Microsoft's new project: Building a better high school

A partnership between the software giant and the Philadelphia School District is an innovative solution to an urban crisis. But can public education survive private management?

By Christine Smallwood

Read more: Education, Microsoft, Bill Gates, Politics, News, Public Schools

March 13, 2005 | "I used to be first in my class, but now I'm second," high school senior Ayesha says before turning back abruptly to her PC. No one, mind you, has inquired about her class rank. "If you'll excuse me, I have to finish typing this letter now." Ayesha is working on one of the dozen computers in the library at Philadelphia's Audenried High School, where titles such as "Cocaine and Your Nose: The Incredibly Disgusting Story" and "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" line the room. Quietly, a handful of students are using the computers the way most public school kids do: to type up papers and run Google searches for a current-issues project.

But for 700 students in the Philadelphia School District (out of a total of 52,807 in regular public high schools), all of that is about to change. As Philadelphia works to achieve its goal of becoming an entirely wireless city of the future, the district has broken ground on the country's first School of the Future, a $50 million spacecraft of a campus in one of the poorer regions of the city.

This new high school is a great idea, but it should sound warning bells to educators around the country: The privatization of educational management is here. The School of the Future itself is not the problem. In fact, it is an innovative -- and feasible -- solution to the crisis that is public urban education. But Philadelphia's hybrid system of public and private educational management threatens to shift brainpower and financial resources away from the public sector, which is responsible to every child -- whether she's first, second or dead last in her class -- and into the private sector, which is responsible only to itself.

Unlike the students of the past, who carry binders to and from their lockers, the students of the future will carry laptops from class to class and home again at night. The new school's curriculum hasn't been written yet, but it will be different from the curriculum of the other high schools in the district.

Learning will be "holistic," organized not around subjects like literature and history but around themes like the Great Depression. And despite the overwhelming presence of fancy equipment, officials insist the curriculum won't be based primarily on science and technology; rather, technology will be "integrated" into how every discipline is approached, practiced and evaluated.

Laptops and a tech-friendly curriculum aren't the only things that make this school different from Ayesha's school. The School of the Future is different because it's a model -- a laboratory, one could say, or a showroom -- that its maker intends to replicate around the world, creating a franchise of educational institutions in which technology, software and learning form a perfect union.

What also makes the School of the Future unique is that one of the poorest "companies" in the country, the School District of Philadelphia, is building it with the one of the richest companies in the world, Microsoft.

The deal is simple: Philadelphia is to provide $50 million for a new building, and Microsoft is to provide consulting and a project leader to help a district team realize the plans. The school is being built from the ground up, and Microsoft's muscle is bringing in experts to help execute everything: the computer equipment, teacher hiring, the curriculum, the building design, security, you name it. Basically, instead of building an educational technology showroom on its Redmond, Wash., campus (which Anthony Salcito, general manager of Microsoft education, said the company was considering), Microsoft is building a showroom in Philadelphia.

In 2001, the commonwealth of Pennsylvania took over the city's 270-plus failing schools. After toying with the idea of ceding all control to Edison Schools Inc. (which the community resisted), the district settled on a "diverse provider" model -- a mixture of public and private educational management. Since that time, a slew of nonprofit and for-profit entities, ranging from the University of Pennsylvania to Edison and the Princeton Review, have come in to design curricula, train teachers and administer campuses. Some of these providers are experienced educators -- like universities -- and some are experimenting in education for the first time.

The district has been trying out some things, too. Following the takeover, it changed the title of the district's head from "superintendent" to "CEO." And it contracted with test-preparation giant Kaplan to create a core curriculum for the entire district. (Commerce Bank has since gotten in on the action with its Commerce Wow Zone program, which teaches middle schoolers "financial literacy.")

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