A new environmental science teacher in a small city in the Northeast could see a river from her classroom window, and across the river, a factory. She and her students noticed a yellow liquid flowing out of a pipe right into the river. She abandoned the textbook, with its chapters on wetland ecology and pollution, in favor of doing a study of the river. They found that it was indeed polluted from multiple sources, including the factory they could see out the window. But once the students understood the science of the ecosystem, they wanted to get political. They wrote letters to the mayor and the CEO of the factory, and talked to local legislators. The students were excited and interested in what they were learning at school.

Some years later in another school, the principal and teachers had worked for four years to develop innovative classes. They combined vocational skills and academic skills in "tech-ademic" classes. The teachers often worked in teams. They got to know their students better by teaching in long blocks of time and by measuring the students' progress by having them demonstrate competency, instead of conventional tests. Then the state in which this school is located adopted a set of standards and tests that favored specific knowledge and skills (like those now mandated in Colorado and most other states). Out of fear that their students would perform poorly on the state tests, the principal and teachers reluctantly dismantled their innovative programs, even though they thought their programs were serving the students better than would the conventional method, with its short periods, discreet subjects and standardized tests.

            

 

These stories are about the front lines of educational reform. And reform is the new national mantra. President Clinton chanted it. Now George Bush is chanting it. On April 2, President Bush declared about pre-schoolers, "Every child must have a place on the starting line." He proposed training 50,000 teachers to improve at-risk kids' reading preparation skills, and then testing them with standardized tests.

Few will argue that the status quo is okay: Startling drop-out rates for high schoolers, huge performance gaps between white, black, Latino and Asian students, and American students' disappointing showing on international standardized tests. Some reformers see other troubling signs: Bored, passive kids slogging through textbook chapters on the French revolution. Is it possible to present a subject so the students' faces alight with excitement and curiosity? Some say it is, that improving test scores and reading competency among fifth graders, for example, falls far short of the change we could be shooting for.

Two such educational reformers are Ted Sizer and Kathy Simon. Ted Sizer created the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) in 1985. He currently serves as Chair Emeritus of CES. CES is a national network of schools, support centers and a national office engaged in restructuring schools. Sizer was recently co-principal, with his wife Nancy, of the Francis W. Parker Charter School in Devens, Massachusetts. He is Professor Emeritus at Brown University where he served as chair of the education department from 1984 to 1989. Sizer is the author of Horace's Compromise, Horace's School, and Horace's Hope, published by Houghton Mifflin. He and his wife Nancy are co-authors of the recently published book, The Students Are Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract.

Kathy Simon is Director of Research at CES. She has a BA from Harvard in comparative literature, and a Masters and PhD from Stanford University in education. She taught at the Stanford University Teacher Education Program and was a high school English and drama teacher.

Nexus publisher Ravi Dykema spoke with Ted Sizer by phone at his home in Massachusetts, and he reached Kathy Simon at Detroit Airport during a layover.

 

RD:  How did American schooling come to be the way it is today?

 

KS: If you look back a hundred years, just about at the turn of the 19th century, although the student population was much smaller, the number of schools in this country was much greater than it is today. So each school had many fewer students

There was also a notion of preparing workers. At the same time that the assembly line started, education shifted more to the assembly line model. You walked kids from station to station, from subject to subject. You poured in the input that they needed and they came out hopefully prepared with the information they needed to do whatever their job might be.

 

RD:  What sort of person do you imagine that system was intending to turn out?

KS:  People who would be able to function in the new industrial economy, especially in mass production, and people who would be literate enough to vote. You might think that, to vote, people would also have to have some discrimination, and critical thinking. But for people in power, it's easier if the voters aren't all that discriminating, and if the voters are fairly easily swayed. So the notion of critical thinking is not a central part of this factory model. What was needed was workers who could fulfill their roles in the economy.

Some of the structures of schooling have remained intact since that time. There are the six or seven periods per day, with 45 to 55 minute periods and a three to five minute passing period between. Biology is separate from chemistry and physics, and algebra is separate from literature and history, while in the practicing lives of biologists or chemists or historians, the distinctions are much more blurry. Another leftover is that the personal relationship between teacher and student isn't central. In California, a teacher is likely to have contact with 150 students a day. If you assumed that the personal relationship between teacher and student was central, you would set up a situation where the students and teachers could know each other pretty well. We think, "That's just the way high school is." There is a lack of imagination about what else it could be.

I think there's also a fear that if you make schools less structured, they will be less rigorous. And if we're concerned that our children get into academically elite colleges, we're reticent to change, because we don't know what we are changing to. You certainly don't want to harm your kids, and you know that in the current system, they'll probably do okay and get into college. Whereas other systems that look different from the model with which we are familiar, are kind of like entering the vast unknown, and that is scary.

 

RD:  It seems that children have enormous curiosity that eventually diminishes. What happens to kids in school that turns them into the adults they become?

