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The Eiffel Project
New York City's Small Schools Partnership
Technology Learning Challenge
Version 1.2
September 1996
5) Resources for Scaling the Project Up
Winning proposals in the competition for Challenge Grants for Technology
in Education will receive substantial funding for five years, with
the requirement to match that federal funding, at least on a one-to-one
basis, from non-federal sources. In the case of the Eiffel Project,
the Challenge Grant is $7.1 million over five years, with $11.2
million required from consortium partners in order to meet the project
challenge. But to succeed, the Eiffel Project must be even larger
in scale, involving many children and teachers, sustaining its influence
over a prolonged period, showing that educational attainment spread
out on an entirely different spectrum of achievement is both possible
and feasible. The consortium therefore seeks to double those goals
through additional fund-raising, and to extend the project at least
five years further into the 21st Century, in order to have transformative
effects on educational achievement in New York City and the region.
Consider the key question. What is the necessary order of magnitude
-- in time and expense -- required to demonstrate unequivocally
the feasibility of significant improvements in the educational attainments
of all children, doing it with palpable effect within greater New
York, one of the 20 to 30 large metropolitan regions in which most
of the world's population now lives? Each year, New York City has
roughly 1 million students in its public schools. We propose to
demonstrate that the educational process those million children
experience day in and day out can become significantly more effective
for each and all of those students. What portion of the million
students does the demonstration need to influence in order to demonstrate
something feasible and significant for all of them? Year after year,
each of those million children in the public schools is working
cumulatively on his or her whole education, which cannot really
be disaggregated into a plethora of parts according to grade and
subject. A reform of the educational process is not necessarily
a simple function of the reform of 5th grade social studies or 9th
grade earth science. What portion of the whole child's whole educational
experience needs to be encompassed within a project for that project
to demonstrate significant and feasible reform of the educational
system?
Assume the Eiffel Project fulfills the goals reflected in the proposed
budget for the Challenge Grants for Technology in Education. What
level of demonstrative presence will it have attained? Approximately
70 schools will have been wired to the Internet with broadband connections
and active access through this in the library and at least one classroom
that has been adapted for small groups using computers to learn
through problem solving. Two-thirds of the schools will also have
media centers to further exploit the connectivity, with each student
being able to work in the center about one period per week. One-third
of the schools will have equipped one-third of their classrooms
with multiple computers (on a 1:5 student ratio), also adapting
those classrooms for a problem-solving pedagogy. Five schools would
have extended this classroom model to all its classrooms. At the
end of five years, 30,000 students, 3% of the City's public school
population, would have started to use sophisticated connectivity
about 10% of their time in their educational program. Ten thousand
of those students, about 1%, would have started to use it about
a third of their time; and 2,500, 0.25%, would have started to use
it all of the time. Finally, at the end of five years, the average
duration of these use levels would have been 2.5 years, not a long
time in view of the fact that we require each child to engage in
12 years of schooling, often preceded by 2 years of pre-schooling
and 4 or more years of post-secondary education. Relative to the
goal of providing a decisive demonstration that significant improvements
in the educational process for all children in a major metropolitan
system are feasible, these use levels are low and their duration
short. Hence, although the Eiffel Project can get an invaluable
start through the Challenge Grants for Technology in Education,
it cannot really succeed by fulfilling its goals alone. To do that,
the Eiffel Project must unfold on a considerably larger scale and
last for a considerably longer period. For this reason, a long-term
funding program is essential.
Financial support for the Eiffel Project will aggregate from four
sources. First, the Project will receive an average of $1.4 million
annually for five years from the U.S. Department of Education. Second,
the sponsoring coalition will provide substantial matching resources
through contributed effort, equipment, services, and talent. Third,
the sponsoring coalition is raising funds for component activities
within the project from diverse granting agencies -- federal, state,
local, and private. Fourth, the Eiffel Project will raise funds
systematically to support the work of the project from a wide cross-section
of New York City businesses and philanthropies.
The table below summarizes these funding goals.
