You may recall that Laurene Powell Jobs decided to reinvent the American high school by creating a design competition for new models. In 2026, she offered prizes of $10 million each to the ten best plans. Over 700 proposals came in. She called it the XQ competition. She hired leading lights from the Obama administration, including Arne Duncan and Russlyn Ali, to advise her. She bought airtime on all three major networks to bring together celebrities to proclaim the failure of U.S. education and the need for Mrs. Jobs’ XQ Initiative.
The awards were announced. Earlier this year, an XQ school in Delaware closed. It was called the Design Thinking Academy.
About 5he same time, an XQ project in Somerville, Massachusetts, was killed by the School Committee, the Mayor, and the superintendent, who were once enthusiastic about it.
The Boston Globe tells the story, which is behind a pay wall. I will try to summarize it briefly and hope to do it justice.
It begins like this:
ALEC RESNICK AND SHAUNALYNN DUFFY stood in Somerville City Hall at about 6:30 on March 18, a night they hoped would launch the next chapter of their lives. The two had spent nearly seven years designing a new kind of high school meant to address the needs of students who didn’t thrive in a traditional setting. They’d developed a projects-driven curriculum that would give students nearly unprecedented control over what they would learn in a small, supportive environment. Resnick and Duffy had spent countless hours shepherding this school through the political thickets that all new public schools face. Approval by the teachers union, which became the most time-consuming obstacle, had finally come through in early January. Tonight, the School Committee members would cast their votes.
Resnick had reason to be optimistic. Mayor Joseph Curtatone sat on the School Committee, and he had been the one to suggest Resnick and Duffy consider designing a new public school in the first place, back in 2012. Mary Skipper, Somerville schools superintendent, had been instrumental in keeping the approval process moving forward when prospects looked bleak. She wouldn’t be voting, but she planned to offer a recommendation to elected officials. And then there was the $10 million. Resnick and Duffy had won the money in a national competition to finish designing and ultimately open and run their high school, and the pair knew it had helped maintain interest in their idea. Voting against them would mean walking away from a lot of outside funding.
The two had met as students at MIT. THey became interested in how children learn. They began making plans and trying them on a small scale in 2012. They called their school Powderhouse Studios. At full capacity, it would enroll 160 students. They intended to match the diversity of the district. The heart of their plan was “ambitious, self-directed, interdisciplinary projects focused on computation, narrative, and design — unheard of in a typical high school. Their work would be driven by goals laid out in individualized learning plans geared toward real-world concepts and would be supported by faculty serving more as mentors than as teachers. The school day would last from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and the academic calendar would stretch year-round.”
In 2016, the pair had worked with middle-schoolers, trying out their project-based ideas. That year they applied to the XQ Project and had the support of the mayor and the superintendent. And they won. What could go wrong?
Finances. That’s what went wrong. Despite the initial enthusiasm of the school officials, they realized that the Somerville High School would lose $3.2 million each year to the new school when it had 160 students. The budget for the entire district is $73 million. The district’s comprehensive high school has 1,250 students. The new school planned to enroll about 13% of the existing high school’s students.
On the night of the decisive vote last March, the superintendent told the School Committee that “opening the new school would force the district to cut at least 20 teacher or counselor positions and to eliminate most before- and after-school programs districtwide. “As someone who believes in and has championed the power of new ideas my whole career, it pains me deeply to not be able to solve this problem,” she said. “In this case, the investment to create something that may only add an unknown amount of benefit to 2 to 3 percent of students, at the expense of the remaining 97 to 98 percent, is one I cannot recommend making at this time.”
The School Committee voted unanimously not to open the school. The Jobs grant of $10 million was alluring, but when the startup money ran out, the district would have to absorb the ongoing costs.
And a second XQ project died.
But when the startup money ran out, the district would have to absorb the ongoing costs, a feature not a bug.
I guess Arne did not advise them about this possibility. LOL.
Education destruction billionaires giving grants to school districts is like the tobacco industry giving out free sample cigarettes without mentioning the dangers of smoking them.
Good analogy LCT.
start up, back out, make the larger public funds keep the profitable game going
Arne Dunce-an is a pretty dim bulb to be described as a “leading light,” but I suspect that that was meant to be tongue-in-cheek. Making this fellow Secretary of Education was a bit like making Private Bone Spurs Commander in Chief. Big mistake. Yuge.
More on the Somerville story here (not behind any paywall): https://hechingerreport.org/anatomy-of-a-failure-how-an-xq-super-school-flopped/ The XQ Institute also awarded $10M to start a Summit Learning HS in Oakland that never opened. https://www.sfgate.com/education/article/Backers-abandon-10-million-Super-School-project-11176992.php That means 3/10 of the awardees of their Super School prize have already failed. https://www.edsurge.com/news/2016-09-14-xq-institute-announces-ten-winners-of-super-schools-competition.
