The Future of School

When educators were invited to design schools of the future for a nationwide competition last fall, the most striking thing about the results was not their diversity but their similarity.

Ungraded, multi-age classrooms; assessments based on performance, not guesswork; students who graduate based on what they know and can do rather than the time spent in class; activities that engage children's hands as well as their heads; and learning done in teams instead of alone at desks were ideas that permeated the hundreds of proposals.

They are all elements of what one researcher describes as an "emerging oral consensus'' about what schooling should look like...