Microsoft's Class Action

Rewriting The Rules At the School of the Future, students like Quetta Fairy are experimenting with a whole new way to learn.

"Miz Mary" Microsoft's Mary Cullinane says the company's "interest in education is very much a vested interest."

Related Stories

• Top Companies Get In The Education Game
  These days, getting involved in public schools is practically a requirement for top companies. Here are some of the most ambitious initiatives.

Kathy Lee, a 20-year veteran of Philadelphia's public schools, may be armed with a handheld mike and interactive whiteboard these days, but she knows high-school kids haven't changed. "Is there a group that's ready to present impact statements?" she demands. "I'm going to count to 10, and someone's got to step up to the plate. Remember, your stuff doesn't have to be perfect today. It's a work in progress."

Twenty-five members of Lee's ninth-grade class hunch in their seats, avoiding her gaze. Finally, a small, lithe girl named Quetta Fairy steps forward, accompanied by three group members, to take the microphone. When she jacks her laptop into the classroom's digital projector, a Microsoft Publisher document pops up on the screen. "Our group is the Community Redevelopment Group, and this is our Action Plan," she says tentatively, as if intimidated by her own amplified voice. "Our goal is to make sure that community members can be included in the revitalization process in West Philadelphia."

"Too many conversational sidebars!" Lee interjects, trying to quiet the other students. "Quetta, can you show us the surveys you put together for the community meeting you're holding?"

"These are the questions we're going to put in the surveys," Fairy responds, clicking over to another document. "Are you aware of the revitalization effort? What businesses and factories were here when you were growing up, and do you know what happened to them? Are you willing to attend meetings to discuss what is happening in our community?"

"Thank you, Quetta. Once again, there are too many sidebars." Lee turns to the rest of the class. "I need you all to pay attention, because we're addressing the competencies you need for the 21st century. You're not going to work for the same company for 50 years, you know. The factory days are gone."

On the face of it, Philadelphia's High School of the Future, a collaboration between Microsoft and the city's public-school district, seems like the kind of out-in-left-field experiment guaranteed to inspire dissent. Yet the school opened last September to almost universal acclaim. Breathless press reports read like an old Jetsons script: Interactive whiteboards! Combination-free lockers! A laptop for every student! An NPR feature titled "In Philly 'Future' School, Books Are So 20th Century" went all gooey over the school's universal Wi-Fi and student-ID smartcards, glossing over just how these bells and whistles were supposed to revolutionize education.

But the news reports captured only part of the project and, in many ways, the least-important part. The School of the Future is not just a high-tech overlay on the traditional curriculum--it represents a wholesale tearing apart of that traditional curriculum. The three Rs are gone; science, English, math, writing, and the rest are being taught not as separate "disciplines," but as a set of interdependent tools for understanding real-world problems. And while the School of the Future may occupy a relatively radical position on the spectrum, corporate involvement in the education system is becoming commonplace, a role that has stirred plenty of controversy.

"Lockheed Martin needs engineers, and they know what the standards are for producing people who can go on to engineering school and become successful," says Paul Vallas, until recently the "CEO" of the School District of Philadelphia. He goes on, ticking off other business partners that have opened their own public schools in Philadelphia: "Sunoco hires students from the city. They know what they need in potential employees." But it is precisely that utilitarian approach that has some parents and teachers concerned. They've long acknowledged--insisted, even--that schools need to prepare kids for the modern working world. But many still want them to do something more, something more subtle. That's why they like to see their kids reading Moby-Dick rather than The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

Still, says Mary Cullinane, director of Microsoft's U.S. Partners in Learning program, the old mode of instruction--what she derides as the "stand and deliver" method--simply has to evolve. "We push all the kids into this big funnel," she says, "and then we're surprised when it doesn't work." Cullinane has been trying for years to drive educational strategy forward. Back in 1997, when she was the technology administrator of Union Catholic Regional High School in Scotch Plains, New Jersey (and nearly a decade before the phrase "One laptop per child" even entered the vernacular), she saw to it that every student in her school was armed with a wireless-equipped notebook computer. Three years later, she joined Microsoft, where she now acts as point person for the School of the Future project. With Microsoft behind her, Cullinane's quest seems considerably more plausible. But it is also relentlessly pragmatic: "Microsoft's interest in education is very much a vested interest," she says. "More and more companies are getting worried that they're not going to be able to find enough good employees in the future, and we're one of them."