We're In This Together -- The University Of Washington's Partnership With Public Schools

UNIVERSITIES such as the UW must establish a new social compact with the society they serve. The public research university is uniquely positioned to help tackle problems facing society, especially those facing public schools, says the president of the University of Washington.

INSTITUTIONS of higher education - and particularly public-research universities - have a responsibility to K-12 education.

If there ever really was a time when higher education held itself apart from the broader educational system, that time has passed. For several reasons, we no longer have the luxury of just minding our own educational business.

First, there is the pressure of widespread public expectations that higher education will help with K-12 reform. Wherever I go across this state, and especially in Olympia, there are questions about what the University of Washington is doing for the K-12 schools. The public is right to ask. As a matter of citizenship, universities do have an obligation to help make the country's entire educational system the best it can be.

More practically, it is a matter of enlightened self-interest. Most of our students come from public K-12 schools. What we can accomplish in freshman English or Biology 101 depends directly on what happened in public-school classrooms across the state. We have a stake in enriching the resources and raising the level of achievement in public schools.

A new social compact

But there is an even more compelling reason we need to step up to our role as a public institution in a larger public system. It goes to the heart of what it means to be a public research university in the 21st century. In my view, universities like the UW must establish a new social compact with the society they serve. The public research university is uniquely positioned to help tackle problems facing society today, whether it is crime, poverty, environmental degradation, or the health of our K-12 educational system.

Today, more than ever before, K-12 schools and higher education are part of the same continuum. This country has a wonderful and distinctive tradition of educating all its children, native-born and immigrant, rich and poor, with the idea of providing opportunity for all and preparing all for participation in a democratic society. Not so long ago, we thought we had fulfilled that commitment if we educated children through the eighth grade, or then through high school.

In today's society, we have come to recognize that more is required.

Post-secondary education is no longer the province of the "elite," but is required for all those who want a part of the good life in this country. This means that K-12 and higher education are in this together.

We are subject to the same demographic pressures, encountering a generation of students more numerous and far more diverse than previous ones. We are facing the same public demands for accountability and efficiency, for objective measures of our effectiveness. We are both troubled by a narrow utilitarianism in many people's thinking about education - the sense that education is only about jobs and not about values, citizenship and the blossoming of human potential. And we are all subject to much more intense public scrutiny of the way we all fit together.

Meanwhile, there is a widespread sense that the K-12 part of this system - which has helped make this country what it is today - is falling behind. Our children's test scores don't measure up. There is increasing disparity between inner-city schools and those of affluent suburbs. We fear for our competitive position in the world. We also fear for our own society, as the gap between "haves" and "have-nots" widens and the common understanding of democracy frays.

An institutional commitment

The University of Washington, like most of its peers, has a long history of involvement with K-12 schools. Our College of Education has been preparing teachers and doing educational research for more than a century.

In more recent years, a large number of our individual faculty and departments, across a wide range of disciplines, have forged partnerships with public schools and teachers in a complex web of activity.

What is new, on our campus, is an explicit institutional commitment to working with the K-12 system as a long-term goal, inextricably tied to our other core missions.

The administrative headquarters for many of our new K-12 programs is the Office for Educational Partnerships, led by Vice Provost Louis Fox. Created in 1997, the office coordinates programs already in operation and works with faculty and staff on new collaborative projects with the schools. The office provides a central point of contact, both for schools, agencies, businesses and foundations that want to be part of our effort and for our own faculty, many of whom would like to work with the schools but are not in a position to invent and run their own program.

The UW has chosen to focus its efforts on five areas where we can match distinctive university expertise to important K-12 needs, where the UW's existing academic strengths permit us to make a difference and where our own faculty and students can benefit from collaboration with the schools:

-- Inquiry-based science: A "hands-on" approach to teaching science to children. Instead of listening and memorizing, students in inquiry-based programs learn science by doing science - by carrying out experiments and learning from the results. From his perspective as an eminent research scientist and educator, Professor Leroy Hood, chair of the UW's department of molecular biotechnology, believes passionately in the need for inquiry-based science as the norm in every K-12 classroom. He developed a partnership among scientists at the University and at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, executives at the Boeing Company, and the Seattle School District.

This group won a National Science Foundation grant, called a Systemic Change Grant, to bring inquiry-based science training to every single K-5 teacher in the Seattle district. Over the 5-year life of the grant 1,400 teachers in 67 schools will each receive at least 100 hours of training in small groups led by skilled science-resource teachers. To date, over 700 teachers have participated.

The NSF has now awarded us a second grant to extend the program to middle-school teachers in five Seattle-area districts. Now, University of Washington science faculty are making plans for a high-school version of this program, to be led by an award-winning science teacher from Yakima.

UW mathematicians have also won two Systemic Change Grants from the NSF. There are also many other kinds of programs at the UW that link research scientists with K-12 teachers. Neurobiologists teach hands-on summer institutes for high-school science teachers; oceanographers take middle-school teachers as research assistants on summer cruises; astronomers visit elementary classrooms and help children make sundials and simple telescopes; and graduate students in mathematics work with middle-school teachers to build new districtwide curricula. These programs are part of the UW's K-12 Institute for Science, Math, and Technology Education. The Institute serves two purposes: It acts as an information hub, giving both UW faculty and K-12 teachers a central directory of programs and resources; and it helps to create new partnerships among those who want to promote inquiry-based science and math programs in the schools.

