Schools That Think

Loren Brinton graduates this June from the Rocky Mountain School of Expeditionary Learning in Denver, Colorado. When he looks back on the events that shaped his four years of high school, he won't recall the football games or parties. And he certainly won't look back on the exams that he aced or the standardized tests that he endured.

He'll remember the semester that his classes in humanities, Spanish, and science focused on a single theme -- the "American dream." For months, he and his classmates and teachers explored every aspect of that dream, using literature, film, essays, Socratic seminars, and independent research projects.

Most of all, he'll remember the way all of that learning came to life at the end of the semester, when his entire class took a one-week trip to the U.S.-Mexico border cities of El Paso and Juarez.

The students used their Spanish when they visited those places where their studies took on real-life meaning. "It was totally, 100%, intense," recalls Brinton, who came away from the experience with powerful impressions and important questions about the tendency in the United States to equate money with happiness. The people he met in Mexico, he says, "might not have a lot of money, but they seemed happier than a lot of people in America."

No multiple-choice test in the world can measure the problem-solving skills and creative thinking Brinton has learned in high school, skills that are sorely needed in the new economy. Talent is the scarcest resource in the new economy. And the growing consensus seems to be that the country's schools are doing little to nurture talent. Our public schools are failing. Work is changing; competition is changing; business is changing. Therefore, education must change too.

Increasingly loud voices, many belonging to leaders of the new economy, argue that the principles of business should be applied to the business of education. What gets measured, they say, is what gets done. Under that model, teachers, students, and schools are gauged by how their test scores measure up. But there are other models of education, models far more in keeping with the kind of thinking needed to succeed in the new economy. Those models emphasize the social dimensions of learning: the teamwork that it involves; that it's participatory and experiential; and that education -- if it is like business -- must shed its manufacturing mind-set and begin to operate as a service.

Today, all across the country, models of new learning are taking shape in hundreds of remarkable experiments in American public schools. And those experiments are producing great results. Here we examine four of these exceptionally promising enterprises. Each is a different school with a different approach, but all have similar instincts for encouraging creativity, individuality, responsibility, and performance in its students.

These educational startups range widely in theory and in practice. But all are driven by educators who share an understanding of and a passion for the essence of education. Those educators also are united in their commitment to grassroots change.

Their efforts are not fueled by big budgets or by big bureaucracies. Rather, they are driven by energy and imagination -- by daring to go back to some of the basic principles, by daring to ask some difficult questions: What is learning all about? What is the larger purpose of education? What kind of school do we have the ability to create? And all of their work is done in partnership -- teachers, students, principals, parents, and community members, all of them helping to shape a new vision of learning.

The Responsive Classroom

Greenfield Center School, Greenfield, Massachusetts
Principal: Laura Baker
Grades: K-8
Number of students: 147
Founded: 1981
Mission: To integrate lessons on civility, humanity, and diversity into everyday education.

It's around 2 PM, and fifth and sixth graders at the Greenfield Center School, in the western Massachusetts town of Greenfield, are hard at work.

A dozen boys and girls are sitting in a circle, puzzling over questions on a flip chart that's leaning near a wall of windows. They take their time writing out their answers before handing in their papers. The teacher examines the work carefully, one paper after another, and draws the students into a discussion.

"What do you look for in a friend?" Teacher Laura Sturgill, 26, repeats the first question on the chart and then reads some of the answers the students have written: "Someone that will give you stuff you need." "Someone you can trust."

More questions and answers follow about what the children do and don't like in friends, until the discussion builds to the real kicker: "What does it mean to respect someone you don't like? What does that look like?" The students wrestle with their answers: "Maybe you can make the best of it and try to make friends," says one. "Try to think of things you have in common," says another.