Big research grants help foster ’systemic change’

One thing that almost everyone agrees upon is that the educational system in the United States is broken. Many of today’s high school and even college graduates are unprepared for the demands of the working world.

Those who believe in radical reform don’t believe that new textbooks or a higher ratio of teachers to students per classroom can solve the education problem in the United States. Neither can money, or for that matter, technology. All of these things can help. But what we really need “is a systemic change in education,” according to Mary Fallon, communications manager for Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow, an Apple Computer research project, known as ACOT.

The ACOT research project, which was established in 1985, is founded on the premise that children’s critical thinking skills can be improved through a new approach to education: in this case, ACOT’s own method of constructivist, learn-by-doing teaching, in combination with lots of technology in the classroom.

Currently, the project has established more than 25 research locations in North America, including schools in Arizona, California, Florida, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas and Canada.

TRADITIONAL ROLES DISAPPEAR BETWEEN STUDENT AND TEACHER

Students attending ACOT classrooms are randomly selected. The only criterion is that ACOT classrooms must reflect the ethnic background of the school that they are located within. For example, if 50 percent of the student body is black, then 50 percent of the students in the ACOT classroom must be black.

At each of these sites the traditional roles of educator and student disappear. In an ACOT classroom teachers “facilitate” learning, leaving behind the traditional “sage on the stage” role. Students work together using computers as tools in the same way most of us used pen and paper to learn.

“Kids who aren’t learning with technology are disadvantaged,” says Fallon, who says that ACOT has done studies showing that combining new learning methods with technology is particularly effective. “Using technology facilitates the learning process because it makes information more fluid. You can access databases, pictures, animations and link them in a nonlinear way. You can’t do that with scissors and paste. And when you can manipulate information, it becomes yours. The learner begins to get fully engaged.”

No silver bullet. That said, Fallon emphasized that she doesn’t think technology is a silver bullet that will dispatch the problems of today’s educational system. “We [at ACOT] always say you have to have technology, assessment and instruction. They are interdependent.”

The picture is bleak indeed. The absence of quality education in the United States today is so vast, according to an April 1992 report done by the U.S. Labor Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS), that “more than two in five African-American men, one in three Hispanic men, and one in five white men, all with high school diplomas, did not earn enough to lift a family of four above poverty.”

And in fact the report further states that “little formal training is now being provided to front-line workers as opposed to managers.” So for the individuals that find themselves stuck in this situation, there is little chance beyond high school for improving their situation.

Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow are an attempt to better prepare children in grades K through 12 today for the business world tomorrow. In fact, according to Fallon ACOT classrooms have the “look and feel,” so to speak, of a business environment. “If you have never been in a classroom with technology,” says Fallon, “it feels chaotic. Everyone is busy, working in groups of two or three. Teachers don’t lecture; they coach the kids. And there is freedom of movement. It’s very similar to how you or I interact in a business setting.”

Many of us in the working world, however, are not fortunate enough to get our hands on the equipment these kids have access to. The classrooms are stuffed with Apple computers, laserdisc players, CD-ROM drives, modems, and on-line communication services as well as oodles of the latest software.

Keith Yocam, ACOT’s teacher professional development manager, says he’d even like to see the kids get PowerBooks from Apple. “We like to watch the kids over time and see how technology changes the nature of their work,” he says. “And with technology getting smaller and more mobile, it will be interesting to see what happens.” (Hmmph. How do we get to go to an ACOT school?)

FRUITS OF ACOT RESEARCH SPREAD NATIONALLY

To aid ACOT in its quest to spread its educational philosophy and technological practices, the Apple research center recently received two national education grants. “We’ve been publishing our research for years,” says Fallon, “but now with these two grants we are able to bring our successes and failures to lots of people.”

The first grant was awarded to the National Alliance for Restructuring Education, of which ACOT is a member, by the New American Schools Development Corp., an independent, nonprofit organization established by President George Bush. The mission of NASDC, which calls itself a catalyst for educational change, is “to underwrite the design of new high-performance educational environments to jump-start learning in America.”

Impressive list of participants. The NASDC grant was awarded to the National Alliance for Restructuring Education to design “break the mold” type schools. Apple’s partners in the alliance include the Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, the Harvard Project on Effective Services, the New Standards Project, the Public Agenda Foundation, the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh, the Center for the Study of Social Policy, the National Alliance of Business, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, and Xerox Corp.

