It’s been suggested, only half in jest, that someone time-traveling to the present from one hundred years back would feel most at home in a classroom. It’s fun to chuckle at this cliché from time to time, but just think about how true it really is. To make it more powerful, try turning it around and imagining your current self warped back a century into the heart of industrial America.

The first thing you would be likely to notice is that everything is done in a sort of bulky, standardized way. People dress the same. Men wear relatively similar suits, coats, and hats, and women wear plain dresses. Travel is also standardized. Trains take big groups of people and products to a few select destinations “in bulk.” (In a few years personal automobiles will become popular, but most of them will be black Ford Model T’s.) In personal life, if you are a man, you go to a factory job where you and countless other men perform “bulk” tasks over and over again. If you are a woman, you tend to your standardized house and to your children during the day. If you are a child, you have a factory-working father and a stay-at-home mother who are married and for whom this is their only marriage. You and your parents consume mass media, mass production, and mass marketing.

And as a child, you find your school perfectly suited for this life.

As a student, you are fully standardized, learning the same things, in the same ways and at the same pace as all the other students in your school. As an organization, your school is structured much like the factory at which your father works: your teacher (i.e., supervisor) tells you exactly what to do, your assistant principal does likewise with your teacher, and your principal does likewise with your assistant principal. Everything is designed around three goals:

1. Ensuring that all students reach a minimum level of reading, writing, and numeracy skills

2. Sorting the future managers from the future laborers

3. Preparing you to follow orders and perform tedious tasks without complaining

Returning to the comfort of the present, life is hard to recognize. In today’s world, “the customer is king,” meaning that everything is customized. We choose just the right car, clothes, cell-phone plan, cable-TV package, kitchen decor, health-insurance plan, investment options, college to attend, and so on. No more bulk, mass, or standardization. Everything is customized to suit our wants and needs. . . .

Except school. By and large, school still reflects the standardized “factory model” that suited life one hundred years ago. Students still learn largely the same things, in the same way, and at the same pace as the other students in the school district. The bureaucratic setup is still in place. Teachers still “transmit” knowledge to students, despite unparalleled access to information thanks to digital technology. School assignments still consist mostly of tedious, repetitious tasks that sort those who can and will tolerate them from those who cannot or will not. Students leave this place thoroughly prepared to enter a world that existed one hundred years ago.

Calls for schools to improve are everywhere, but recently calls for schools to transform have proliferated, based on the idea that schools are not simply underperforming but outdated if not obsolete. Most prominently, scholars and authors such as Phillip Schlechty, Peter Senge, and Francis Duffy have targeted school and school system leaders with books calling for whole-system or systemic change to make schools compatible with other information-age social systems.

Charles Reigeluth offers one “vision” of what such schools might look like.2 A few of the prominent features he suggests, based on comparable changes in other social systems, include:

• Teachers who operate as guides and facilitators of learning rather than sources of learning. Under such an organization, learning would become resource based, project based, and student or group based, rather than teacher and class based. Colloquially worded, he refers to transforming teachers from “sages on the stage” to “guides on the side,” allowing students to take greater charge of their own learning. 

• Personal learning plans and contracts for each student, negotiated by the student, the teacher, and parents. Such contracts would reflect standards-based goals similar for all students as well as goals of interest to the particular student. 

• Multi-age grouping based on developmental level rather than chronological age, allowing a student to remain with one guide and community of learners for longer than a single year. 

• Thinking skills, problem-solving skills, and creativity integrated into an interdisciplinary curriculum. Such new learning needs, reflected in the demands of information-age jobs, could be pursued in conjunction with more traditional standards in a less-fragmented curriculum.

• New, more central, and comprehensive roles for technology in schools.

• Administrators moving from a commanding role to a supporting role.

Gradually, schools and school systems are undertaking the challenges necessary to create schools that reflect these modern needs. The remainder of this article will profile ten such schools and school districts worth getting excited about now—in the information age. The examples were chosen based upon reports relating their adoption of some or all of Reigeluth’s vision.

Halau Lokahi Public Charter School—Honolulu

The charter for the Halau Lokahi Public Charter School grew out of a declaration by the International Covenant on the Rights of Indigenous Nations affirming the right of indigenous peoples worldwide to all levels and forms of education by culturally and traditionally accessible means. This group concluded that such an education is possible only when indigenous people themselves acquire both the control and the resources to develop culturally relevant curriculum and instructional practices. Throughout the Hawaiian islands, locally created and controlled educational models that reflect, respect, and embrace Hawaiian native values have been established by the New Century Public Charter School Alliance, formed in 2000.

The charter school movement in the United States provided a natural vehicle for such models, and the Halau Lokahi Public Charter School in Honolulu is the leading example of the movement’s possibilities. Halau Lokahi is a project- and culture-based bilingual charter school organized around student-centered, self-directed inquiry. Classes are multi-age, utilizing the ohana method of classroom management, whereby students operate primarily in groups of five or fewer. The ohana are responsible for managing their own behavior, projects, and working relationships under the guidance of a teacher.

The strong focus on cultural immersion is reflected in Halau Lokahi’s commitment to service learning. Students there “learn and develop through active participation in thoughtfully organized service experiences that meet actual community needs,” and in the process they directly learn and participate in the Hawaiian culture. Through this unique structure, students are able to meet the local desire that student learning reflect an understanding of their native culture in addition to the state of Hawaii’s academic standards.

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