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.

This discussion isn't part of Sturgill's lesson plan, which was to study the
exploits of Odysseus in Homer's "The Odyssey." But things haven't been going well
for the past week or so: One student has become the target of a lot of teasing and
hostility. Sturgill and fellow teacher Andy Hauty, 46, have decided to tackle the
problem head-on.

Instead of scolding the students, the two teachers are working the issue through
with them, patiently questioning, listening, and talking. This particular
afternoon draws to a close with everyone thinking about respect and ways to deal
with someone you just don't like. No one has come up with a perfect solution, but
that's okay. The students are up against a life problem, the kind of social
dilemma that stumps adults on a regular basis -- which is exactly the point.

Welcome to one of the more radical experiments in education reform -- a school

founded on the notion that how children learn to treat one another is as important
as what they learn in reading, writing, and arithmetic. It's a learning agenda
that makes sense, especially in the new economy. "The school has a clear mission,"
says principal Laura Baker, 48. "We're about developing informed, ethical decision
makers and problem solvers. That's not instead of teaching academics; it's
teaching academics in a way that is always focused on making us more humane."

It's a mission that has been clear from the very beginning at GCS, a grade school
(K through
8) with 147 students. Starting with a handful of children in a four-room rented
building -- the school now occupies two buildings on a campus in the rolling
Berkshire hills -- the teachers developed, and continue to work on, a style of
teaching that they call the "responsive classroom." What that means is that
classroom learning at GCS, though rooted in academics, takes as its distinctive
mission the nurturing of social skills like cooperation, standing up for what's
right, responsibility, empathy, and self-control -- and does so on a daily, even
an hourly, basis.

"It's all about communication," says Chip Wood, 58, one of the six teachers who
founded GCS. Because Wood and his colleagues established GCS as a laboratory,
outside the local public-school district, it technically is a private school. But
there are no academic requirements for entrance, and tuition is based on parents'
ability to pay -- anywhere from $650 to $6,050 a year. The only constraint on
entry: A student body is chosen to maintain racial, gender, and economic
diversity.

GCS serves a local population, but its impact is national. Its parent
organization, the Northeast Foundation for Children, includes consulting and
publishing arms to further the founders' mission of transforming learning in U.S.
public schools. The foundation regularly publishes books by its teachers and staff
-- including Wood's recent "Time to Teach, Time to Learn: Changing the Pace of
School." Its newsletter reaches about 50,000 educators nationwide. Also, hundreds
of visitors a year stop by to see the responsive classroom in action.

What those visitors -- most of whom are educators -- see or hear about in
workshops is a kind of teaching that refuses to compress learning about character
and civic values into a weekly one-hour unit. The staff at GCS has created a model
of social-skills learning that is integrated into every aspect of school life:
Each morning, in every classroom, all children greet one another and are given
time to talk about whatever might be interesting or troubling them, at home or in
school. Once a week, the entire school meets for a special morning meeting to
celebrate academic and personal achievements.

The message isn't lost on students, many of whom have been at the school since
kindergarten. Seventh- and eighth-graders occasionally roll their eyes about
things getting "a little sappy," as one girl says. But they're also clear on what
the school has taught them. "I think I'd be a really different person if I hadn't
come here," says Sadie Childs, 14. "I'm a better person. I've learned about things
like conflict resolution. This school not only teaches you academic stuff; it also
teaches you how to be a good person in the world."

A lot of this learning doesn't translate neatly into standardized tests. But at
GCS, standardized tests are not the point. Even so, from the third grade on,
students take the California Test of Basic Skills, and their scores consistently
go up, so that by the seventh and eighth grades they're in the 90th percentile.
As far as Baker and her staff are concerned, though, the standardized test is only
one indicator of how well students are learning. At GCS, children are evaluated
constantly. Teachers regularly keep classroom journals. And report cards are
actually detailed assessments that cover specific academic and social skills. For
first- and second-graders, skill categories run from "Understands and counts using
odd and even numbers" to "Initiates and participates in conflict resolution."

