PHILADELPHIA — When the Microsoft-designed School of the Future opened, the facility was a paragon of contemporary architecture, with a green roof, light-filled corridors and the latest classroom technology, all housed in a dazzling white modern building. It might as well have been a fishbowl: Educators and media from around the world watched to see whether Microsoft could reform public education through innovation and technology. Although the school’s creative ambitions have been frustrated by high principal turnover, curriculum tensions and a student body unfamiliar with laptop computer culture, the school graduates its first senior class Tuesday with each student having been accepted to an institution of higher learning. “The first three years were definitely a challenge,” said Mary Cullinane, Microsoft’s liaison to the school. “They’re hitting they’re groove now. I’m excited to see what’s in store.” From the beginning, everything about the $63 million School of the Future was designed to be different. Built in the city’s rough Parkside section with district money, the school partnered with Microsoft on new approaches to curriculum, instruction and hiring. It attracted reform-minded teachers and students bent on avoiding traditional high schools. INFLUENCE: Bill Gates pushes education reform The vision was for a paperless, textbook-less school that embodied the motto “Continuous, Relevant, Adaptive.” Each student would get a take-home laptop on which to keep notes, do homework and take tests. But learners are chosen by a lottery of public school students. Most are low-income and without home computers, yet they are expected to manage their high school careers on a laptop. “I felt kind of awkward,” said senior Kenneth Bolds, 17. “I was used to using books and pencils for eight years.” Educators also assumed learners would enter the school performing at grade level, but half the students in the academically troubled district are not proficient at reading or math. The school’s first set of standardized test scores last year were dismal. Only 7.5% of 11th graders scored proficient or higher in math; 23.4% scored proficient or higher in reading. Cullinane notes that the school can’t control students’ education before ninth grade, but said test scores don’t tell the whole story. “It is a long-term journey and we have to get away from short-term yardsticks,” she said. The project-based curriculum also caused problems because it did not translate to district benchmarks. Its interdisciplinary nature made it hard to tell what material had been taught, said Nancy Hopkins-Evans, special assistant to the district’s chief academic officer. “Our issue was that you had content and standards that you absolutely needed to cover,” Hopkins-Evans said. Report cards, too, were incompatible with the district’s needs. The narrative assessments rated students from “Advanced” to “Not on the Radar” instead of giving letter grades. And the idea to replicate a professional work day by using a 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. schedule had to be altered; some students needed the traditional school day. All the while, there were tours, tours, tours. More than 3,000 people from 50 countries have visited the school, said Cullinane, worldwide director of innovation for Microsoft Education. Senior Mahcaiyah Wearing-Gooden, 18, said she led countless tours as a freshman, showing off computerized blackboards (“smart boards”) and digital lockers that popped open by waving an ID card. “It was a lot to process at the time,” she said. Principal Rosalind Chivis — the school’s fourth — described the building’s journey as “trying to build a plane while flying it.” Yet now, she said, a revamped curriculum, steady leadership and better use of resources and scheduling has yielded the “first full year of uninterrupted education.” Teacher Aruna Arjunan said part of the school’s strength lies in offering a combination of academic, technical and real-world skills. Students’ familiarity with Microsoft programs make them employable straight out of high school, she said. They are also evaluated on “competencies” that Seattle-based Microsoft uses with its own employees, such as dealing with ambiguity and thinking on the fly. “There are kids in this building who would have flunked out of other high schools,” Arjunan said. “I just think the culture here is unlike any other.” All 117 seniors were accepted to post-secondary programs, from community colleges to selective schools like Villanova University ; however, 11 of them must attend summer school to graduate. Some students, like Wearing-Gooden, weren’t even considering college as freshmen. But this fall, Wearing-Gooden will be studying climatology on a scholarship at Green Mountain College in Vermont. She said she realized her potential at the School of the Future, which offered individual attention, a supportive atmosphere and a familial dynamic. The hectic first years also taught Wearing-Gooden a valuable life lesson. “It showed me that the world is not as stable as we want it to be,” she said. “Now I’m ready for anything.” Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

