(Note: I suck at HTML and formatting in general, even with a WYSIWYG setup like blogger uses. I am sorry. I might edit the formatting of this piece in the future, but that might just make it worse.)
In the first two posts, I talked a bit about the character of the high school I subbed at - small town, small schools/academy setup, etc. In this post, somewhat inspired by recent events in the district, I want to comment on the academy system more generally.
Specifically, I have been thinking about the fact that the district superintendent just got placed on indefinite paid administrative leave by folks who have spent a lot of time either bashing the academy system or getting their support from folks who bash the academy system. While those folks who voted to send the Superintendent to mow his lawn did not say it was because of the academy system directly, it is hard to believe that the biggest controversy of the last several years has nothing to do with it.
From the setup, it appears I am about to defend said system, but I'm not sure. I want to lay out the pros and cons as I see them, and see what happens.
*Puts on policy wonk hat.*
Pros (and these are the pros as I see them, not as how they are touted by supporters of the idea; the same goes for the cons):
- Increased attendance, decreased tardies - or at least the potential for this. In some parts of the school, it appeared that tardies and unexcused absences were down; in others, they had stayed the same or risen. From what I saw, the biggest gains were made due to the diligence of one person, not the academy system; even given that, I think the academy system helps here, since it allowed the person in question to be responsible for 300-400 students instead of 1400, which allowed her to be much more effective. The fact that she was extremely thorough and diligent also helped - I saw staff in other parts of the school who were much more lax about following the rule of law, and the result, based on what I was told by one teacher, was that those areas of the school that didn't enforce the rules so tightly had absence and tardy rates that weren't going down.
- Staff get to know students better, since they are more-or-less reduced to dealing with a small portion of the overall student body rather than the full 1400 people. This allows for more personalized attention with a decreased chance for students to fall through the proverbial cracks. Anecdotally, this was backed up - several teachers I talked to said that the number of students dropping out in their academy had decreased since the previous year. Furthermore, these teachers implicitly credited the fact that they were all working as a team more than they had before the implementation of the academy system, and could therefore more easily track students who were in trouble.
- Location - physically placing each academy in a separate part of the school allows for decreased time between classes, which has a myriad of social consequences, but also affects tardies and presumably skipping, even if to a small degree. It also, theoretically, allows for greater cohesion among students who share an academy. I am not sure if I saw this, or if I saw cohesion based on shared interests or previously formed friendships or social groups.
- Greater opportunities for a cohesive curriculum across departments and/or opportunities for team teaching. I saw the former in spades in at least one academy, and in another there was an amazing team-taught class. The possibility to make the curriculum comprehensive and coherent at the academy level is, for me, one of the biggest selling points of this system. I never experienced anything like that until college, when I would end with classes that complimented each other. While I think it's less obvious to students in high school, I certainly think the ability to coordinate is greater - and the fact that it can be conscious coordination, even to the point of telling students what's happening, is very useful.
- Greater diversity of class offerings. This is pretty interesting, since it also relies on the fact that the academy system requires more teachers - meaning that it's not really the academy part that results in more classes but the increased number of classes being taught. So I'd call it a semi-pro. One thing, though - it is certainly true; word has it there is going to be Sociology and Anthropology/Archeology taught there next year, two things I'd never expect to see...now if only they could add a Critical Thinking/Philosophy class...
Cons
- Gender. This is the big one for me. I know that high school can be a harsh and dangerous place, one where gender roles are enforced with such ruthless efficiency as to give the Mafia or the military pause, but still. I think the academy system really exacerbated the way students experienced gender, especially when it came to the different ways that people presented masculinity and femininity. For instance, one academy was very male-dominated (85-90% male); are those students going to leave high school with the same ideas about gender, sexuality, and women that they would have in a school that didn't have this kind of artificial segregation? I doubt it. Furthermore, I got the sense that life for women in that system was pretty difficult. Many of them showed signs of having adapted to being more masculine, and while some of them seemed to relish in their newfound freedom, for others it came across as a nasty set of behavior guidelines.
