Bill Gates' Guinea Pigs

Mountlake Terrace High School occupies a few dozen acres of that quasi-netherworld between Seattle and Everett. The entrance to the grounds of the school, which opened in 1991, winds through a massive parking lot, a testament to the auto-oriented nature of our late-20th-century suburbs. An architect's rendering of the school as seen from above hangs in the administration office. It sets out in gray tones a neat and rectilinear assembly of cubes, cylinders, and cones—an antiseptic structure that looks like it could just as well have functioned as a refrigerator factory. In virtually every way, Mountlake Terrace High is an average school in a standard suburb, with a typical enrollment—about 1,800 students. Average, too, have been the high dropout rate, mediocre test scores, and continuing evidence of student apathy.

The last five years, though, have been anything but average. Mountlake Terrace and its staff and students have been guinea pigs for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's Small Schools project. It is the first suburban high school in the nation to go through a wrenching top-to-bottom transformation process that has been hailed as both the salvation of our failing public education system and a crucial step on the road to sustained economic success for America. Success or failure at Mountlake Terrace will play a pivotal role in the future of this high-powered and monumental effort to reimagine a major social and educational institution: the American public high school.

The Gates Foundation has made a billion-dollar bet, plunking grant money down in front of school districts from Los Angeles, Calif., to Providence, R.I. One thousand six hundred schools are receiving grant money from the foundation, half of those about the size of Mountlake Terrace. All are chanting the Gates Foundation's mantra: Small is good. Bill Gates himself is also trying to herd the nation's governors into his transformation effort. Last February, he gave a scorching keynote speech on the failures of the nation's high schools at the National Governors' Conference in Atlanta, Ga. Saying that American high schools leave him "appalled," he pointed to a dire future. "When I compare our high schools to what I see when I'm traveling abroad, I am terrified for our workforce of tomorrow. In math and science, our fourth-graders are among the top students in the world. By eighth grade, they're in the middle of the pack. By 12th grade, U.S. students are scoring near the bottom of all industrialized nations." In essence, most of our public high schools are unmitigated disasters.

At the heart of the Gates Foundation's plan is research showing that smaller schools generally do a better job in student retention, graduation rates, and test scores. Students and teachers report that smaller schools improve relationships between teachers and their charges. Smaller schools reduce discipline issues.

A fundamental of the Gates plan is the wholesale creation of completely new, small high schools. These smaller schools, the thinking goes, will better prepare more students, especially low-income and minority students, for the post-high-school world. But that's the easy part. There are 20,000 large high schools in America with enrollments of more than 1,000 students. In essence, the Gates Foundation wants to stick a fork into most of them and carve each one into new bite-size schools of 400 to 600 students.

According to Tom Vander Ark, 46, head of the foundation's Small Schools effort for the past seven years, these smaller schools will "set high expectations for all students, acknowledge students learn in different ways, and engage them and give students the personalized support they need to succeed." Education in these schools will be revamped to focus on the new three R's—rigor, relevance, and relationships.

The Gates Foundation has set high expectations for itself, too. Creating thousands of small schools is only a means to an end.

Can the best and brightest really come up with a workable plan that fixes American high-school education? That's the foundation's challenge, and Mountlake Terrace is at the leading edge of the process. There is no guarantee of success there or nationwide. Student test results in "conversion" schools (large high schools divided into smaller schools) have yet to show dramatic changes, graduation rates remain flat, teachers are split about the effectiveness of the changes, and students are generally lukewarm. In addition, the Gates Foundation money isn't endless, and no one is sure what to do when the funds paying for school reinvention efforts run out.

And while it's still too early to come to any final conclusions, educators and the Gates Foundation are learning some critical lessons. Indications from the Mountlake Terrace experiment indicate that conversion efforts run the risk of driving a wedge between teachers, and raise questions about the role of outside foundations in shaping public education. Hubris on the part of the Gates Foundation and inertia on the part of school boards, teachers' unions, and administrators can compromise the effort. Indeed, a close look at the Mountlake Terrace experiment shows that dealing with reluctant taxpayers, turned-off teenagers, and testy teachers might prove to be a lot more difficult than outfoxing IBM or KO'ing Netscape.