A Talk to Teachers
Meier, Deborah
Editorial board member Deborah Meier is the founder and director of Central Park East, a group of alternative public schools in East Harlem that has won nationwide praise for its innovations and...
...We aren't convincing because what we do in most schools bears little resemblance to anything that we can convince kids powerful adults do later on in their lives...
...To honor these goals, we would need to create schools in which adults and children are jointly engaged in such efforts themselves...
...Academic disciplines are merely means, not ends...
...These are the habits of mind and character that will determine their future far more than SAT scores...
...It is like driving and trying to change the tire at the same time...
...It's even a bit suspect, a bit unAmerican...
...We just didn't pretend it was necessary...
...And to make matters even worse, the academic game is one much maligned in our general culture, associated with decadence, effeteness, impracticality, nerdiness...
...My brother and I spent long hours watching baseball in our youth...
...Watch how you get around on that ball...
...The oldest form of teaching—the one that every family practices—is built on apprenticeship...
...We cannot get kids to want to be something we don't genuinely want them to be—and we should not have to pretend we want them all to become academics...
...The students were always testing us, worried about being guinea pigs and reassured when we reverted to form...
...We need to be concerned with the 20 to 30 percent who drop out, move, or transfer between ninth grade and graduation—kids most schools conveniently "disappear...
...And of those—less than 5 percent— who "drop out," could they have been saved if . . .? In our concern with the success of those we keep, have we missed something important about the minority who leave us...
...The schooling created for the old elite was itself an odd one...
...Advisories seemed tough and so we considered giving grades or having curriculums—but held back...
...Not the least of which is to keep alive the conversation about what the task is, not only about how to do it...
...To do nothing may be worse than to fall back on old habits...
...We imagined advisories as close-knit support groups whose members often ate together, went on trips together, and learned to know each other as people, not only as students and teachers...
...And not to be surprised or discouraged at the stubborn fact that it's a slippery business...
...We didn't know whether we should be protective parents or more collegial allies...
...But they will understand better that they are not lesser people, just less experienced people...
...He watched as a future Yankee...
...But I haven't said a word about the particular properties of specific academic disciplines...
...If I wanted to convince children to be good tennis players I'd be sure they had seen tennis played, and played well, and under circumstances that might arouse their joy and envy...
...The particular stroke would not remain long separated from its role in the game itself...
...Advisory trips became more of a chore and we thought about dropping them...
...We know each other through our shared work and interests...
...But even with all this going for us, we are always in danger...
...We back away from our thematic approach, in which all subjects are combined, and we begin to de-integrate subject matter to return to sequential and often essentially tracked classes, to non-thematic courses...
...we didn't know if it was good or bad to call kids who skipped school...
...And we are...
...Our high school system was designed to meet this conception: the education of a small elite fit for schooling, and of a somewhat larger number who were diligent enough to apply themselves to a watered-down version of the real thing, peppered by vocational training...
...And in each such case the natural tendency is to reach for an answer from one's own experience, from the experience of friends and colleagues...
...What percentage of them graduate...
...They cannot think or labor for you...
...They are left with either rage or despair, anger at us or at themselves...
...The task is a task of at least a generation...
...In 1946, the guru of American education, James Conant, dedared to general acclaim that 20 percent of the population could benefit by a liberal arts college education (the "real thing...
...In my youth a majority of teenagers were not expected to graduate, and only a small number of the minority who did graduate went on to college...
...We imagined classes of different sizes, as needs arose or tasks suggested...
...They must want to grow up . . . not fear it...
...Not only is that our natural tendency, but so is it that of the student and his or her family...
...They must be places where real data are gathered and examined, real experimental activity carried out...
...We have not been willing, until recently, and then only tentatively, to reexamine the purpose and nature of our schools, so that their means and ends align better...
...Do we wonder 84 • DISSENT A Talk to Teachers then if kids create their own counterculture, their own escape hatches...
...We were equally avid Yankee fans...
...But fortunately—never a boring one...
...We designed CPESS to be like the elementary school it grew out of—not course-based, but classroom-experience-based, at least for the first four years...
...Skeptical—with an open mind to other possibilities...
...In such settings kids don't have to be the equals of their faculty...
