What's Inside:

Front Page
— Education Now and In the Future: Conference offers solutions to educators' questions
Features
— Supporting High School Redesign
— Student 'Zine Describes Reform Efforts
— Video Features Tutoring Program
— Business and Philanthropy: Educating the Northwest and Beyond
— National Forum Focuses on Reform Efforts
— Online Survey Facilitates Change Process
— Providing Supplemental Services to Rural Schools

Conference News
— Conference Call

What's New on the Web
— www.nwrel.org

Flashback
— Pictures from past events

Credits
— Credits

Supporting High School Redesign

"All children in this country are born free, not wise. The purpose of education here is to make free children, wise." With those words, Ray McNulty, program director of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, urged on participants at the Practitioners' Forum on High School Redesign in Portland. About 128 educators, parents, and students from five western states attended the November conference, which was convened by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory for the Gates Foundation.

Gates has funneled more than $534 million into an initiative focused on transforming large American high schools into smaller learning communities. More than 1,553 schools and a half million students are involved in the effort so far. According to McNulty (pictured above), "This work is the beginning of the next great civil rights movement." He observed, "You can't preserve a democracy in a country that doesn't educate two-thirds of its children well."

The purpose of the two-day gathering was "for us to learn from you and for you to learn from each other," said Joan Shaughnessy, who is coordinating NWREL's work in smaller learning communities. (For more on NWREL's SLC work and resources, consult www.nwrel.org/ scpd/sslc/). In small-group sessions, conference participants discussed weighty topics like the challenge of autonomy, the speed of the change process, and how to collect meaningful data. They also were briefed on how to use the Gates Foundation Small Schools Toolkit, unveiled at the conference by its Stanford University developers. Access http://schoolredesign.net for more information about the toolkit.

Kenneth Jones of the Gates Foun-dation told the conference-goers that they have the most awesome task in the present-day history of secondary schools. "We're hoping this is not just a collection of random acts of brilliance," he said. "This is a movement of educators to change something that's been around for a long time and to create sustainability."

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