"These kids may have to learn certain pieces of rote learning when they leave GCS
and go on to high school, but they leave here knowing how to go about finding what
they need," says Beth Gildin Watrous, 50, a GCS teacher whose two daughters
attended the school and are now in high school and in college. "Kids here engage
in a kind of creative thinking and problem solving everyday that I think links up
with the incredible, creative entrepreneurship that's going on right now."

And that's real education, according to GCS standards. In a time of tremendous

technological and economic change, learning, they say, must lay a foundation for
grappling with life and for determining what matters. "Most education reform has
missed the mark," says Baker. "Whenever there is a period of rapid change, you
need to know what anchors you. You need to be firmly rooted in what you know is
important and right. What we do here is focus on what's important."

The Service School

University Public Schools, San Joaquin Campus, Stockton, California
Principal: Mary Welch
Grades: K-5, expanding to K-6 in September 2000
Number of students: 350
Founded: 1999
Mission: To bring the customer focus and sense of responsibility of a top-notch
service organization or consulting firm to public education.

Christina Cross, 43, finally has found the elementary school that she's been
looking for, right here in what used to be a grocery store on a dusty road just
off Highway 99 in Stockton, California. Cross thinks that it's the perfect place
for her 8-year-old son, Will Thomson, who's a third grader there. Never mind the
storefront setting. Never mind the there's not a blade of grass in sight, thanks
to the huge parking lot. Here, at University Public Schools, Cross has found a
place that offers a challenging curriculum, one based, she says, "on learning how
to think."

What's more, Cross found it all without leaving the public-school system, thanks
to a 1998 California law that increased the number of charter schools that could
be created throughout the state's 8,000-school public-education system, from 100
to 250 and allowed for the creation of an additional 100 schools each year.
Fortunately for Cross, her local district agreed to contract with University
Public Schools, a nonprofit group of educators and businesspeople, to start the
charter elementary school that her son and 349 other children now attend.

"Parents can have a say about what's important to them," says Cross about UPS,
which leased the old grocery store and opened its freshly renovated doors last
September. "If we think that it's important for our children to learn about
different holidays because of the many different cultural backgrounds in our
community, we can ask, 'Can this be included?' It's nice to be involved in the
education that goes on here."

Count Cross as one more proponent of school choice. Since the first law
authorizing charter schools was passed in Minnesota in 1991, 37 states have passed
similar laws. And the resulting schools have become powerful change agents in the
push for education reform. A charter school, as its name implies, operates under a
charter -- a sort of mission statement that describes the school's objectives in
terms of student achievement. Test scores are just one proof of that achievement;
others are records of attendance and individual progress. And in exchange for that
achievement, the school receives per-pupil public funding and the freedom to reach
its educational goals using curricula and teaching methods of its own choosing.
Charter schools have a high incentive to attract and to satisfy both the state and
parents: Without students and without proof of their achievement, there is no
money and no school.

"This isn't anti-public schools; it's pro-public schools," says Don Shalvey, 55,
CEO of UPS. "I see charter schools as a way of demonstrating that public schools
can be responsive, can grow, can change. Change creates a vibrancy. It forces you
to consider what matters. Working at this school is like coming to work in a
flotilla of kayaks, rather than sailing in on an ocean liner. You're right on the
water, where the action happens."

Shalvey knows firsthand the difference between the small flexible charter school
and the large, hard-to-maneuver public-school system. In addition to serving as
CEO of UPS, he worked as a public-school superintendent in San Carlos until
January 2000, an affluent community near Stanford University. His involvement with
charter schools dates back to 1992, when his district became home to the first
charter school in California. "We saw it as a necessary element in a high-
performing organization," he says. "You want to be able to attempt thoughtful
innovation. That's what charter schools do in the public-school system."