KS:  If you look at most kindergartners, they have enormous curiosity. They want to know about snails or cowboys or Jupiter or social interactions. But in elementary school, that natural curiosity is squelched by the strong message that there are right and wrong answers, and that it's not worth it to venture an answer that might be wrong. So kids start clamping down, raising their hands less, volunteering less. Second, there is the message to kids that what they're curious about doesn't drive what they're going to learn, and the curriculum may have nothing to do with their particular interest, or even their community. So if we're in Denver, it's not any more likely that we are going to study about mountains than rain forests. The curriculum is supposed to work for everybody everywhere. I would be very happy if kids in Boulder spent more time learning about mountains than kids in St. Paul, Minnesota, who might spend more time learning about lakes and glaciers.

There has been this notion that everybody ought to get exactly the same thing, and if it's fourth grade, it's going to be the American Revolution. It doesn't matter what you are interested in. I think the phenomenon you are talking about, of the curiosity being stamped out, is very real. If you look at the faces of kids, especially by the time they get to high school, there is a passivity when they're sitting in school. If you see them in other contexts

 

RD:  I would imagine you encounter the argument that children's interests won't lead them to math and history and literature, foundations that they will need in order to succeed in the real world.

KS:  I have a couple responses to that. First, time is wasted by drilling kids with information that has no relevance to their lives. If they were learning things they were interested in, their interests would lead them to a lot of those areas, like math or biology, that we're afraid they are not going to get. Second, kids learn much faster when they are motivated and interested. If we can show kids why a subject has some application to their interests, they're more likely to learn.

 

RD:  What are some of the aspects of a more effective school?

KS:  First, kids would have more choice. Typically, if you walk into a 10th grade English class, the teacher hands you a syllabus that says, "We are going to read these six novels and plays this semester." Why not give the kids a list of 40 novels and plays and say, "Find six of these that you want to read this quarter." Second, the focus would be on less is more, in terms of the curriculum. A typical history course, on a high school level, covers about 3,000 years in one or two semesters. Instead, why not say, "Here are three or four key essential questions that we are going to explore about history." For example, a central question may be, "Does democracy result in representative, equitable and humane governments?" and then we might look at three eras.

Another aspect is more emphasis on relationships between teachers and students. Instead of a 150-to-one model, we have to find a way to set up a situation where teachers and students know each other well. I would say that number is under 50 to one. That doesn't necessarily involve upping your budget. We have many examples of schools that have changed the teacher-to-student ratio on the same budget. One can bring down the ratios by creating interdisciplinary teams of teachers that work together with smaller groups of students.

Another aspect: Creating authentic tasks. Typically, students do assignments for the teacher, so the two people who have seen it are the teacher and the student. Instead, try to think about what are the authentic tasks that kids could be doing. For example, the School of Environmental Studies in suburban St. Paul is built on the grounds of the Minnesota Zoo. Kids in the high school create lovely, hands-on exhibits to teach elementary kids about the animals in the zoo. It means the high school kids have had to understand the material deeply enough to translate it for other people to learn.

And instead of hundreds of discreet assignments, kids might spend an entire semester working on one project that has many facets. There are science classes that have done projects on sampling water quality in their neighborhood streams, preparing reports to the City Council and working with community members to find strategies to improve the water quality. This project involves interviewing experts, testing the water, talking to businesses, seeing who's dumping what into the river. It involves science, chemistry, social studies and certainly a lot of writing. If the whole course was arranged around an essential question, that would add a cohesiveness and a depth that can be incredible. In terms of igniting the curiosity and passion of the kids, these changes would go a long way.

 

RD:  My kids want to play and have fun and be lazy, and do whatever they want to do

KS:  I think this is a deep fear that keeps us locked into a system that isn't working. But if school was a place that met kids' needs for autonomy, connection and fun, I think you'd have a hard time getting them home. Kids need choice, from where they sit in a room to what they wear to what they are supposed to be thinking about. But in most schools, kids have no autonomy. They need connection, but they are ranked against their friends, and they know only so many of them are going to get the good grades. So instead of their friends being allies and sources of emotional support, by the fifth grade their friends are their competitors. A child's needs for enjoyment, play and just fun aren't met in school, because the model is pretty much sit down, be quiet and do what I'm going to tell you to do.

 

RD:  What school models today achieve the sorts of changes you would like to see? I worked in a free school when I was in college in the '70s.

KS: The movement that is closest to the free school movement is called the Subury Valley Schools. There are a couple dozen around the country, and they have principles very much like that of Summerhill in England and free schools did. There is our movement, which is a little bit less radical. The Subury Valley schools are private schools. We are trying to work in the public school sphere.

