Museum School to Be Education Showcase : Innovation: Elementary school planned for Exposition Park is designed to change the way children learn about science.

Stacked atop a filing cabinet at the Los Angeles Unified School District, three architectural models and nine fanciful drawings are giving officials their first glimpse of a project designed to change the way this city’s children learn about science.

Brought to life in bits of cardboard and balsa wood are three distinctive visions of the Manual Arts New Elementary School No. 1, to be located next to the California Museum of Science and Industry in Exposition Park.

Although the winning design is yet to be selected, educators already are predicting that, inside and out, from its clustered classrooms to its hands-on curriculum, the school will be unlike anything Los Angeles has ever seen.

The project, the nation’s second museum-based school, is the focus of an ambitious effort to improve the teaching of science and math throughout the district. Developed as part of a broad makeover of Exposition Park, the school is scheduled to open in 1996 on a site where the Armory Building now stands.

Recently, participants in the project--a joint venture of the school district, the science museum and USC--have begun to map strategies to accomplish what studies indicate is a daunting goal: turning kids on to science.

Last month, the U. S. Department of Education’s Science Report Card found, for example, that in 1990, few American fourth-, eighth- and 12th-graders had enough science knowledge to accomplish even relatively simple tasks requiring thinking skills. The study placed the blame on schools that did not make science a priority in the curriculum.

The Science Museum School will seek to remedy that, giving 900 students from kindergarten through fifth grade a thematic emphasis on science, math and technology.

The $30-million school, to be built with state “Space Saver” funds that reward neighborhood school projects that do not displace residents in crowded cities such as Los Angeles, will draw about 70% of its student body from the surrounding Exposition Park area. The remaining 30% of the slots will be open to pupils from other parts of the district.

But children will not be the only ones the school seeks to educate. USC’s School of Education, which is developing a master’s degree program in science education, plans to use the Science Museum School as a teacher-training center for its students. The museum, meanwhile, is hoping to build a Science Education Resource Center for use by teachers throughout the state.

If there is genius in the Science Museum School concept, its sponsors say, it is in this effort to educate children and teachers at the same time. Educators say a major obstacle that keeps youngsters from grasping scientific principles is that their teachers are baffled as well.

According to several surveys, including a USC study of the Los Angeles area, only one elementary school teacher in 100 has even minimal background in science. As a result, officials acknowledge, whatever science gets taught in the public school curriculum often is either intimidating or dull.

“We aren’t preparing our youngsters in the areas of math and science the way we should be,” said Andrew A. Cazares, the associate superintendent in the school district’s office of instruction.

In fact, USC and science museum officials say, the current state of public science instruction not only fails to invigorate children, it scares them away.

“Most kids start elementary school with an interest in the world around them. But by fifth grade, half of them have negative attitudes about science,” said Ann M. Muscat, deputy director at the museum, who laments that children have been taught to regard science not as a creative process of discovery but as a tedious exercise in memorization.

While the Science Museum School curriculum has yet to be designed, educators have agreed that a central goal will be to reverse that trend, convincing students that science and math can be fun. And that, educational scholars say, is where the museum can play perhaps its most vital role.

In his book “The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach,” Harvard University professor Howard Gardner suggests that when it comes to imparting scientific information, museums may have a distinct advantage over traditional schools.

“Certainly, there are exemplary schools, and just as certainly there are poorly run museums,” he writes. “Yet as institutions, schools have become increasingly anachronistic, while museums have retained the potential to engage students, to teach them, to stimulate their understanding, and, most important, to help them assume responsibility for their own future learning.”

Fueled by visions like Gardner’s, and inspired by the success of a similar school in Buffalo, N. Y., science museum officials have embraced the school project. They have timing on their side. The project dovetails with a planned $41-million rehabilitation of the museum itself, which lost much of its exhibition space when its main building was declared seismically unsafe in 1990.

Executive Director Jeffrey N. Rudolph says he hopes the new and improved museum will provide an informal complement to students’ formal education, allowing them to test out ideas they encounter in class.

Depending on how the school’s curriculum is structured, museum officials expect that some classes will be taught in the museum itself. In preparation, they are beginning to experiment with new exhibits that lure children into discovering scientific principles through play.

Science in Toyland, which goes on national tour April 26, reflects the direction in which the museum is trying to move. The exhibit resembles a well-stocked playroom, and most days it is crowded with children steering model sailboats into the wind, assembling imaginary insects out of huge foam parts and sending cars hurtling through a loop-the-loop course.

Other activity-based exhibits the museum may seek funds to install: an astronaut training center, a tidal pool, a rain forest that visitors explore in a glass elevator and a polar exhibit, complete with penguins.

The school building itself is expected to be innovative, incorporating state-of-the-art technology and modular, clustered teaching areas to create what the district’s written design criteria calls a “global teaching station.”

The three architectural proposals being considered by the Los Angeles Board of Education--the winners of a recent design competition--seem to rise to the challenge. One has a central, walled courtyard, shaped like the elliptical path of an orbiting planet. Another places a huge outdoor classroom in the shadow of the DC-8 “Spirit of Los Angeles,” which sits on the corner of Exposition Boulevard and Figueroa Street.

The school board is expected to choose among the three architects at its April 20 meeting, forwarding its recommendation to the State Allocation Board, which issues the contract.

Model Science

The Los Angeles Board of Education will soon choose among three architects who hope to design the Science Museum School. The architects--the top finishers in a recent design competition--were asked to create a stimulating place for learning on the site of the Armory Building in Exposition Park. Here’s what they came up with:

* Morphosis Architects keeps only the entry portal to the Armory Building, creating a three-story building that faces the Rose Garden and fashioning a huge outdoor classroom in view of the DC-8 “Spirit of Los Angeles.”

* Siegel/Diamond Architects’ adventurous design completely replaces the Armory Building with a modern complex marked by an elliptical, walled courtyard, designed to resemble the path of an orbiting planet.

* Arthur Golding & Associates retains the armory’s western facade as well as the structural frame of its main space, creating a translucent canopy over classrooms they described as a “a green oasis, protected yet stimulating.”

Science School

The Science Museum School, which will be on the site of the Armory Building in Exposition Park, is scheduled to open in 1996. It is a joint venture of the California Museum of Science and Industry, the Los Angeles Unified School District and USC.