Ten Schools and School Districts to Get Excited About

Calls for schools to "improve" are everywhere, but recently calls for schools to "transform" have proliferated, based on the idea that schools are not simply underperforming but outdated if not obsolete. Most prominently, scholars and authors such as Phillip Schlechty, Peter Senge, and Francis Duffy have targeted school and school system leaders with books calling for whole-system or systemic change to make schools compatible with other information-age social systems. Gradually, schools and school systems are undertaking the challenges necessary to create schools that reflect the modern needs. This article profiles ten such schools and school districts to get excited about now--in the information age. These include: (1) Garden City Community School--Garden City, Idaho; (2) Chesapeake Public Charter School--Lexington Park, Maryland; (3) New Technology High School--Napa, California; (4) Halau Lokahi Public Charter School--Honolulu; (5) Great Expectations School--Grand Marais, Minnesota; (6) Cyber High School--based in Fresno, California; (7) Charles Dickens School--Vancouver, British Columbia; (8) Decatur Central High School--Indianapolis; (9) Minneapolis Public High Schools--Minneapolis; and (10) Chugach School District--Alaska. These ten schools and school districts exhibit many of the information-age features one would expect to find based upon changes in society and in other social systems. (Contains 1 table and 14 notes.)