Classrooms With a View
Innovative school design is hard, but it doesn’t have to be.
By Ronald E. Bogle
Students work on a project at High Tech High near San DiegoWhen people talk about how hard it is to change our public schools, they’re usually referring to curriculum reform or employment contracts. But there’s another area where change is difficult: design. When a proposed school building doesn’t look exactly like what folks think a school should look like, officials freeze.
In part this is because they don’t know any better. It has nothing to do with intelligence or passion for education—it has to do with awareness. In the 1990s, I served on the Oklahoma City School Board and for several years was its president. After voters passed a historically large bond issue to support the renovation or new construction of every school building in the district—a windfall that in these tight times one can only look back on with wonder—I came up with many ideas, which in hindsight I now see were plenty flawed, about how we should approach design. Among my turkeys were moving a school from within its community to a field on the remote edge of the city and proposing a merger of elementary and middle schools into a K-8 that never got past parents’ fears of hulking teens overwhelming vulnerable kindergartners in the cafeteria.
I realize now that design could have solved both problems. In the first case, we should have simply renovated the building where it stood. In the second case, we could have designed a layout with methods to separate the big kids from the little. Looking back, I am a little horrified about how much I and other school leaders didn’t know. But there were few resources available to inform us. Too often, education leaders have not had much exposure to new ideas in design. The fallback position is to go with what you know. We knew practices were changing inside the classroom. It didn’t occur to us that those classrooms should change, too.
Creativity in the design process doesn’t automatically fit into the parameters many architects and contractors use for constructing schools. The traditional process focuses on management—schedule, budget, and efficiency—and leaves little room for creativity. This process doesn’t just undermine innovation; it can kill it. I’ve seen it happen.
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