A multimillion dollar effort to fundamentally rebuild public education from the ground up is looking for an Uptown location for the launch of its first charter school in New Orleans, and plans a public meeting Thursday in Carrollton to discuss its plans.
Bricolage Academy “will deliberately preserve New Orleans’ diversity, culture and spirit of innovation” by emphasizing science and entrepreneurship to a group of students from families at all income levels, according to its website. When it opens with a pre-kindergarten and kindergarten in 2013, Bricolage will be the culmination of years of research into education reform in an innovation incubator called 4.0 Schools.
“The average life expectancy of a multinational corporation is between 40 and 50 years,” reads the 4.0 Schools website. “The design of our current education system dates back to the late 19th Century.”
With the premise that radical reform is needed, the 4.0 Schools team has been working since late 2010 to “rethink everything” and transform the future of schooling, in part by examining revolutions in other industries. While some of the 4.0 innovators are looking to develop new technologies to support schools, Uptown New Orleans resident Josh Densen is one of three who plan to found a new school in 2013 (the other two are in Memphis and Nashville).
Through by a million-dollar grant from the Walton Family Foundation, 4.0 Schools funded Densen’s research as he planned the concepts underlying Bricolage Academy — including a significant emphasis on listening sessions around New Orleans — and will next help him hire a leadership team and begin training educators for the school.
“The school’s focus is on preparing students for the world they will enter into as adults,” Densen explained in a recent email interview. “It’s nearly impossible to predict exactly what technical skills will be needed to succeed in the professional world in the mid-21st Century, but we can reasonably expect that all adults who live a life that impacts the human story will be inquisitive, creative, autonomous professionals who are able to empathize with, and work with, people who are not exactly like them. It’s those qualities that lead us to pursue science, entrepreneurship and an intentionally socio-economically diverse student population.”
That economic diversity is a core value of the school, Densen told Gambit in December in a broad article about the 4.0 Schools project, as he seeks to create a learning environment inclusive of all income levels that bridges the gap between New Orleans’ often rigid segregation between tuition-based private schools and impoverished public schools. At Bricolage, Densen may reserve large proportions of each class for different economic segments, to ensure a mixed-income population.
Densen’s hope, however, is that by giving geographic preference for half the class to students from a portion of Uptown that runs roughly from Napoleon Avenue through Audubon and the university area, Freret, Carrollton, Broadmoor and Hollygrove, a diverse group of families will be attracted, and no controls on admission will be needed. Densen also noted that there are a number of school buildings in the area that are soon to be vacated.
As Bricolage Academy takes shape, the listening process continues. Densen held a community engagement meeting last week in the Desire neighborhood, and will hold another at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at KIPP Believe at McNair Academy, 1607 S. Carrollton Avenue (at Birch Street).
This sounds promising!!
Well I particularly like the effort at inclusion of the neighborhood and a priority on diversity. Given the segregationist history of the Charter School movement, and the exclusive policies of at least one other uptown charter school I have been having my doubts.