Marginal Impact: time's too short for one kid at a time - Book Review - four books on education

Education Next, Summer, 2003 by Robin J. Lake

Upstart Startup: Creating and Sustaininq a Public Charter School

By James Nehring

Teachers College Press, 2002

Standards of Mind and Heart: Creating the Good High School

By Peggy Silva and Robert A. Mackin

Teachers College Press, 2002

Central Park East and Its Graduates: "Learning by Heart"

By David Bensman

Teachers College Press, 2000

One Kid at a Time: Big Lessons from a Small School

By Eliot Levine

Teachers College Press, 2001

"Inspiration," "heart," "democracy," "models for national education reform" ...so advertise the covers of four books from the series on small schools by Teachers College Press. True to promise, the authors deliver compelling stories of students once on the brink of academic failure who have thrived in four small schools, all based on principles from the Coalition of Essential Schools. Tony with Down's syndrome, Tamika from a broken home, and others similarly afflicted became engaged in learning thanks to superhuman efforts from teachers and student-centered learning.

These stories illustrate the argument in favor of creating smaller schools: students get personal attention, individualized learning plans, and grades based on long-term projects and performance-based graduation requirements. All of these schools, for example, require senior exhibitions" for graduation, where students present project results to a panel of outside experts. Most of these schools also regularly collect portfolios of student work in an attempt to go beyond standardized test results and provide richer measures of achievement.

This all makes small schools sound very attractive. But if small schools are to live up to their promise as national reform models and broader remedies for inequity, inspiration and heart may not be enough.

As these books demonstrate, operators of small schools share good ideas about how to make their own schools work, but they regularly ignore the fact that they have escaped from a system that prevents others from doing the same thing. Lots of educators who decide to create small schools, often by negotiating special arrangements with the local school district, do so because they don't have any confidence that the system can be changed in any real way. Their solution has been to try to save as many kids as they can get their hands on. But they act as if anyone could do what they have done. Their denial of their own special circumstances lets them ignore--and even oppose--the system-wide changes that must occur if their valuable ideas are to be widely replicated. They rail against state standards and accountability systems, but offer few practical alternatives for ensuring that all public schools perform at a high level. Any serious reform effort must articulate a credible strategy for replicating successful sch ools.

Reinventing the Wheel

The strength of these four books is the honest lessons they offer people who are interested in starting new schools, Upstart Startup is the story of a Massachusetts charter school founded by Ted and Nancy Sizer (he the founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools). Handpicked veteran teachers staff the school, and a constant stream of Harvard graduate students scrutinize its workings and volunteer their time. If any school should succeed, this is the one, Yet author James Nehring, the school's first principal, tells a story of utter chaos in the school's first year, including scheduling meltdowns, administrative blunders, and a failure to link course objectives with established graduation outcomes.

In Central Park East and Its Graduates, David Bensman describes similar early mistakes and regrettable incidents in the famous small school Central Park East. Now more than a decade old, at various times the school tried consensus-based governance and failed, struggled to get teachers to collaborate on instructional strategies, and butted heads over race and student favoritism.

The majority of new "small" schools are likely to make similar mistakes, The lure of building from scratch and deliberating until every teacher is happy with every decision is strong for small-school founders. And they all seem doomed to learn the same lessons in isolation. School founders have few places to turn for advice about how to avoid disaster. School districts simply do not have the expertise to help--or, worse, actively get in the way--and potential sources of technical assistance like the Coalition of Essential Schools are thinly funded and reluctant to intrude.

Inexplicably, even when lessons, resources, and help are available, school founders resist the notion of replication. Nehring's attitude is common. He argues that efforts at replicating his program are ill advised--not even a school's scheduling policies should be imitated. Those interested in starting their own schools are told not only to expect but also to embrace the "muddle through" strategy. Nehring argues that school reform is necessarily this messy and irreducible, By contrast, the entrepreneurial founders of the Met School in Rhode Island (as described in One Kid at a Time) have started a nonprofit to seed other Met-like schools around the country and are developing materials and assistance to make that happen.