An Interview with Dr. Charles Stallard who is Director of the Center for SmartSchool™ Development. This interview was conducted during his last days in office as the Director of Technology and Information Services for Henrico County Public Schools in Virginia.

Question: When did you first begin envisioning what you now call SmartSchools?

Dr. Stallard: I was Assistant Dean at Old Dominion Univeristy at the time and consulting with the U.S. Navy Atlantic Fleet Traning Command. The Navy was awash with the concept of "smart" things, especially smart weapons and smart buildings. Once you realize the technology behind "smart" things, it is no great leap to realize how useful the concept could be in eductional settings.

Q: When was that?

Dr. Stallard: That was in the early to mid 1980's. The idea was reinforced when I did some work for the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command at Ft. Monroe. They were very much looking at the future of warfare and how data and data analysis could be used to both manage and define the battlefield.

Q: What is a Smart School really?

Dr. Stallard: Smart schools adjust their processes and content to meet individual needs and interests. They are as much a way of doing business as they are an application of information technology. IT is however absolutely essential in determining how smart anything can or will be.

In practice, a smart school would adjust its processes and its content and provide a highly individualized learning environment and learning experience for each child. In the traditional school, the processes and content are geared to classes or cohorts of students. Their focus may be more on subject matter than it is on the learning individual.

The business of smart schools is learning. The product of smart schools is learning as measured in individual learners.

Smart schools collect and use data of all kinds as a base for understanding individual needs and interests. Further, smart schools use advanced IT applications such as data mining, knowledge discovery, regression analysis, decision tree strategies , etc. to automate the analysis and report both potential and problems to teachers, parents, and to the learners themselves.

Q: If I want to see a smart school where would I go?

Dr. Stallard: You might go to India, Malaysia, and soon to Egypt. These countries have or are about to adopt strategies to create smart schools.

Q: Where in the U.S. could I go?

Dr. Stallard: The tragedy is that there are no smart schools in the U.S that I am aware of. Even though we have been talking about them for nearly twenty years, and the technology to create them has been on hand for at least a decade, American schools have not yet developed an interest in being more responsive to individuals. Mass education offers learners a Procrustean Bed. Either the learner's needs and capabilities fit the offerings of the curriculum and the teaching method or the has to adjust to accomodate them. The smart approach would be to reverse this and have the curriculum and the instruction match individual needs and capabilities.

Q: Why is that?

Dr. Stallard: The reasons are many. A primary reason is that U.S. schools are locally controlled. It is much more difficult to change the culture of school in such a differentiated environment. Malaysia, for example, controls schools from the central government. An enlightened individual there can have far reaching impact. Egypt is now looking at the Malaysian model with thoughts of replicating elements of it.

Transience is another factor about American education. Leadership at the superintendent, school board level, and even the legislative level is short lived. We had conversations with Malaysia about Smart Schools as early as 1993. They have managed a sustained effort there.

That would be very hard to do in the U.S.

Q: The idea of schools responding to individual abilities and interests makes excellent sense to me. Are we ever likely to have smart schools in the U.S.?

Dr. Stallard: The next few years will determine that. K-12 schools in the U.S. are in their last days as we have always known them. I see evidence in lots of places that the mandate to teach the academic curriculum that K-12 schools have monopolized for centuries is now passing to other institutions.

If present day K-12 schools cannot learn to tailor curriculum and instruction to individuals, these other institutions will assume that mandate, and they will do it very quickly., The marketplace will then drive K-12 schools to begin to offer more and more personalized service to learners and their families. I suspect, however, that their response will be too little, too late for them to hold on to the mandate.

Q: Well, I have to ask. What are these new institutions?

Dr. Stallard: I call them e-learning service providers. They are a class of companies who have content and the expertise to package it for individual use, or they have a client base they are now serving in other ways and they are looking to add e-learning to their list of services. These companies are grappling with the market now. They really don't understand it that well. Eventually, however, they will get all the pieces together and have content, organization, and access to learners everywhere. I see this as a major growth industry between now and 2020.

Q: Dr. Stallard, I want to thank you for the interview today as you prepare for the next adventure in your professional life.

I suspect we have only touched the surface of smart schools. Perhaps you will talk to us again once you are settled into new offices at the Center for SmartSchool Development.

Dr. Stallard: I would be happy to.