But it wasn't until Shalvey joined forces with Silicon Valley entrepreneur Reed
Hastings, 39, a leader in the drive to pass the new charter-school legislation in
1998, that he realized that if one charter school could promote change, then a
whole system of charter schools could leverage it. With $1 million in startup
money from Hastings -- a sum matched by the New Schools Venture Fund last fall --
the two men officially launched University Public Schools in 1999. The goal: to
create a system of 110 elementary, middle, and high schools throughout California
over the next 10 to 15 years. From the beginning, says Shalvey, the intent was to
develop scalable models and to share all of the lessons learned along the way.
Other for-profit charter schools were not as forthcoming. "We felt that none of
the existing charter schools in California had as their purpose the intent to
create replicable models," says Shalvey.

With a staff of eight full-time educators, UPS opened one small school in Modesto
last year, and this year it plans to open another one in Oakland and two more in
San Joaquin County. But its real focus has been on the campus in Stockton, a 350-
student showcase for education reform, in particular in demonstrating the idea
that education can and should be a service industry.

"Traditional schools operate on an old-fashioned factory model," says COO Gloria

Lee, 29, who left McKinsey & Co., in San Francisco, last year, taking a 40% pay
cut to work with UPS. But education is really a service business, where each child
is highly individualized. "It's more like strategy consulting," says Lee, who has
a master's degree in education and an MBA.

What makes the UPS model so successful? What creates all of the satisfied parent-
customers? It's the teachers. Recruit the best teachers you can possibly find.
Treat them as professionals, experts in their fields who don't have to be told
what to do in a classroom. And reward them. Link pay raises to performance --
their own and their students'.

"Good teachers are the key to everything," says Elise Darwish, 34, the
organization's chief education officer. "You can do everything in the world with
infrastructure, but if you don't have good teachers, kids aren't going to learn."

At UPS, teachers' raises in pay are based on merit; they are tied to meeting team
goals as well as individual goals and are measured in student achievement.
Teachers are encouraged to plan standards-based thematic units together and to
share knowledge with one another. They have the freedom to develop their own
curriculum, and they are involved in every aspect of school administration,
including hiring other teachers.

It's an unprecedented amount of freedom for teachers who, in traditional public

schools, often complain that they're given neither creative leeway in the
classroom nor input into their school's decision-making process. On the other
hand, UPS does not offer tenure: The job security that many public-school teachers
take for granted simply doesn't exist at UPS. Teachers sign one-year contracts.

But tenure aside, teachers have shown an overwhelming interest in joining the
faculty. In fact, for each of the 18 positions available at the Stockton school,
20 people applied. Teachers are so eager to work there some of those who were
hired willingly make a daily commute of nearly four hours to come to work.

"We're all willing to take a risk. That's why we're here," says fourth/fifth-grade
teacher Gina Solari, 33, who is also lead teacher for the school's four
fourth/fifth-grade teachers. "I believed in that when I came here, that I would be
part of something big -- a big idea."

And that's precisely the idea. "The basic principle at this school is that a
rising tide lifts all boats," says Lee of University Public Schools. "Our hope is
that existing public schools will look at us as an example to follow and ask, 'How
can we learn from them, so that we, too, can better serve our children and their
families?' We're trying to build a system of charter schools that has the ability
to empower good people so that they can make a difference."

The Expedition School

Rocky Mountain School of Expeditionary Learning, Denver, Colorado
Executive director: Rob Stein
Grades: K-12
Number of students: 315
Founded: 1993
Mission: To apply Outward Bound's principles of expeditionary learning -- real-
life experiences, challenging personal goals, and individual support -- to the
field of education.

Okay, time for a pop quiz. The subject: World War II. Think hard. When was Pearl
Harbor bombed?

What happened on D day?

Who was Robert Oppenheimer?

Come on! You must have spent a couple of weeks on the subject at some point in
school. You probably can come up with the right answers: December 7, 1941; the
Allied forces invaded western Europe; the man in charge of developing the atomic
bomb.