[FUNDING INFORMATION AVAILABLE ON REQUEST]
Examples of non-federal grants that will be available for the first
year are a $293,000 grant by the New York State Science and Technology
Foundation to the Institute for Learning Technologies for the Living
Schoolbook Project, which will be included within the Eiffel Project;
New York City Council funding for technology to the Frederick Douglass
Academy in the amount of $200,000; and significant portions of the
Annenberg Foundation's grant to start Networks for Learning Renewal.
Many sources of federal funds can strengthen the over-all capacities
of the Eiffel Project and we will continue to seek funding for curriculum
development, networking infrastructure, teacher development, and
evaluation projects from the National Science Foundation, other
parts of USDE, the Department of Commerce, and other agencies.
As important as these sources are likely to be, corporate support
and private philanthropy will probably be the most fruitful way
to expand the Eiffel Project to the required scale and duration.
The business and philanthropic communities of the entire New York
region have two strong reasons why backing the Eiffel Project at
a substantial level of support, over an extended period of time,
makes good sense. First, competitiveness and economic health: the
strength of New York City and its surrounding region, as well as
the strength of the corporations doing business there, depends increasingly
on success in the information economy. When it was an industrial
manufacturing center, New York needed to attract a docile, low-skilled
workforce. With manufacturing in significant decline and the information
industries its main source of competitive advantage, the City needs
a highly educated and educable workforce, and educational excellence,
attainable by all, becomes increasingly important to its economic
strength. It is imperative to show, through efforts such as the
Eiffel Project, that the least advantaged in the Metropolitan Region
can succeed in the complex, high-skilled, ever-changing job markets
around them by making full, disciplined use of the new educational
resources to which they have access. Here are the numbers for New
York City (from a recent New York Times article):
| Job-base: |
3,300,000 |
over 20% held by suburban commuters |
| Total net job gain since 1992: |
88,000 |
1992 was a recession bottom; net gain predominantly
in knowledge-industry jobs. |
| Unemployed in NYC: |
271,000 |
not on welfare, looking for work |
| Adults on welfare in NYC: |
470,000 |
will be required to seek work |
Second, a great cosmopolitan center is a very effective way to
attract and concentrate the diverse, exuberant talents needed in
centers of communication and intellectual creativity. To attract
such talents spontaneously, the conditions of life need at once
to be safe and civil while pulsating with cultural vibrancy. Such
conditions will best thrive where educational opportunities are
both extensive and excellent, and where participation in them is
universal. The City needs nothing short of the very best educational
opportunities for all its citizens.
Beyond this need, New York City and its region have remarkable
advantages with which to become the educative leader for the 21st
century. It makes sense to concentrate large-scale effort on a technology
learning challenge here, and the sources of corporate and private
philanthropy in the City and region are sufficient to underwrite
such a sustained, unparalleled effort. This effort is the key to
scaling the Eiffel Project into one of crucial importance to the
historic reform of education.
But a Technology Learning Challenge must also address issues of
scaling explicitly -- how can it provide a generally applicable
model for implementation elsewhere? Discussion of scaling should
identify key dimensions along which scaling proceeds. We concentrate
on four:
- Scope: How to scale across the full intellectual scope of a
child's educational experience.
- Penetration: How to scale to affect the whole community, not
just its most favored parts.
- Reach: How to scale out to all locations and draw from all sources
so that it is universal in both availability and import.
- Resources: How to scale up funding and participation sufficient
to produce historical change.
Too much technology in education lacks scope with respect to the
full process of education as a person develops from early childhood
into a productive adult. Scaling up means going from isolated products
to changes in the whole process, changes that encompass the entire
educational experience. The Eiffel Project will work to scale up
with respect to scope by building up coverage of more and more subjects
through digital resources, interacting with a wider and wider range
of mentors and experts, developing an extensive repertoire of problem-solving
resources, and generally through curricular resources and intellectual
tools. A strength of the Eiffel Project as it unfolds over time
is the thorough-going involvement of a major research university,
for we need to work systematically to reshape the whole curriculum
and to do it over an extended period of time in which the cumulative
effects of an entirely restructured educational process can become
evident and fully effective.
