Trumped-Up School

The most drastic of the many plans for revamping U.S. high schools is that of the Trump Commission, a group of Young Turk schoolmasters financed by the Ford Foundation and headed by J. Lloyd Trump, Associate Secretary of the National Association of Secondary-School Principals. Trump argues that "lockstep" classrooms--30 or so children in one room no matter what the subject--stifle the spirit of inquiry and waste teacher resources.

Schools can be redesigned, he says, so that children are stimulated to teach themselves.

The "Trump Plan" envisions students spending roughly equal thirds of their time in large classes where they listen to lectures, small seminars where they freely exchange ideas in bull-session fashion, and study rooms equipped to let them follow the dictates of curiosity. Parts of the plan are being tried this year in more than 1,000 schools, but only one school so far is fully Trumped-up. It is Ridgewood High School in Norridge, Ill., which opened last year, and by last week could hardly keep up with admiring visitors from all over the world.

Though near Chicago, Norridge (pop. 15,000) is not a rich suburb. Instead it is a middle-income town that three years ago, as a result of growth, decided to build its first high school. It hired Eugene R. Howard, 37, who had studied under Trump at the University of Illinois, to be superintendent, and set him free to build the school. Howard supervised the construction of the $2,000,000 school as though Trump were looking over his shoulder. Main features:

sb Lecture halls that hold about 125 students each, with movie screens, microphones, tape recorders and closed-circuit TV outlets.

sb Discussion rooms that hold about 15 students and one teacher, seated around a big table.

sb Fourteen study areas, each equipped for one subject, such as a foreign language, with individual study booths and teaching machines for self-testing.

To spur the spirit of individual learning, Ridgewood's 700 students move progressively each day through these areas. A cycle may start in a large room, supervised by at least two teachers, where fundamental ideas are introduced. Then comes discussion of the ideas in a seminar, conducted almost entirely by an elected student chairman, with a teacher sitting in for deft guidance and summation. After that the student moves to individual projects in one of the study areas. Superintendent Howard describes the process as one "in which the students keep a series of appointments."

One result is that students really study. The atmosphere is almost eerily quiet (there are no bells). Talk in the seminars is orderly and interesting. At one seminar, 15 sophomores taking a course got down to their discussion well before a teacher even arrived in the room. In a science resource lab, two students seated themselves before a teaching machine. Each had earphones on his head and was tuned in on a tape prepared by a biology teacher on chromosomes. The material they were hearing supplemented their required studies. As they listened, slides were flashed before them on a screen.

Students like the plan; they have little compulsory homework, find themselves stimulated by teachers and machines. Teachers like it; they have more time to prepare lessons, and, since they frequently teach in teams, they are able to try out new techniques and benefit from their colleagues' criticisms.

But class scheduling turns out to be a source of administrative migraine. With students divided into grades, high and low ability levels, lectures, seminars and individual study, it takes a logistics expert to get students in the right place at the right time. Modern-minded as ever, Ridgewood plans to get a computer for this bothersome job.

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