TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/092192/0921120.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 9.3 KB | 187 lines

                                                                                EDUCATION, Page 52

Can I Copy Your Homework -- and Represent You in Court?


A new breed of school tries to teach students about the adult
world by re-creating society in the hallways -- complete with
fake money, tax returns and a justice system

By KEVIN FEDARKO


    The three students who stole a suitcase filled with cash
from Sarah Edwards' classroom closet were pretty sure they had
pulled a fast one. Granted, the cash was fake, but Edwards and
her pupils had been using the money to learn some basic lessons
in economics. Now, instead of studying supply and demand, the
class was busy congratulating the thieves on their daring raid.
Edwards' response? She held an auction -- only ersatz dollars
allowed. The students' admiration swiftly evaporated as boxes of
candy and toys went on the block and the pirates began buying up
everything in sight. More effective than any punishment Edwards
could have imposed, the furious debate that ensued on ethics and
hyperinflation virtually put an end to theft for the remainder
of the summer.

    It's strange way to teach, but then this is a strange
school. Imagine a place where children learn math by holding
jobs, paying taxes and owning businesses that sell everything
from pompom pencils to potpourri pillows. A place where students
study logic and law by taking their peers to court and fining
them in the school's own currency. A place where kids come to
understand politics by drawing up their own constitution,
drafting laws and deciding which days of the week baseball caps
may be worn to class. Imagine, in short, a school where civics
is not just a course but a continuous experience in playing with
the building blocks of modern society.

    In five American elementary schools -- two in
Massachusetts and three in New York -- such experiments already
exist. Called "Microsociety," these programs bear as much
resemblance to the standard neighborhood school -- with its
traditional textbooks, work sheets and lesson plans -- as
fiber-optic communication does to sending smoke signals. At a
time when reformers, corporate leaders and politicians are all
heralding the need for "break the mold" schools, Microsociety
puts the radical rhetoric to the test.

    Microsociety is the dream child of George Richmond, a
painter, teacher, author and acclaimed educator who was raised
in the tenements of Manhattan's Lower East Side. His first job,
at a Brooklyn elementary school in 1967, was a rookie teacher's
nightmare. Richmond's fifth-graders skipped class, scorned
homework and slept through lectures, their apathy and cynicism
surpassed only by their appetite for petty classroom warfare.
In the end, the young idealist from Yale threw up his hands at
a system in which teachers who pretended to teach and students
who pretended to learn did very little of either. From that
frustration was born his thesis: if discipline, willpower and
the force of reason couldn't hook students, maybe freedom and
responsibility would.

    Grades were a basic dilemma. Nowhere else, Richmond
realized, were people expected to work without compensation. An
A-plus could not be saved, or invested, or traded for something
of value. That was how a teacher with a deep belief in the
value of learning for its own sake began paying his students --
in fake money -- for completed assignments, good marks and per
fect attendance. Students then used their "cash" to play a new
game, a sort of life-size, walking version of Monopoly in which
they bought, sold and mortgaged various "properties" around the
classroom.

    Some used their profits to start up other ventures: a
postal system, a comic book, a loan agency. Disputes eventually
led to the creation of laws, police, courts and a
constitutional convention (democracy triumphed over a police
state by a single vote). As they began to discover the relevance
of reading and arithmetic through managing their miniature
society, Richmond's students also discovered in themselves an
enthusiasm for education -- and a hunger for more.

    Richmond wrote a book about his experience and eventually
helped launch the first school based entirely on his Micro
society model. After much sniffing and sneering from the local
newspaper, which dismissed the idea as "futuristic," "dubious"
and "a gimmick," City Magnet School opened in 1981 in a empty
library in Lowell, Massachusetts. By 1987 the school's students
were testing two years above the national norm in both reading
and math. Then in 1990, 13 eighth-graders passed first-year
college-level exams, again in reading and math. School
attendance hovers around 96%, and during the past six years only
five children have dropped out. Those numbers were impressive
enough to inspire the New York school districts of Yonkers and
Newburgh and the Massachusetts district of Pepperell to create
their own versions of Microsociety, and two weeks ago the doors
of Manhattan's first Micro school opened -- just 10 blocks from
the slums where Richmond grew up.

    Even more compelling than test scores are the changes that
cannot be quantified. In 1981 Lowell's school system was so
racially segregated that a federal judge ordered the city to
correct the imbalance. When C.M.S. first opened, the student
body was mostly black; this September more than half the
students are from white and Hispanic families who requested to
take part in the program. Until the practice was dropped several
years ago, parents used to register their children for C.M.S.
in the hospital the day they were born. A mother of six,
Margaret Pollard sent her three youngest children there, and
marvels at the difference it made. Compared with the older
children from more traditional schools, says Pollard, who now
works as a secretary at C.M.S., her young ones "are more open,
more apt to take chances and much more comfortable with stating
opinions than the older ones." It leaves a lasting impression
on a child, says Lowell curriculum coordinator Tom Malone, to
be able to make an impression on their surroundings: "Because
they are empowered to create their own society, they see
themselves as capable people."

    Under the Microsociety model, the school day is split in
two. The morning is devoted to traditional classes in history,
science, English, math. In the afternoon students put the
lessons to work. They memorize multiplication tables not only
to score well on problem sets but also so they can keep
double-entry books, write checks, bill customers and complete
financial audits. Says Gladys Pack, Yonkers' assistant
superintendent: "We're making learning real because kids in
Micro believe they're living in a real world."

    Skeptics have been worried that the Microsociety's heavy
emphasis on grownup concerns like money, taxes and employment
might shunt children onto a fast track to adulthood. Teachers
rebut such claims by pointing out that the program taps one of
childhood's most salient pleasures, the impulse to play, and
harnesses it in the service of absorbing knowledge. "Think about
what we usually tell kids when they come into school," says Fred
Hernandez, principal at Yonkers. " `Sit down. Shut up. Get in
line.' That's counterproductive, because kids love to play. What
Micro does is get them to role-play life."

    Still, the question remains: If children are invited to
run banks and businesses, won't this turn them into pint-size
plutocrats, long on avarice and short on scruples? The irony is
that for all the emphasis on economics, the Microsociety schools
seem to serve best as living experiments in applied moral
development. Consider the check-kiting caper that broke at
Lowell after one boy outbid dozens of his students at a
Christmas auction and bought up a sackful of toys by writing bad
checks. His outraged peers took the boy to court, where the
district attorney convicted him but was unable to recover any
of the items (everything had been given away as pres ents to a
string of girlfriends). As punishment, the school court decided
to confiscate the student's paychecks and ordered him to perform
community service for the remainder of the year.

    The success of the program has been drawing attention not
only in America but abroad as well. Each month Lowell receives
calls from teachers in places like Portugal, India and Hungary.
Even the Japanese, whose educational results -- if not the
system itself -- are the envy of the world, have expressed
interest. Japanese educators have toured Lowell, and principal
funding for planning behind the Manhattan Micro school comes
from Tokyo's Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank, which donated $100,000.

    While it may be exciting to contemplate what this could
hold for the rest of the world, Micro seems to offer the most
at home: a chance to customize schools to reflect American
culture -- flexible, grass-heterogeneous, self-designed. Such
an approach would go a long way toward making U.S. public
schools a cradle of national renewal. Microsociety schools won't
do this all by themselves, of course, but they have demonstrated
the potential to accelerate learning, provide ladders of
economic opportunity and give children a sense of how their
society works. And for a nation whose dreams seem increasingly
beyond the reach of its young, that seems a prospect worth
cultivating.