Pretty standard stuff, really -- the basics. What more can you expect from a
public-school education?
A lot more, especially if you're a student at Denver's Rocky Mountain School of
Expeditionary Learning, a public school, covering grades K through 12, that uses
learning expeditions as the foundation of its curriculum. Children from four local
school districts are selected by lottery for RMSEL. If they get in, students at
every grade level embark on "voyages of learning," near-total immersions in one
subject, explored from every possible angle, for months at a time.

Take World War II: For nearly five months, middle-school students explored the war
through literature, memoirs, film, museum visits, science projects, a camping trip
to a nearby war memorial, creative writing, and talks with senior citizens and
concentration-camp survivors.

Besides learning that Robert Oppenheimer was head of the Manhattan Project,
they've also conducted experiments to test the theories of matter and energy that
the bomb is based on. They've studied the effects of radiation and written
pamphlets about its dangers. And, as with all learning expeditions at RMSEL, the
class topped off its months of studying World War II with an in-depth project:
After a visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, DC,
the students returned to school and went about creating their own museum.

Now, that's learning, and the kids know it. "I can't recall what I learned in
public school two years ago," says Misha Kravitz, 12, who transferred to RMSEL in
the fall of 1999 from a traditional school. "It just wasn't interesting. This
school makes it interesting."

RMSEL humanities teacher Kathleen McHugh, 30, one of four middle-school teachers
who developed and taught the World War II expedition, describes the classroom
experience as "in-depth learning." "It's not learning from the outside, or
skimming the surface," she says. "You live it, you breathe it, and you do it to
learn it."

McHugh sums up the passion that drives this school -- that learning is a living,
breathing, hands-on, hearts-and-minds-engaged experience with high goals and lofty
expectations. "Why is it when you go on a three-week Outward Bound course, you're
transformed for life," asks executive director Rob Stein, 40, "but you can't
remember what you learned in seventh grade? Outward Bound has this quality of high
stakes, high standards, and the support so that everyone succeeds. That's our
goal: to make school more like Outward Bound."

RMSEL began as a pilot project in 1993, one of 10 sites selected by Expeditionary

Learning Outward Bound as a demonstration school for expeditionary learning. The
Cambridge, Massachusetts-based organization is one of eight projects sponsored by
the New American Schools Development Corp., which is a nonprofit group of
educators and business and community leaders that supports the development of
break-the-mold designs for public schools.

In the years since its creation, RMSEL, with its 315-member student body, has
served as a model for other public schools interested in expeditionary learning.
To date, 85 schools in 25 states, working with ELOB, have made the switch.

And the results? Students routinely outscore other area students on national
standardized tests. One longitudinal study by the Denver public schools showed
that 72% of youngsters who transferred to RMSEL improved their reading scores.

The performance measures use old standards, traditional criteria. Real achievement
at RMSEL is measured by something completely different: the students' portfolios,
a rigorous body of work that reflects their learning and knowledge. RMSEL students
do not receive letter grades or pass routinely from one grade to the next. They
must prepare portfolios and present them to a panel of judges that include
teachers and members of the community. These comprehensive reviews are required on
four different occasions during the course of a student's career: to pass from
second to third grade, from fifth to sixth grade, and from eighth to ninth grade,
and to graduate.

The learning expeditions -- among them the "American dream," "Harlem renaissance,"
"Galileo and the scientific revolution," and the "eye, art, and the camera" -- are
the raw material for the portfolios. Each portfolio has a different set of
requirements that meet or exceed state education standards. A fifth-grade
portfolio, for example, must have, among other things, a personal statement that
reflects a student's thoughts on the learning experience; a research project using
a variety of resources that shows an understanding of a culture or historical
period; and an analysis of a scientific article that demonstrates a clear
understanding of the subject. Instead of grades, students are assessed using four
levels of achievement, from beginning to exemplary. Those who fail to complete
their portfolios do not move on to the next grade until the portfolio is finished.

