained to do--teach children. But unless we seize what may our last opportunity to create schools for the 21st century, those who know less and care less will take over and try to do what we did not do ourselves. * Lesson 3: Systemic reform takes longer than you think. In the beginning, I naively thought, "Give us three years and we can turn this whole thing around." It's true. Pride definitely goeth before a fall. I can't imagine why I thought that 125 years worth of ritual, culture and relationships could be undone in just three. We have been at the business of school reform in Memphis unceasingly for seven years. It will take a minimum of another four before I can say with some confidence that we have reached a true turning point and can never go back. You must work to build support within and without the system to have the permission of the key stakeholders to continue until the job is one and done well. This is extremely difficult because some circumstances at beyond your control. But you manage the ones that you can for as long as you can and keep your eye on the prize. Unpopularity Contest * Lesson 4: A lot of people may not like you or what you are trying to do. Leading the kind of s systemic change necessary to get the right results is not a prescription for popularity y. A cardiologist who tells patients with h heart disease to eat whatever they want; exercise only if they feel like it; smoke whenever the urge strikes them; and take their medication when they get around to it, may be popular--for a while. But she is prescribing certain death for her patients. Making the kinds of bone-deep changes that will ensure the long-term health of our schools and ultimately our nation is difficult, messy and painful. But the alternative--to continue to allow large numbers of students to exit school prepared only for lives of tedious drudgery-is unthinkable. * Lesson 5: Leadership can be lonely. The former world champion hurdler, Renaldo Nehemiah, used to say: "I get myself out front, which is where I want to be. I'm used to the loneliness out there." But if loneliness is the price of leadership, limitlessness is the reward. For those willing to run the race out front, the view can be so clear, so compelling. It is what keeps you striving forward while continuously reaching back to bring everyone else to this place of possibilities. * Lesson 6: There is no rescue team. If meaningful school reform is to happen, you and your colleagues in your school district will make it happen. There is no one else. Nicolo Paganini, considered one of the greatest violinists of all time, was about to perform before a soldout opera house when he realized he had someone else's violin in his hands. Horrified, but knowing that he had no other choice, he began. That day he gave the performance of his life. After the concert, Paganini told a fellow musician: "Today, I learned the most important lesson of my entire career. Before today I thought the music was in the violin; today I learned that the music is in me." Within us is everything needed to transform our schools into places where the minds, bodies and spirits of all children thrive and grow. We can and must reach deep within ourselves and make it happen. Every time you feel like giving up, ask yourself the eternal questions: If not me, who? If not now, when? Continuing Legacy We have the fortune, or misfortune, to stand and watch at a momentous point in time. Mary Antin in her book, The Promised Land about her experience as an immigrant child, says this about the nation's public schools: "Education was free. ... It was the one thing that my father was able to promise when he sent for us-surer, safer than bread or shelter. No application made, no question asked, no exam, ruling, exclusions, no fees. The doors stood open for everyone of us." This has been the legacy of every American almost since the founding of the republic. It was our It is what gave us what we needed to be in this profession today. We can do no less for the generations that are to come. One of the last great promises we have to keep to those who founded this country and to those who will inherit it is that of educational equity and excellence for all children. As a nation, together, we have conquered so many new frontiers. Perhaps none will prove to be as important as the one which stretches before us--the unmined intellect of all of our children. I believe that this is territory worth fighting for a and a legacy worthy of being passed on. Gerry House is superintendent of the Memphis City Schools, 2597 Avery Ave., Memphis, Tenn. 38112. Embracing Excellence and Diversity FREEMAN A. HRABOWSKI III Public education's success early in the new millennium hinges largely on how well the nation's schools address two critical challenges. On the one hand, our society is growing steadily more dependent on technology. Simultaneously, it is becoming increasingly diverse. To succeed in the new century, our schools must work to ensure that all students, particularly minorities, are able to meet the demanding standards for excelling in science and technology. Consider the following: * By 2050, experts predict the U.S. population will increase by 60 percent to 400 million and that almost one of every two Americans will be non-white; * By 2030, one of every two Americans will support one retired person (in the 1950s, the ratio was four workers to one retiree); * Currently, we barely can meet half of the nation's demand for a skilled information technology workforce. Also, women and minorities continue to be underrepresented in science and technology disciplines; and * By 2003, worldwide Internet commerce will exceed $1.3 trillion (last year it totaled $50 billion). Most important, our growing, aging and increasingly diverse population is unevenly prepared to participate in a booming technology-based economy. By extension, one of our most critical goals for American education should be to eliminate the gap in achievement levels between the "haves" and the "have-nots," recognizing that many of those in the latter category are minority. Information Processing Regardless of their backgrounds, students will need to be comfortable with science and technology in order to succeed in the future. Though most, of course, will not be computer professionals, students will need to have basic technical literacy and upgrade their skills constantly regardless of career choice. Our information-based economy also will place a high premium on the ability of citizens to think critically and communicate clearly, given the need for evaluating the quality and variety of information fueling