The centerpiece of President Bush's plan to reform American education has always been vouchers -- giving public money to help kids go to private schools. But the President also has backed a competition to design "break-the-mold" schools embodying revolutionary new ways of educating our youngsters.
The winning designs were announced last month by the New American Schools Development Corporation (NASDC), the outfit set up to handle the competition and solicit private contributions to pay for turning the designs into reality. Now, eleven groups will get to test and refine their winning proposals: They'll have five years and enormous budgets - nearly $1 million a year for each if the $50 million in private contributions is divided equally.
What can we expect from the NASDC winners? The project leaders are among the most talented and creative people in American education. One project, headed by Theodore Sizer, the founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools, also includes James Comer and Howard Gardner on its team. Comer, a child psychiatrist, is well known for his work with poor minority children in New Haven, Connecticut, and Gardner, a psychologist, for his writing on human intelligence and on how children learn. Another project is led by Audrey Williams, who founded a college based on promoting service, and another by a former U.S. secretary of education, William Bennett. Bennett's project proposes a traditional curriculum based on his "James Madison High School" and on E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy.
So here is a bunch of exceptional people who will be getting huge infusions of money - the kind most people who try to reform their schools can only dream about. It would be amazing if these eleven teams didn't do some very interesting things.
But the point is not just to create a group of terrific schools; the winning teams are supposed to be creating models or prototypes that can be picked up by all the other schools in the U.S. That's how eleven winning proposals are supposed to transform American education.
How will this work? We have 100,000 schools in this country, but where are we going to find 100,000 Ted Sizers or James Comers to lead these schools? And what about the money? We're told that the 100,000 schools will do all these new things with the same budgets they have now. If it costs $5 million to start up each "break-the-mold" schools project, what makes us think that the start-up for the rest of the schools would be cheap? How would these schools pay for the consultants or train the teachers, administrators and staff or buy all the new technology and materials they'd need?
There are plenty of excellent alternative schools in the U.S. -- and there have been for years. But they are a lot more like rare perennials than like the kind of flower that once planted spreads out until it takes over a garden. Everyone has heard about the great virtues of District 4 in New York City. It's in East Harlem, a neighborhood where people expect to find lousy schools. Yet it has outstanding teachers and supervisors who have come up with exciting and original ways of teaching kids. Parents from all over the city try to get their children into District 4 schools; people all over the country hold these schools up as examples. And yet, though District 4 has been around for over a decade, it has hardly spread at all; there are no District 4 spin-offs in Tulsa or Helena and only one or two others like it in New York City.
There are lots of reasons why excellent new ideas for schools don't move beyond their own district -- if, indeed, they continue to flourish there. Parents often resist innovation. They don't like to feel that their children are being experimented with. And they want schools that look like the ones they went to -- whether or not they learned anything. Most superintendents don't want to raise contentious issues with their school boards because they are afraid of losing the one or two votes they need to hold on to their contract. And many principals worry that if they try something new and it doesn't work out -- as is often the case -- they'll get all the blame. Even if a bunch of enthusiastic teachers and administrators work themselves half to death so they can get a good idea off the ground, they are likely to see everything they've done discarded when a new superintendent or a couple of new school board members come on the scene.
Is the President's program going to produce some terrific new ideas? No question about it. But it will not transform American education. We've always known that when you give extraordinary people extraordinary resources, they can do extraordinary things -- in any field. This doesn't mean that what they do can be duplicated elsewhere by ordinary people on tiny budgets that are getting smaller all the time.
But what if every ordinary school or school district in the country said, "We want to change; we want to become like one of these 'break-the mold' schools. Just give us what you gave them." This might work. It would mean finding 100,000 -- or 15,000 -- Sizers and Comers and at least $75 billion or as much as $500 billion -- what we need to pay off the national debt.