NEW HAVEN, Connecticut (AP) — Former President Bill Clinton told Yale seniors on Sunday to listen to people with whom they disagree. In a Class Day speech that included points similar to a commencement address he gave a week ago in West Virginia, the Yale Law School alum said today’s college graduates will be left to deal with a world that has three major problems. “It is too unstable; it is too unequal, and it is completely unsustainable,” Clinton said. He urged them to change that, and said that will mean working together. “One problem we have in the modern world is, we’ve got access to more information than ever before, but we don’t all listen to the same information,” he said. A tidbit of information Clinton didn’t give the Yale seniors was that he was involved in a minor traffic accident on the way to the event. State police Lt. J. Paul Vance said Clinton’s secret service van was in a minor accident just north of New Haven on the Merritt Parkway when it was hit from behind. “There was no injury, no endangerment to Clinton,” Vance said. “The motorcade continued on to its destination, and we’re piecing it all together.” Clinton told WTIC-TV that the accident was a fluke. “It was one of those deals where everybody in the passing lane slowed down, and we all slowed down, and one person didn’t,” he said. “It happened to be the person behind us.” During his speech, Clinton told Yale seniors that while the country is less sexist, racist and homophobic than it once was, people today only want to be around those who agree with them. “In our media habits, we go to the television sites, we go to the radio talk shows, we go to the blog sites that agree with us, and it can have very bizarre consequences” he said, citing the controversy over the origin of President Obama’s birth certificate by “birthers” who claim Obama was not a natural-born U.S. citizen, and thus unqualified to hold the presidency. He also warned that as information becomes more available, so does the potential for its misuse. He noted that Faisal Shahzad, the man accused of attempting to bomb Times Square, received a college degree in the United States before flying back to Pakistan to train as a terrorist. “It shows you that when you tear down all the walls, and you can break through all the barriers of information, that the same things that empower you to get access to more information more quickly than ever before could empower you to build bombs,” he said. “It’s an unstable world.” Clinton said he believes the mission of every empowered person in the world should be to increase the positive forces and decrease the negative forces of the world’s interdependence. “We have to be relentlessly committed to change,” he said. “And change is hard.” Clinton’s wife, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was Class Day speaker in 2001, and received an honorary degree last year. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

WASHINGTON (AP) — First lady Michelle Obama challenged George Washington University graduates at their commencement Sunday to “keep giving” through community service work and to “keep engaging” with the world. Obama spoke to some 5,000 graduates and their families at the ceremony on the National Mall . She agreed to be their speaker after students, faculty and staff met her challenge to complete 100,000 hours of community service. “I have one more request to make of you, one more challenge,” Obama said during her speech. “Keep going. Keep giving. Keep engaging.” Graduates in black robes cheered as Obama spoke with the Capitol behind her. The university said that 163,000 hours had actually been worked. Obama noted many of the accomplishments: improving a Washington school, visiting with veterans, teaching English to refugees and shoveling snow during a record winter snow storm. But she urged students to continue the work, both in the United States and abroad. She said serving would make “the world safer” and make the students “more competitive.” “So many of today’s challenges are borderless — from the economy to terrorism, to climate change … more than any other generation yours is fully convinced that you’re uniquely equipped to solve those challenges,” said Obama, who spoke for about 30 minutes. She expressed confidence in the graduates. “You guys can’t be stopped. You don’t know the meaning of the word can’t. And every time someone’s tried to tell you that you’ve replied what? Oh yes, we can,” Obama said, a refrain President Obama used during his campaign. Obama said that at her husband’s inauguration, “he pledged to seek a new era of American engagement, and he asked each of us to embrace anew our duties to ourselves, our nation and the world.” “Now I’m not a president. I’m just a citizen. But as a citizen I’m asking you as graduates of this global institution to seize those responsibilities gladly,” she said. “I’m asking you to play your part.” Graduates said the first lady’s words moved them and had motivated them during the year. Gilbert Rein, 21, a graduate from Marlboro, New Jersey, said he had always done volunteer work with his fraternity, but the first lady’s challenge pushed them to do more. “This year we went above and beyond,” he said. Rein, who is going to law school, said he plans to do pro bono work to continue to give back. Saturday’s speech was not the only commencement address the first lady has given this year. Earlier this month she spoke at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, a historically black college. Obama, who graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law School, will also speak next month at the graduation of Anacostia Senior High School in Washington, a public school she visited last year as part of her mentoring program for young women. During the ceremony, George Washington University president Steven Knapp presented Obama with an honorary Doctor of Public Service degree. Pianist and composer Dave Brubeck and entrepreneur A. James Clark also received honorary degrees at the commencement. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