Our group is The Coalition of Essential Schools, and schools within our system are called Coalition Schools or Essential Schools. About 300 schools are actively affiliated members of the national organization, which is to say that they interested in living according to our principles. It's a loosely knit organization. We have a national office and 19 regional centers, so if you add all the schools working with the regional centers but not necessarily affiliated with the national organization, it's well over 600, probably towards 800. Almost all of them<96 percent

 

RD:  Why would you rather work with public schools?

KS:  It's our mission. We believe that the public school is key to the health of our society, maintaining our democracy and having an educated public that can participate actively and understand deeply the issues that our society faces.

 

RD: I imagine some parents would think, "This sounds fine if my child ends up being an artist or a musician, but if they are going to become a CEO of a large organization, they would be misdirected by this." They might worry that their kid wouldn't be prepared for college or a career.

KS:  The data doesn't show that. Our college attendance rates and college success rates for kids in urban schools, where the percentages for college attendance are typically low, are radically improved compared to the same school prior to their adoption of CES principles. And in communities where most of the kids are going to college, we certainly don't have lower rates. The Coalition of Essential Schools is not espousing getting rid of regular courses and having all kids completely chose their curriculum. A typical Coalition school will have courses where the kid will learn math. It's just that instead of covering 150 topics in math, we'll be more like the industrialized European world where kids will deeply cover 35 topics in math.

 

RD:  Are kids who follow this model of education different in other ways?

KS:  We focus more on development of habits of mind rather than memorizing loads of information and disconnected facts. Habits of mind refer to traits one can draw on in a wide variety of situations and applications, like knowing how to seek out multiple points of view, understanding how to apply similar concepts in a new, unfamiliar situation, asking about moral questions. I think traits you see from kids in our schools are confidence, understanding of how they themselves learn and how they keep learning in other situations.

 

RD:  Imagine that you were a science fiction writer and that schools nationwide adopted the Coalition of Essential Schools principles. How would you see society being different?

KS:  I think the public discourse would change. I think there would be a demand for more thoughtful conversation about controversial public issues beyond the sound bite. People would have a longer attention span for discussions. They would know better how to evaluate an argument and to ascertain whether it stands on solid ground. I would like to think that there would be more attention to the impact of social policy on the Earth and of other people around the globe because of the habit of asking that question, of asking the moral question when studying a problem.

 

RD:  What would a moral question be?

KS:  In most science classes, the questions are technical, about formulas and understanding mechanisms. I don't know of many science classes in which the question gets asked, "Are there scientific discoveries that we should not pursue?" which is a raging social question. If that question does not get discussed in the context of learning about science, the training of scientists and the raising of moral questions around science don't happen together. It is as if that is a completely separate sphere. Or the question, "What constitutes a just war?" Kids get drilled in the names of generals and battles and particular wars, without ever addressing that question.

 

RD:  So the people who graduate from these schools might have one of those "Question Authority" bumper stickers on their cars?

KS:  Yes, and they might also have the "Participate Actively" bumper sticker. "Question Authority" may allude to whiners, people who don't like how things are going, and who complain and blame the leaders. But it would be an informed questioning.

 

RD: You haven't mentioned fulfillment and happiness. Is that part of what you imagine happens to kids who keep their curiosity?

KS:  I think that you are right, that people who are living much more fully to their intellectual capacity are likely to be more happy and fulfilled

 

RD:  Overall, is the school reform movement succeeding? It doesn't sound like there is much happening if you listen to George W. Bush.

KS:  Our organization is one of about 20 organizations which were named in federal legislation as comprehensive school reform designs. There was significant money offered by the federal government for schools to adopt one of these comprehensive school reform designs and to get help in implementing reform. The philosophies of those various reforms are pretty much all across the map, but we are one of these designs and have been, as I say, adopted by hundreds of schools across the country.

 

RD:  Have they been very successful? Is there a trend toward innovation and improvement in schools?

KS:  There are trends in both directions. There are schools adopting programs like "Success for All" which are extremely regimented for both the teacher and the students. There are also a number of movements like ours, including Expeditionary Learning, Atlas Project and Accelerated Schools. All of these are philosophically akin to the Coalition, with strong adherence and hundreds of schools they are working with. The national trend at the moment is in the opposite direction, because of the kind of philosophy I have been talking about doesn't fit well with the notion of testing every student every year with the same test. We believe the learning we are talking about is too deep and too varied to be measured by a single test for every kid every year. So the accountability measures that come with the implementation of those tests makes it harder for people to figure out how to adopt our kind of philosophy.

 

RD:  I can imagine schools would be reticent to experiment with a reform, for fear they would lower their grade, lose students in open enrollment and end up going out of business.

KS:  But there are plenty of success stories, in terms of graduation rates, test scores and retention rates. And our schools are much, much, much safer than the average school. The other organizations that I've talked about have success stories as well. And it is catching on. We get calls everyday from people who have heard about us and say, "What can we do? How can we start?" The challenges are also very real, so that it hasn't become a forest fire. It's a series of long, slow changes against the grain of tradition and practice.