-- Technology: The UW serves as the Northwest regional hub of the Internet and now Internet2 and has a top-ranked department of computer science and engineering. Meanwhile, the state's schools, like schools everywhere, are struggling to bring technology into the classroom. We all know the costs involved - equipment, training, maintenance. We also know the importance of the task. Access to information technology is now a major equity issue in educating our children for life in the next century.

Professor Ed Lazowska, the chair of our computer science and engineering department, believes that university computer scientists have a special responsibility to their communities in this age of galloping information technology. Ed's expertise, missionary zeal and access to industry resources were a key part of both statewide and Seattle efforts to wire the schools. He and his colleagues worked closely with state officials on Washington's K-20 Network. They also helped develop the blueprint and assemble the donated resources that allowed the Seattle district to get its network up and running.

Of course, the hardware and the connections are only the first step.

Teacher training, technical support, curriculum and overall leadership and planning are other crucial ingredients in making effective use of technology in the schools. The Smart Tools Academy was created last fall in collaboration with the Technology Alliance, a group of Seattle-area industry and civic leaders.

In a yearlong study of technology in the Washington state schools, the Alliance found that school and district leadership plays a crucial role in the development of good K-12 technology programs. The best programs exist where superintendents and principals are true believers and are knowledgeable about what technology can do.

Our new Smart Tools Academy is built on that finding. Over the next 12 months, the academy will offer all school leaders in the state of Washington - 2,300 people in all from public and private schools - an intensive, four-day residential-technology program, with hands-on training and a laptop computer to take home to their school or district. This summer, 900 principals and superintendents attended the academy. Funding is from the Gates Learning Foundation.

The idea is to ensure that all the state's educational leaders share a vision and an understanding of the ways that technology can support and improve student learning, so that every school in every district will give its students access to these critical resources.

-- The John Stanford International School: John Stanford had the original idea for a school reflecting this region's international perspective. He shared it with me at lunch one day and asked the UW to be involved. The Seattle district has now chosen a site, in an elementary school not far from the university, and has announced an opening date of September 2000.

The mission of the John Stanford International School will be to offer K-5 students an education shaped in all its dimensions by an international point of view and a strong emphasis on technology. Children will begin serious foreign-language study starting in Kindergarten and will also learn from the mix of cultures and languages in the school itself, which is meant to attract both immigrant children and "natives."

The UW's role in all this is manifold and exciting. UW people in a variety of fields will help design imaginative new curricula around the international focus. We will also connect the school to the super-fast Internet2, making it the first elementary school in the nation to be attached to an Internet2 Gigapop, the Northwest hub of the next-generation Internet. We will help the school develop international partner schools.

And we will be part of the team that extends the K-5 international curriculum up into the middle- and high-school levels throughout the Seattle School District. The John Stanford International School represents a new kind of partnership - a much closer working relationship - between the University of Washington and a particular elementary school. Since we are in the midst of efforts to enhance and extend international programs on our own campus, the timing is perfect.

-- UW Institute for K-12 Leadership: The critical role of strong principals and superintendents in building good schools and the lack of enough real training tracks for producing those strong leaders led educators in this state to ask us for help.

The institute will be a deliberate effort to develop and support K-12 leaders. It will offer training in the precise skills required for these positions and, as part of that training, a forum for actual or aspiring leaders to exchange ideas and build a supporting community. It will draw on the broadest possible range of resources and talents, from the UW and the K-12 system but also from business, government, and foundations.

We are now in the process of drawing up initial plans for the institute and hiring a national education leader to direct it. We expect to run our first summer session for principals and superintendents next July and August at the UW. From these beginnings, we hope eventually to make the institute not just a Northwest resource, but a national one.

-- A center for mind, brain and learning: This is really just a gleam in the eye of a few UW scientists and officials, community people and potential funders. The idea is to bridge the gap between neuroscientists and educators to produce the latest and best knowledge of how minds work and children learn.

It is now well known that early childhood is a crucial time for brain development and learning. Brain synapses established then are stimulated or lost forever. We want to combine the UW's core strengths in the neurosciences with a focus on early-childhood education.

The center would offer instructional programs rich in neurosciences to prospective teachers. They would earn a bachelor of science in education, combining standard education coursework with study in such areas as developmental neurobiology and cognitive neuroscience. This would create a cadre of teachers with enough knowledge to become research partners with neuroscientists.

The center would also offer graduate students in the neurological and biological sciences the opportunity to learn something about education. These science students would have a year in coursework design and would spend substantial time observing in the preschools and schools.

This would create a cadre of scientists with firsthand knowledge of the challenges and demands of pre-K and K-12 education. This center, of course, doesn't yet exist, and it may not come to fruition. But I think it's a wonderful idea, and if we don't do it, I hope somebody else out there will. It represents yet another model for harnessing high-powered university research to the needs of one of our society's truly crucial institutions - its public schools.

There are enormous rewards in this work. University faculty who work with good K-12 teachers gain a whole new perspective on the art of teaching - and tremendous respect and admiration for what these teachers do under often difficult circumstances. Our faculty also gain new insight into the students who will soon be in their own classrooms, particularly valuable as the demographic profile of these students is changing.

But the big reward, of course, is the feeling at all levels that the university is involved in society's important work.

The public schools have long been a cornerstone of our democracy. If they are to keep our children and our nation abreast of a changing and evolving world, schools must also evolve and change. Research universities have a role to play in this process.

Richard L. McCormick is president of the University of Washington.