WASHINGTON (AP) — First lady Michelle Obama challenged George Washington University graduates at their commencement Sunday to “keep giving” through community service work and to “keep engaging” with the world. Obama spoke to some 5,000 graduates and their families at the ceremony on the National Mall . She agreed to be their speaker after students, faculty and staff met her challenge to complete 100,000 hours of community service. “I have one more request to make of you, one more challenge,” Obama said during her speech. “Keep going. Keep giving. Keep engaging.” Graduates in black robes cheered as Obama spoke with the Capitol behind her. The university said that 163,000 hours had actually been worked. Obama noted many of the accomplishments: improving a Washington school, visiting with veterans, teaching English to refugees and shoveling snow during a record winter snow storm. But she urged students to continue the work, both in the United States and abroad. She said serving would make “the world safer” and make the students “more competitive.” “So many of today’s challenges are borderless — from the economy to terrorism, to climate change … more than any other generation yours is fully convinced that you’re uniquely equipped to solve those challenges,” said Obama, who spoke for about 30 minutes. She expressed confidence in the graduates. “You guys can’t be stopped. You don’t know the meaning of the word can’t. And every time someone’s tried to tell you that you’ve replied what? Oh yes, we can,” Obama said, a refrain President Obama used during his campaign. Obama said that at her husband’s inauguration, “he pledged to seek a new era of American engagement, and he asked each of us to embrace anew our duties to ourselves, our nation and the world.” “Now I’m not a president. I’m just a citizen. But as a citizen I’m asking you as graduates of this global institution to seize those responsibilities gladly,” she said. “I’m asking you to play your part.” Graduates said the first lady’s words moved them and had motivated them during the year. Gilbert Rein, 21, a graduate from Marlboro, New Jersey, said he had always done volunteer work with his fraternity, but the first lady’s challenge pushed them to do more. “This year we went above and beyond,” he said. Rein, who is going to law school, said he plans to do pro bono work to continue to give back. Saturday’s speech was not the only commencement address the first lady has given this year. Earlier this month she spoke at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, a historically black college. Obama, who graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law School, will also speak next month at the graduation of Anacostia Senior High School in Washington, a public school she visited last year as part of her mentoring program for young women. During the ceremony, George Washington University president Steven Knapp presented Obama with an honorary Doctor of Public Service degree. Pianist and composer Dave Brubeck and entrepreneur A. James Clark also received honorary degrees at the commencement. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

A few years ago, any discussion of the master’s in business administration would begin with discussions of scandal and mismanagement. Look at instances of accounting fraud at Enron and WorldCom : MBAs behaving badly. A president of the United States with mixed approval ratings and plenty of opponents in his own party: an MBA whose leadership skills seemed lacking. Business school discourse today has a new set of topical lessons, emphasizing the roles played by MBAs in precipitating the global recession and creating financial products that benefited corporations but hurt consumers. “When we bring students into business school, we narrow their vision,” says Stephen Spinelli, president of Philadelphia University and co-founder of the Jiffy Lube auto service company. “We teach them to focus with increasing blinders until they have pinpoint recognition, but that limits what they can see on the periphery.” A much-maligned concept like mortgage-backed securities, he says, “in its construct … could be taken as being sound — a hard asset that has clear value.” With broader perspective, they’re tougher to define and much riskier than they might seem. “You become dislocated from the person and their ability to pay that loan, the value of the property, what’s happening in the neighborhood around that property and what’s happening with the job market in that city and region.” The financial crisis has administrators and faculty at business schools around the country rethinking that narrowing approach. Courses and curriculums are being revised to avoid building silos in business schools and students’ minds. Words — and ideas — like globalization, innovation and sustainability are taking hold. Though he first started thinking about broadening students’ perspectives a decade ago while serving as vice provost at Babson College , Spinelli says that his ideas solidified as he watched investment banks crumble and ordinary people face foreclosure. “If we don’t teach people to sort of look around and have greater peripheral vision, then we’ve just set ourselves up for the next crisis,” he says. In the fall of 2011, Philadelphia will roll out a revamped MBA program that will emphasize collaboration with the university’s engineering and design schools. Business students will work on hands-on projects with students in other fields, all with the aim of preparing them to collaborate once on the job. “We used to think it was highly collaborative when marketing and finance were working together,” Spinelli says. “Now we see that partnerships need to be much broader; three-dimensional collaboration needs to be taught.” Yash Gupta, dean of the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, has a similar perspective. “What has happened in the last 18 months has shown that you cannot manage a complex system by dividing it into smaller pieces and optimizing those pieces without considering the whole,” he says. “You cannot build an organization by simply maximizing shareholders’ value. Customers, employees, the general public are important.” BEFORE COLLEGE: In-school banks dispense financial sense In building a curriculum at Carey, which spun off from Hopkins’ School of Professional Studies in Business and Education in 2007, Gupta looked to industry for recommendations. Among the