Daring to Think Outside the K-12 Structure

Last in an occasional series looking at kindergarten through sixth grade, "The Building Blocks" of education, and seventh through 12th grade, "The Next Step"

First-graders a few decades ago spent their day playing; today they learn to read -- if they don't already know how.

Sixth-graders once enjoyed being the big kids on campus of their neighborhood elementary school -- until many of them wound up at the bottom of their regional middle school.

Algebra wasn't introduced until ninth grade, but now some seventh-graders have already mastered the subject.

And the pressure to get into a good college begins long before senior year.

The past few decades have witnessed major changes in the substance and rhythm within the individual grades that make up the architecture of kindergarten through 12th-grade education. Curricula have become more interdisciplinary, material is presented earlier and math and reading wars periodically rage and wane.

Some of these changes are evolutionary as new discoveries about the nature of the world are made. But others have been imposed by legislation and regulation at a time when the K-12 system has become one of the country's most controversial institutions.

Some people say public schools are failing to teach basic information and critical thinking to students who must have these skills to operate in the technological world of tomorrow. Some say U.S. public schools are doing a better job than ever with a far more culturally diverse population. Others say both are true, depending on where you live.

As a result, countless retooling programs have been launched across the more than 15,000 school systems in the country, many offering different models of education aimed at altering the curriculum, time spent in school, teacher qualifications and just about everything else.

Independently run, publicly financed charter schools have sprouted up as alternatives to the traditional public schools even as President Bush launched No Child Left Behind, which emphasizes high-stakes standardized tests to hold schools accountable.

Yet despite the desire to improve the K-12 system, what has not changed for the great majority of students is the fact that they still go to school in such a system.

After two years of occasional articles about what happens in each grade, staff writers Jay Mathews and Valerie Strauss look at experiments underway today that, in different ways, challenge the notion of K-12 education.