11 Teams Chosen to Design ‘Break the Mold’ Schools : Learning: Los Angeles project is among those selected. Concepts must reflect President Bush’s education goals.

A business-funded organization formed by the Bush Administration to boost the President’s education reform plans announced on Thursday its choice of 11 teams--including one in Los Angeles--to design “break the mold” schools, intended to help overhaul America’s public education systems.

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.

The teams, chosen from 686 applicants, 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 between 1993 and 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 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.

Several of the winning concepts were steered by some of the biggest names in the decade-old national school reform movement, including Theodore Sizer of the Coalition of Essential Schools at Brown University; James P. Comer of the Yale University Child Study Center; Chester Finn Jr. of the Education Excellence Network of Vanderbilt University; Marc Tucker of the National Center on Education and the Economy in Rochester, and Joe Nathan of the Center for School Change at the University of Minnesota.

The Los Angeles project--whose three partners are a local, business-backed education reform organization, the Los Angeles Unified School District, and its teachers union--envisions creating individual support systems for each student. It will be tested at two still-to-be-determined sites, dubbed the Los Angeles Learning Centers, and will initially involve about 3,200 students from pre-kindergarten through middle school.

Mindful of the rapidly growing and increasingly diverse immigrant and low-income population of the school district, the Los Angeles project will link the two schools to health and social services. It envisions a “moving diamond” of support for each child: a younger child at the base of the “diamond” will be matched with an older student at the top, a teacher at the right and the child’s parents and a community volunteer to the left. The support people will follow the child through various phases of schooling.

The learning centers also will emphasize in-depth, thematic teaching that cuts across various subjects and attempts to provide real-world applications of the lessons. Other features include a “transition to work” program during the final two years of school; frequent, regular planning and learning sessions for teachers, and a performance-based system for determining how well a child has learned.

Peggy Funkhouser, president of the Los Angeles Educational Partnership, which joined with the school district and United Teachers-Los Angeles for the project, said the group drew on the ideas of 150 business leaders, educators, other professionals and parents.

“We had no preconceived ideas, and we didn’t have a guru, but what we came up with represents an amazing amount of consensus,” Funkhouser said.

The Los Angeles project is unique for its key roles for top district officials and the teachers union. It also has the strongest element of teacher collaboration, Funkhouser said.

Christine Gutierrez, a teacher at Jefferson High School in South Los Angeles and assistant coordinator of its highly regarded “Humanitas” program, told the news conference in Washington that she and other teachers are excited about such high-level support for innovations.

“We have been truly committed (to trying out new ideas). Now for the first time on a national level, we have been supported in that commitment,” Gutierrez said.

The other 10 projects are:

* Atlas Communities, based in Providence, R.I., with sites in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland and Maine; the design team includes noted reformers Comer and Sizer.

* The Odyssey Project, of Gaston County, N.C. It emphasizes basic schooling for 3-to 18-year-olds, who also will study the arts, a second language and perform community service.

* Roots and Wings in Lexington Park, Md., whose design team includes the director of the John Hopkins University’s Center for Research on Effective Schools for Disadvantaged Students. The project emphasizes critical thinking and creativity for rural students.

* The National Alliance for Restructuring Education, based in Rochester, N.Y. Plans call for 243 school sites by 1995, including San Diego.

* The Bensenville Community Design, to be located in a community of 17,000 near Chicago. Representatives from every walk of town life were included in the design, which calls for students to do a large part of their learning at such community sites as government offices, industrial complexes, libraries and technology centers.

* The College for Human Services, designed by the Audrey Cohen College in New York. The project calls for seven to 30 schools in Arizona, California--including San Diego--Illinois, Mississippi, New York City and Washington, D.C. The project runs from prenatal care to college.

* Community Learning Centers of Minneapolis, with several Minnesota sites. The design calls for teacher accountability and targets five basic subjects.

* The Co-NECT School of Cambridge, Mass., with sites planned for Boston and Worcester. Its emphasis will be on math, science and ways to use technology to improve learning.

* Expeditionary Learning of Boston, with sites planned for Portland, Me.; Boston, New York City, Decatur, Ga. and Douglas County, Colo. The project emphasizes outdoor expeditions as a basis for learning and the development of societal and personal values.

* The Modern Red Schoolhouse, based in Indianapolis, with sites in other Indiana cities and in North Carolina and Arizona. The design team included former Education Secretary William J. Bennett, and the project includes a “time-tested, classical education” and emphasizes technology.

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.