...And new habits don't yet exist...
...We've raised the ante, and we have offered no honorable escape hatches—no dignified alternative work and honor...
...If we want a culture in which practicing with one's mind is as natural as practicing basketball, we need to redefine what we value in the use of our minds...
...We need to find ways to see each kid respectfully, not only for what they might become but for what they are...
...If you don't study history, you'll be doomed to repeat it...
...Tradition has made certain courses prerequisites for others—calculus before engineering, and so on...
...Finally one student asked, "Do you really listen to Mozart for pleasure...
...Finding ways to do this will come slowly—in some cases, one kid at a time...
...Everyone, especially our allies, thinks we've created a kind of Camelot, the school of tomorrow...
...And it was with just such a commitment in mind that we started CPESS in the fall of 1985...
...And we need to make an honest case that what we want all kids to learn is worth learning...
...Its traditions were gradually expanded to meet the needs of (or provide a thin layer of polish to) young aristocrats and then, later on, to the children of the new middle class...
...That means young people must be exposed to other adults besides teachers, whose enterprises suggest a continuum between the school and other adult enterprises...
...So I want to provide a context for our work, and then to review the solution—the "idea"—we invented to respond to its difficulties, and to think again of new ways to tackle the initial plan...
...I drove down to the college and listened to classical music on the way...
...One day I failed—so exquisite was the Mozart quintet...
...In the end, we recreated a full-scale grading system where we had intended to have a pass/fail system...
...They can only put you in the best way of thinking and laboring for yourselves...
...We did less and less teaming, especially with two teachers in the same room, and teachers saw less and less of the insides of each other's classes...
...A cooking school surrounds its apprentices with cooks, and gives them real live diners to practice on...
...And, second, we would focus on developing demonstrable intellectual habits of mind—not the accumulation of course credits, coverage of academic domains, a list of discreet skills, or scores on norm-referenced tests...
...They "choose" failure because they see no realistic alternative...
...The trouble with our ad hoc compromises is that they sometimes block such self-definition, and in the name of support undermine self-generative activity...
...If I knew my students well, I'd also be wary of changing their unconventional backhands if they seemed to work well...
...Thus, while the school is all about human relationships, we need to remind ourselves that the strategy we've selected is to organize these relationships around the stuff of life—the subject matter, ideas, projects, and work that we do together...
...I can think of a lot of evidence to the contrary...
...We got tougher on attendance and detentions and holding kids in after school, and assigning standard homework...
...The school must be a place where adults are engaged if we are to engage the young...
...But do we really believe that historians are better able to set policy than nonhistorians...
...but you get our diploma only by earning it—by convincing us...
...Then the absence of a reason is cruel and unusual...
...What history tells us of such efforts is that there's an inexorable tendency to return to the norm—an almost inevitable inertia...
...Probably necessary and wise...
...If schools are to develop thoughtful citizens, productive employees, and life-long learners, then one big change is needed...
...We gradually introduced more courses with traditional names and even textbooks...
...Not a single aspect of the process we envisioned worked out quite the way we expected...
...Look at the racket...
...If we mean that all children will learn to be shapers of their own destiny, active agents of their own learning, then we still have a long way to go...
...And I'd provide lots of feedback...
...We imagined classes of different lengths as these small teams of teachers tackled time creatively and flexibly—using the school as a base and venturing out often into the larger world...
...And a majority of those who "succeed" have only gone through the motions...
...At no time in the history of the world have most human beings taken to such "esoteric" delights...
...My brother's game improved by watching, but mine didn't...
...It grew out of a religious and scholastic European tradition that viewed an education in the nonpractical arts to be the highest distinction, the mark of a leisure class, the more esoteric the better...
...All they can count on is their street smarts, and all they can hope for is a lucky break...
...We intended to communicate our confidence in their eventual capacity to meet the challenge, however long it took...
...Someone who is closely observant, open to patterns and details...
...What kind of standards did they meet elsewhere...
...What our students think about our enterprise is, as Priestly would have understood, at the heart of the matter...
...Ditto for literature, the arts, and math and science...
...And if they fail...
...It's not any wonder that we think the answer lies in the old patterns...
...Able to WINTER • 1994 • 83 A Talk to Teachers communicate carefully, persuasively, in a variety of media...
