If it wins the necessary approvals, Oracle will break ground in June on a 64,000-square foot, two-story structure that will become the permanent home of Design Tech High School, a two-year-old charter school authorized by the San Mateo Union High School District.
Students would take Oracle shuttles, eat Oracle food (in their own cafeteria) and use Oracle’s gym (when employees are not using it).
For now, the school known as D.tech occupies a former adult-education center in Burlingame owned by San Mateo County, its second home in two years.
Along with core subjects such as English, math and history, all students take a course each year in design thinking, a popular problem-solving strategy. Students learn at their own pace, some lectures are opt-in, and failure is celebrated as a learning experience.
“Failure is anathema to most schools today,” said Colleen Cassity, executive director of the Oracle Education Foundation. “If you could teach failure as a learning experience, you could change the game in education.”
Kent Montgomery, Design Tech High’s executive director, observes students working at the school’s current home at a former adult-education center in Burlingame.
Oracle says it won’t design the curriculum or run the school. But its employees will continue to participate in two-week “intersessions,” when students take a break from core classes to learn coding, basic electrical engineering and other skills.
“The school will operate autonomously,” Cassity said. “We think the curriculum is powerful.”
School’s growth plans
D.tech currently has 274 students, all freshmen and sophomores. Next fall, it will have 420 freshmen, sophomores and juniors at its present location. Prospective students have until Monday to apply for the 2016-17 school year. The school has already received 462 applications for about 150 openings.The following school year, 2017-18, D.tech is expected to have 550 students in all four grades and move to the Oracle campus, assuming the new school is finished on time.
“Tech is one of our primary tools for teaching students,” said Ken Montgomery, D.tech’s executive director. “They all have Chromebooks, all materials are online. They also create technology.”
In the school’s “design realization garage,” on Thursday, one group of boys was building a trebuchet (a type of catapult), while another edited a video. A third group used a 3-D printer to make a replacement foosball for one that got lost. Nick Dal Porto was soldering a quadcopter piece that got broken.
Sophomore Cypress Sell was using a laser cutter to create what she called “a reasonably sized box” to store “witchcrafty items.” She likes D.tech because “you are doing something because you are interested in it, not because it’s an assignment.”
The only thing Sell doesn’t like is the long commute from the coastal town of Montara. “I’m sad I will only get to be at the (Oracle campus) for one year,” she added.
Oracle brass met the D.tech team at a design challenge the Oracle Education Foundation convened. It invited nine high schools to “help us rapidly prototype some elements of our new operating program,” Cassity said.
Cypress Sell (left), a student at the Design Tech High School, programs a laser cutter to make a box "of a reasonable size" with teaching assistant Jasmine Calderon (center) and student Ezra Graves in Burlingame, Calif. on Thursday, Feb. 25, 2016. The charter school has plans to relocate its school to the Oracle campus in the near future.
D.tech, she said, “stood head and shoulders above the rest. They speak the language of education and also the language of innovation and technology sectors. We understand them. They understand us.”
Many tech companies and executives are aiming to transform schools. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife are starting a private school in East Palo Alto that will integrate education and health care for disadvantaged children. Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’ widow, is giving $10 million to five or 10 teams that come up with the best ideas for a new high school.
IBM pioneered P-TECH, a six-year program that combines high school, community college and workplace skills. It’s now in 40 schools. Since 1999, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has given $6.7 billion to education, including $4 billion to K-12 schools.
Facebook and IBM, however, haven’t built public schools at their corporate headquarters.
School lease plans
Oracle will own the land and building and lease it to the school “for zero or perhaps a buck,” Cassity said. Because it will retain ownership, Oracle will not get a tax deduction for the project, she added.
As a charter school, D.tech is open to any student in the state. But if demand exceeds supply, the school will hold a lottery, using a system that gives local students preference. Students from the San Mateo district will each get five virtual lottery tickets. Students from the neighboring Sequoia Union High School District, where Oracle is located, will get four each. Everyone else will get one.
The two high school districts agreed to pay D.tech about $8,400 for each student from their district who attends the charter school, even though the Sequoia district did not have to because it’s a basic-aid district that gets no state funding because its local property taxes are so high. The funding agreement between the San Mateo and Sequoia districts is a first, Montgomery said.
The new school needs approval from Redwood City and, because it’s near the shoreline, the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission. The city has posted the plan at www.redwoodcity.org/designtech and is taking public comments through March 10. Comments can be emailed to lchan@redwoodcity.org.
A student uses a calculator to solve a math problem at the Design Tech High School in Burlingame, Calif. on Thursday, Feb. 25, 2016. The charter school has plans to relocate its school to the Oracle campus in the near future.
Traffic concerns
At a meeting of the Redwood City Planning Commission on Feb. 16, the only concerns raised by residents were about increased traffic and ensuring that Redwood City students can attend. To mitigate traffic, students will not be allowed to park on campus. They can be dropped off or take an Oracle shuttle from the Millbrae BART and San Carlos Caltrain stations.
“People are happy that a school is getting built that doesn’t rely on taxpayer funding,” Montgomery said.
The school was Oracle CEO Safra Catz’s idea. Catz and Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison had been talking for years about the need for a school “that teaches students how to think,” Cassity said.
The school revolves around design thinking, also called human-centered design. “You begin by empathizing with your user, deeply understanding their problem,” Cassity said. The next steps are “ideation” or brainstorming a solution, building a rapid prototype, taking it back to the user for feedback and incorporating it into the next version.
“We have all kinds of agreements between high schools and career tech programs.” said Michael Kirst, president of the California State Board of Education. There are students learning auto repair at auto dealerships and future farmers working on farms.
But D.tech, he said, is different. “This is the total package.”
Kirst said the state will be monitoring the school to see how it works.
“Whether it can be scaled up depends on whether a lot of businesses want to do this,” Kirst said. “It’s one thing to run an experimental school on its grounds, another to extrapolate and say this should be done generally, or this is a big solution to solving schools.”
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