Reflection on Microsoft's School of the Future

    The school of the future in West Philadelphia initially seems impractical due to the exuberant cost, but when scrutinized a little deeper we can establish a positive example.  This single school in the district is currently serving to model a package of technologies and methodologies pertaining to digital literacy, an increasingly required skill-set in our modern society.  The proliferation of computers, laptops, Internet, WIFI and all other highly marketable technologies has allowed our youths to evolve beyond traditional passive Audio Visual entertainment such as television and radio to highly interactive Audio Visual forms such as.  As our society digitally evolves even further, the need for digitally literate workforce will become increasingly prevalent.  The school of the future models the use of these interactive technologies to examine if they can be used as a primary tool to teach traditional content such as US History, Math and Science.  As students progress through the program their performance is monitored and analyzed to determine best practices and most importantly viability of the packaged technologies as legitimate teaching tools.  Program directors stress that this school uses technology to teach, not to teach technology.  Overall, this school serves as a fairly expensive case study for the Pennsylvania school district and their direct partner, the Microsoft Corporation ®.  As a case study, this school will provide invaluable information that can really lead to a school of the future.
    Unfortunately, in terms of the current state of national education, this school of the future is a failure.  Although it may seem exciting to the 200 or so students lucky to have been chosen to attend this school, they only represent less than a 1/10th of 1 Percent (0.01%) of the all the students in their school district.  This is a massive injustice in that the school district spent about $64 million to build a gleaming new facility for 0.01% of the student population.  Perhaps that money could have been spent to upgrade facilities in many other schools in the district so that the money could have made greater positive impacts to much more of the student population.  In addition, as a case study, the program evaluators have hypothesized that independent variable of the packaged technologies will positively effect student achievement.  Unfortunately, a critic brought up a solid point when she mentioned that students who feel important, whose self worth are elevated, may achieve regardless of the technology.  For example, the students of the school are walking into a brand new $64million learning facility instead of a broken down 30-year-old school.  Naturally, according to the critic, the student’s self worth is elevated and therefore is another variable that can effect achievement.  In addition, several of the students interviewed stated that their teachers and counselors encouraged them regularly and monitored their performance to help them achieve.  All that encouragement can also effect the positive achievement of the student.  In conclusion, although this school has great intentions to model a school of the future and serve as a basis for a case study, the unreasonable cost to student population benefit ratio and additional case study independent variables invalidates the effectiveness of this school as a reasonable model to serve for the entire school district.