Philadelphia’s high-tech School of the Future, which opened in 2006, cost $62 million.
High-tech schools of the future end up looking a lot like schools of the past, writes Larry Cuban in Regression to the Mean, Part 1 and Part 2.
His examples are a public middle school in New York City, called the Downtown School in a study, and School of the Future, a public high school in Philadelphia.
The first had funding from technology entrepreneurs, the second from Microsoft.
Disruptive Fixation: School Reform and the Pitfalls of Techno-Idealism describes the New York City school, where idealistic founders dreamed “students would create gaming software, work on high-tech projects in teams, and learn in spaces similar to start-up companies.”
This would be a school where coding and digital media production practices across the curriculum became routine, where pedagogy was redesigned to be game-like, and where the school would “cultivate student agency, creativity [and] improvisational problem-solving capacities” (p.98). In short, a media technology, student-centered school of the future.
Nine years after it opened, the school resembles a traditional school for most of the year.
Philadelphia spent $62 million to build the School of the Future for 750 students, he writes. Each “learner” had a software-laden laptop; there were no printed textbooks.
A shining new media center, science labs galore, and especially equipped classrooms supported interdisciplinary projects and team-driven projects driven by students’ interests. , , , Frequent changes in principals, unstable funding from district – the state had taken over the Philadelphia schools – mediocre academic achievement, and troubles with technologies – devices became obsolete within a few years – made the initial years most difficult in reaching the goals so admirably laid out in the prospectus for the school.
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