Whatever Happened to the Model Schools Project?

Today, school improvement is narrowly defined in terms of raising students' test scores. Mr. Keefe and Mr. Amenta look back to an era when educators examined every dimension of schooling to see how it could be made more effective in advancing student learning. THE FEDERAL No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 (the latest revision of ESEA) has exerted strong pressure on the states to encourage local public schools to improve their standardized test scores. This emphasis reflects a desire on the part of politicians and policy makers for strict accountability in the form of current test scores that can be used to determine the comparative status of all schools. But NCLB reduces school health to a single criterion -- whether a school makes AYP (adequate yearly progress), as reflected in its test scores. AYP is an inept magic bullet. It has little to do with school improvement and, regrettably, nothing to do with helping individual students to learn. NCLB is certainly nothing like an earlier school renewal program, sponsored between 1969 and 1974 by the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) and called the Model Schools Project (MSP). The MSP represented the culmination of that era's seminal thinking about school renewal. It proposed a comprehensive model of school restructuring that was adopted by thousands of junior and senior high schools throughout the U.S. and Canada. Unlike NCLB, the MSP presented a far-reaching and coordinated view of schooling that included everything from management and evaluation to advising, scheduling, and grouping. When the MSP formally ended, a follow-up consortium of schools and districts called the Learning Environments Consortium International (LEC) was formed to sustain the project's impetus for school renewal. Members of the LEC Forum have recently published a retrospective on the key concepts of the MSP and what has happened to them during the past 30 years. In that book, the authors analyze the most successful school- renewal practices stemming from the MSP and discuss how those practices are being used today. This article summarizes the chief findings and conclusions of the LEC Forum publication. Background The need for change in our accustomed ways of schooling was evident to some educators as early as the last decades of the 19th century. Thus we have been struggling with school renewal and restructuring for more than a hundred years, yet we continue to conduct most schools today much as we did in that remote time. Even today, many people still do not see the need for school change. They fail to see the benefit to society of schools that really meet the needs of all students. Indeed, most educators are not willing to assume the responsibilities that come with systemic school renewal, nor do they understand the process of change when renewal efforts are undertaken. Educators, parents, and policy makers are willing to talk about school reform, but they do not want to act in ways that will prepare for its exigencies. We continue to be bogged down in a back-to-basics present that is really the distant past warmed over. Make no mistake about where we stand: the American public school system has been one of the world's spectacular success stories. The notion that every girl and boy, of whatever socioeconomic background, is entitled to equal educational opportunity is so startling that most of us who live in this society fail to appreciate its implications. No other country in the world, except for our neighbor and traditional partner, Canada, offers anything comparable to the American secondary system. And much of the rest of the world, seeing its validity and value, is following in our footsteps. The American model is a deliberate attempt to educate the masses. At its best, it is an exemplar for the world. But it is not indestructible. It can and must continue to evolve to meet the needs of each succeeding generation. …

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