Could the Next Steve Jobs Come From Philly?

If there’s a local ground zero of the Baby Zuckerberg movement, it’s the leafy campus of SCH Academy (which was formed in 2010 when all-girls Springside merged with its neighbor, all-boys CHA). One day in late September, I’m inside the old Springside library—a portion of which has been reconfigured to look a little like the headquarters of a start-up—observing the ninth-grade entrepreneurship class, one of the required courses in the school’s new Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership curriculum. At the moment, all eyes are on three girls who are giving a presentation about their first big assignment: generating revenue by disposing of out-of-date laptops. The girls—who, like most of the class, ping back and forth between awkward and confident—explain that they’ll be selling the laptops on eBay, though they’ve smartly decided to clean them up and throw in protective cases to goose the price. When they finish, Mark Greenberg, the teacher of the class and executive director of CEL, jumps to his feet.

“Okay, how’d you do?” he asks.

Since one of the tenets of the new curriculum is for kids to develop superior public speaking skills, Greenberg not only asks the other students to critique presentations; he asks the presenters to critique themselves.

“Well, I could have said ‘um’ less,” one girl responds. When it’s the class’s turn to give feedback, one student asks, “Is it okay to say something nice?” Everyone laughs.

Dressed in a blue suit, green tie and shiny black dress shoes, Greenberg, a boyish- looking 39-year-old, seems less like your typical high-school teacher than an entrepreneur himself—which is fitting, because that’s precisely what he is. A real estate investor whose two kids go to SCH Academy, he first got involved in CEL last year as a judge for a shark-tank competition. The idea of teaching entrepreneurship to kids energized him. “I wanted to jump in a time machine and go back to high school,” he says. Sands made him a more practical offer: Step in and run the entire program.

Greenberg is clearly enthralled by what he’s seen from the kids so far. Talking about this first class assignment, he notes how one group came up with the novel idea of raffling off the laptops—potentially generating more cash than the eBay approach. He smiles at the memory of first hearing their idea. “It’s this beautiful moment,” he says.

Greenberg runs CEL on a day-to-day basis, but the vision for the program came from Hayne, the ex-hippie who turned Urban Outfitters into a retail powerhouse and himself into one rich dude (Forbes puts his net worth at $1.8 billion), and Sands, who started running Springside School in 1996. An engaging woman with smartly cut white hair, stylish glasses and a down-to-earth attitude, she says the roots of the program actually go back six or seven years. She and Hayne would discuss her growing sense that something was amiss in American education—even among elite private schools.

“I was reminded of the Rip Van Winkle story,” she says. “If he woke up now, everything would overwhelm him—except school, which basically hasn’t changed. The delivery has been tweaked, but it hasn’t fundamentally changed.”

As the Great Recession deepened, Sands also came to fear that the business model independent schools had been following for at least a decade—erecting pricy new buildings to lure students, jacking up tuition to ungodly levels, focusing obsessively on getting kids into the most elite colleges—seemed neither sustainable nor, in a way, moral: “We typically think, well, we get them into college, that’s our job. But what skills are really needed? And are we creating a generation of highly educated, useless people?”

The doubts set her off on a quest for answers. She devoured books about change and disruption, like Clayton Christensen’s influential The Innovator’s Dilemma and Disrupting Class. She traveled to Boston to meet with business professor Hal Gregersen, author of The Innovator’s DNA. She delved into Penn psychologist Martin Seligman’s work, and learned that resiliency trumps grades and SAT scores as a predictor of future success. She sent staffers to Stanford’s design school, impressed with how the study of design makes you examine problems in a different light.

Out of all that—as well as hours of conversations with the school’s trustees and staff—emerged CEL. The program, which is interwoven into the school’s regular curriculum from kindergarten through 12th grade, embraces seven “strands”: the art of communication, engineering/new media, ethics, global immersion, leadership, statistics, and, of course, entrepreneurship. On top of that are partnerships with local universities and the newly launched Venture Incubator, which lets students work alongside seasoned entrepreneurs.

Still, Sands says the specifics of the program are less important than the overall point of view the school is trying to instill in kids—one that puts a premium on being adaptive, inquisitive and resilient, no matter what field you end up going into. “Too many times we think ‘entrepreneur’ means business, and that’s not the case,” she says. “It’s a mind-set.”