"…The typical parent, the typical taxpayer, the typical voter, when asked what constitutes a quality education will talk exclusively about the who and the what: the teachers and the curriculum. But we know the where is also part and parcel of a quality education. We believe that where our children learn matters. And when we send our kids to schools with crumbling walls, with leaky roofs, with mold all over the carpets, not only are we not creating an environment for a quality education, but we’re also creating conditions that get in the way…"

— The Center for Green Schools 

American public schools are in such disrepair, it will take more than a half trillion dollars to bring them up to date, according to a 2013 report by the Center for Green Schools, supported by the National Education Association, the 21st Century School Fund, the American Federation of Teachers, the American Lung Association and the National PTA. 

Put another way, fixing American public schools is a half trillion dollar-plus business opportunity with a long string a collateral “goods”: healthier children and teachers, better environments for learning, digital-age connectivity and cheaper operational costs. This is the low-hanging fruit of school reform. The classroom, as Reggio Emilia founder Loris Malaguzzi famously put it, is the “third teacher.” Children learn from their surroundings, good or bad. Right now, hundreds of thousands of American children are learning that they are a low priority, which it both shameful and shortsighted. We are blighting our own future. 

The “go-to classroom” in the US is a noisy, stuffy, dimly lit, poorly insulated   prefab trailer, notes Ann Hand, CEO of Project Frog, a San Francisco-based construction company on a mission to build better schools. Prefabs are typically pushed into service decades beyond a projected five year lifespan. “They’re full of mold,” says Hand. “The number one cause of absenteeism in California? Asthma.” The most dedicated teachers, thoughtful curricula, committed parents and motivated children are no match for a literally toxic environment. You can’t learn if you can’t breathe.
 
The good news is the dramatic and fast difference righting wrongs can make. “There are a lot of studies out there that say that with natural daylight, kids’ grades go up about 20%. That’s taking someone from a C to an A,” says Hand. Improve acoustics and air quality and academic success  almost becomes a given. 

Yet faced with anorexic budgets and long construction schedules, administrators and school boards often have little choice but to opt for quick and dirty band-aid repairs. Enter Frog with its “technologically advanced component buildings” designed to maneuver past these very hurdles. Components are delivered to construction sites in a series of cheerfully branded, IKEA-like flat-packs that can be assembled into a building—aka, a Frog—over summer break. Unlike a prefab classroom whose dimensions are determined by the size of truck (determined, in turn, by the width of a traffic lane), Frogs are free of any such restrictions. Instead, Hand explained at the recent KIN Global conference, Frog schools are designed around what’s best for learning. 

Mixing human-centered designed to focus on students’ needs and integrative design for better building performance, Frog has figured out how to deliver a higher quality school faster and at a competitive price. Improved energy efficiency means a Frog costs less to run, too. 

"…We have urban planners and architects on our staff, but they sit next to people from product design, people from strong manufacturing backgrounds. We’re crashing all of those capabilities together and really creating an innovation engine that we just so happen to be asking…Is there a better way to build?" 

Clearly, the answer is a resounding yes, but it has been a years-long nail-biting journey full of cash-flow cliffhangers and near-miraculous team triumphs to get there. The first installment of Frog’s first large scale order—15 of 40 schools in California—was finished with only hours to spare before the morning bell of the first day of class last fall. Immediately, the company shifted gears to analyze dozens of lessons learned from a summer spent on the exhilarating edge of panic and possibility. Hand slowed down the sales pipeline to give Froggers—there are fewer than 60 employees—a chance to catch their collective breath. In addition to schools, Frog had been building healthcare clinics for Kaiser-Permanente and developing a “flex” design adaptable for almost any use. Sales had been on track to hit $100 million this year, but Hand cut the target in half, figuring time was more valuable than money in the near term to add resiliency to supply chains and smooth out the rough edges of production. If all goes well in the next couple of years, Hand sees IPO in Frog’s future. It turns out daylighting not only boosts grades, but bottom lines as well. 

