Design Assumption
When the New Designs project was started eight years ago at the National Center for Research in Vocational Education, a National Design Group was brought together to guide the effort. To give them some freedom in their thinking, we introduced a "design assumption" as an orientation. The assumption was a quotation from On Being a Teacher by Jonathan Kozol (Continuum, 1981):

Public schools did not exist forever, they did not come out of the forehead of a Greek or Roman God; they were contrived by ordinary men and women and for just this reason--they can be rebuilt or reconceived, dismantled, or replaced not by another set of gods but by plain men and women. You and I leave school as it is, can change it slightly or turn it inside out and upside down.

This statement gave permission to think about schools very differently.

Design as Learning
In the initial design process, the project staff and design group looked historically in the United States from the time high schools came into being to review the major changes, the reform initiatives, and what could be learned from these experiences so that we did not reinvent the past. We wanted to make sure that if we did recommend some concepts and ideas from the past, we were building on strengths and avoiding limitations. We also noted that the performance of high schools in terms of learning achievement in the United States is no longer being compared with schools in the next-door community. Schools are being compared internationally. With this in mind, we examined high school change initiatives in six other countries--Australia, France, Germany, Japan, Sweden, and Great Britain. We noted: What are the changes they are making? Why these changes? What problems are they encountering in their high schools? What could we learn from each country about designing future-oriented high schools in the United States?

In the end, we found that designing schools for the twenty-first century is a learning process in itself. Those responsible for the design of the school cannot simply look at the last new schools that were built in the area and hope to get by with minor modifications. We must go through a serious educative process to figure out new designs. The resources for the design process will include a review of the latest educational research and cutting-edge professional practice in schools throughout the world. The design process must be a learning process where the school staff and students, the community, and the designer staff work together to uncover and discover new ways to design a school's learning experiences and environment.

Design Goals
The project staff had several goals for the characteristics and features of the learning experience and school design when the project, New Designs for the Comprehensive High School, was initiated.

The first goal was that we wanted the design to represent the leading edge of a new breed of schools in a way that would create some new "space" in which to think about the operation of high schools. Our thinking was that perhaps high schools in the United States were as good as they could be given the current way that the schools were designed and operated. Consequently, there is a real need to think about design and operation in some very different ways if we are to improve effectiveness without increasing costs. We wanted to break through some of the traditional educational practices where they were standing in the way of school effectiveness and efficiency. The Carnegie unit as a framework for learning time, the department structure for organizing staff, and the nine-month school year all represent confinements of thinking about high school operation and supporting designs.

We have new high schools opening in the United States today that have academic and vocational building wings. At the same time, we are spending millions of dollars to integrate the curriculum, knowing that the split of academic and vocational curricula forces young people to make choices between these two areas when they need both for a bright future. We're opening schools in the United States today where if you are not a student, teacher, counselor, or administrator, there is no place for you to comfortably be in the school. At the same time we are introducing major new initiatives that call for closer collaboration and partnership with the community as being essential to improving school effectiveness. These are some of the current educational practices from which we need to break.

Second, more and more schools and states across the country are promising the idea of a common set of learner outcomes or expectations for all graduates. Conversations with school administrators and board members in these schools and states suggest they are getting very nervous about what it is going to take to deliver on these promises. These schools and states are guarantying a common set of expectations or results for all students. That's not what we have in high schools across the United States today. It is becoming more and more apparent that schools cannot deliver on this promise given the way high schools are currently organized and operated. Schools that are going to deliver on the promise of a common set of expectations for all students will very likely have to look different than the schools we have today. For example, these schools will need to believe that a student can learn the same thing in a variety of subject matter areas or in a variety of settings. If the student needs to learn problem solving, the school will recognize that it could be learned in an art class or a business class or a science class or a work setting. None of these subject matter areas or settings has "cornered the market" on teaching problem solving.

The third design goal was that learner expectations must be closely related to the challenges and opportunities in work, family, community, and personal life and the lifelong learning that each of these roles and responsibilities demands. So, rather than starting with a curriculum that is modeled on the university or based on the latest textbooks, we must begin to sort out the important challenges and opportunities that young people are facing, either now or in the future, in work, family, community, and personal settings, and then work backwards to see what curriculum context makes sense. That is a new way to approach curriculum design and not the typical way of planning the high school learning process. It will take some courage and plain hard work; but, if we want to reconnect school and life and the need for lifelong learning for young people, we will have to take this approach seriously.

Fourth, we felt the new high school needed to operate more as a learning community. When the project staff talked with students, staff, and other stakeholders in high schools across the United States, one of the major concerns they expressed was a need for their schools to have a greater sense of caring, of common and high expectations, of attachment and ownership. Those are characteristics that we can't command anybody, whether youth or adult, to provide. They are attributes derived from a feeling of being trusted and cared for in a reciprocal way among all those involved. And one of the places where this happens is where there is a strong sense of community. So we decided that somehow the sense of community, where students are both recipients and producers, must be strengthened in new school designs.

Fifth, the project staff and design group wanted a high school where there is a close alignment among the learner expectations, learning process, learning organization, and the learning environment. The importance of the idea of alignment or coherence within the school comes from the work on total quality management and continuous quality improvement. The assumption is that if we want quality, effectiveness, and efficiency, internal alignment and coherence of operation is needed. Aims and processes have to fit together. Many high schools, particularly large high schools, do not fit this pattern. Too often there are many things going on and they are going in several different directions; they do not form a consistent and coherent pattern. We recommended a design process that results in much more alignment and coherence in the operation of high schools that, in turn, results in increased quality and efficiency.

Sixth, the project staff and design group believed that the attention in a New Designs school had to be much more on learning (in contrast to teaching). Much of the current high school environment seems to be first a teaching environment. It is largely a classroom environment, set up for an adult with twenty to thirty young people; the teacher stays in the room and young people move around on a bell system. What would happen if you began to reverse these roles and make the learners the center of attention?

Seventh, we wanted the school to have a positive special character that gave focus, coherence, and spirit to learning. This concept draws on the school effectiveness literature and from the experience of private schools where one of the things that contributes to quality and high performance is a sense of specialness. Everybody in the school knows what that positive specialness is, from the janitor to the students, teachers, administrators, school board, and parents. It is a uniqueness that permeates all that goes on at the school. In the typical comprehensive high schools across the United States, it is very difficult to detect a positive specialness from one school to the next. About the only thing that distinguishes one school from the other is the name of the athletic team. We are suggesting that each community re-think what the specialness of its high school should be.

The last point in envisioning a new design for high schools was that we wanted a school that didn't cost any more to build or operate than an existing school. Given the resource constraints for education, we tried to keep the cost challenge before us throughout the design process.

In summary, the design process was developed to assist us in moving beyond the current barriers to school reforms and initiatives, and that represented a renaissance with respect to thinking about teaching and learning. We took an architectural perspective, being careful that we understood the learning attributes of the school before we thought about its physical environment. We used a "design-down" process to give the alignment and coherence we wanted, forcing us to ask the most important design questions first. The design incorporated a synthesis of research and best practice. It had a "stem to stern" orientation which moved beyond studies of single aspects of the high school, such as curriculum, organization, decision making, or technology, and put these all together in one system so that one aspect could be aligned with another. And last, we wanted the design process to model the process of involvement of students, teachers, administrators and community. This broad-based involvement is crucial because the resulting high schools would likely operate and appear very differently from the high schools of today. Without solid involvement it would be difficult to get the political support needed to implement new design models.