THE EIFFEL PROJECT

The Eiffel Project
New York City's Small Schools Partnership
Technology Learning Challenge

Version 1.2
September 1996

1) The Challenge: Offer a Creative New Vision for Technology in Education

A consortium -- led by the Center for Collaborative Education (CCE) and the Institute for Learning Technologies (ILT) at Columbia University -- will join in a large scale demonstration of how children contending with poverty, discrimination, and urban crowding can achieve world-class education standards when liberated by fundamental efforts at school reform, empowered by the full use of advanced digital information. The Eiffel Project will bring the intellectual, cultural, and human resources of a major research university, one committed to improving the quality of life in New York City, to bear on the complex problems of urban education.

A depressed urban semi-circle -- Harlem and Upper Manhattan, the South Bronx, Queens, downtown Brooklyn -- experience the persistent problems of inner cities in America. These communities surround the commercial core of Manhattan, which harbors an immense wealth of cultural, technological, and financial assets. The objective of our coalition is to show that the combination of school reform and technological resources can solve the persistent problems of education associated with urban adversity.

Marshall McLuhan's suggestive phrase, "the medium is the message," is most apt in thinking about schools. Large, bureaucratic schools that treat students and teachers as depersonalized, interchangeable agents who perform routine, fragmentary tasks along the production lines of instructional labor, impart the wrong message. To advance equity and excellence, educators must reshape the school itself, so that it conveys a more expansive, liberating message. This conviction grounds the small schools reform movement, which seeks to scale down the size of schools, to make them more autonomous and self-directing, to concentrate on what teachers, parents, and children find important and moving.

In New York City, a school-reform movement has taken root, with support from the Annenberg Foundation; the Mayor, City Council, and Board of Education; the State Board of Regents; the teachers' unions; key universities; and major civic and corporate partners. Large schools serving the urban poor have too often been examples of the school as factory and warehouse -- big, impersonal institutions, mediocre as places of education and most effective in keeping kids off the streets. The small schools reform movement seeks to transform big, impersonal schools into models of autonomous learning communities, scaled to nurture the child, to provide face-to-face involvement for both students and teachers. The Center for Collaborative Education has been a leader of this movement since its inception, in both New York City and the nation at large.

The Center for Collaborative Education gives the Eiffel Project a firm base in the small schools reform movement. The project will work to extend and strengthen this base, stressing smaller class sizes, cooperative learning, interdisciplinary study, and strong parent and community involvement. In 1987, the NYC Board of Education agreed to support the work of CCE, which provides on-going leadership to a growing number of schools that are restructuring on the model Deborah Meier created through the renowned Central Park East Schools. In 1995, the Annenberg Foundation awarded a "Networks for Learning Renewal" grant to four groups pioneering small schools reform in New York City -- CCE, the Manhattan Institute, ACORN, and the Fund for New York City Public Education. As part of the Eiffel Project, CCE is developing an association of restructured public schools across the City -- the Small Schools Partnerships, clusters of three to five schools within one or more community school districts. By 2001, CCE will directly support restructured educational and governance practices among 13 Small Schools Partnerships in all five of the City's boroughs, serving 22,000 students and 1,000 teachers.

Building on the Small Schools Partnerships, the Eiffel Project will additionally develop a second ring of schools that are restructuring according to the same fundamental principles but are not receiving direct Annenberg support through CCE. Some receive support through other Annenberg grantees, particularly the Fund for New York City Public Education, a consortium partner in the Eiffel Project. Several will be schools reshaping on small schools reform principles through projects that ILT has initiated such as the Living Schoolbook, the Harlem Environmental Access Project, and Reinventing Libraries. A few will be Schools under Registration Review that seek to reverse cycles of school failure by changing scale and using advanced technology. In all, n its fifth year the Eiffel Project will directly benefit at least 67 schools, engaging 30,000 students, most from African-American, Latino, immigrant, and economically disadvantaged families, with 1,350 teachers. The project will further serve numerous parents and community members accessing it through 10 community-based organizations in areas where the need for technology is acute.

Throughout the Eiffel Project, the key criteria for inclusion are the willingness of teachers at each school to take responsibility for shaping the curriculum and educational program and the commitment of all involved -- students, teachers, administrators, and parents -- to working at a scale at which interpersonal, face-to-face recognition of each other as autonomous agents, responsible for their actions, is the controlling norm. Technology can greatly facilitate such efforts. Digital libraries, multimedia educational programs, and wide-area networking -- three related and maturing technologies -- make advanced media a powerful engine for equity. These technologies have great educational significance, and the Institute for Learning Technologies has been a leader in their use and development. The libraries of the very richest schools represent minor academic resources compared to those of the digital library and digital museum, which become accessible at the desktop in school or home with appropriate connections to the Internet. Educational experiences, activated by multimedia simulations, can appeal to diverse learning styles and engross students of all backgrounds in cooperative, inquiry-based educational work. Wide-area networking can enable desktop video conferencing and group work in a content-rich context, and these new forms of educative communication can overcome the traditional isolation of the classroom, bringing youthful minds actively into the laboratory, the archive, the field station, the theater, the museum, and the office. With these technologies fully deployed, all students can attain an unprecedented improvement in educational quality.

Implicit in their chosen scale, small schools encounter significant limits, particularly in large cities. Urban schools, large or small, must cope with significant diversity among students. In CCE's Brooklyn New School, students speak 36 different languages. Throughout the City, students draw on disparate experiences and aspire to diverse visions. Small schools must cope creatively with complexity, and consequently networking -- interpersonal and technological -- has become essential in the school reform movement. Networks of and for small schools can provide deep and diverse resources to suit the remarkable range of human difference. The Small Schools Partnership is developing these sustaining interpersonal networks, and Columbia University will augment these with digital information networks adapted specially to serve small school reform. The interconnection of school-based personnel will also be supported by Media Centers, discussed at length in section 3b. These will exist as nodes on the electronic network and will form the connective tissue between school-based activities, community involvement, and overarching systemic management.

In pursuit of better possibilities, it is time to move from isolated pilot projects, which merely suggest the potential of new technologies, to implementing a large, decisive demonstration of their power. We believe the cost-benefit equation to be achieved with thorough use of advanced media in education, particularly in support of the school reform movement, will be advantageous for the whole society, but it will be a difficult equation to demonstrate in the arena of public discourse. The reason is simple: the benefits of small schools strengthened with advanced media will be very, very great relative to the current state of schooling, yet those benefits can be realized only by a significant reordering of expenditures on education. Can we persuade the public and its leadership to make a significant reallocation of resources? Evaluation studies of pilot programs -- showing incremental gains in a traditional subject in one or another grade -- will not suffice to make the needed point in policy debate. A sustained, dramatic, large-scale, decisive demonstration, concentrated in a prominent locality that embodies the recalcitrant difficulties of contemporary life, can infuse the policy debate with new vision. The City of New York is the place to produce that demonstration -- the Eiffel Project.

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