Homey ‘Community’ Is Structure for Education : Education: The public-private partnership in Miami is an innovation. Various ways to improve teaching are being tried on a school-by-school basis.
At South Pointe Elementary School, the desks are never aligned in neat rows. No classroom is completely walled off from another. Each has a television, computer, telephone and a rocking chair in the reading corner.
Each pupil at South Pointe will be assigned to one of four “communities,” a school within the school, and spend all of his or her elementary years there. “We want to have an atmosphere like home,” said Beth Rosenthal, a third-grade teacher.
South Pointe opened here Sept. 3 under joint management of the Dade County School Board and Education Alternatives Inc., a private company based in Minnesota. The partnership, believed to be a first in public education, is not the only radical experiment in the classroom as the 1991-92 school year begins.
Many current experiments in American schools are on a smaller scale than in the past: Educators have shifted from trying to change the system to changing schools one at a time.
“It’s kind of a period of creative redesign, experimental redesign, at the local school,” said Ernest L. Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
“The highly standardized strategies that were mandated from the top--school districts and states--did not produce the results that were hoped for,” said Sharon Robinson, director of the National Center for Innovation, part of the National Education Assn. “Then how do you do it? You do it school by school.”
Denise Callaway of the Milwaukee public school system, which is soon to open an “African-American Immersion School,” said: “We’re becoming a system of schools, rather than a school system.”
Detroit also has three Afrocentric elementary schools which, like the one in Milwaukee, was intended only for black boys but will not exclude girls.
President Bush has incorporated the school-by-school approach into his education plan. He seeks business support to design 15 model schools suitable for the next century. A separate component of the plan, announced in April, proposes immediate federal sponsorship of more than 535 schools that would become models.
In one recent sign of the growing popularity of experimental schools, more than 500 educators, consultants and business representatives attended a recent conference in Arlington, Va., for information on designing schools for the future. Because of the interest, two more conferences are planned.
“You have to think about a learning environment in a whole new way, and that’s exciting,” said David Kearns, deputy secretary of education and a former Xerox executive.
Some educators have expressed concern about the limited impact of model schools, and possible abandonment of more sweeping approaches.
“One might call the current strategy ‘excellence by exception,’ ” Boyer said. “The question is, how do we make it available to all? Or are we going to abandon the notion of the common school for all?”
Boyer, a former U.S. commissioner of education, said the school-by-school strategy lets government officials “off the hook” by allowing them to avoid more expensive and difficult solutions, such as providing quality preschools, reducing class sizes in early grades and finding ways to get parents involved.
By design, no single type of experimental school has dominated, because each is intended to address the needs of that school’s students. This theory is borrowed from the new business practice of decentralized decision-making.
In general, the school innovations have altered longstanding management or scheduling practices, introduced specialized studies and instruction methods or addressed emotional problems that hinder learning. Because the purpose often is to reshape an entire school, the innovations tend to have many dimensions.
That is the case with South Pointe, where non-traditional approaches are to be taken to instruction, classroom design and technology, in addition to management.
Education Alternatives, based in suburban Minneapolis, has helped to hire South Pointe’s principal and faculty, revise blueprints for the new Spanish-style building and train teachers in “Tesseract,” an instruction method used in its private schools. The company also is expected to raise about $1.2 million over five years from grants and donors interested in the experiment. That money will cover the firm’s annual management fee, which may be as high as $275,000.
South Pointe was built to relieve overcrowding at two Miami Beach schools where enrollments have been predominantly Latino and poor. The educational experiment has attracted some higher-income parents whose children attended private schools, but South Pointe’s expected enrollment of 550 will roughly resemble that of an urban school.
One example of Tesseract’s flexibility might astonish many public school veterans. “Our teachers don’t have set lesson plans they work from,” said Kathryn Thomas, vice president of Education Alternatives.
The importance of textbooks is reduced. “This is my (base) reading series--fine (children’s) literature,” Rosenthal said, opening a cabinet filled with such books as “Charlotte’s Web.”
Around the country, much of the experimentation in public schools has been orchestrated by groups other than the local school board.
There are about 200 schools in the Coalition of Essential Schools, based at Brown University in Rhode Island; a similar number in the School Development Program, pioneered by James Comer in New Haven, Conn.; 29 schools in the Next Century Schools Program funded by the RJR Nabisco Foundation; and six in the Mastery in Learning Consortium, a program of the National Education Assn. The schools are spread out nationwide.
Nearly all of those programs said inquiries or membership have increased in the last year. In 1990, 1,000 schools applied for competitive RJR Nabisco grants, and 1,600 did so this year, according to Roger Semerad, the foundation’s president.