In another academy, women were pretty dominant, and I noticed that the males were far more flexible in their presentation of gender, i.e. suggestions that they were anything but hypermasculine weren't met with grunts and raised fists. My point is actually one I can crib from a teacher at the school who tried to talk to their students about where they learn about things like love and relationships: Look who they are learning these things from. It's not anything like a representative sample of their peers - heck, it's not even as representative as it was pre-academy.
And this has larger ramifications than gender; many of these students are going to graduate with much narrower view of the possibility of human personalities than they should. Students seem to have developed a dominant view for what people should be like based on what academy they are in; I think this sort of stereotyping is a very bad thing, as it actually reinforces larger stereotypes (in this case nerd, hick, 'emo fag', etc.) by not placing students face-to-face with people who can shatter those stereotypes.
- Class Stratification - Part of the stereotyping is, of course, stereotyping people's intelligence. This, too, has negative consequences, especially for those students who start believing they are dumber than they are. Also, if I remember correctly there was an incredibly large difference across academies in rates of college attendance; it seemed to track almost perfectly with the presence of females in the academy (more females, more college-bound students).
One of my pet peeves about this kind of system is that it essentially asks 14-year-olds to pick a career path, something that I think is the worst kind of stupid (it reinforces existing class inequality and stratification - how many people just want to do what their parents do or only have exposure to what their parents do at that age, especially males?). Most people don't know what they want to do for their entire life at that age, and as far as I know, most people change professional careers multiple times (to say nothing of college majors). Therefore, asking students to pick something like this so early is criminal in my mind. I know my own experience with electives - Journalism & Newspaper, Chemistry up through the AP class, the entire Electronics series, and four years of German - could not have taken place today, as three of those series are in different academies and German has been eliminated entirely. Put frankly, high school is not a time to pick a career. It is a time to learn, grow, experiment, and dabble (just like college, I might add). Life skills are far more important than career skills at this point.
This is one objection I've never heard proponents of an academy system really respond to; sure, the goal is to get college attendance rates and academic difficulty equal across all academies, but there are larger structural forces working against that, and there is a giant disparity present at the moment in this area, especially where I was.
- Increased Anonymity Outside Your Academy - a teacher pointed out to me that there are now hundreds of students who can waltz into his area of the school, wreak havoc, and leave, and he would have no idea who they were. The point, of course, is that with increased awareness of and time spent with those students in your academy come less knowledge of the student body as a whole. Relatively minor, maybe, but still worth noting.
- Increased resource requirements - all of a sudden there are multiple offices with multiple policies, not to mention three of almost every department. From an NEA article:
But like most good education reforms, this one can be done well or badly. “Small schools can be great, but they do take more resources,” says Oakland, California, math teacher Jack Gerson. His big high school was chopped into three small ones. “Now we have three principals, three attendance clerks, three offices,” says Gerson, and yet Oakland is slashing its school budget.
Like giving schools more resources is a bad thing. I understand that it's not likely to happen, not even under a Democratic Administration, but let's be clear: School funding needs to be increased by at least 100%, regardless of policy. Nevertheless, I am counting it as con since it's likely to force districts to stretch their resources even thinner.Honestly? On the whole, I'm not a fan of the academy system, at least no in its current iteration. I also ran across something that I think could easily happen where I worked, and maybe already is (it would especially true if resource allocation is unequal for any length of time):
That is a big deal.Valerie Lee, a University of Michigan professor and co-author of a new book about five big-school conversions, cautions that the phenomenon is still so new it's hard to draw hard conclusions about its value.
One troubling finding, Lee said, was that social stratification at all five schools increased, with the motivated students with good grades gravitating toward one or two of the smaller units, and unmotivated students to others.
