MIT Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

MIT's Building 20: The Magical Incubator Story, Anecdote, or Reminiscence

MIT's Relationship with the Boston and Cambridge Public Schools

Alan Dyson
alandyson@hotmail.com

In November of 1982 I came to MIT as the Executive Director of S.T.E.P (Secondary Technical Education Project). I was the second or third director (Bob Hayden was the director I replaced). STEP was MIT's responce to Judge Arthur Garrity's call for assistance from area colleges and universities in the late 70's to help desegragate the Boston Public Schools. MIT, Wentworth Institute of Technology and the Mass Port Authority were paired with the Mario Umana (Judge Umana) High School of Science, Technology and Aviation in East Boston. Over the course of this relationship, Wentworth and then Mass Port dropped by the wayside which left MIT in a relationship that an lot of faculty, staff and students worked at until 1986 without much success because the Boston School Comm. almost always refused to fund anything MIT or any of the partners had worked out with the faculty. I negotiated MIT out of the relationship with Boston and into a relationship with the Cambridge Public Schools at the suggestion of Walter Milne and Paul Gray.

In the fall of 1984 Bob Peterkin, an Assoc. Superintendent in Boston, was appointed Superintendent in the Cambridge Public Schools. Bob and I knew each other from my work in Boston. He asked Paul Gray for a chunk of my time to forge a relationship between the colleges/universities, businesses and the public schools. At Walter's urging Paul provide Bob with my services for about 20% of my time. I reduced my time in Boston to help found the Cambridge Partnership for Public Education, Inc. Bob and I visited the Chamber of Commerce and convinced them to put together a meeting which we could use to organize institutions of further education and various businesses into a not for profit organization, CPPE (Cambridge Partnership for Public Education, Inc.). CPPE came into being officially as a 501(c)(3) in 1986. Paul Gray then contributed about 50% of my time to become the first executive director of CPPE. I continued in that role building CPPE into a partnership that created a Shared Vision with our colleagues in the public schools of Cambridge. When I left in the spring of 1992, CPPE had 50 strong partners.

I returned in 1992 to MIT at the request of President Chuck Vest to assist Prof. Latanision develop the CPSE (Council on Primary and Secondary Education). One of the projects developed by CPSE at the urging of Prof. Leon Trilling, became The Institue for Learning and Teaching (TILT). I became the Executive Director of TILT until I retired in October of 1996. Prof. Trilling wanted to develop stronger relations with schools by taking what he had learned at STS, as the founding director of ISP, as a founder of the METCO Program and a member of the school committee in Brookline, MA. Soon Prof. Trilling forged a relationship with MIT's ECSEL program, a NSF program in concert with CCNY, Howard, Morgan State, University of Washington and Penn State and with the assistance of John Wilson in MIT's Foundation Office, we had enough support from NSF and the Pew Foundation, soon to be followed by the Noyce Foundation, to invite 50 teachers from Boston and Cambridge to assist us in developing a model for teaching teams how to go about the process of creating change in their own school systems. From '92-'96, 32 teams came to MIT for a program that included three intense, residential weeks in the summer with follow up via site visits, email and telephone. Along the way the staff grew to include a teacher from Boston, Matthew Goode, along with Chris Craig from ISP, and Kelley Fischer and Linda Breisch from CPSE.

There are currently 32 teams in the USA and 2 in South Africa. The teams are as diverse as three teams in Ashtabula County, Ohio (sponsored by MIT graduate Bey Blanchard and his wife Phyllis), a team of Navajo's on the Navajo Reservation in Shiprock, NM, teams in NYC (The Choir School of Harlem), teams from vocational/technical high schools and teams from tiny towns in Vermont and Massachusetts.

In July of 1997, at the invitation of the Ministry of Education in South Africa, I assisted colleagues at the University of Natal in Durban, South Africa, adapt the TILT model for the Further Diploma in Education for young people who want to be teachers. All the students come from rural areas and are not able to come to the university to be trained to become teachers. The University of Natal put together IPEB (Institute for Partnerships between Education and Business) to assist primarily blacks in rural areas become teachers. IPEB now provides courses in Mpumalunga and the Eastern Province and TILT is part of the students course work.

Prof. Trilling and I are now working with others at MIT to use the model of TILT to create Research/Technical Projects for students who will be entering a new university in Malaysia which a group at MIT holds a contract to create the first private colleges of engineering.