 |
|
|
|
|
CAN HARD KNOCK GRADS LEARN TO SPEAK GEEK?
by Christine Smallwood
February 2005
PARKSIDE, Phila.—The scene could almost be the meeting of any residents association on any October evening.
At the front of the second floor sanctuary of Christ Community Baptist Church, an architect is clicking through colorful renderings of a building he's hoping to build, droning on about shrubbery and the inevitable question of parking. The pews are filled with seventy or so residents. Some shift in their seats, anxious to get their say in. Others are taking notes, or glancing at two handouts. The first is an agenda from Philadelphia Public Schools, a fuzzy-lettered sheet of goldenrod paper that looks as though it's fresh off the ditto machine. The other is a four-page brochure, printed in crisp full color on heavy glossy stock. On the front of the brochure is a picture of two teenagers doing their homework, a girl taking notes with a pencil and a boy tapping away on his laptop. Floating above them both is the word “Empower,” superimposed on a soft-focus shot of the city skyline. Above it, in smaller letters, is the reason everyone is here tonight: “Microsoft.”
The meeting may seem ordinary, but the project is not. Microsoft, the $37 billion-a-year software giant, has teamed up with the perennially cash-strapped Philadelphia Public Schools to tackle one of today's toughest policy challenges—the battle to save public education. Together, they're designing the perfect public school from the ground up. Dubbed the School of the Future, the 700-student high school won't open until the Fall 2006, but it's already being touted as a potential worldwide model for technology in education. The district plans to buy all students individual laptops or handheld personal computers to take with them from class to class and home at night. Many of the school's textbooks won't be books at all, but files read off the screens of these digital devices.
All told, the school will cost about $46 million to build, of which Microsoft has pledged to contribute nothing, at least not in the way of money. What they are contributing is expertise, most of which comes in the person of Microsoft employee Mary Cullinane, the School of the Future's “technology architect.” Before she began work on the School of the Future, Cullinane supervised all of Microsoft's education initiatives nationwide. Tonight, she's wearing a grey sweater over an oxford shirt and brown slacks, and her brown hair is tied back in a ponytail. When the time for questions and answers arrives, she declines the offered microphone.
“What will be the changes?” a man in the back asks. “What are you leaving out?”
“What's going to change in the community?” another voice chimes in.
Cullinane's answers are unusually direct. The school wants to be a good neighbor. It will offer up its space for community meetings, and maintain a relationship with the neighborhood association long after being built. But really, she says, everyone involved with this process needs to remember that the School of the Future is much larger than any one neighborhood, and everybody needs to get on board. Public education is a problem that needs a solution, and Microsoft believes the solution can be found right here in Philadelphia.
“We are demonstrating what we believe needs to be the norm,” she says, her voice carrying across the room. “We believe this model should be replicated throughout the world, and the eyes of the world are watching you all to see whether this will be successful.”
This is enough to convince Lana Felton-Ghee, whose public relations firm was hired by the district to help solicit community feedback on new projects. She's here as a facilitator. “The future is Microsoft, let's face it,” she says, drawing scattered nods and “uh-huhs,” from the crowd.
When Philadelphia breaks ground on a project as ambitious as the School of the Future, everybody wants a hand on the shovel. One month later and two blocks away, no fewer than five shovels dug into the site at the corner of Girard and Parkside avenues: one by the mayor, the governor, the school district CEO, the chair of the School Reform Commission, and a Microsoft vice president. Cheering them on were a gaggle of students and a near-quorum of City Council members. On her web log, Cullinane called it a “tremendous day,” but expressed frustration with “the internal and political issues that have threatened the energy and spirit created at the beginning of this undertaking.”
“Sometimes, you know, I want to get different people in a room and just say ‘get it done,” Cullinane explained in a December interview. “There are a lot of instances in the corporate world where you can do that. I can't do it here.”
***
The deal between Philadelphia Public Schools and Microsoft goes like this: Microsoft consults and supports, most significantly through the full-time efforts of Cullinane. The district pays the $46 million it will take to build the school. Once the school is built, the district will get a template for how to use technology in the classroom that it can apply to other schools. Microsoft, which has been positioning itself as a nationwide provider of public education solutions for some time, will help run a real-life public high school.
Sometimes referred to as “the Microsoft School,” the School of the Future is the most visible of twenty-six small neighborhood high schools Philadelphia Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas is overhauling with the help of the private sector, a campaign that will double the number of magnet schools in Philadelphia and increase the total number of public high schools in Philadelphia by fifty percent. To help realize his plan, Vallas has sought out both university partners and corporate ones. In addition to Microsoft, the district is building three engineering programs with Lockheed Martin and a new science program with the Princeton Review. But Microsoft is doing more than planning a high school. Vallas has also invited the world's largest technology firm to help him overhaul the way the entire district is run.