Thanks for the link. The amateurs were clueless and the initial support for the project was all razzle and dazzle about winning a prize that itself is another case of amateurs out of their depth. I am glad this school failed, and before it drained money from the public system.
Are you saying Laurene is a thin, blond ditz in the company of a dumb jock (Duncan)? Or, am I?
“But there’s a difference between reading the literature and having the day-to-day experience to actually implement it.”
This shows us what the “failing schools” crowd is thinking- a sanitized view of how schools really work. It’s one thing to have an idea for innovating curriculum. It’s quite another to feed, transport, buy materials, accommodate children with disabilities, run extra-curricular activities, clean the building, etc. etc.etc. Algorithms alone just don’t translate into the real world so much.
The never ending irony of so-called reform! These billionaires and their hubris are never ending. They do not see the big picture or really understand what they are doing.
By the way Bergen Academy has had students working on self directed projects for years. The projects are one component of the longer school day these students receive. The bulk of the day is spent in regular academic classes with a teacher. The project culminates with each student completing a senior project that they present. I do not know if they are still doing the projects as my son graduated in 2002.
Right. Project based learning was pushed aside in schools that would benefit from that type of curriculum when the only metric required by law is standardized test scores.
Dear Billionaires: You want to make an impact? Stop telling teachers how to do their jobs and instead create some after-school centers for the poorest kids, where they can go and GET A DECENT MEAL and play in a safe environment and have access to a library and a gymnasium and art supplies and computers with internet connections and to coaches and counselors. These would be a big help. Thank you.
Billionaires should consider the work of LeBron James as a template for responsible philanthropy. He has given a lot of money to the Boys and Girls Club and the Children’s Defense Fund. He is partnering with a public school in Akron, Ohio in which he is providing much needed supports for at risk students in a public school. He has also renovated and given homes to single mothers in Ohio. LeBron is a legitimate philanthropist.
Great idea. But it doesn’t leave any room for tech zillionaires to preen and chatter about “21st century skills.”
Oh, yup. Well, scratch that. It might actually help kids.
And, Cindy, there’s no room for them to blather about “scaling up”.
Speaking of which, look at what our state public employees are doing for the Gates-funded SETDA at their website- promoting digital learning and public-private partnerships.
What if some of the ed reform billionaires relinquished some of their need for control and stopped and getting around democratic systems with wads of cash and instead of replacing public schools with their vision they spent their money on programs to supplement what public schools already offer?
There would be little or no opposition to that in districts, many of which are stripped of “extras” under ed reform governance. Sure, this would mean they couldn’t control a whole public system, but if their ideas are so great the ideas should work alongside a school, right? They’d have to cooperate with public schools. They couldn’t call themselves CEOs and OWN schools, so that’s a sacrifice and would require some humility, but if they’re really well-intentioned and this is a crisis they should be able to give a little, correct?
It continues to amaze me how there is zero concern for the other children in the system when these plans are launched.
Schools in a given area are systems. It is delusional to continue to insist that opening new ones has no possible downside to the other students in the rest of the system.
This is DOGMA in ed reform. Betsy DeVos parrots the most extreme version of it, where she continues to tell the public that funding private schools will have NO effect on existing public schools, which is just nonsense. No one questions it in ed reform, because no one gives even a passing thought to the other children in the system. It’s as if the public school students in the existing system do not exist and they are just the designated collateral damage of this “movement”.
If they get their way there will be a reckoning, because it HAS to happen. They refuse to admit there is downside risk to privatizing schools AND THERE IS. It’s like denying gravity. It won’t end well.
Why are our leaders so incredibly reckless? I suspect it’s because they are personally insulated from the downside risk of their experiments.
Here’s the plan. Create a fabulous new school that will drain money away from the schools that enroll 95% of students. The 95% lose arts, physical education, etc. and gain larger classes. Quite a trade off!
Ed reformers are now entering the super-hot and fashionable “space” of career training. Vocational education. They have announced they invented apprenticeships. Which is, I believe, an idea that has been around and used successfully since the 16th century.
Ohio had and has THOUSANDS of vocational schools. No one in elite circles paid them any attention until they all announced they were ready to “transform” them and they trotted out Ivanka Trump in a hard hat. Is this a joke? What do ANY of these people know about “the working classes”?
Cha ching. Let thousands of consultant-driven “new ideas” bloom. I think Ivanka hired a Goldman analyst, because no one knows more about working people than elite finance consultants, right?
Are they incapable of offering anything of value to systems that already exist? Why? Is it hubris? A need for control? A need to put their individual names on buildings or make themselves “CEO’s”?