"We measure students' thinking by how they perform and by what they have in their
portfolios," says Stein. "We measure progress, and we reward students by what they
have in their portfolios. There's no way to test out of the fifth grade. Students
don't move on until they complete their portfolios. It's just like the real world.
A contractor gets paid when the job is done and the building inspector says that
it meets code. That's what a portfolio does. Why is that method commonplace in
business but radical in school?"

Loren Brinton, 17, came to RMSEL in ninth grade, after years of being told that he
needed special education, which meant having to leave his classroom for special
instruction. "Dealing with that kind of stigma for so long lowered my self-
esteem," Brinton says. "I learn more with a hands-on approach so this place really
clicked for me."

Brinton says that his graduation portfolio -- which will draw from all four years
of high school -- will include the results of a four-week miniexpedition: During
their senior year, students design and carry out two expeditions. For one,
Brinton, an accomplished snowboarder, worked for a California snowboard maker and
designed his own board. For the other, he plans to develop a business plan for his
own snowboard-clothing company.

"I think RMSEL is like life," he says. "It's taught me to be self-directed, and
that teaches you how to learn. It doesn't just teach you."

The Transformed School

North Jackson Elementary School, Jackson, Mississippi
Principal: Joyce Pully
Grades: K-5
Number of students: 500
Founded: 1981
Mission: To reenergize public education through the application of high standards
and nontraditional teaching techniques, and the supportive training and
development of teachers.

Talk about change.

When principal Joyce Pully walked into North Jackson Elementary School on her
first day on the job in 1994, the school was the very model of old-fashioned
American learning: Students sat quietly in neat rows; teachers stood at the front
of the classroom to teach; and learning was straight out of state-adopted
textbooks.

Walk into that school today, and here's what you'll see: In a fifth-grade
classroom, you might find students lying on their backs, coloring on paper taped
to the bottom of their desks, while classical music plays quietly in the
background. After 20 minutes or so, the teacher stops them and says, "You don't
know this, but you're working the way an artist named Michelangelo painted during
a period of time called the Renaissance. It's what we're going to be studying for
the next three weeks."

Rote learning, rote teaching, rote education are gone. In their place are
innovation and excitement at the prospect of discovery. That current runs through
every classroom, where about 500 students, all African American, are actively
engaged in creative learning.

The magnitude of the change at North Jackson Elementary School in six years is
staggering -- testimony to what is possible in education reform. But even more
remarkable is that all of this change took place within the context of the school
that was. Working with the school's existing staff, students, and budget, Pully
has pulled off an educational triumph: She has brought innovation and systemic
change into a tradition-rooted, bureaucracy-bound setting.

"I came into a setting that was very traditional," recalls Pully, 52. "It was
highly structured, and it was very orderly. Now it's chaotic. Children sit in our
classrooms and learn. They aren't sitting there reading page 64 of a textbook,
learning what some author wants them to say. They're exploring, researching, and
writing. It's not a regurgitation of facts anymore."

What's happened at North Jackson is a tale of transformation worth noting: The

vast majority of U.S. children go to traditional public schools -- and will for
the foreseeable future. If change doesn't happen in those schools, then the kind
of learning that is needed for the 21st century simply isn't going to happen.

In the case of North Jackson, Pully says, she was fortunate in what she found when
she came to the school. She had worked for 10 years as a teacher and a principal
in northern California. In her last 3 years as a principal in Sacramento, she had
turned around a failing school. At her new job, Pully found a well-run school and
a dedicated staff that was committed to teaching students well. And at one level,
they were doing just fine: Students at the school consistently scored above the
district average on standardized tests.

But Pully came to the job with the conviction that education could be -- had to be
-- better. Not only did a fast-paced economy demand more-innovative education; but
the changing community of North Jackson was calling out for it. The once
relatively affluent neighborhood was becoming less so, evidenced by the proportion
of children receiving free or reduced-price school lunches. When Pully came, the
percentage was already on the rise: It reached 50% in 1994; today, it stands at
69%. And research, Pully says, shows that "with poverty comes children who have
not had exposure to a high level of literacy, children who don't come to school
ready to learn."