“Microsoft has more to offer than just technology,” Vallas said in a December interview.
“Microsoft has their creativity, their process. What impressed me about Microsoft is obviously their technology but also their management system.”
“We're interested in using their internal processes to help us do business more efficiently,” said district spokesman Cameron Kline. “That's record-keeping, communication, sharing information. If we can streamline the way we do business in the school district, with 200,000 plus kids and 270-plus schools—”
Ellen Savitz, chief communications officer, interrupted him. “We are talking about modernizing all of our business practices with their help.”
The district's agreement with Microsoft is for a three-year partnership that expires six months into the school's first year of operation. Until then, Savitz said, it's all up for grabs: Human Resources. Payroll. Transportation. Building design and planning. Budgeting and personnel. For the School of the Future, Microsoft has advised the district on how to paint classroom walls to promote collaborative learning. It has surveyed strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats—a practice as common in the corporate world as it is rare in public administration. As the district works on developing a new payroll system it has two Microsoft employees at its disposal, who will fly out from the company's Redmond campus if necessary. By September 2005, a full year before the School of the Future is scheduled to open, Vallas hopes to have built thirty to forty “Classrooms of the Future” in existing schools across the district.
Microsfoft, according to Savitz, can convince textbook publishers to go digital with much more ease than a district employee could.
“We don't want the kids to have textbooks,” said Savitz. “What we'd like to think is that their textbooks could be digital and online. You see kids with these giant backpacks, carrying these giant loads, not getting work done because there's this giant thing on their back. The textbook companies are concerned that textbooks could go digital. But this is the future, this is what's going to happen, and they need to get on board,” Savitz said. “The clout of Microsoft gives us a little more pressure to get this done.”
***
On a cold day this December, Cullinane met with a dozen members of the school's Curriculum Working Committee (CWC), which has been charged with determining what classes will make up the school's day and what professional development programs will be available for its teachers. Midway through the meeting, Cullinane announced her intention to take the members of the CWC on a retreat. She wanted to get them out of Philadelphia, onto an airplane and off to someplace sunny, a retreat where they would find themselves “out of the comfort zone” and be unencumbered, creative, productive. To assist this process, she offered to bring anyone in the field of education to the retreat, no matter how busy or how prominent, to give the CWC their counsel and cheer them on. “Email me the names of the big fish in your fields,” she said, “and I'll get them there.”
She then asked the members to email her suggestions of where to hold the retreat. She suggested they might choose a warmer clime, but not Florida. Why not? It's unclear. “I love Florida,” Cullinane said later. “I'm a huge proponent of all fifty states.”
When the meeting adjourned, Cullinane left with Allen, who has worked in public education for thirty years. “I don't understand why you didn't just pick the location,” he said to Cullinane. He didn't think anyone would have minded.
Cullinane smiled and continued packing up her tablet PC. “It's good for people to feel like they're part of the process,” she replied merrily.
But when they start trying to control the process, that's when her merriment fades. Sometimes, Cullinane seems to almost relish confrontation. She has a vision for the school, and she wants to bring as many of her varied constituents as possible to feel like that vision is their own. But Cullinane is also quick to identify irreconcilable dissenters as such, and then politely outflanks them with as many arguments as she can muster.
For example, Cullinane is vehement that the school's curriculum should not focus on science to the exclusion of other subjects. When a teacher at the CWC meeting said she wanted use science as the starting point for planning the curriculum, Cullinane saw a threat. “We've got to blow this science thing out of the water,” she said to Allen after the CWC meeting. She recalled when a member of the school's technology subcommittee wanted to debate the virtues of one-to-one computing, the notion that every student should have their own laptop, tablet, or another digital device. In this case, she enlisted a colleague to “blow this one away,” who sent around an email detailing the extensive research backing one-to-one computing. The point wasn't raised again, and the CWC wound up backing one-to-one.
“The things that have frustrated me have been very limited willingness to be empathetic towards—an inability to be empathetic towards another person's position,” said Cullinane, in reference to the frustrations referred to on her web log.
Cullinane is learning from what few mistakes she's made. For instance, Microsoft uses a “competency wheel”—a set of characteristics like leadership and the ability to think strategically that all Microsoft employees should demonstrate. Cullinane thought it would be a good idea for the district to develop similar competency wheels for all the School of the Future's “stakeholders”—students, principal, teachers, staff, community groups, business leaders.
First, she tried having a subcommittee draft the wheel, under her lead.