abilities and skills companies said they wanted from their employees: adapting to change and being flexible; critical thinking; a broad worldview; connecting invention with innovation; and linking content to context. All of those things, Gupta says, will be interspersed throughout the global MBA program that Carey is beginning this fall. Rather than simply having one class on ethics or decision making as some other schools do, the curriculum will include those skills throughout. “We’ll teach students about decision making — behavioral, rational, how the brain functions — in the first year, but we’ll also give them chances to make decisions,” he says. “We’ll bring in CEOs or prominent academics to talk about ethics and ethical concepts, how managers sort things out and decide which decision is the right decision.” Carey will treat globalization similarly. Rather than taking a few classes on international business or an optional specialization, all students will work on projects in the developing world and spend time learning to work with people from different backgrounds. The school is taking the right approach, says John J. Fernandes, president and CEO of the AACSB: Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, the world’s largest business school accreditor. “You can’t look at things as compartmentalized,” he says; everything needs to be interconnected, and everything must be contextualized to everything else. “After Enron and WorldCom, everyone said, ‘Let’s teach ethics,’ but they did it in the corner as this separate discussion,” Fernandes says. “But it is best taught across every business discipline because they all have different ethics challenges.… It’s best taught across everything we do.” At Harvard Business School , where administrators insist that ethics has always been incorporated throughout the MBA curriculum, it became clear that there was a need for students to get a solid dose of ethics. In 2004, the school began requiring all students to take “Leadership and Corporate Accountability” during the second term of their first year. David A. Garvin, a professor of business administration, describes the course as “a way to give students a sense of the responsibilities that they will have to all these different stakeholder groups.” With shareholders, they’ll have to worry about fiduciary responsibilities. With customers, “information asymmetries” (as Garvin explains it, “Under what circumstances do you need to disclose?”). With employees, students will be educated about treating them fairly. With the public at large, MBAs’ responsibilities may be even greater — to deal with issues like child labor and freedom of speech. Though these were all pre-financial crisis concerns, the high-profile ethical lapses that helped precipitate the downturn have only intensified the sense that MBA programs need to do more to create ethical graduates. Students in Harvard Business School’s class of 2009 drafted and spread “The MBA Oath,” a brief code of ethics that has been signed by more than 2,500 MBAs and business students. In conducting research for Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads , a book published last month, Garvin says he heard from executives and deans who, after well-publicized accounts of unfair business practices and gigantic post-bailout bonuses, hoped to see ethics education ramped up. “There was a sense of a greater need in helping students understand the roles, responsibilities and purpose of business and business leaders.” ON THE WEB: The B-school glass ceiling INSIDE HIGHER ED ARCHIVE: De-departmentalizing biz school Executives and deans also told Garvin that they saw a need for students to better understand “the limits of models and markets — risk, restraint and regulation,” he says. Before the economic crisis, they came up with an even lengthier list of near-universal needs: 1. Having a global perspective. 2. Developing leadership skills. 3. Improving integration skills. 4. Understanding organizational realities and implementing them more effectively. 5. The ability to act creatively and innovatively. 6. Thinking critically and communicating clearly. None of the needs are too surprising, but they are tough things to teach that business schools must continue working on. Creativity and innovation are at the core of a new report from the AACSB, in which a task force of deans, university presidents and business leaders calls on business schools to play a larger role in innovation. Although business schools are “built to go in a lot of different directions, and we as an accrediting body don’t try to push them one way or the other,” says Fernandes, the association’s president, innovation is something administrators and faculty should be thinking about. “If the light’s not already turned on, it turns that light on for them, that they should apply an innovative intention to their strategies.” Business schools don’t have to be hotbeds of invention, just places where students and faculty develop better processes and products. Robert S. Sullivan, dean of the Rady School of Management at the University of California at San Diego, points to Apple ‘s creation of devices like the iPad as the sort of thing business schools ought to be training students to do. “The technology in the iPad is not a new invention,” he says, “but Apple looked around the corner in terms of figuring out what people want without necessarily asking them.” And the products that business schools must train students to develop aren’t just glitzy gadgets or risky financial instruments; they’re things that will benefit humanity — business schools hope. “If the world has shrunk, then business schools must solve the world’s problems,” says Gupta, of the Carey School. People who face challenges of “poverty, education, health: these are going to be my customers and employees tomorrow, so business schools must help them, too.”