Russlynn Ali was a shill for No Child, etc., and Program Improvement. She came to my district and lambasted hard-working teachers for what she called our “low expectations.” The solution for that, apparently, was to dumb down a quite robust English curriculum. People like her seem to fail upwards, but I will never forgive her.
Mrs. Jobs is surrounded by people who failed upwards.
Good one.
MIT- where David Koch is a lifetime board member, where he, his brother and father went to school.
Does this post mean that the XQ cartoon figure merchandise in the shop tab at the XQ website will be retired? Get them while they last. But, don’t try to call, in my experience there’s no phone pickup at XQ.
Stop letting 20-somethings with little experience and knowledge reinvent schools (though it’s interesting that these “reinventions” all tend to look the same: they usually revolve around project-based learning. When will we finally understand that project-based learning is not what it’s cracked up to be?)
“While Powderhouse would not be a charter school, its financial impact on the wider district would be similar. District budgets are necessarily zero-sum, and funding Powderhouse would mean taking money away from the district’s existing schools.”
(Just like a charter).
Another charter-type issue: “Resnick and Duffy had consulted with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the Southern Poverty Law Center in creating an enrollment algorithm that would guarantee them a school population that mirrored the district’s within the boundaries of the law, but the school district’s attorney questioned its legality.” One of the main reasons the mayor nixed the XQ school is he expected it to skim off hi-academic achievers/ privileged kids that would do fine at the regular high school, while leaving lower-income/ achieving with less $/ fewer services.
Duffy drew this conclusion– same one many districts would make about proposed charters if they had the control: “In this case, the investment to create something that may only add an unknown amount of benefit to 2 to 3 percent of students, at the expense of the remaining 97 to 98 percent, is one I cannot recommend making at this time.”
Retired teacher notes that pubsch systems can do something like this w/o billionaire largesse & outside design, citing Bergen Academy. Certainly true – & has the great advantage of not being done at all if the public/ elected board doesn’t want/ can’t afford it. Stats show the Bergen Academy campuses in Hackensack are among the nation’s top pubschs. However, magnets seem to invite similar problems as charters: their free/reduced-lunch [proxy for child poverty rate] is 1.5-3%. Compare to 22% average in Hackensack.
There are really serious issues that these billionaires’ money could be addressing. I mentioned, above, the enormous disparities between what’s available to kids after school–whether they get a decent meal, whether they have safe places to play and socialize and study, whether they have access to computers and the internet, whether they have access to caring adults.
Here’s another one that has been in the news lately: way back in the 1990s, a report on a couple metastudies, published by the American Psychological Association, suggested that high-school students at the time were more stressed out than were the average institutionalized psychiatric patient of the 1950s (“The Age of Anxiety? Birth Cohort Change in Anxietyand Neuroticism, 1952-1993,” J. M. Twenge). My own read is that while kids today are quite woke, they are even more stressed out than back then. This is true at the same time that most schools have cut back on counseling and guidance staff because they are so strapped for cash.
So, billionaires, that’s another thing you could do: endow positions for counseling and guidance staff in middle schools and high schools. And stop pushing freaking standardized testing, which a) serves no pedagogical purpose, b) dumbs down curricula and pedagogy, c) steals time from teaching and learning, and d) stresses kids out A LOT.
We need to do some serious thinking in this country about how to ease up on our kids. Here, a few suggestions:
End high-stakes standardized testing. It’s worse than useless, far, far worse.
Allow kids to be kids in preschool and kindergarten–let them play, socialize, and listen to stories.
Change middle- and high-school schedules so that kids have 20-to-30 minutes between classes to chill out, regroup, socialize, and refresh for the next class. No one can attend six or seven classes per day with three minutes between them and be present psychologically. That’s just crazy, and we need to stop it. NO ADULT WOULD STAND FOR THIS.
Make sure every school has good counselors/guidance staff who can actually spend time counseling students rather than spending all their time proctoring tests, doing IEP and 501K paperwork, and assisting with scheduling.
Outlaw homework on weekends, and limit the amount of it given through the week.
Implement meditation practices in middle schools and high schools.
Make sure that every kid has breakfast and lunch; expand considerably free breakfast and lunch programs.
These billionaires (Gates, Jobs, Hastings, etc) act as though kids were machines to be programmed differently. They are not. They are people with wants and needs to be met. And they need to be treated a LOT more humanely than we are treating them today.
To the ruling class, the kids of labor are machines. Their own kids are entitled to and encouraged to live off of the work of others and to step over those below them in the hierarchy. It’s what Lincoln warned about, allowing the elite to eat the bread for which others toiled.
The recent college admission scandals and before that the University of West Virginia scandal involving the degree of Sen. Joe Manchin’s daughter (who graduated to president of Mylan where patients were gouged in the sale of Epipens) provide illustration.