...We imagined them taking courses in museums and being involved in political activities in lieu of traditional courses, but didn't know how to support such work or make sure it wasn't a cop-out or demoralizing...
...For good as well as bad reasons, Americans have understood their genius to be based on effort, ingenuity, resilience, and street smarts...
...We love you regardless...
...We didn't know how to handle transcripts...
...We imagined opening up the lunch period for many options, beyond, but including, team sports...
...If only it were true that "once upon a time" we knew how to do all this, then we could just "do it" again...
...We had to rethink each of these ideas, mostly on the spot...
...What we are trying to do is unprecedented...
...Not only is the school radically different than most, but our statistical success is impressive...
...By the standards of this task, American public education has done a phenomenal job over the past generation...
...We make claims...
...For every sign of resilience under trial, reliability, resourcefulness, humor and grace...
...we must, if you will, "convert" them, so that they decide to join our club...
...We imagined the library as an adjunct to all classes and the librarian as a closely connected member of the teaching staff...
...Meanwhile most of us can't remember the last time we solved a problem using an algebraic equation...
...We worried, and they did too, about what colleges would expect...
...Try again...
...They recognize that a good education provides a credential—the first of many such credentials that will finally allow them to do something that they want, or might want, to do or anyway that will pay them a wage they know they'll need...
...If our definition of an educated person were broader, were we to see academics as one example of important intellectual activity, not a synonym for such activity—then we'd be asking different questions and finding different answers...
...In fact, the claims for the value of academic education are based on the flimsiest evidence, given the mammoth nature of the enterprise, not to mention its cost...
...If it chiefly depends on their industry, then we must engage their industry...
...Over the years, our approach has become more formalized, less flexible...
...We wouldn't have to enlist their imaginations...
...You must form all conclusions and all maxims for yourselves, from premises and data collected and considered by yourself...
...They don't believe they can get it...
...And often we ourselves are only enforcers of the rules for scoring, not the real judges...
...We're trying to do something that has not been done before...
...in the habit of stepping comfortably —even uncomfortably — into the shoes of others...
...But I think the evidence is in...
...If being good at school comes naturally, it's a nuisance worth putting up with...
...Sometimes it was hard to drag myself away from a great piece to make the class on time...
...academic but of a new category and a new terminology for using our minds well for what society agrees are worthy goals...
...WINTER • 1994 • 87...
...It's not a question of vocational vs...
...The sons of the powerful might become warriors or kings, landed aristocrats, or, at a later date, wealthy traders and adventurers—or they might become monks, scholars, rabbis...
...Novices, throughout history, learn best from participating at their own pace alongside experts at something they want to be good at...
...In the habit of imagining how others think, feel, and see the world...
...Trusting us that it's worth it is not sufficient...
...Each case history has its particulars...
...Our schools must be places to which every parent—including us—would willingly, if not gladly, send their own child...
...And we, their teachers, are often unsure about what the game is, rarely having had an opportunity to try it out ourselves...
...Now schools must become communities in which mentor and novice—of various ages and stages—learn alongside each other...
...We are not wrong in noticing the recurrent problems: too much lateness, kids not doing homework, not 80 • DISSENT A Talk to Teachers working hard enough, the absence of apparent consequences, our not knowing how to create an appropriate curriculum, and so on and so on...
...Teaching and keeping a school going involve countless small decisions, compromises, and negotiated crises...
...and "Is it truly so...
...At our very first retreat, we committed ourselves to two propositions: first, we'd be a school designed for any and every kind of kid—with a particular commitment to those Latino and African-American youth least well served in New York...
...I hadn't dared imagine I could...
...Are American historians more likely to give Clinton good advice than nonhistorians...
...A messy one...
...We back-tracked, side-stepped, hemmed and hawed, for very good reasons...
...Even the aristocratic student of Cambridge and Oxford preferred the "gentleman's C." And if this is true in general, it is even more true in certain subgroups—working-class men, for example, who see excelling in academia as something unmanly...
...Was it necessary to toss so much away in the process...
...There was a dead silence...
...That's a fact...
...We gave "drop-outs" honorable jobs and the respect of their peers...