The Eiffel Project in its fundamental character is an effort to
scale up with respect to penetration, for it addresses the needs
of under-served populations directly, working primarily in schools
serving predominantly African-American, Latino, immigrant, and economically
disadvantaged children, specifically including Schools under Registration
Review among those it seeks to reach, and cooperating with key groups
such as the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone. As disparities of
income are dangerously increasing in contemporary life, so disparities
of education widen. New York City can become a serious dystopia,
leading the nation to a two-tiered future of fundamental division
between haves and have-nots, if these disparities are not ameliorated
effectively in practice. New York City must find ways to integrate
its large disadvantaged groups into the electronic future. The Eiffel
Project will address that problem and the City needs to sustain
the integrating, democratizing effort for the sake of its long-term
economic strength, and for its civility as a vibrant human habitat.
As a specific test of its reach, that is, its scalability to other
localities beyond New York City, the Eiffel Project is working in
the Kingston-Newburgh Enterprise Zone to see whether educational
resources we are developing in New York City schools and locales
will prove useful in the Newburgh Enlarged City School District,
specifically in improving educational opportunities for African-American
and Latino families living in Newburgh's depressed downtown section.
Newburgh is representative of numerous small to mid-sized cities
where the affluent have abandoned downtown areas in favor of near-by
suburbs, leaving behind a weak commercial core with a run-down housing
stock, high unemployment, and a local political impetus to avoid
and neglect these growing ghettos. Long-range plans, for instance
that recently released by the Regional Planning Association, put
a high priority on the resuscitation of these decaying downtown
centers in order to reverse environmental degradation arising from
unchecked suburban sprawl and to energize the overall economy, which
has been left stagnant by the decline of industry and manufacturing.
Newburgh's downtown, in its demographics, its needs, and its opportunities,
is much closer to Harlem, the South Bronx, or Bed-Stuy, than it
is to its contiguous communities. We postulate that what the Eiffel
Project does in these New York City areas will have great relevance
to improving educational opportunity and general economic strength
in areas such as Newburgh, which, like New York, must succeed in
the information economy, and we will work with the schools there
and an innovative housing renewal project to test this postulate.
This will entail establishing high-speed Internet connections to
the Newburgh schools and extending new pedagogical resources to
children through the schools and to their homes, particularly those
resources concerning participation in civic life, engagement in
the workplace, and developing distinctive cultural strengths. Should
it prove successful, it will chart an important path for extending
the reach of the Eiffel Project to other places with similar problems
throughout New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and Mid-Western states.
Resources deployed through the Eiffel Project could expand in scale
almost limitlessly: first, by deploying a more and more complete,
state-of-the-art technological infrastructure in, between, and around
participating schools; second, by developing all the interesting
opportunities for new curricular tools and resources that pertain
to full education of the whole person living in a complex world;
third, by providing fuller and fuller support to teachers, students,
and parents engaged in the activities of school reform and the educational
use of technology, and fourth, by including more and more schools
within New York City, its region, the country, and around the world,
all serving children of vast, undeveloped human potentials. The
true learning challenge is to trigger a chain reaction of further
effort by empowering key elements and energizing them to draw more
and more resources into the work.
New York City and the region have great strengths, distinct competitive
advantages in an effort to become an essential center of educative
leadership in the 21st century -- an extraordinary concentration
of major universities, numerous centers of corporate research, and
unparalleled concentrations of cultural holdings in major museums
and libraries. The Eiffel Project must mobilize all these advantages.
It must capture the public imagination and command its participation.
It can, by pursuing its essential objective -- to meet progressive
expectations with a high-profile, large-scale project that will
demonstrate that the small schools reform movement, empowered with
advanced media, can break the constraints of the traditional school,
thereby enabling all children to achieve unprecedented levels of
excellence.
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