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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In developing those lesson plans, School of the Future teachers have the option of pulling down prototypes from the Microsoft Web site, which the company has collected over the years. All of them have three common core elements: They're geared toward molding students into more-critical thinkers, more-confident communicators and presenters, and more-experienced users of Microsoft software--theoretically, all characteristics of the ultimate 21st-century employee. (Predictably enough, many of the plans, available for free on Microsoft's Web site, carry tag lines such as "Software required: Microsoft Internet Explorer, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel.")

Microsoft likes to describe the school's environment as "continuous, relevant, and adaptive," but it's clear that "relevant" is the program's real linchpin. Shirley Grover, the school's principal (aka, chief learner) until she resigned in July, says that many teachers bristle when students ask them the time-honored question, Why do we need to know this? But from her point of view, if a teacher can't answer that one, the lesson plan is underdeveloped.

One year into the experiment, it's way too early to assess just how well the School of the Future is doing. Certainly, it is beset by the same problems plaguing most urban schools ("Too many sidebars"), and many students still read and write below grade level. Their advancement as a group will not be tracked until they take their first state-administered tests in 11th grade, more than a year from now. And because School of the Future students still must meet the proficiency levels in traditional subjects mandated by No Child Left Behind, they also have access to individually paced online courses and other resources to make sure they stay up to grade level in crucial areas such as algebra and reading. Still, these kids already come across as seasoned presenters and communicators. "Before, I wasn't excited about learning," says Wilson, an open-faced teen with a ready smile who wears a different college sweatshirt every day to remind herself of where she's headed. "Going to school on Saturday to work on a project? Yeah, right. But this school really makes us all want to participate and be heard." Last spring, Wilson won an award in Philadelphia's National History Day contest for a digital documentary she and other students created on the city's involvement in the Underground Railroad.

For her part, Grover loves to talk about how the kids' new practical knowledge has upped their prospects on the job market. She brings up Black History Month, when the students wrote interpretations of Langston Hughes poems and presented them--in PowerPoint, naturally--to residents of a local senior-citizen center. "One kid used Microsoft Movie Maker to weave the other kids' PowerPoint presentations into a movie, with music," she says. "An employee at the center was so impressed that he said, 'I'll pay you to make another movie for me.'"

"How well do you conduct yourself in front of a group? How well do you use these computer applications? That's the pace of business," says Amy Guerin, a spokeswoman for the Philadelphia school district. "We are constantly selling and pitching for our jobs--that's how the world operates. Any one of these kids could pitch a toy, pitch a story, pitch an initiative at City Hall."

Not all parents and educators are convinced that the purpose of public education is to build a nation of pitchmen. And since Microsoft is open about the fact that it isn't just in this for the good karma, it's worth asking whether these students will receive a balanced, broad-based education. Is this work missionary--or mercenary?

"When the scoreboard at a high-school football stadium is branded with the name of a soft-drink corporation or a local business, we don't spend much time worrying about the motivations," says Christian Long, a school planning consultant and former president of DesignShare, an online global forum that addresses the future of education. "On the other hand, when we talk about partnerships that bring together corporate and educational leaders to help shift learning for entire systems and societies, we should raise the bar of conversation."

"I don't like this idea that if you're not preparing kids for the high-tech world, they're not worth anything," says Susan Ohanian, a former teacher and the author of Why Is Corporate America Bashing Our Public Schools? "These companies seem to be devaluing a lot of other skills that are very necessary." Jim Horn, an education professor at New Jersey's Monmouth University, is still more direct. "The efficiency experts have been hard at their message, which is that we need to streamline these schools and make them operate like successful businesses. But schools should not be work-preparation centers. They should be places where children are nurtured and receive multifaceted educations."