...It's one among many vocations that the young might set their hearts on...
...Like listening to Mozart...
...They don't see how hard work will pay off...
...It's okay in its place...
...You'll get it, eventually...
...We imagined kids creating clubs and student newspapers, putting on plays, and setting up art exhibits...
...e're in a position both enviable and unenviable...
...He had joined the club...
...In fact, it's as one who honors the real thing, that I don't want to water it down in the interests of stuffing it into all kids' heads...
...And still does...
...Dare we go back now and see what could be recouped...
...Unlike in the real world, teachers are usually the only audience of their students' work...
...What we do want them to be we must make real, tangible, believable, credible—and valued...
...They have value because they can inform our intellects, not the other way around...
...Can we find any evidence that individuals or nations with a great deal of historical knowledge have been more successful, made fewer mistakes...
...All of which were intended to achieve the central task of the SI: to help kids take progressively riskier and more self-initiated steps that would prepare them for leaving us, under circumstances of relative safety and security...
...I was there strictly as an observer, a devoted looker-on...
...The mantra "All children can learn" is either a truism or an incomplete sentence—can, or will, learn what...
...You have time...
...No wonder then that our schools are a disappointment and that so many have grown discouraged...
...I'm not for watering down anything...
...Granted some small number might set their hearts on being college professors or scholarly researchers...
...And it is the great object of this institution to remove every bias the mind may be under, and to give the greatest scope for true freedom of thinking and enquiry...
...But we never did it...
...Playful and imaginative...
...We print below a talk she gave to the teachers at the Central Park East Secondary School (CPESS) on the completion of the secondary school's eighth year...
...we have much to celebrate in our success—as well as much to do...
...The academy was designed to be the place of training for the latter scholarly pursuits...
...Do those who best know Yugoslavia's history arrive at similar conclusions about what went wrong or how it might be fixed...
...As in the elementary school, students would spend two years with a small core of teachers, who would divide up the day in ways that they designed—including time for seminars, independent study, direct instruction, small group work, and so on—around a set of powerful interdisciplinary themes, selected to provide opportunities to internalize the habits of mind we most cherished, as well as related habits of work...
...Editorial board member Deborah Meier is the founder and director of Central Park East, a group of alternative public schools in East Harlem that has won nationwide praise for its innovations and for its students' academic success...
...These were not requirements created with the intention that all should meet them...
...We can only go as fast as we can go, and only change to the degree that we know how to change...
...But if you're not good at it, it's one long arduous task, full of humiliation and confusion...
...In the city as a whole, only slightly over 50 percent of the students graduate from high school with regular diplomas, and less than 50 percent do it in four years...
...We worried about what message we were sending if we didn't monitor attendance...
...At CPESS, it's between 70 and 80 percent in four years, and 90 percent in five—virtually all of whom have gone on to college, mostly to four-year schools, and almost all of whom have made it through the first year and into the second...
...See how you turned away...
...How can I get there...
...Naturally, the path of least resistance is easiest to follow, and we've often opted to do so...
...We know that though we've come a long way, we have a long way to go...
...It takes twice as much effort to break new ground and find alternative responses...
...And of course, what passes for academics in most high schools bears little resemblance to the real article anyway...
...The most ambitious sister effort—the eight-year study schools of the late 1930s—was a well-publicized, heavily supported, and hugely successful attempt to reshape high school in a manner not so dissimilar to ours...
...Schools must be places where important questions are asked and important answers heard—including "Why are we studying this...
...I apologized when I arrived and explained why I was late...
...We've taken away almost everything we can from the lives of the uneducated, and 50 percent fall into the abyss anyway...
...If they are to devote twelve or more years of their life to it, it needs a damned good explanation...
...To quote Joseph Priestley on the occasion of the dedication of New College in London in 1794: Whatever be the qualifications of your tutors, your improvement must chiefly depend on yourselves...
...If we're going to make kids stay in school, we need to be sure schooling isn't designed for shame...
...We're sure they need the schooling, but the connection between schooling and success is at best unclear...
...I know of few schools that have been more unflinchingly honest at trying to do the impossible...
...That academics has become the path all children must pursue in order to meet their nonacademic aspirations—from engineer to lawyer to bookkeeper—is absurd...
