Can I Copy Your Homework -- and Represent You in Court?

By Kevin Fedarko

THE THREE STUDENTS WHO STOLE A suitcase filled with cash from Sarah Edwards' classroom closet were pretty sure they had pulled a fast one. Granted, the cash was fake, but Edwards and her pupils had been using the money to learn some basic lessons in economics. Now, instead of studying supply and demand, the class was busy congratulating the thieves on their daring raid. Edwards' response? She held an auction -- only ersatz dollars allowed. The students' admiration swiftly evaporated as boxes of candy and toys went on the block and the pirates began buying up everything in sight. More effective than any punishment Edwards could have imposed, the furious debate that ensued on ethics and hyperinflation virtually put an end to theft for the remainder of the summer.

It's strange way to teach, but then this is a strange school. Imagine a place where children learn math by holding jobs, paying taxes and owning * businesses that sell everything from pompom pencils to potpourri pillows. A place where students study logic and law by taking their peers to court and fining them in the school's own currency. A place where kids come to understand politics by drawing up their own constitution, drafting laws and deciding which days of the week baseball caps may be worn to class. Imagine, in short, a school where civics is not just a course but a continuous experience in playing with the building blocks of modern society.

In five American elementary schools -- two in Massachusetts and three in New York -- such experiments already exist. Called "Microsociety," these programs bear as much resemblance to the standard neighborhood school -- with its traditional textbooks, work sheets and lesson plans -- as fiber-optic communication does to sending smoke signals. At a time when reformers, corporate leaders and politicians are all heralding the need for "break the mold" schools, Microsociety puts the radical rhetoric to the test.

Microsociety is the dream child of George Richmond, a painter, teacher, author and acclaimed educator who was raised in the tenements of Manhattan's Lower East Side. His first job, at a Brooklyn elementary school in 1967, was a rookie teacher's nightmare. Richmond's fifth-graders skipped class, scorned homework and slept through lectures, their apathy and cynicism surpassed only by their appetite for petty classroom warfare. In the end, the young idealist from Yale threw up his hands at a system in which teachers who pretended to teach and students who pretended to learn did very little of either. From that frustration was born his thesis: if discipline, willpower and the force of reason couldn't hook students, maybe freedom and responsibility would.

Grades were a basic dilemma. Nowhere else, Richmond realized, were people expected to work without compensation. An A-plus could not be saved, or invested, or traded for something of value. That was how a teacher with a deep belief in the value of learning for its own sake began paying his students -- in fake money -- for completed assignments, good marks and perfect attendance. Students then used their "cash" to play a new game, a sort of life-size, walking version of Monopoly in which they bought, sold and mortgaged various "properties" around the classroom.

Some used their profits to start up other ventures: a postal system, a comic book, a loan agency. Disputes eventually led to the creation of laws, police, courts and a constitutional convention (democracy triumphed over a police state by a single vote). As they began to discover the relevance of reading and arithmetic through managing their miniature society, Richmond's students also discovered in themselves an enthusiasm for education -- and a hunger for more.

Richmond wrote a book about his experience and eventually helped launch the first school based entirely on his Microsociety model. After much sniffing and sneering from the local newspaper, which dismissed the idea as "futuristic," "dubious" and "a gimmick," City Magnet School opened in 1981 in a empty library in Lowell, Massachusetts. By 1987 the school's students were testing two years above the national norm in both reading and math. Then in 1990, 13 eighth-graders passed first-year college-level exams, again in reading and math. School attendance hovers around 96%, and during the past six years only five children have dropped out. Those numbers were impressive enough to inspire the New York school districts of Yonkers and Newburgh and the Massachusetts district of Pepperell to create their own versions of Microsociety, and two weeks ago the doors of Manhattan's first Micro school opened -- just 10 blocks from the slums where Richmond grew up.

Even more compelling than test scores are the changes that cannot be quantified. In 1981 Lowell's school system was so racially segregated that a federal judge ordered the city to correct the imbalance. When C.M.S. first opened, the student body was mostly black; this September more than half the students are from white and Hispanic families who requested to take part in the program. Until the practice was dropped several years ago, parents used to register their children for C.M.S. in the hospital the day they were born. A mother of six, Margaret Pollard sent her three youngest children there, and marvels at the difference it made. Compared with the older children from more traditional schools, says Pollard, who now works as a secretary at C.M.S., her young ones "are more open, more apt to take chances and much more comfortable with stating opinions than the older ones." It leaves a lasting impression on a child, says Lowell curriculum coordinator Tom Malone, to be able to make an impression on their surroundings: "Because they are empowered to create their own society, they see themselves as capable people."

Under the Microsociety model, the school day is split in two. The morning is / devoted to traditional classes in history, science, English, math. In the afternoon students put the lessons to work. They memorize multiplication tables not only to score well on problem sets but also so they can keep double-entry books, write checks, bill customers and complete financial audits. Says Gladys Pack, Yonkers' assistant superintendent: "We're making learning real because kids in Micro believe they're living in a real world."

Skeptics have been worried that the Microsociety's heavy emphasis on grownup concerns like money, taxes and employment might shunt children onto a fast track to adulthood. Teachers rebut such claims by pointing out that the program taps one of childhood's most salient pleasures, the impulse to play, and harnesses it in the service of absorbing knowledge. "Think about what we usually tell kids when they come into school," says Fred Hernandez, principal at Yonkers. " 'Sit down. Shut up. Get in line.' That's counterproductive, because kids love to play. What Micro does is get them to role-play life."

Still, the question remains: If children are invited to run banks and businesses, won't this turn them into pint-size plutocrats, long on avarice and short on scruples? The irony is that for all the emphasis on economics, the Microsociety schools seem to serve best as living experiments in applied moral development. Consider the check-kiting caper that broke at Lowell after one boy outbid dozens of his students at a Christmas auction and bought up a sackful of toys by writing bad checks. His outraged peers took the boy to court, where the district attorney convicted him but was unable to recover any of the items (everything had been given away as presents to a string of girlfriends). As punishment, the school court decided to confiscate the student's paychecks and ordered him to perform community service for the remainder of the year.

The success of the program of the world, have expressed interest. Japanese educators have toured Lowell, and principal funding for planning behind the Manhattan Micro school comes from Tokyo's Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank, which donated $100,000.

While it may be exciting to contemplate what this could hold for the rest of the world, Micro seems to offer the most at home: a chance to customize schools to reflect American culture -- flexible, grass-heterogeneous, self- designed. Such an approach would go a long way toward making U.S. public schools a cradle of national renewal. Microsociety schools won't do this all by themselves, of course, but they have demonstrated the potential to accelerate learning, provide ladders of economic opportunity and give children a sense of how their society works. And for a nation whose dreams seem increasingly beyond the reach of its young, that seems a prospect worth cultivating.