WHILE YOU’RE AT IT, THROW IN A GARDEN, PLEASE…

For Kimbal Musk—of the irrepressibly enterprising family Musk (Tesla, Solar City, SpaceX)—the sweet spot is right outside the school building in the garden. For nearly a decade, Musk has been working to spread the good food word, first with a handful school garden near his Kitchen chain of “community bistro” restaurants in Colorado and now with hundreds of gardens in Chicago, Los Angeles and Denver.  

"… Scale does matter. It really does matter…When you do one school, you have a system. When you do a 100 schools, you have to have a totally different system…There’s no point in doing one school. You’ve got to do 100 schools, create the system that works for 100 schools and then you have a system you can scale."

Like Project Frog, Musk’s Learning Gardens are modular, flexible, affordable and designed to be an easy “yes” for school administrators. The components are basic but thoughtful: a series of sturdy above ground planting boxes set at the perfect height for young gardeners. They can be placed almost anywhere, from asphalt to rooftops, and are easy to maintain, pre-plumbed for irrigation. Set up takes just a couple days, with children, teachers and parents doing the actual planting. 

Musk wants kids to learn about science and nutrition but sees Learning Gardens as a kind of all purpose outdoor classroom: a part of the school, rather than a special project tucked away behind a fence. In fact, proper siting is essential. Gardens must located where kids naturally gather or Musk’s team won’t build them. “Scale is a combination of how many schools you can be in and how many kids you can reach when you’re in those schools,” he explains. “The critical thing about what we do is that it works in every single school yard in the world.”

MAKING A DIFFERENCE AND NOT JUST A DENT

"Change at Scale," the theme of this year’s KIN Global, focused on the difference between a good idea and a transformative one. It turns out there is a pattern—something I first learned from energy pioneer Amory Lovins while writing a magazine story on distributed power generation. If a solution is modular, flexible, scalable, affordable and recyclable, bet on it. It almost doesn’t matter what subject—energy distribution, social networks, personal computers, IKEA furniture—the formula works. This is nature’s tried and true strategy: from particles and proteins to atoms and cells to everything that is and has ever been. In fact, the smaller the building block, the greater its potential. 

Hand and Musk have developed solutions that embody those characteristics, bringing an elegant clarity to problems that have confounded generations of school administrators, school boards and politicians. Rather than try to shore up a broken system, they have set their sights on outcomes (happier, healthier, more successful students), then took the list of seemingly insurmountable hurdles as marching orders. It turns out a healthy school environment is good news for the environment as a whole which, of course, is an A+ for everyone.  

— J. A. Ginsburg

RELATED: 

• State of Our Schools Address / Center for Green Schools / (video)

• Why Going Green Means Big Business in the Construction Industry / Issie Lapowsky / Inc magazine

• How Kimbal Musk brings garden classrooms to Chicago Public Schools / Amina Alahi / Chicago Tribune

I stared at the small glass bottle in the exhibit case for quite a while. Somehow it had survived millennia. Taken out of the case at the Museo del Vetro—the Museum of Glass—on the Italian island of Murano, its specialness would have been obscured by an utterly unremarkable appearance. Spectacular glasswork is part of the Venetian sparkle, its seductive shimmer. Such a small plain bottle. Who made it? What did it hold? How had it managed to navigate the centuries intact? 

It was late winter and the tourist rush was still off in the distance, so I had the Museum mostly to myself. Murano, too, for that matter. I strolled narrow streets festooned with colorful laundry hung to dry overhead, nibbled on the most delicious cookies from a local bakery, listened to seabirds and felt  the warmth the fast-approaching spring. It was easy to slip back in time—maybe not millennia, but certainly a few centuries into the past—to a time when even the plainest of glass jars was still something to treasure. In a pre-plastic world, glass provided secure, transparent storage. In Italy, of course, form and function are incomplete without beauty. The little bottle was a light translucent lavender. 