...And the habits and dispositions that go with these broader goals—being reliable, someone you can count on, resilient, capable of dealing with frustration, not expecting certainties and absolutes—these are traits that are as critical to the academic vocations as to all other decent worthy human vocations...
...Show me," we say...
...But surely, not even in our fondest dreams do teachers or the public expect that most students have such goals in mind...
...And if it were easy many more would have succeeded...
...In a generation, we transformed the expectations of schools, but not yet their aspirations and working norms...
...And I'd be sure they had lots of opportunities to practice it with people who were in their own league and a little better— while continuing to be exposed to the real pros...
...They must be party to the work going on—allowed to listen in, privy to its secrets, taken seriously, listened to, gradually assuming more and more rights and privileges as members-in-training of the school's ruling class—its faculty...
...We tried math courses that were based on activities of interest, and didn't quite know how to carry them out or how kids could study when we weren't working one-onone with them...
...They must see adulthood as worthy, and teachers as part of that adulthood...
...And curious—someone who asks, "How come...
...Can one be intellectually competent and nonacademic...
...How many academics do we want...
...Barely a ripple remains of that work...
...If the consequences for failure were serious enough, some proponents of more draconian high-stakes testing suggest, the kids would work hard—like it or not...
...those are our internalized patterns too...
...EDS...
...Not scorn it...
...No big deal...
...They were not set up to succeed at the new tasks allotted them: to train every single kid to a high level of academic achievement in areas of study that have expanded exponentially even since the 1940s, WINTER • 1994 • 81 A Talk to Teachers and to require that they demonstrate by the age of eighteen that they know the subject matter of these manifold academic disciplines and are able also to prove their knowledge in the most sophisticated and persuasive ways—through high levels of skill as a writer, mathematician, researcher, technician, and so on...
...Video would be a blessing, and I'd wonder what they did in the good old days...
...We eliminate independent study...
...By 1970 the country had invented "dropouts...
...Their purpose was precisely that all would not...
...After all, it brings praise, and being competent feels good...
...We were both equally amazed...
...We look good...
...They're not lazy because they don't want to be successful, but because they don't get it...
...We have almost no time to pause and reflect about our work, much less confer with colleagues, sit back and observe, watch and wonder, model...
...Do they do better at other schools...
...If our story is to be different, it will be in part because we take this lesson to heart, and in part because we're living in an extraordinary moment when the political rhetoric that surrounds our work—especially among educational policy pundits—may be increasingly aligned with our own vision, when the number of our allies may be great enough not only to protect our work but enlarge it, and when we have an excellent reputation from some of the unlikeliest sources to fall back upon...
...But they all also have commonalities...
...Respectful of evidence and open to reason and discourse...
...The postgrad plan was intended as an on-going record of the process of thinking and rethinking "Who am I?" "Where am I heading...
...To get from "here" to "there," the assumption was that SI students would need as many different forms of support as there were students—including quite traditional college courses, less traditional courses at CPESS, classes at museums, independent study, small tutorials, internships, travel, you name it...
...It's when we take 86 • DISSENT A Talk to Teachers three back and one forward that we need to worry...
...There is no "real-world counterpart" to the "judging" that goes on in schools...
...We took it for granted that that higher education stuff wasn't for everybody, no shame to it...
...But we mostly ask students to learn to play a game they've never seen played and may never again see in their entire lives...
...Including the vocation of citizen...
...But few architects I know claim they've ever used the calculus that was a prerequisite for the architecture they do use...
...We have a healthy skepticism toward academic learning...
...He has it all there: the goal—to become learners (not learned but a learner) and the means—hard work under one's own steam...
...And of those who do graduate from CPESS, as we focus on scoring grids and "standards," how are they doing in terms of such qualities as resilience, reliability, and sense of responsibility— what some of us have started to call the other 3 Rs...
...Some years ago, I was teaching a course to a group of adults at the college organized by District Council 37, a local public employees' union...
...We ask them to learn bits and pieces of it without ever having a chance to practice it whole...
...She knew classical music was good for one's mind and was prepared to appreciate it dutifully...
...Taking ideas seriously, persuading others, writing poetry, painting or sketching, gathering useful evidence, making important decisions, taking the time to understand the other person's viewpoint before rushing to condemn it—are such traits academic or vocational...