"The students and teachers all recognized that there was one subunit where all the loser kids were," Lee said. "We had kids say: 'We know we're losers, and here we are all together in the loser academy.' "
More from the NEA article:
Many cities are imposing small schools from the top down, but success depends on giving teachers a leading role, says journalism teacher Stan Karp, who led a small school in Patterson, New Jersey, and now works on a state taskforce writing guidelines for small, urban high schools. “Where the rubber meets the road is in the teacher teams. They’re on the front lines,” he says. “They need support and autonomy.” [emphasis mine]If they are not talking about the LCSD, they should be. I'm getting hints that part of the problem was in fact the top-down administering of this shift, and that the resentment it caused has never been dealt with. Do you hear that?
That’s why it’s important for Association members to be proactive when a small school conversion is in the works, says Smith. “The union needs to call people together and move out front. Have a discussion with members and talk about the pros and the potential challenges. This needs to be done with us, not to us.”
“They need support and autonomy.”
That is perhaps the single most important thing that I can say about teachers and teaching in the short term. Yes, there are horrible teachers out there, but everyone suffers when the hammer comes down on innovation. Heck, everyone suffers when the hammers comes down and there's a memo attached to it that results in massive changes to the school. Changes of this magnitude are very, very hard, if not impossible, to do from above, and it takes an extremely delicate touch and, ultimately, the support of teachers. From what I hear, Jim Robinson had - and has - neither.
Conclusion
One reason I wrote this post is to reiterate larger point about the ongoing disaster that is the LCSD. I have tried to provide, as substantially as possible, some of the ups and downs of the current system.
I have never seen anyone else do this, either in the paper or at a school board meeting. I am positive the district personnel are talking about the pros and results of the system, since they implemented it. However, I would expect the system's detractors to have SOME sort of evidence (after four years) to support their claims. I have seen or heard none, so I think it's out up or shut up time - and it should be clear by now that I think there is plenty of evidenced that academy system is far from perfect. It's just that the detractors don't seem to be even trying to make legitimate arguments in support of their points. (Yes, I am aware that my insistence on things like 'evidence' and 'coherent arguments' provide proof of my pretentiousness.)
Along those same lines, I went to the effort to try and organize my observations because I think it's something that both proponents of the small schools system and perhaps more importantly, the teachers and staff who work within the system, need to do. If there was one overriding thing I heard about the academy system, it was that it wasn't perfect - and therefore needed tweaking. I believe the people best suited to do that tweaking are, at least in part, the teachers on the ground. (Along with that, of course, I believe the students who are affected need to have a very big and very meaningful part in any sort of discussion.) I wasn't aware of any organized effort to initiate the sort of bottom-up, informal evaluation I am thinking about. For that matter, I didn't see any evidence of any sort of evaluation, though I am sure there is SOME kind of evaluation process in place. What I did hear was a lot of very information and anecdotal information, most of it pretty insightful and very relevant. I just didn't see it going anywhere.
(Note: Whether or not any of my comments and observations are worth anything is for the reader to decide. I will only say that I feel very strongly about the gendered aspects of the academy system, and indeed high school in general. The policy wonk/numbers game stuff is probably best left to people who believe in it more strongly than I do, but since it is a common metric for measuring this sort of thing, it's included.)
7 comments:
Having worked in an actual small school, it's easy to see why small school light (aka the academy system) doesn't work the way it's supposed to. The strengths of an actual small school can't be replicated in a school-within-a-school scenario because the community feel of a small school comes from a couple of different places.
1. An administration (usually consisting of 1-3 people) that KNOWS the kids, knows the families, and gives a damn about both. The members of the administration have a vested interest in the school because they live in the community and their kids (if they have any) are students at the school they run. When I was at LHS, most of the admin DIDN'T live in Lebanon, and lacked an understanding of the community and the students.