Last fall, I made a glass bowl of my own at a workshop given by Chicago’s Ignite Glass Studio (a particularly popular offering through the Chicago Ideas Week festival). Glass, it turns out, is neither a liquid or a solid, but an amorphous solid, which means it has properties of both. The basic recipe is simple—silica (sand), soda ash and lime—but it can be chemically manipulated in the most remarkable ways, adding color, thermal properties and resilience (the newest version of Corning’s Gorilla glass for smartphones and tablets can be bent without breaking). Glass can be molded in a kiln, “floated” on tin sheets to make windows, rolled, spun and even 3D printed. 

Blowing glass, though, has an almost alchemical magic to it. The glassblower literally breathes life into the form by providing a bubble of air and must keep the form alive by constantly spinning a heavy metal rod. What starts as an unpromising molten blob attached at one end slowly transforms into something delicate, translucent, ethereal. It takes brute strength and a delicate touch, neither of which I possess, but my master teacher deftly filled in the gaps. 

The video below is a demonstration from the Corning Glass Museum. Watch  all the way through and you’ll be joining in with the videographer exclaiming early and often, “Wow!”

My little bowl was nowhere near as elaborate, but still fills me with wonder. It turns out it doesn’t matter whether the glass is half-filled or half-empty. The point is there is a glass. 

GLASS AND TECH: FROM THE RENAISSANCE TO SILICON VALLEY

No one material has been at the center of more disruptive innovation than glass. Edison’s lightbulb, the archetypal symbol of innovation, required a glassblower to blow the bulb. 

Centuries earlier, Galileo, who ground his own lenses, pointed his telescope toward the heavens, boldly looked where no one had looked so clearly before, and profoundly altered our view of the cosmos and our place in it. The Space Age had begun. Similarly, microscopes made the invisible visible, leading to new theories of disease and a much deeper understanding of how bodily systems worked. These tools of superhuman sight led to insights that changed the world.

Eyeglasses, which date back as far as 13th century, did not bestow  superhuman powers, but vastly improved countless lives by bringing the day-to-day into focus. Eight centuries later, a project to make affordable glasses in Africa just won a prestigious award from the Siemens Foundation for empowering technologies. A single eyeglass machine carted from village to village by a trained operator can churn out thousands of pairs at a cost of less than one dollar per to manufacture That’s not just life-changing, but potentially society-changing.

Back to the 19th century, Edison’s lightbulb almost literally lit the way for a revolution in electronics that would define much of the 20th century. Vacuum tubes, which made radio, television and sound recording possible, also required glassblowers in their development. Even today, many university and corporate labs have a glassblowing studios on premises to fabricate equipment and components. 

The story of Steve Jobs’ discovery of a failed glass product developed by Corning in the early 1950s is the stuff of Silicon Valley legend. In a mind-boggling six weeks, the company manufactured enough of its super-tough Gorilla glass to launch Apple’s first iPhone, ushering in the era of the touchscreen. Tablets and smart phones are just the beginning. Thin bendable glass is the next gadget frontier: 

"…it also means an entire galaxy of new types of gadgets that haven’t even been conceived of yet. Imagine an in-car display that ripples and wraps itself across your dashboard, or some sort of super-charged Magic Eightball that is simply a sphere with a 360-degree display. These gadgets are still a ways off, but the likes of Corning, Apple, Samsung, and LG are skating to where the puck is going. In 20 years, you won’t be able to believe that the world of gadgets was once so boxy.

—John Brownlee / Fast Company Design

SKYLINES AND POWER PLAYS

Modern cities glisten with glass. Buildings soar ever taller, reflecting the sun, the weather, each other. But there is much more to a building’s glass surface than an elegant shimmer. Glass can let in light, add color and provide thermal insulation. Now, with integrated solar panels, a building’s skin can also generate electricity.  

Imagine:  a city full of elegant buildings that double as power plants. Let’s raise a glass to that. From ancient perfume bottles and stargazing telescopes to the lights of Broadway and a clean energy future, glass just seems to have a way of bringing out the best civilization has to offer. 

RELATED: 

• For the Files: Glass, Tech and Civilization bibliography