...stronger in some ways, in terms of the depth of materials, work, and comfort...
...Two terrible choices with equally damaging consequences...
...As we reflect on our first eight years, we need to understand the context of our experiment—its larger social and educational dimensions—and simultaneously be aware of the particular history of reforms such as ours...
...And we don't always have twice as much energy and time...
...The concept of a well-educated person doesn't naturally couple with the concept of an academic...
...So, in part, the kids don't want to be well-educated (although they'll try it, mind 82 • DISSENT A Talk to Teachers you) because they can't imagine what could be "wantable" about it...
...If, therefore, you get knowledge you must acquire it by your own industry...
...They can't buy in until they can taste what it is that we are claiming might lie on the other side...
...But she couldn't imagine the intense sensual pleasure I was describing emanating from such dry and remote sounds...
...The preparation would be focused around a postgrad plan—a what-next-and-why plan—the successful presentation and defense of seven major and seven minor portfolios and a senior project...
...Do the environmental decisions being made in nations whose kids do better on international science exams surpass ours...
...We're proposing that our students and our faculty can do good work—and that this is a safe place to initiate, organize, and reflect upon how to do such good work...
...After all, the shoemaker's apprentice needs a real shoemaker...
...So we reinstitute grades, we start falling back on traditional textbooks, we impose detentions...
...We imagined that team teaching would make the task easier and richer, and would provide kids with authentic examples of adult intellectual sparring...
...Often such solutions are the wise ones...
...He was there in body as well as spirit with each pitch, each slide to the plate, each leaping catch...
...Off with their heads, say some, while others propose that only the discipline of the marketplace—the privatization of our schools—will impose the necessary discipline on both the kids and their teachers...
...We are not the first to try...
...If we want to keep the academic traditions alive and healthy, to ensure that they continue to thrive so that they can feed all our other worldly and spiritual pursuits, there must be a cheaper and sounder way to do that...
...Jobs and the good life require it, for obscure reasons...
...The kids have to want to become well educated...
...Our schools have accommodated to entirely new demands— brought forward first by the second- and third-generation white ethnics returning from war with the GI Bill, and then ten years later by African Americans...
...Following this four-year highly personalized core immersion, students would graduate into a transitional "Senior Institute" (SI) designed to prepare them for the world beyond...
...We'll always be taking—at best—three bold steps forward and one back...
...Their own steam and energy and industry must be enlisted in the cause of learning, not just ours as teachers...
...And I'm leaving out the way we originally designed the foreign-language requirement, our expectations regarding music, and a variety of other things...
...The biggest danger is the inevitable tendency to revert to the norm...
...We apprentice kids to masters of the trade...
...I want something intellectually honest in its own right...
...Of course...
...The list could go on...
...But unless we occasionally wipe the slate clean and return to the original vision, these small ad hoc compromises will lead us back to the kind of school we are trying to replace...
...we are here for you forever...
...The study of algebra is alternately based on claims that (1) it's good training for the mind, (2) that we need it to survive in modern society, or (3) that like it or not it's an essential gateway for more highly skilled jobs...
...We need to keep our eye on the most vulnerable—the ones it's easier to overlook— for whom courses are often the least successful learning strategy...
...We thus appear even more powerless than our students...
...All this we can aim at...
...And on the cheap...
...Us and the kids...
...and finally "How am I doing...
...The miracle, to me, is how many we talk into sticking it out...
...We need to keep going back to that original dream and seeing whether expediency hasn't led us to be slightly less than we are capable of being...
...But we're also here to stir, tease out, support, coach, and nourish every strength, interest, passion, curiosity, and nascent talent we observe...
...While every diploma would represent some common requirements, WINTER • 1994 • 85 A Talk to Teachers each would also differ substantially depending on the student...
...But with a difference...
...They have to experience it...
...But as a device to weed out the less worthy, at no cost to the already powerful, it worked...
...But then we must be sure it's a club they might want to and think they are able to join...
...Adults must represent something worthy of emulation...
...Should they have stayed with us...
...It's just a hoop you must jump through because it's good for you...
Vol. 41 • January 1994 • No. 1
