School of Future Shock

At Philadelphia’s School of the Future (SOF), textbooks have been replaced with laptops and high schoolers are taught core curriculum through technology-based programs like YouTube and instant messenger.

SOF is a charter school in the Philadelphia School District serving mostly low-income students, and was created through a 2006 partnership with the Microsoft Corporation. But the school, once hailed as “the next big thing” by National Public Radio, is struggling to live up to these high expectations.

SOF’s original goals were to supply each student with a laptop computer that he would personally care for, open the school to the community in order to educate urban adults in technology and use technology and a project-based curriculum to increase student learning. Unfortunately, problems have been plaguing the school since the beginning: Students are unable to properly care for their laptops, there is very little community involvement and test scores have been inconclusive in measuring student achievement.

On May 28, teachers, administrators and researchers got together at the American Enterprise Institute to analyze the successes and failures of the school.

Some analysts expressed concern over what seemed like the lack of clear goals for SOF. “It’s very easy to convolute ends and means. Online learning is not the end…You need a very clear vision,” said Mitch Chester, commissioner of the Massachusetts public schools.

“When not wanting to be like what exists becomes one of the main qualities, you can’t grow on what’s good,” Chester added. “You reject what might be worth saving.”

Chris Dede, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, agreed that teachers and administrators should focus on the best teaching methods and not get distracted by the idea of technology. “Technology is just a catalyst…that enables a more powerful pedagogy,” he said.

While some analysts believed that the school went too far in rejecting the status quo, others believed that the school did not go far enough.

“There is no innovation here, at least not yet,” argued Kent McGuire, dean of the College of Education at Temple University. “This has been a failure in planning and execution.”

One of the biggest roadblocks for the school has been the increased involvement of the Philadelphia School District, which many teachers and administrators have found restrictive and hampering to innovation. Another difficulty has been the upheaval in school administrators—SOF went through four chief learners in three years—and the high turnover rate of teachers.

Because of these distractions, SOF has been forced to abandon its original principle of a project-based curriculum in favor of a more traditional, textbook-based program, but is planning a return to this by the 2010 school year.

However, some analysts believe that SOF will never be able to foster innovation as long as it is working within the public school district.

John Chubb of Edison Schools argued that technology in schools has an inverse relationship to the strength of teachers unions. “The system is resistant to technology,” he said. “Technology is going to take some of the jobs of teachers.”

Chester E. Finn, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, agreed that working within the system is not going to yield results. “Vendors are not reformers. Consultants are not agitators,” he said. “At the end of the day, are we talking about school reform, or are we talking about being consultants to a system that does not want to change?”

Margaret Cullinane, the director of innovation and business development for the Microsoft Corporation, disagreed that innovation could not happen within the public school districts, saying that you “can only change the system if you’re involved in the system.”

Alana Goodman is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.