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.

In recent decades, a number of schools, many of them private, have tried tinkering with this outmoded system (the open classroom being one of the better-known attempts). But the push from within corporate America began when Sanford Weill, who would later become CEO of Citigroup, began applying modern business practices and know-how to public education in the early 1980s. A rising star in Manhattan's securities brokerage industry, Weill had watched two parallel trends play out: Company after company was fleeing New York, citing a lack of incoming talent, and city kids were languishing in the public schools. "You saw young people playing in the street without having a clue of what life was about and how they could become part of the system," Weill told the House Ways and Means Committee years later. "That was the beginning of the idea that the private sector should get together with the public sector and see if we could create a high-school-level program that could expose young people to a career in the financial-services industry." Such a partnership, as Weill saw it, would be win-win: Students would receive focused career training in addition to their academic course loads, and companies would benefit from a fresh infusion of qualified candidates into the entry-level worker pool.

Weill's first Academy of Finance, sponsored by American Express, opened in 1982 at Brooklyn's John Dewey High School with 35 students. Over the following two decades, 600 public academies opened in 40 states, each with its own career-focused specialty: finance, hospitality and tourism, or information technology. At every stage, new business partners joined the conga line. To date, AT&T, Citigroup, Lucent, Oracle, and Verizon have all bankrolled their own academies under the auspices of Weill's nonprofit National Academy Foundation. The foundation plans to open 160 new academies within the next five years, bringing dozens of corporate partners on board along the way. One of its most tireless supporters has been Gates, who presented Weill with a $5 million grant from the Gates Foundation in 2006.

Other companies have followed Weill, looking to shore up their supply of human capital. Since its inception in 1994, IBM's Reinventing Education initiative has dispersed $75 million to more than 20 school districts across the country, so they can reinvent their classroom offerings according to the company's "Learning Village" guidelines. Google inaugurated the Google Teacher Academy earlier this year, which invites educators to learn how to incorporate Google into their lesson plans and become "technology evangelists." In May, Ernst & Young published a white paper titled "Best in Class: How Top Corporations Can Help Transform Public Education," a list of recommendations to other companies hoping to overhaul local public-school systems.

Science, English, math, and the rest are not taught as separate disciplines. The three Rs are gone. The school tears apart the traditional curriculum.

Self-interested corporate funding has prompted some cynicism. But that reaction misses an essential point--Weill's experiment failed in one critical respect: He had conceived of the academies as feeders for firms like Citigroup and American Express, but that pipeline never materialized. Of the 45,000 students who currently attend the academies, says J.D. Hoye, the foundation's current president, "only a small fraction" end up working for sponsoring companies. Yet in the big picture, Weill's efforts were a smash. More than 90% of National Academy Foundation students graduate from high school, compared to sub-50% to 70% in the struggling urban districts where most academies are located, and 80% eventually obtain two- or four-year college degrees. Five to 10 years after graduation, 85% of alumni continue to work in white-collar jobs.

Cullinane is based in New York, where she helps manage Microsoft's Partners in Learning education-reform program, but one week a month, she leaves her desk and returns to Philadelphia. Known to the kids affectionately as "Miz Mary," Cullinane is an evangelist. She sees the School of the Future as part of a much broader and more complex bid to change American education. Around the time Vallas and Salcito were first planning the school in West Philly, Microsoft helped found an advocacy group called the Partnership for 21st-Century Skills, which encourages schools nationwide to adopt their own curriculum reforms. The partnership's members run from Apple and Adobe to AT&T, Cisco, Dell, Intel, and dozens of other corporate giants who agree that public education is in dire shape. Part of Cullinane's role is turning the School of the Future concept into a replicable meme, one personal encounter at a time.