S.D. on Teams to Design ‘Break the Mold’ Schools : Education: Eleven groups are chosen to ‘reinvent America’s schools for the next generation.’

A business-funded organization formed by the Bush Administration to boost the President’s education reform plans announced Thursday its choice of 11 teams--including two in which San Diego schools will participate--to design “break the mold” schools, intended to help revamp the way America educates children into the next century.

The announcement by the 1-year-old New American Schools Development Corp. signaled an important test for the Administration’s controversial theory that widespread reform can be achieved by privately financing the development of a small group of radically different, experimental schools that can be copied by districts and communities across the nation.

“Together they have given us the set of blueprints we will need for reinventing America’s schools for the next generation,” Ann D. McLaughlin, the corporation’s president and chief executive officer, said of the design teams, whose selection was announced at a news conference in Washington.

San Diego city school leaders expect major results--with a few beginning perhaps as early as this fall--from their participation in two of of the winning teams.

From student health to testing to training of teachers to classroom management to school-to-work transition, the design teams will generate ideas and provide expertise that can help San Diego build upon nascent reforms already under way in a few district schools, Supt. Tom Payzant said Thursday.

“I don’t think it’s an accident that San Diego is a participant in these major approaches to move beyond fragmented reforms, with lots of little things going on in a few places, to an overall strategy that improves teaching and learning everywhere,” Payzant said.

“It’s a credit to the work we’ve done the past three to four years.”

The nation’s eighth-largest urban school system is part of the National Alliance for Restructuring Education, one of the teams selected Thursday by a nonprofit corporation formed last year by American business leaders to help jump-start American education into wide-ranging, permanent reforms.

The winning proposals were among 686 submitted to the New American Schools Development Corp., formed by President Bush to push his American 2000 educational agenda.

The alliance includes school districts in Pittsburgh, Rochester, and White Plains, N.Y.; and the states of Arkansas, Kentucky, New York, Vermont and Washington, as well as a wide range of business and community partners.

Although the alliance promises to set up 243 “break-the-mold” schools by 1995, Payzant explained Thursday that, at least in San Diego, “It doesn’t mean building new schools from scratch but rather taking existing schools and redesigning their curriculum or the (way) they are managed, or building on curriculum they have already begun, in terms of restructuring.” Payzant said the district does not necessarily need a lot of money--the full cost of the alliance design is estimated at $20 million--to benefit.

“I don’t expect much in the way of new dollars for this first grant, but we will get access to the expertise of all the other partners as we ourselves move forward,” he said.

Already, the district has major experiments in teaching, counseling, health and school management in progress at numerous schools, including Darnell and Hamilton elementaries and O’Farrell, Mann, Wilson and Muirlands middle schools.

Deputy Supt. Bertha Pendleton is back in New York this week working on specifics of the alliance “blueprint,” along with a group of 11 parents, board members, teachers and labor union employees.

“This is a major chance for us to go beyond a few break-the-mold schools we’re already trying, to become a break-the-mold district,” Pendleton said.

San Diego Unified is also a participant in a second winning team, The College for Human Services out of New York City. Alcott Elementary School in Clairemont is one of 30 schools in California, Arizona, Illinois, Mississippi, New York and Washington that are part of the project, headed by Audrey C. Cohen of Audrey Cohen college in New York.

Payzant said Thursday that project focuses on the idea that “the community outside the school is the real classroom.”

“So the point is to have the students do things in the community beyond the walls of the school,” he said.

The teams won initial, one-year grants of up to $3 million each to test their proposals, which range from expanding the schoolhouse to encompass an entire community, to teaching youngsters through wilderness expeditions.

The first grants will pay for research and design. The nonprofit corporation also expects to pay for the next two phases--testing the ideas in “reinvented” school settings from 1993 to 1995, and providing technical help between 1995 and 1997 to other communities that want to adapt the ideas for their own schools.

McLaughlin, a former labor secretary who was recently brought to the corporation to improve its sluggish fund raising, acknowledged that the organization has raised only about $50 million of its $200-million goal for underwriting the innovative schools. But she expressed confidence that contributions will be easier to get now that potential donors can see what is planned.

“We’re positive we’ll (reach the goal). . . . We know the interest is there, we know the will is there,” McLaughlin said.

The winning projects bear many of the hallmarks of recent education improvement efforts and thinking: increased involvement by parents; the linking of school, community and social services; the tailoring of learning strategies to the individual child; extension of the school year and expansion of formal education from early childhood through adulthood.

Because of the corporation’s desire to see the ideas replicated as widely as possible, grant applicants were instructed to design schools whose per-pupil costs were roughly the same as the amounts afforded public schools. The nationwide average for the last school year was about $5,400 per student. Applicants also were required to show how they would meet the school reform goals outlined by President Bush and to include ways to test their schools’ effectiveness.

The schools development corporation was launched shortly after the Bush Administration unveiled its “America 2000” education reform strategies in the spring of 1991. The plan was praised for making school reform part of the national agenda and for seeking some new ways to jump-start improvement. But it was also criticized for relying on private corporations and for failing to provide additional government money for underfunded public school systems.