Pully knew exactly what kind of changes she wanted to see at North Jackson. None
had anything to do with what she dismisses as "little boxes and kits" -- the
programs that all too often pass as reform in the nation's classrooms. Pully's
vision, similar to that of other cutting-edge reformers, was rooted in research
showing that real learning takes place through methods that break the mold of the
old assembly-line model of education, such as those described in the following
examples.
Thematic teaching. Pully wanted to replace rote textbook learning with "thematic
teaching," creative instruction that ties together several disciplines -- math,
reading, art, and science, for example -- around a single theme, such as the
Renaissance or ancient Greece.

Cooperative learning. Pully's plan for cooperative learning had students sitting
in pairs or in small groups, collaborating on assignments. Pully doesn't think
single-row seating is completely useless: It can be good, say, for independent
tests. But it's hardly the stuff of a model classroom. Get students out of neat
rows and into small learning groups.

Continuity in learning. Pully's model involved keeping students and their teachers
together for at least two years. Continuity, she insists, gives students stability
and makes teachers accountable.

Pully's was a huge agenda for change, and she began putting it into practice in an
unconventional way: For the first year, she did nothing. "I knew that in order to
really effect change, you don't change anything for a while," she says. "Change is
difficult; that's a given. You're asking people to come out of a comfort zone."

So instead of charging ahead with her plans, Pully first worked to build trust.
She talked about her ideas, many of which she had put into practice in California,
and she shared current research about learning and the brain with her staff. She
listened carefully to teachers' concerns and involved them in decision making. She
promised them that they would be trained before she asked them to try new
approaches to teaching. She made it clear that her expectations were high -- "Her
expectations are about here," says fourth-grade teacher Megan Price, 30, holding
her hand above her head -- but she also encouraged her staff to take risks, not to
fear failure.

"There's a caring in the way she administers," says first-grade teacher Mildred
Burnett, 49, who has worked under every principal at North Jackson since it opened
in 1981. "She assured us that our ideas were much needed and that she would
respect us."

Pully introduced thematic teaching in her second year at the school. "It was very
gradual," says second-grade teacher Lynn O'Dell, 56. "We had professional
development to help us make the change. We weren't beat over the head with it. We
were encouraged to do thematic units, and she would point out those of us who were
doing that -- right in front of the others. She'd kind of brag about us."

The change meant more work, says O'Dell: It involved planning units of study that
weren't textbook driven. But the hard work also offered personal rewards. "It's
all cut-and-dried. This new method seems more fluid. You can go your own way. You
can ask yourself, 'How can I best teach this so that children master it?'"

As changes continued to be implemented over the next several years, Pully kept all
of her promises. Out of the school's 31 teachers, 5 eventually decided to go work
elsewhere. And Pully helped each one of them land a job at a different school.
"What I was asking was a little too much for some people," she admits. "This
method is not for every teacher. But I won't hang anyone out to dry. If you're
honest, and you come to me and sat that it's too much for you, I'll help you make
a change."

Today, every one of Pully's changes has taken hold at North Jackson. And the
result? A school that was once a quiet model of tradition is now alive with
learning. Walk through the school on any day, and you'll be hard pressed to find a
single neat row of desks or a teacher standing in front of a class. Instead,
you'll see students engaged in all kinds of learning -- writing a first-person
story from the point of view of a Chinese immigrant in America and then building a
diorama to illustrate the story; working out math problems in small groups;
discussing the importance of the Statue of Liberty and other symbols; doing
independent research projects on Native Americans; even learning the Bill of
Rights by doing a bit of creative word juggling and performing it as a rap song.

"You have to change the way you think," Pully says. "You have to think outside the
box. You can't sit there and wait for somebody else to do something for you."