(2007-08-31) Corporate Driven School Change

Microsoft has a School Of The Future program (Educating Kids), and other corporations are doing similar things.

• When the former Chicago city-budget guru (PaulVallas) inherited the Philadelphia Pa school district in 2002, it was a monkey on his back. Fewer than half the students were passing basic competency tests, and more than a third dropped out before graduation. In his Sisyphean push to reverse those numbers, Vallas had one thin reed to cling to: corporate partnerships. Successful businesses' ideas about maximizing results and solving problems creatively, he thought, might help transform the failing district. "We've been seeking corporate partners all along to help us design schools and, ultimately, to help us run schools," he says. "Our approach has been to partner with everyone we can." (This summer, Vallas took the job of superintendent of the New Orleans system, which should be every bit as challenging as Philly's.)

• In recent decades, a number of schools, many of them private, have tried tinkering with this outmoded system (the open classroom being one of the better-known attempts). But the push from within corporate America began when Sanford Weill, who would later become CEO of CitiGroup (NYSE:C), began applying modern business practices and know-how to public education in the early 1980s. A rising star in Manhattan's securities brokerage industry, Weill had watched two parallel trends play out: Company after company was fleeing New York City, citing a lack of incoming talent, and city kids were languishing in the Public School-s.

• Mary Cullinane is based in New York City, where she helps manage Microsoft's Partners in Learning education-reform program, but one week a month, she leaves her desk and returns to Philadelphia.

• Inspired by such results, Salcito, Cullinane, and the Philadelphia Board of Education swept aside the old "silo learning" model and replaced it with one in which subjects are subsumed into open-ended topics: "How are our identities constructed?" or "Should the U.S. be concerned about bird flu?" Traditional disciplines are applied in the course of exploring these broader questions, exercising students' writing, calculating, and analytical skills concurrently, as well as the career-oriented skills on Microsoft's "education competency wheel," including organizing and planning, motivating others, dealing with ambiguity, and working in a team setting.

• In developing those lesson plans, School of the Future teachers have the option of pulling down prototypes from the Microsoft Web site, which the company has collected over the years. All of them have three common core elements: They're geared toward molding students into more-critical thinkers, more-confident communicators and presenters, and more-experienced users of Microsoft software--theoretically, all characteristics of the ultimate 21st-century (New Economy) employee.

Jun'2009: considered a Failure. *In the absence of real leadership, and because no community partnerships had formed, the SOF started to adopt more traditional district assessments and classroom practices.

"It’s a theory called isomorphism that Dr. Henry Levin applied to educational entrepreneurship," explained Riggan. "We’ve seen it a lot before in other innovative schools: Basically, the experimental school eventually conforms to the parent model from which it is derived. By year three, the Philadelphia school district was mandating the SOF’s curriculum, assessments, et cetera."

Riggan later went on to explain the theory, saying that "innovative schools don’t tend to get the benefit of the doubt because they deviate so far from the standards conventionally used to determine what a school should be to begin with. If SOF blasted out of the gate with great test scores, no one would be concerned that it has a very different idea of what ‘CurriculUm’ means. But since it did not, the natural assumption is that the things that made the school deviant are the reasons for its failure. In order to survive, therefore, the school has to adopt more conventional structures and practices."* (School Reform)