the economy. For example, by the end of 1999, the World Wide Web will have amassed nearly 1.45 billion pages, which will more than quadruple to 7.7 billion pages within two years. Also, surveys indicate the average e-mail user sends and receives up to 25 to 30 email messages daily, making e-mail the predominant mode of communication for business and personal use. How will students handle so much information? What are we doing to prepare them to think critically and express themselves clearly in such a world? Clearly, education will be a lifelong process. We will need to be able to learn in both formal and informal settings, grasp new concepts often and quickly and work well with others from diverse backgrounds given the increasingly interdependent nature of problems (and solutions). Public education will require strong, skillful and imaginative leadership that encourages innovative approaches that reverse the tide of apathy toward hard work and inspire all students to want to achieve. Despite the demand for skilled information technology workers, college enrollments in computer science and information systems have declined. One reason is the poor performance of American students in math and science. when I ask schoolchildren about their favorite subjects, they often tell me "math is too hard" or "I don't like math." Their responses contrast sharply with what I've observed in other countries, where students actually rise to applaud high academic achievement by their peers. In the new century, we must work to make education the No. 1 priority of our society, so that high academic achievement is the rule rather than the exception. Overcoming Odds To ensure the success of all students, public school educators must find ways of engaging parents and families in the process of educating young people. This is especially true for school districts with significant minority populations because of our concerns about the low academic achievement level of these students. In fact, we often hear about unsuccessful minority students, why they are failing and how their attitudes are not conducive to high achievement. Yet we need to listen carefully to the voices of successful minority students and their parents in order to learn what factors made the positive difference in these young people's lives. Often when I meet with young black males in a school, one or more of them will ask, "What did we do wrong this time?" "Nothing," I quickly respond before telling them I asked to meet them because I know they are bright and I want to ensure they understand that to succeed in life, they have to succeed in school. At first, I usually see some doubt on their faces about my sincerity. But as we talk and I offer them attention and praise, the students become truly engaged in the discussion and show pride in their ability to think. In Beating the Odds: Raising Academically Successful African American Males, my fellow authors, Kenneth Maton and Geoffrey Greif, and I interviewed the parents and sons of 60 families affiliated with the nationally acclaimed Meyerhoff Scholars Program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, designed to address the shortage of minorities in professional science careers. Over a three-year period, we listened to mothers, fathers and sons talk about what they did to ensure the student's academic success. We chose to look initially at males (and have begun a second study on talented black women in science) because they are doing the least well academically in schools across the country. Our goal was to provide interested groups with information about what actually works in raising academically successful black males. So what did we find? First, we explored the parents' own upbringing and how their experiences affected how they raised their sons. The result was like an intricately woven tapestry of three generations. Regardless of their own education or their economic or marital status, the parents in our study were influenced most by an emphasis on education and academic success, coupled with a focus on hard work and over-coming adversity. More specifically, we identified the six most prevalent components of successful parenting among the 60 families, whether the sons grew up in Baltimore, New York City or Oakland, Calif. They included (1) child-focused, self-sacrificing love, including a deep and enduring commitment to education; (2) strong limit-setting and discipline by parents; (3) continually high expectations of the sons; (4) open and consistent communication between parents and sons; (5) positive black male identification; and (6) parents' reliance on community resources, such as churches and schools. We also uncovered several related factors contributing to the academic success of the young men in our study: (1) the importance of reading, beginning with parents reading to their sons at a young age; (2) the parents' view that education is both necessary and extremely valuable; (3) parents' active encouragement toward academic success; (4) close interaction between parents and their sons' teachers; (5) strong parental interest in homework; (6) considerable verbal praise; and (7) parents helping their sons understand that even when they face prejudice or racism, they cannot afford to see themselves as victims and still succeed. A Family Duty What's most significant about the families we studied is that the parents have viewed their sons' education as their top priority. Although they knew that the schools and others could help them, it was ultimately the family that took responsibility for developing the boys' reading skills, values and positive attitude toward education. These parents have been their children's chief advocates and have regularly offered both praise and criticism. Most important, they have helped their children to want to achieve academically in a society where too many minority children believe it is not "cool" to be mart. In our book, we describe a single father, who was only 14 years older than his son and who, with his mother's help, raised the boy from the age of 5. He told us about his approach to addressing the child's mediocre performance in school: "One particular hard time I had with him was in his junior year when we were going over his report card like we always did and he blew up. He said, 'Look, dad. Get off of it! Leave me alone. I just want to be like everyone else.' That was the first time I experienced that he was not going along with me. I stood back and thought a minute and told him, 'But you're not average. You ere never average and never will be. Even if you try to be average, you won't be.' And