$100M from Laurene Powell Jobs to remake schools for high tech age

WASHINGTON — Teachers at Washington Leadership Academy, one of the city’s newest charter high schools, long ago decided all students would learn chemistry. But they couldn’t afford a fully outfitted chemistry lab, let alone the services of a qualified teacher.

So they’re hiring developers to build a scientifically accurate, virtual-reality chemistry lab that someday, they hope, other schools can log on to — for free. They’ll develop it, test it out and then give it away.

“There are a million kids in the country who don’t have access to high-level chemistry,” said Seth Andrew, one of the school’s founders. “And I don’t mean good teachers — I mean any chemistry at all.”

The project is one of a handful being underwritten by an audacious new philanthropic effort led by Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Her so-called XQ: The Super School Project is placing $10 million bets on 10 high schools over the next five years that she and others hope will spark experimentation nationwide.

Powell Jobs will be in Washington on Wednesday evening to unveil the 10 lucky schools funded through her charity, The Emerson Collective.

At first glance, the 10 schools seem to be dreaming big. They include a Michigan school partnering with the Grand Rapids Public Museum and Ferris State University’s the Kendall College of Art and Design, among others. Another, in coastal Louisiana, will hold class on a barge to create “floating classrooms and labs.”

In many ways the new effort seeks to fund experiments that will overturn one of the most basic paradigms of high school, which holds that classroom seat time should be constant while everything else — including achievement — falls into place around it, said Russlynn Ali, Emerson’s managing director.

For more than a century, schools have dictated that “time is fixed and standards are the variable. So in the end, unfortunately, based on how much money our parents make, the color of our skin, the language spoken at home, what we learn is different," said Ali, who is also a longtime education advocate and attorney who served as assistant secretary for civil rights in the Obama administration's Education Department.

In an interview with USA TODAY, Powell Jobs said she was “humbled” by the response to the competition, which received about 700 applications. She and others spent a year working with 348 teams in 98 districts nationwide, many of which will push to complete their work even without XQ’s funding, she and others said.

Powell Jobs said she hopes the 10 schools, as well as others that XQ plans to honor Wednesday, will serve as new models for next-generation U.S. high schools. “There’s enormous capacity for creativity within districts,” she said.

Almost exactly a year ago, XQ went looking for "audacious, unconventional, unconstrained ideas to reinvent the American high school," with plans to fund five schools.

“We were trying something new, and when you try something new you don’t know where it’s going to lead and how it’s going to unfold,” Powell Jobs said. “We didn’t know how many communities would come together in the way that they ended up coming together.”

They soon realized that five wasn’t enough, so they doubled the number of awardees to match the response. Ali said that even at 10 schools, XQ is tapping “a fraction of the amazing ideas cultivated already by these many teams.”

The American high school could surely use a makeover. According to recent federal statistics, while U.S. high school graduation rates hit an all-time high in 2014 at 82.3%, the gap between African-American and white students remains stubbornly high at nearly 15 percentage points.

While 87.2% of white students graduate on time, only 72.5% of black students do the same. Among students for whom English is not their first language, the rate is even lower, at 62.6%.

Other research has shown that even students who graduate face tough odds in college. Columbia University researchers recently found that more than one in three new community college students are forced to take remedial coursework just to get to college-level work.

Ali said she hopes the project will flip the classroom equation, making time the variable and achievement fixed, thereby allowing more students to succeed.

“What they need to know and be able to do will become what is non-negotiable. The time that it takes to get there, that is what is flexible.”

Follow Greg Toppo on Twitter: @gtoppo