Fountains of Reform

An unnerving degree of chance rules curriculum change in most of the 30,000 local school systems in the U.S. Lacking the financial and scholarly resources to rewrite courses, they have to take curriculums in packages from textbook publishers and teachers colleges. An energetic exception to this educational drift is suburban Cleveland, where 27 private, public and parochial school systems are partners in the Educational Research Council, a nonprofit laboratory for learning founded five years ago with backing from civic-minded Cleveland business leaders.

Its mission is "to help schools change --often radically--what they are doing," and it has become a fountain of reform for the whole U.S.

Crucial Transformation. The council's most famous innovation is a comprehensive new math curriculum for kindergarten through sixth grade that is being taught this fall to 5,000,000 students in 50 states. Its newest change is perhaps its most crucial: transforming social studies from a dull memorization of unrelated facts, which has long been the scandal of grade-school education, to a lively, integrated understanding of the economic, political and historical crosscurrents that comprise U.S. democracy.

The framework for the social-studies reform, as for the math program, was built by leading university scholars brought to Cleveland for lengthy planning. Then the council's own staff of 30 professionals, working closely with local teachers, devised and frequently revised the texts, teaching aids and teacher-training courses. Last week 18,000 third-and fourth-graders and 1,000 teachers began working with the new program, which eventually will reach all of the council's 250,000 students through the twelfth grade.

Dangerous Illusions. "I don't want to turn out a bunch of little cynics," says British-born Raymond English, 47, chief planner of the new social-studies course, "but contemporary children entering school have far greater knowledge of social problems than an educator of 30 years ago would have dreamed of. They are aware that their parents pay taxes for schools, police and garbage disposal. They hear about race riots and space flights. We must teach facts at the lower grades so that teachers in the upper grades won't have to spend time erasing an illusionary picture of the world."

Learning related facts, pupils are introduced to maps in kindergarten instead of waiting until the fourth grade to grasp what the whole earth looks like. They are told that Norseman Leif Ericson discovered the New World, not Columbus. For years, social-studies courses pounded away on the virtue of thrift, but the council program realistically recognizes that students know their own families rely heavily on credit, and teaches that both saving and spending have a place in the usual household economy.

In a synthesis of economics, geography, social anthropology and politics, third-graders study Cleveland as a shipping and commercial center, a melting pot of immigrants and native pioneers, and a city plagued by the problem of slum neighborhoods and urban renewal. Throughout, the aim is to encourage valid judgments and discourage rote recitations. "The youngster should be aware that he's in a society that has values, and that a careful choice of values is what determines a rational man," says English.

"The time is ripe not for tinkering, but for real reform," says the council's executive director, George H. Baird, 41. His goal is overhauling the curriculum from kindergarten through high school. When that task is done, the council expects to be able to send its high-school graduates to college knowing as much as the average present-day college sophomore or junior.

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