‘This is a model for education'

In classrooms lining a hallway with old but gleaming floors and old-style lockers, the students - some with heads bent over desks, some watching a teacher at the board - seem little different from hundreds of other sixth-graders around the Pikes Peak region.

But this is not your average school. The teachers wear white lab coats emblazoned with the school's name and their name. The Colorado Springs Conservatory, an organization dedicated to the performing arts, operates out of the lower level of the building. And on Thursday, the buzz of a grand opening ceremony provided a clear indication that big things are expected from the Galileo School of Math and Science and its inaugural class of 250 students.

Reborn in the building that housed the failing East Middle School until it was closed in May 2007, Galileo has attracted more than 100 students from outside its boundaries for its emphasis on math and science and its partnership with the Conservatory.

"I'd say this is a model for education throughout this country," author Daniel H. Pink said at Thursday's ceremony. "Why a model for the course of education? Because it's preparing kids for their future, not our past."

Pink, a former political speechwriter and a bestselling author of books on the changing work world, including "A Whole New Mind," spoke to teachers, students and administrators at the school and later addressed a luncheon of the Colorado Springs Economic Development Corp. Pink's works examine the move from an organization-based work force to one that increasingly values self-employed or independent workers.

Sometimes called the "creative class," it's a segment of the work force with a rising wage level that is focused on customization, novelty and nuance, he said in an interview. As that happened, education went the opposite way by stressing systems and standardization, he said.

"The K-12 education system is a massive system and it's hard to change in a systemic way," he said. "You need the grassroots efforts, like charter schools.

"This school is an exception," he said of Galileo. "You're not going to reform education with one school in Colorado Springs. But it's a start."

A school that blends math, science and the arts and emphasizes creative thinking will help students think like inventors and innovators, skills that are essential for the 21st-century work force, he said.

For decades, "logical, linear abilities mattered the most," he said. "These abilities are essential. But while they're necessary, they're not sufficient."

That's why medical students in some schools are taken to art museums, and Google says it hires "nonroutine savants," he said.

"Any work that is routine is disappearing from this country," Pink said. "If you can write down the steps and it has a right answer, it's gone."

That's the kind of work that is being outsourced to India and elsewhere now, and that will only increase, he said.

Galileo has a new staff, new curriculum and a new climate aimed at preparing students for that world, said Mary Ley, project director for the magnet school. The district received a three-year $5 million federal grant that will pay salaries and other expenses.

"Everything about it is fresh," she said.

The school opened in August with 250 sixth-graders - about the same number of students in all grades at East when it closed, she noted. The first-year students will move into a new seventh-grade program at the school next year, and eighth grade the following year. Ley expects the school to be at capacity with about 750 students in three years.