This
series on institutional transformations required to keep America's
promise would be incomplete without looking at our schools. Their
students will live in these institutions and be the agents of their
change. Since I know little of such matters, I asked the guy who I turn
to for such insight, Joe Beckman, to write this column.-Bill Shelton.

It's
reasonable to ask if there is a future for education as we know it. Our
understanding of schools has changed dramatically since we attended
them and will change even more over the next twenty years. Let's look
at the record. Progressive educators pushed typewriters and multiple
choice tests, since those were their most advanced technology.
Typewriters beat handwriting during the Depression; and tests measured
the post-war era. In the '60's we rebelled. We had Sputnik and the new
math, invented federal grants for higher education, along with Peace
Corps and VISTA.

In the years following Watergate, not much
happened. Schools got crusty. Lots of the '60's stuff got blown away.
It took vouchers, charters and unions, Bush and No Child Left Behind,
nasty shootings and school violence to produce serious innovation..
Ugly provocations led to ugly suggestions: mandates for more hours,
more days, more years of class in controlled environments.

Those
mandates don't work in Baghdad, and they won't work in Somerville. If a
kid's bored in five hours, that kid will explode in 7; if it's bad for
9 months, it will be prison by month #11; and if school tests saintly
students to survive through age 18, lots fewer will get to heaven when
it's the law. You get more with honey than vinegar.

Let's look at the alternatives.

With
retirements and transfers, 15%-to-20% of Somerville teachers leave
every year. So in the next five years. nearly 40% will be children of
the Internet. Sometime around then they will share with their students
this cultural transformation. There is no limit to what they – and
their kids – will do.

If we think of incentives rather than
mandates we can imagine a much happier future. If we ask kids how to
solve a problem rather than test them for a single solution, we'll get
lots more than what tests now measure.. If they see school as a
laboratory, a resource, a means of building lives – and if we share
that vision – we'll get more for them and lots more for us. And then,
if we help teachers create this laboratory rather than regulate and
limit their courseware to a set of standards, our schools can be the
resource we need to build our community, to know each other better, and
to create a self-renewing city.

This sounds pretty grand, but
it's easy. First, we know that the SAT and MCAS are stretched beyond
their capacity to measure what kids know. Real change in testing is
about to crack the College Board's ceiling. People have created
reliable, tested, and useful ways to measure "wisdom," for example –
"anticipating the impact we make on others." At Tufts, they asked,
"with an 8 _ by 11 piece of paper, solve a problem – any problem – and
tell us how and why." That kind of question invites evidence of wisdom,
creativity and practicality. It sure beats "how many widgets are left
when you give six to Mirabelle!"

Second, we know that
after-school programs can be fun, can pay, and can co-opt the day
program. That's why MIT's "interterm" pulls together students' first
and second semester into a transition. We lack that kind of integrative
project in the middle and high school.

Not for long, however..
There are already video projects that extend that day. There may soon
be city planning, economic development, and community organizing
projects to turn schools into what we need, to get the most from the
$700,000,000 Green Line, or from the New England Revolution in Inner
Belt, or a new Assembly Square. Projects like these build résumés that
make an SAT score less important to a college.

Third, the best
innovations come from within the schools, not from outside. Those
whiteboards now sprouting in Somerville classrooms are perfect for kids
to correct each others' papers like gleeful gamers and refine their
drafts for other teachers or colleges when the time comes. They are
also perfect for a movie or a lecture or a news commentary from the net
when somebody says something you KNOW needs correcting. When a
classroom is a real lab, those "toys" show both how to learn, and how
to learn from each other – lessons long sought and rarely shown.

Fourth,
the gamers will finally figure out how to turn scores into grades.
Already the state lists hundreds of old MCAS questions on their website
(http://www.doe.mass.edu/mcas/testitems.html). Soon some smart kid will
code those questions into a game, with points for speed and accuracy.
Ultimately, some funder will give a prize for good scores. Everybody
will then see that MCAS is just a game itself, and that other games,
far more fun, can show lots more than a simple speed test using old
fashioned tech. When getting into Harvard with $250,000 in scholarship
money is just another way to say a kid won The World of Warcraft, lots
more game makers will make a lot more money from eager-beaver parents.

Fifth,
we are not alone. The average kid "texts" at least four other kids a
day. When students work together, there is no limit to where those
collaborations go. Networks already involve students everywhere. I've
used tutors from Romania and the Philippines in classes in Chelsea and
Boston. There are few student aid programs abroad, and tutors here cost
$40/hour. That disparity cannot long prevail. Eventually we'll have
lots of graduate students from abroad chatting with classes in
Somerville for lots less money and lots more contact.

Sixth, you
can't keep a lid on things, forever. Information flows in lots of
directions at once. Eventually, student blogs will warn about certain
teachers or give cues to better grades or easier ways into better
colleges, or, at the very least, brag about beating a test. Those blogs
will warn about teachers to avoid and celebrate those who makes things
fun. For a first cut at this, check out
(http://www.ratemyteachers.com/schools/massachusetts/somerville/somerville_high_school.
; Just as schools now use CORI (criminal records checks), schools,
kids, teachers, and parents will to vet their next assignments.

Finally,
it will be interesting to see how long it takes before students produce
an online newspaper. It is so easy to set up a website, its surprising
that it hasn't happened. Also surprising is that there are so few
YouTubes of people angry funny or creative. An example of this was Mark
McLaughlin at Teen Empowerment last year
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6c6VN2pOLWU). Once we thought that kind
of "work" was for footnotes and papers. Soon it will be blogs and
self-promotion.

This vision challenges subjects we now think are
central – history, English, algebra, etc. Recently, Tom Bent, who
serves on the High School's School Improvement Council with me,
described how a student on his electrician crew at Harvard saw a wiring
diagram on a blackboard and observed, "That's an algebra problem. Why
didn't they tell me I could actually use that subject." So, we'll find
those uses and make 'em work.