Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, March 30, 1992                   TAG: 9203300155
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A-5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By PHILIP WALZER
DATELINE: NORFOLK                                  LENGTH: Medium

ODU PROFESSOR PROPOSES RADICAL SCHOOL REFORMS

It's all part of the brave new world of Dwight W. Allen, Old Dominion University's eminent professor of education and brainstormer extraordinaire.

Impatient with the sluggish pace of school reform, Allen has written "Schools for a New Century," a book that is a blueprint to speed the changes. The catalyst would be a network of experimental schools, run by a national school board with $1 billion a year from the federal government.

"We need a national vehicle for education reform," Allen said. "Most reform now is at the edges. Part of the reason is that we have this illusion of local control [of schools]. But there isn't enough local control there that authorities feel comfortable moving out" into new territory.

The book's subtitle is "A Conservative Approach to Radical School Reform." It is conservative because only 1 percent of the nation's schools would be involved. It is radical because at those schools, nearly anything would go.

Allen's suggestions include:

Mixing grade levels in classes: "This gives teachers the cue that they should be organizing instruction individually. We need to have different learning processes for different kids."

Moving public libraries and post offices into the schools. "Right now schools tend to remain empty large parts of the day. I don't see any benefit to that."

Overturning the pay system so that top salaries go to teachers in inner cities, not rich suburbs.

The book begins with a foreword by Terrel Bell, the U.S. education secretary under President Carter. Allen hopes to catch the ear of the current administration, too.

President Bush last year formed a panel of businessmen to select - and fund - about two dozen proposals to bring innovation to schools. Allen's plan is one of 680 under consideration. The proposal includes a promise by four cities - Chesapeake, Newport News, Norfolk and Portsmouth - to open some of their schools to experimenting.

The foundation of Allen's plan is the notion of a national curriculum. In his experimental schools, two-thirds of the curriculum would be the same across the country. The rest would be left up to the school system.

The scheme, he said, would help equalize the nation's schools and quicken reform. "Right now it takes 25 years to cycle in any major curriculum reforms," he said. Local school boards are skittish about promoting change and must follow the lead of textbook publishers and makers of standardized tests, he said.

Allen, 60, is no stranger to school innovation. Thirty years ago, he pushed "modular scheduling," which divided the school day into blocks as small as 15 minutes. In some of those periods - "open laboratories" - students could do whatever they wanted.

The system was tried in several schools across the country, but was mostly abandoned because it was engulfed in chaos. With more patience, Allen said, it might have worked. But that, he said, is the point of experimenting: Some ideas will work; others will flop.

Disgruntled with the "back-to-basics" movement, Allen kept his peace in the '70s. But he's back to throwing out ideas.

And if he had his way, he'd try even more radical reforms: "There's no doubt in my mind that students can graduate when they're 15 knowing 50 percent more than they do when they graduate at 18 if we had things better organized."