A Blueprint for Change

Gary, Ind.

James M. Piggee sorts through his keys. He tries one. Then another. Then a third. A tall, distinguished man with a neatly trimmed gray beard, he is hunched over the padlock that secures the auditorium at Horace Mann High School, where he is the dean of students.

Today, as on most days at Horace Mann, the auditorium is empty, and school officials have chained its two doors to keep potential vandals away. Once upon a time, such a scene would have been unthinkable. When Piggee, 60, went to school in the 1940s and 1950s across town at the then-all-black Roosevelt School, the auditoriums in Gary's schools were open and actively used all day.

They were, in fact, central--figuratively and literally--to what may have been the 20th century's longest and most thorough experiment with progressive education. The district's "platoon system," or work-study-play program, made the schools here internationally famous--and sometimes infamous. More than any other public school system, Gary applied the ideas of the country's most celebrated and debated...