Each company or group in the alliance plays a specific role in “remolding” the schools selected by the alliance. Xerox Corp., for example, is working on improving quality management within the educational system. (David Kerns, the former chairman of Xerox and now the assistant secretary of education, created the quality management system while at Xerox and implemented it during a 10-year period before he was asked to take his current position in the federal government.)

Harvard is working on how to address the health needs of students, and the University of Pittsburgh is working on developing new assessment measures — new standardized tests — for students. ACOT, of course, is responsible for bringing the knowledge it has gained about learning and teaching as well as technology into the classroom as a “knowledge building tool.”

The Alliance, which is seeking a total of $20 million over a five-year period from NASDC, initially sought a grant of $3 million for the 1992-93 school year from the nonprofit group so that it can begin planning curriculum, training and research at three schools each in Vermont, Kentucky, and the city of Rochester, NY.

FINALLY, SOME MONEY FOR THE TEACHERS

The second grant awarded to ACOT is a National Science Foundation grant for $1.16 million to be distributed over the next three years. The purpose of the grant is to create year-round technology training clinics for the professional development of teachers. The program is designed to study how to shorten the “time to acceptance” teachers require to apply technology effectively in the classroom. The NSF grant pays three years’ worth of salary for three teachers as ACOT coordinators at each of the initial sites (one in Cupertino, CA, one in Columbus, OH, and one in Nashville, TN). In addition, some of the grant will be used for stipends for teachers participating in the ACOT training programs.

Learning to dance. “Teachers,” says Fallon, “come out of school with this whole lecture mode of teaching. We have to change their belief structure. Most people teach as if knowledge is an abstract thing. You are told about a marshland, but you don’t see it. It’s like learning how to dance without moving your feet. Our philosophy is knowing and doing are interlocked and inseparable.”

Yocam emphasizes that educators are willing and able to try something new. “When you provide teachers with a challenging context,” he says, “they respond to that and make changes.

“The difficulty,” he says, “is getting the context. The current system works against change. It doesn’t allow for teachers to take the time to visit other classrooms. Their accountability is tied directly to test scores on standardized tests. They have no authority to change their classroom, to be able to apply new methods. Many districts in the educational system control these things. Trying to be more constructivist in a typical classroom is impossible if the kids have to get up every 45 minutes.”

CHANGING THE FUNDAMENTAL PREMISES

To combat those types of fundamental problems, part of the NASDC grant will be allocated to research and to an outreach program to educate different institutions and communities about what ACOT is doing. “We will look at societal things like how to get the public more engaged in what’s going on in the school,” says Fallon, who pointed out that only a small portion of the U.S. adult population has children of school age. “We want to find out what the public’s concern is and gauge the gap between what they are interested in vs. what the educators’ goals are. We need to explain the economic realities of an educational system that is unable to teach kids critical thinking skills.”

Can ACOT provide the change necessary for reform? What happens, for instance, when these intellectually stimulated, computer-literate kids, who are used to getting up from their school seats whenever they feel like it, hit traditional, “sit down and shut up” education — perhaps for the first time?

ACOT is, after all, a research project. Despite the longer reach it may have via its new research grants, it does not have the funding or the support to extend its programs and philosophies too far beyond its research locations, some of which are as small as one class of one grade in one school of a district.

You can lead a horse to water … In Memphis, for instance, seventh graders who returned to traditional education after a year in an experimental ACOT class were perceived as “problem students” by their teachers, according to Yocam. “The kids got put into basic programs, and they were seen to be rowdy because they were bored. They eventually went back to the ‘normal functioning’ of a traditional classroom. And that’s an unfortunate thing.”

According to Yocam, the Memphis school district had made a commitment to ACOT to pursue the technology and education goals ACOT established but didn’t follow through with it.

And perhaps this is where skepticism must come in. Although certainly ACOT’s hands-on research has had a positive effect on education, it cannot regulate what happens after the research projects end. Nothing will ultimately change until parents, teachers and society at large take responsibility for how children are educated. As ACOT is finding out, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.

Janice Maloney