We can't afford enough teachers, but we can afford to purchase and
maintain laptops?
50 million spent on one school?
Seriously, I could cry.
:P
On Mar 14, 2005, at 8:21 AM, John Ellingsworth wrote:
There was an article on Salon today about this. I have pasted the
article text below.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/03/13/
public_school_privatization/
Microsoft's new project: Building a better high school A partnership
between the software giant and the Philadelphia School District is an
innovative solution to an urban crisis. But can public education
survive private management?
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Christine Smallwood
March 13, 2005 | "I used to be first in my class, but now I'm
second," high school senior Ayesha says before turning back abruptly
to her PC. No one, mind you, has inquired about her class rank. "If
you'll excuse me, I have to finish typing this letter now." Ayesha is
working on one of the dozen computers in the library at Philadelphia's
Audenried High School, where titles such as "Cocaine and Your Nose:
The Incredibly Disgusting Story" and "The Autobiography of Malcolm X"
line the room. Quietly, a handful of students are using the computers
the way most public school kids do: to type up papers and run Google
searches for a current-issues project.
But for 700 students in the Philadelphia School District (out of a
total of 52,807 in regular public high schools), all of that is about
to change. As Philadelphia works to achieve its goal of becoming an
entirely wireless city of the future, the district has broken ground
on the country's first School of the Future, a $50 million spacecraft
of a campus in one of the poorer regions of the city.
This new high school is a great idea, but it should sound warning
bells to educators around the country: The privatization of
educational management is here. The School of the Future itself is not
the problem. In fact, it is an innovative -- and feasible -- solution
to the crisis that is public urban education. But Philadelphia's
hybrid system of public and private educational management threatens
to shift brainpower and financial resources away from the public
sector, which is responsible to every child -- whether she's first,
second or dead last in her class -- and into the private sector, which
is responsible only to itself.
Unlike the students of the past, who carry binders to and from their
lockers, the students of the future will carry laptops from class to
class and home again at night. The new school's curriculum hasn't been
written yet, but it will be different from the curriculum of the other
high schools in the district.
Learning will be "holistic," organized not around subjects like
literature and history but around themes like the Great Depression.
And despite the overwhelming presence of fancy equipment, officials
insist the curriculum won't be based primarily on science and
technology; rather, technology will be "integrated" into how every
discipline is approached, practiced and evaluated.
Laptops and a tech-friendly curriculum aren't the only things that
make this school different from Ayesha's school. The School of the
Future is different because it's a model -- a laboratory, one could
say, or a showroom -- that its maker intends to replicate around the
world, creating a franchise of educational institutions in which
technology, software and learning form a perfect union.
What also makes the School of the Future unique is that one of the
poorest "companies" in the country, the School District of
Philadelphia, is building it with the one of the richest companies in
the world, Microsoft.
The deal is simple: Philadelphia is to provide $50 million for a new
building, and Microsoft is to provide consulting and a project leader
to help a district team realize the plans. The school is being built
from the ground up, and Microsoft's muscle is bringing in experts to
help execute everything: the computer equipment, teacher hiring, the
curriculum, the building design, security, you name it. Basically,
instead of building an educational technology showroom on its Redmond,
Wash., campus (which Anthony Salcito, general manager of Microsoft
education, said the company was considering), Microsoft is building a
showroom in Philadelphia.
In 2001, the commonwealth of Pennsylvania took over the city's
270-plus failing schools. After toying with the idea of ceding all
control to Edison Schools Inc. (which the community resisted), the
district settled on a "diverse provider" model -- a mixture of public
and private educational management. Since that time, a slew of
nonprofit and for-profit entities, ranging from the University of
Pennsylvania to Edison and the Princeton Review, have come in to
design curricula, train teachers and administer campuses. Some of
these providers are experienced educators -- like universities -- and
some are experimenting in education for the first time.
The district has been trying out some things, too. Following the
takeover, it changed the title of the district's head from
"superintendent" to "CEO." And it contracted with test-preparation
giant Kaplan to create a core curriculum for the entire district.
(Commerce Bank has since gotten in on the action with its Commerce Wow
Zone program, which teaches middle schoolers "financial literacy.")
School districts around the country have Coca-Cola machines and
Nike-sponsored basketball uniforms. What makes Philadelphia's brand of
privatization unique -- besides its being the largest ever in the
history of American public education -- is its relationship to the
national "small schools" movement, the trend of replacing the large,
anonymous schools of the past 30 years with intimate campuses of 400
to 800 students. Throw in a $1.5 billion capital program, and the
district is looking at 28 new high schools in Philadelphia by 2008.
That's a lot of opportunities for diverse providers. In fact, district
CEO Paul Vallas intends all 28 new schools to benefit from some kind
of partnership. Nearly half will have corporate partners, and all will
have at least one university partner.
"We're creating multiple school options in every region," Vallas said
last December. "We want them all to have unique programs: I.B.
[international baccalaureate], advanced math, science, technology and
engineering, health sciences, etc. All college prep, with unique
programs -- dual language."
According to the district, privatization opens opportunities that
would never have been available to students otherwise. It also brings
naming rights (the School of the Future is a working title; its name
is available for $5 million) and philanthropic gifts. But to an
increasing extent, the privatization of the district's schools has a
hands-on nature. Last April the district announced the
Sunoco-sponsored Academy of Petro-Chemical Sciences and Technology, a
special curricular program within a vocational tech high school.
According to official remarks of chairman and CEO John Drosdick, among
its other achievements, "the Petro-Chemical Science and Technology
Academy will respond to the need that Sunoco and the industry continue
to have for qualified process operators." And Lockheed Martin is
trying to convert its internship program in engineering into three
similar academies in the city.
