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."

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Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, has admitted to being "terrified for our workforce of tomorrow." And company brass had dreamed for years of building a kind of technology-saturated edutopia at their home base in Redmond, Washington. It made sense enough: The company's campus already boasted a Home of the Future and an Office of the Future; a Classroom of the Future would be a natural brand extension. The thought was that it would further Gates's ambition to use technology as a catalyst for educational reform, and that the classroom would emerge as an archetype for educators and districts across the country.

That was the plan, anyway--until Vallas entered the picture. When the former Chicago city-budget guru inherited the Philadelphia school district in 2002, it was a monkey on his back. Fewer than half the students were passing basic competency tests, and more than a third dropped out before graduation. In his Sisyphean push to reverse those numbers, Vallas had one thin reed to cling to: corporate partnerships. Successful businesses' ideas about maximizing results and solving problems creatively, he thought, might help transform the failing district. "We've been seeking corporate partners all along to help us design schools and, ultimately, to help us run schools," he says. "Our approach has been to partner with everyone we can." (This summer, Vallas took the job of superintendent of the New Orleans system, which should be every bit as challenging as Philly's.)

When Anthony Salcito, Microsoft's general manager for U.S. education, offhandedly mentioned the languishing Classroom of the Future concept in a meeting the Philadelphia district arranged with potential corporate partners, Vallas decided to go for broke. "I said to Anthony, 'Look, we're building a new high school in West Philadelphia from the ground up. Wouldn't it be great if Microsoft helped us with everything from soup to nuts?'" The $65 million for the school's construction, Vallas assured Salcito, would come directly from the district's own coffers. Microsoft's role would be to dole out not money, but knowledge and insight.

Vallas's and Salcito's timing couldn't have been better. "I sent a draft up the management chain, and Bill Gates signed off on it in about a week and a half," Salcito says. The swift decision came as a shock to many, not least Vallas himself. But from Redmond's perspective, the idea was basically idiot proof: On PR grounds alone--"Microsoft helps urban kids make good"--it would have paid for itself. Still, Microsoft went beyond a cookie-cutter school tricked out with a high-tech veneer. Instead, Salcito, Cullinane, and their colleagues took Vallas's "from the ground up" directive literally, agreeing that every aspect of the school--from curriculum to grading rubrics to staff development--would be reexamined. And to ensure the experiment's universal replicability, the first class of 170 students would be chosen by lottery, not by academic merit. Three-quarters of them would hail from the West Philadelphia neighborhood in which the school was to be built.

It's no secret that the U.S. public-school system is in splinters. A surprisingly young institution--American children were mostly taught at home or in private schools until the mid-1800s, when reformers such as Horace Mann lobbied for free public education--it now often looks like an experiment gone wrong. Scarcely two-thirds of government-educated students graduate from high school, and in poor inner-city districts, such as in Cleveland, Memphis, and Milwaukee, graduation rates have fallen below 50%.

Mann argued that public schooling would eradicate poverty and crime, and build a nation of informed citizens. But factory owners--eager for a steady supply of taxpayer-educated worker bees--quickly jumped on the idea for their own purposes, leading to curricula organized according to what modern-day educators call the "factory model." Students were trained to absorb and regurgitate information, fill out worksheets, and meet baseline competency levels in writing and math--skills that would serve them well as future foremen or assembly-line employees. According to Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond, author of The Right to Learn, this "batch processing" model of education--characterized by large class sizes and little interactivity--has persisted despite its glaring obsolescence.