School of One is an online program that was piloted in 3 schools.
Two of the three schools have dropped it, but the Bloomberg administration plans to expand it to more schools.
School of One was developed by Joel Rose, who was TFA, Broad Academy, Edison, then worked for Chis Cerf and Joel Klein at the NYC Department of Education. The NYC Parent Blog describes the history of the School of One here and points to some important ethical issues.
Time magazine cited School of One as one of the best inventions of 2009, before it was implemented.
It won a $5 million grant from the US Department of Education as one of the most innovative programs in the nation.
The city put $9 million into the program so far, and previously projected the cost at $46 million. It will be added to four more schools, with the help of the federal grant.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Joel Rose was on a DFER panel yesterday at the DNC.
Let’s hope School of One becomes school of none.
I’d drop the program just based on the name alone.
‘School of One’ – that’s as close to an oxymoron as you can get.
I think it is a refrain of an Army recruiting slogan: an Army of One.
The Army dropped it.
It is an oxymoron.
My son did not go to a school of one, but he often had to take a class of one because of limited course offerings in his High School.
Affiliated with Edison? Guaranteed fail!
All the best credentials: TFA, Broad, Edison, Cerf, Klein
I wrote a commentary on today’s news about the School of One. My basic argument is that the best kind of math instruction–the kind where students learn to see patterns and glean hidden aspects of problems–has no place in the School of One.
I also discuss the School of One in the eighth chapter of my book.
Even if School of One did not succeed, it was at least an attempt to improve math education. Your solution of increased tracking also has it’s cost. My son went from fifth grade math to eighth grade math in a year. The structure of the public school system here meant that he had to change buildings to do this, and it created a socially difficult situation for him. It may well have been better for him to stay with his age group, but be able to take higher level mathmatics on an individualized basis.
My son also insists that you are not talking about tracking, but simply skipping. Tracking involves a different trajectory, no moving along the standard tragectory at a different pace.
I was not suggesting increased tracking as the “solution.” This is what I said:
“What can we do instead of expanding the School of One? We could adopt strong math curricula that give students a foundation in the early grades. We could allow for certain kinds of flexible tracking—so that, for instance, a fifth-grade student could take math with sixth graders if she were prepared (but would take other classes with her fifth-grade classmates). We could have public lectures, seminars, and workshops on mathematics, so that parents, teachers, and others could grapple with math problems together. We could identify first-rate math textbooks, possibly translating a few from other languages, so that teachers did not have to scramble for appropriate resources. All of this would be far less expensive—and far truer to the purpose of teaching math—than the School of One.:
Each of these needs more elaboration, of course–but it’s obvious that I wasn’t proposing tracking as the answer.
just put him in front of a computer and he can have his very own school of one
I guess I was confused when you talked about “flexible tracking”. I should have known that “flexible tracking” is not really tracking at all.
My son has found Wikipedia and Math Stake Echange to be great resources.
He did mostly teach himself in front of a computer using Wikipedia and math.stckexchange.com. Luckily he also lives in a university town so he was able to take his math classes at the university for his last two years of high school.
He should have asked Arne Duncan for $5 million for his own School of One
Sorry for the bad links. Here is The actual link: http://math.stackexchange.com/
Well, you didn’t ask me what I meant by “flexible tracking.”
I meant a system where students can benefit from focused whole-class instruction with other students at a similar level. If it takes the form of tracks within a grade level, there should be ways for students to change tracks if they wish. (Also, the tracks should be particular to a subject.) If it takes the form of “skipping” to another grade, then there should be supports so that the student is not isolated.
But I am wary of tracking in elementary school, for the most part. It makes more sense to focus on improving the curriculum (and offering supplementary classes to those who want them). In middle and high school, students should have more opportunities to study at different levels.
My main point is that we shouldn’t be so quick to get rid of whole-class instruction, which allows for sustained focus on a topic or problem. Granted, self-instruction does, too–but it isn’t quite the same as having a teacher there to give you challenging problems, help you navigate through them, and point to their implications.
I certainly agree that being in a class with other students of like ability is extremely important, but difficult to achieve in a zoned school system. Another poster spoke eloquently about the problems of teaching a seventh grade class when some students were reading at a post high school level and other were readings at a second grade level.
Most of the school districts in my state have less than a thousand students. It is likely impossible for them to form classes with student’s at a similar level in each grade without them being classes of one. Even in my son’s school district, the seventh largest in the state, he had to study on his own. His search for a community of scholars was the primary motivation for his college choice.
It is always interesting to me that taxpayers will NEVER complain about all of this money being WASTED by a district, but when that district’s teachers want a raise, especially those in larger districts like NYC, Chicago, or Philadelphia (typically for cost of living associated with the mandate that larger cities have that their teachers live within the city limits), everyone collectively loses their minds. God forbid teachers get a small, mediocre raise that probably, system-wide, wouldn’t even amount to the millions of dollars blown on pilot programs, scripted curriculums, and the implementation of new protocols and software, all of which get canned after a few years.
This is just a weird, weird name! Sounds so lonely and kind of spooky!