"Hey," says district spokesman Cameron Kline, "we're not going to turn
anyone away with a checkbook. We'll find a way to make it work."
Sometimes the district doesn't even turn away companies without
checkbooks. "We've always had external partners," said Vallas, "but
never one quite like this."
What Microsoft has to offer the district isn't money -- after all, if
it funded the Philadelphia program, the argument goes, the School of
the Future couldn't be replicated. Could the company realistically
traverse the globe, handing out checks in Bora Bora and Belize? No,
what Microsoft is providing is better than money. It's Management 101.
"Microsoft has more to offer than just technology," Vallas said.
"Microsoft has their creativity to offer, their process -- the
Microsoft process, the Microsoft system."
The company is helping the district streamline and modernize all of
its internal bureaucratic processes -- its business operations. From
record keeping, communication and information sharing to
transportation, human resources and billing, Microsoft is doing what
the private sector has always done for the public sector: increasing
efficiency.
The School of the Future is the first high school Microsoft has
offered to build from the ground up, but Philadelphia is not the first
district it has tried to improve. The company has also helped
Washington state train teachers and administrators to use technology
effectively; contributed $4 million to help Michigan teachers achieve
their No Child Left Behind requirements and make students aware of
opportunities in the workforce (ahem); and allocated $3 million for
professional development for principals in Virginia, including a
special emphasis on "business management skills."
According to Salcito, Microsoft is working with districts in New York
City, Miami-Dade County, Fla., Orange County, Calif., and Chicago on
collaborative Web portals, student information systems and tracking
programs. And conveniently for districts facing increasing pressures
to meet No Child Left Behind standards (and scrambling for funding if
they don't), Microsoft's Web site now offers information on "Microsoft
Solutions in Support of NCLB" and funding sources for education.
The School of the Future employs the corporate jargon of the future,
like Microsoft's "competency wheel," a pie chart of strengths that
"stakeholders" should possess. When a committee of educators failed at
wheel-based planning, Microsoft decided to assign the task to
Lominger, the private company that handled Microsoft's own wheel.
Microsoft also had a hand in developing the building's design, which
abandons straight hallways, desks and a cafeteria for flexible space,
workstations and faux-urban street corridors (replete with faux-urban
street signs). Mary Cullinane, Microsoft's "technology architect,"
talks about how the design coheres to the company's ideal of
"continuous, adaptive, relevant learning." And it does. It also looks
like the bastard child of a shopping mall and a corporate campus.
According to Microsoft's David Driftmier, general manager of worldwide
education strategy, the company sees itself as playing an "enabling
role" in education. "We're not an education company. We're a software
company. Technology is what we know." Besides, he added, "it's not
about the technology; it's about the people that use the technology."
Greg Butler, director of worldwide K-12 education strategy, seconded
that notion. "Part of our corporate mission is to enable people and
corporations to develop their potential. It's to our benefit to
produce people that can work in companies like ours."
It is nearly impossible to find a critic of the School of the Future.
Part of this is due to simple misinformation: Many Philadelphians --
even education activists -- wrongly assume that Microsoft is paying
for the school's building costs. Yet even when they learn the terms of
the deal, they tend to associate Microsoft's foray into public
education with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has
invested $600 million in the creation of small schools. Just last
month, the Indianapolis Public Schools announced that it had received
$1.3 million from the Gates Foundation to convert its five traditional
high schools into 21 small academies, part of a $11.3 million package
that also envisions the creation of 10 new high schools (public,
private or charter) in the metropolitan area. New York City's
small-schools bonanza (27 high schools, 14 middle schools and 11
sixth-to-12th-grade schools) is backed with $58 million from the
Gateses.
The Philadelphia project has no ties to the Gates Foundation, but
small schools and integrated technology are trends that the Gates
Foundation has popularized. The Gateses have unquestionably done
marvelous things for students -- provided computers, trained faculty
to teach with computers, reduced class size. And in the process,
they've spread the idea of specialized academies and encouraged a
market-based approach to school construction. District CEO Vallas'
driving passion -- many small neighborhood schools that offer kids a
free-market choice of where they go -- is vintage Gates.
But the question, as always, is who actually gets to choose. The
independent group Research for Action, which released a report on the
effects of privatization in Philadelphia last May, has found that
citizens have been closed out of decisions surrounding partnerships.
"There's very little public input about which companies come to
Philadelphia and why, and to which schools they'll be assigned and for
what they'll be held accountable," said RFA's Eva Gold. "Our concern
is that given that public education is a public institution, there
should be public dialogue and discussion about these issues, with the
public playing a role."
"The district is using the small-schools language, but what's the real
definition of 'small schools'? Community control, community
involvement in decision making ... It's sort of the opposite of what
the district is trying to do," Eric Baxon, executive director of the
Philadelphia Student Union, told the Philadelphia Inquirer.
And then there's the tricky issue of the transfer of capital from the
public to the private sector. "Can we afford to have a company
extracting a profit from a profoundly and chronically underfunded
school district?" asked Paul Socolar, who edits the Philadelphia
School Notebook, a quarterly grass-roots education publication. "And
when a company gets a contract to do something the district hasn't
done well, shouldn't we figure out when and how to transition back to
having the school district do the job and thereby keep all that money
in the local economy?"
The privatization of education management is here, and it's not going
away. The urgent conditions that led to the 2001 state takeover make
Philadelphia a special case. But communities around the country would
be wise to watch their local school boards carefully as they struggle
to respond to the challenges of high-stakes testing and the increasing
pressure to provide more for students with less public money. You can
bet that Microsoft already is. In fact, the company has already had
meetings with Chicago-area educators interested in their own School of
the Future.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
--
Thanks,
John Ellingsworth
2005-03-14
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