Things move quickly at TPM Cafe.  A day or so I was reading a blog entry by cmaukonen entitled Some "Stringy" Money for Education.  As often happens, the post entered my subconscious and percolated there a  bit, until it bubbled up as the seed of a very preliminary idea I'd like to share with anyone interested.  Among other things "C" says:

Testing is not the solution, it's part of the problem. All we are generating is a bunch of brain dead, test passing zombies. Kids today are not unintelligent, they're bored out of the minds by the drivel they are forced to memorize. What is needed is an atmosphere that encourages expression and creativity.

I have to agree with this.  The students I get now have been laboring under "no child left behind" for most of their schooling.  They come to school with mistaken ideas of what kinds of performance are rewarded:  they memorize well, but they neither write nor synthesize well.

But I think what really got my attention was the focus on atmosphere, which got my consciousness streaming--that and two images:  kids sitting on school busses in the dark at 6:30 in the morning, and, in July, a  multi-acre field not far from my house in which hundreds of black and yellow busses sit fading in the  sun.   I  don't live on the lone prairie.  I live in the most densely populated state in the country (also  the  smallest).  So why are so  many kids being bussed hither and  yon...:  Not for diversity's  sake,  but for  the sake  of an education model based on large consolidated schools. 

There may have been some economies of scale when these educational behemoths were first built.  When I was a youngster (my 50th high school reunion comes up next year, so you can tell that was a long time ago) my schools were urban,  but relatively  small.  I gather my grade  school had a population of  perhaps 350 (two classes per grade,  k-6).  My graduating  class in High School had 108 students in it. The total population hovered around 600  or  so.  1941 was the  year of  the '"baby bust".

Nowadays it isn't unusual for high schools to have populations in the multi-thousands...and while most grade schools are smaller, they are still too large  allow their populations to foot it to class as I did. 

So my idea is this.  Why not have one of  those "think tanks" run the numbers on  the cost of a system of decentralized, compact, schools to which the vast majority of students walk?  How much would we save by eliminating large portions of the school bus fleet.  How  much  would the carbon footprint be reduced?   If a student spends as much as an  hour on the school bus he/she could walk the equivalent of four miles.  How much would that  reduce childhood obesity? How much economic stimulus would be provided by constructing modestly-sized, well equipped schools.  How much  by creating the infrastructure to serve them (those things called sidewalks...F.D.R.'s W.P.A. built a lot of them)?

Hold teachers accountable by letting them administer themselves.  Give them low maintenance, high tech buildings, and design  those buildings to be flexible so they can adapt to new uses as the neighborhood demographics change.  Make the buildings visually interesting and good neighbors in  their context. My suspicion is that such  a system  would be cheaper, more manageable, less dangerous, and more able to provide foci for  real communities.  Cheers shouldn't be the only place where everybody knows  your  name.

I'm a historian, not an architect, and my knowlege is more  of  historic school buildings than of contemporary  ones.  I haven't quite figured how to add photographs yet, but American Memory has many iconic school images in  the Historic American Buildings Survey area.  Browse awhile and see if any of them tickles your fancy.  If you're more futurist than you are "retro" then consider them as examples of volume only, and redesign them to your heart's desire.