he said he just wanted to be like so and so and named some of his friends. And I said to him, 'You know those people whose pictures are on your walls? Michael Jordan and those musicians? Those people are not average. They tell you they are average but hey are not. If they were, they would not be making millions of dollars.' When I was done talking to him, I was pleased and I said, 'Whew,' to myself. "I kept telling him one thing when he was young--I would ask him, 'Who am I?' and I would say, "I am your father first and your friend second. And when you become wise enough, I'll become your friend first and your father second. And I'll decide when that time comes." Whether as parents, teachers, school administrators or members of the public, we need to set high expectations for our students and ourselves as we strive to ensure the success of all students in the future. Freeman Hrabowski III is president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, Md. 21250. The Harder Task of Superintendent Searching JOHN ISAACSON Over the last 10 years, our firm has been up close and personal with a regular stream of school superintendency searches. We do civic searches of every variety--from big medical centers to little neighborhood groups--but, consistently, we find superintendent searches are the hardest ones to conduct. In the coming decade, superintendency searching promises to be just as taxing an endeavor. The reasons are multiple. The most critical ones have to do with the public's demands that a successful superintendent be qualified to deal with parent and community concerns in an arena that includes vouchers, charters, school-based management and standards, finding ways to manage these forces and resources so that children's achievement rises. In all executive-level searches, the choice of new leadership stirs anxiety within an organization, but school searches stir up the most passionate feelings. Teachers, who are the front-line workers in K-12 education, are anxious; the middle managers are anxious; the senior management is anxious; and most of all, the parents are anxious. In the last few years, we have seen the worried parent factor move into the political process. Parents are scared to death that their kids are going to fail the test of the modern economy and school boards have accurately heard the fear in their constitutents' voices Political Influence For the last 25 years the income differential between well-educated, badly educated and uneducated workers has grown steadily. In a knowledge-intensive economy, a good education adds very substantial value, sometimes a fortune to a child's prospects. In a global economy, where developing countries can offer a literate, disciplined, accessible work force, the value of unskilled labor has dropped steadily. The fundamental economics have sunk in. Parents know their kids are at risk. The good news for superintendents is that education has become the No. 1 political priority in America. The bad news for superintendents is that education has become the No. 1 priority in America, which means the public wants results. The political sea change inevitably influences our searches. School boards want to hear how a candidate has improved academic performance in his or her district. They will listen patiently to a good story about academic processes, a tale about management changes and descriptions of program innovation and reform initiatives. They are interested in academically intriguing ideas, and they want their superintendent to possess a clear, articulate vision of how to improve things. But above all they want to hear the student assessment numbers. We see it time and again. The school board sensibly explores a candidate's educational history and outlook. They respond favorably to an articulate and coherent story of attempts at districtwide improvement. But the candidate who concludes the presentation with favorable quantitative measures wins the race. Numerical proof of improving student performance has become a necessary, though not a sufficient, condition for superintendent appointment. Obsession With Data Search committees, composed of a cross section of stakeholders, are not exclusively obsessed with numbers. Collectively, they are not that simple minded. The candidates who come in and just spout the numbers leave everybody cold. The search committees are, after all, responsive to teachers and parents of children. The superintendent still stands "in loco parentis," and search committees want to see and feel a live human being. But they also want proof that is hard to come by--that their superintendent will win, and they translate winning simply. I want my kid and my school to hit the mark on the tests. I have come to believe that we are in the early phase of a long term and major trend. Over the next 25 years we will, as a country, focus with ever improving techniques on measurable gains in student achievement. The trends are pretty clear. We will both decentralize and centralize at the same time. We will decentralize the control of schools and in some cases break systems apart. We will try vouchers, charters, magnets, performance-based contracts and school-based management, some inside the public school envelope and some outside. The distinction between "in the system" and "out of the system" is far less important than the trend, which is clear. Competing Forces In the diametrically opposite direction, we will centralize standards curricula, professional development and assessment. We will do it at the College Board, in states, in school districts and in private, for-profit and not-for-profit management companies and service providers. Publishing companies will follow in the wake by producing fancy systems wholesale that package everything from academic standards to curriculum to textbooks to computer software to professional development to assessment. States, localities and even individual schools will purchase competing systems. We are going to simultaneously break up and control. It will not be pretty. The public will insist on continuous innovation and then will punish innovative failures. Superintendents always have had hard jobs. They carry more freight than most of us. In the next 25 years, we as a search firm expect winning superintendents to learn to both control and devolve simultaneously and to build reliable, public measures of success and failure. It was never an easy job. It isn't likely to get easier. John Isaacson is president of Isaacson, Miller, an executive search firm, of 334 Baylston St., Boston, Mass. 02116. |
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