“My first thought was to take the idea we used at Microsoft and give that idea to a bunch of different representatives, and let them drive it. But from a time perspective, and from a coordination perspective, I quickly realized that was a dumb idea.”
So she called in Lominger, the same Minneapolis firm that Microsoft brought in to devise their own competency wheel. Philadelphia Public Schools' own wheel is now underway. Before she worked for Microsoft, Cullinane was a current events teacher at her alma mater, Union Catholic High School in Scotch Plains, New Jersey. Cullinane, the youngest teacher at Union, was also the school's technology director. After she attended a Microsoft technology summit for educators in Seattle, Cullinane began to get excited about the possibilities of weaving computers into the entire curriculum. When she finally brought laptops into the school's classrooms and saw the results, she became an evangelist.
“A parent of one of remedial students came in and said, ‘Ms. C., I just want to thank you. For the first time, Chris has experienced success at school. He has this tool that he relates to that he gets excited about, all of a sudden school is fun for him.'”
“Self esteem is priceless,” Cullinane said. “I saw classrooms that were once very quiet, very rigid, where the noise level increased, and the interaction between student and student or student and teacher changed dramatically.”
Cullinane—as well as Vallas, Savitz, and Kline—frequently use the word “replicability” when talking about the school. They see their job as the development of a model that other schools can, and will, replicate. Cullinane speaks of the need for research and data collection tools to determine the successes and failures of the school, and to glean lessons that will be of use the other schools that are sure to follow in its wake. Already she is meeting with other districts, which are interested in learning how they might copy Microsoft's Philadelphia strategy.
This is why, Microsoft says, Philadelphia Public Schools will pay almost all of the School of the Future's costs. (A portion of this may come from the school's naming rights, which could bring in an estimated $5 million, which could render Microsoft's School of the Future “Comcast School of the Future”, or “Pfizer school of the Future”). Microsoft isn't planning to chip in, aside from contributing the staff time of Cullinane and other consultants from their Redmond campus. At the October community meeting in Parkside, this arrangement struck one woman as strange. “With Microsoft's money you could have smaller class sizes, and that could be part of the experiment,” she suggested.
Not so, said Cullinane. “Part of this partnership is that it should be replicable,” she said. “If Microsoft came in and handed the school district a check for $50 million, that would be great for the school district, but that could not be replicated throughout the world. It is not realistic to expect that they're going to write 16,000 checks for $50 million apiece.”
Nevertheless, the School of the Future will have some advantages that are unlikely to be repeated 16,000 times. The school's principal and some of its teachers will be culled from a national search and trained for months before the school opens. While three quarters of the school's students will be from its “catchment area” in West Philadelphia, all will have opted to participated in a lottery for admission and thus be somewhat self-selecting. They will inhabit a brand-new building, a lumpy, white modular spaceship that's designed to conform to the Microsoft educational program's trinity of “continuous, relevant and adaptive” learning, which boils down to modular classroom space, faux-urban street corridors, and transparent glass walls. Whereas the post-World War Two “egg-carton” schools resembled generic factories or prisons, the School of the Future's campus will look something like a suburban office complex or interactive mall.
Microsoft, for its part, hasn't always seen Philadelphia Public Schools as a partner in technology. In 2001, Microsoft received word that a Philadelphia teacher had installed a pirated copy of Microsoft Office on a few administrative computers. They then threatened suit, forcing the district to audit of every computer in each of its 264 schools. In the future, Microsoft expects Philadelphia Public Schools to remain a good customer, paying their standard prices for upgrades and the additional licenses that will be needed should one-to-one be adopted as district-wide standard. While Microsoft may argue that their desire to imagine how technology can improve public education in the public interest, it is doubtless part of the company's own long-term business interests as well.
Many details on School of the Future are still up in the air. The CWC has postponed finalizing the length of the school day and most of the curriculum until a principal is hired. It also isn't yet clear what kind of software the school's students will use, or how much it will cost. Dr. Janice Biros, a vice president of technology at Drexel University who sits on the CWC who's been involved with several other public school technology projects during her career at Drexel, said the potential of the School of the Future was unprecedented.
“Technology will be a tool, a part of the process, but that's not the major thing. The major goal is to reshape and rethink students are taught. It's extremely exciting and the implications are much more far reaching. This is going to be a model for schools throughout the country.” The school has also drawn national interest—experts hailing from Harvard and MIT have agreed to take part in the planning process.
“Every single day they provide a solution that I believe we could never have found without them,” Savitz said. “If Microsoft isn't prepared to find a solution, they find somebody who will find a solution and then they bring it back to us. It's been incredible. I sound like I'm promoting them.”
She also sounds a bit like Mary Cullinane.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