2. Teachers play a more important role in how the school is run when they make up 90% of the staff (as opposed to having 6 administrators, a dozen office staffers, etc.). This means that teachers are invested because the state of the school reflects on them, not just the students they have in their class. A small school cannot function without some added effort on the part of the teachers, but because the added responsibilities comes with added respect and understanding (and hopefully, added pay) from the administration/school board/families/community, they are more than happy to do it.
3. Parents that know what is going on at their child’s school. By high school, this is pretty much a pipe dream for about half of the school population. I don’t know how to solve this, except for to invite parental involvement early and often.
When all of these aspects are aligned, it hardly matters who the students are – any student flourishes when they are surrounded by a caring community.
The solution? Heck if I know. The academy system may be the only feasible way for the small school to work in a community like Lebanon. But I think that forcing a child to choose their career path at age 13 or 14 is insanity, as is the segregation along gender and SES lines. Why not have a separate building for each “academy” around a central large community building, group students heterogeneously, and offer core classes all at the same time within your small school, then have all the electives in the large central school, allowing students to interact with other students, try out different subjects? It’s not the same as an actual small school, but I think it would provide some of the benefits without all the downsides of the academy system as-is at LHS.
Your last suggestion is in line with what I heard from teachers, including one very tall Celtics fan. It would replicate the old Core system that I had in 9th grade, and I think it's far more effective and efficient. In Lebanon, of course, the physical separation won't occur, but hey.
There are also questions about what counts as an elective vs. an academy-specific class. Where do you put things like AP classes?
Here's some posts on a Small Schools site. There's a comment by Jim Robinson on the end.
http://thinklab.typepad.com/think_lab/small_learning_communities/index.html
Baby with the Bathwater
Just because logic, passion, and good intentions join forces to re-shape the modern educational system doesn't mean that we're going to avoid controversial backlash.
Such is the case in the Small Schools Movement which takes a hit in a recent CNN story entitled "Backlash Builds up Against the Movement to Break Up Big Schools". While not a terribly long article nor one that reaches beyond a few obvious markers (Manual HS in Denver, the Gates money, etc.), it does point to a series of issues that you hear time and time again in the ever-changing landscape of education.
Sadly, I think we have another simplistic 'open school plan' debate on our hands. Instead of seeing the 'design' within a larger pattern, we see the 'design' as the solution itself. And when test scores don't go up (as the highlighted school in the article faced) or if the football team is not as strong because they have fewer kids to select from or if the kids are angry about scheduling limits, then the obvious reaction is that in time the small school/academy movement will swing back to impersonal uber-high schools that offer a shopping mall approach and a huge sports stadium filled on Saturday nights. And not sure it matters much until we re-think what we mean by 'learning' rather than just the window-dressing of small vs. large school language.
Fortunately, in the article 3 reasonably calm voices suggested that in spite of backlash, we may still see a commitment to a more important issue than the 'size' of a school. Perhaps we'll actually move closer and closer to the 'future of learning', instead. Perhaps...
Marie Groark, a senior policy adviser at the Gates Foundation, said going small is not "a magic bullet." In districts where the proposal has failed or suffered setbacks, it is largely "because somewhere along the way, there wasn't full support."
Wanting money often gives the impression of support...but going the distance in a true culture change is an entirely different thing altogether!
Clara Hemphill, director of insideschools.org, a project of Advocates for Children of New York, said trouble can begin with what she called "small schools in drag" -- schools that are small in concept only.
"The school becomes these four 'Groovy Academies for Esoteric Studies,' but the kids still call it 'Roosevelt' or whatever. The teachers aren't really interested and the building stays the same, and they just rename the floors," she said.
You don't hear many people speak this way...and it is about time! Posters in hallways, "groovy" team/academy names, and dividing by floors means nothing. You have to build culture on a deeper level, and that's often impossible when the 4 academies are merely shuttled by each other even though the kids themselves don't see the distiction. Create a legit school, rather than just divide by numbers, and you'll find that most of these issues simply don't seem to matter. Go by numbers and money alone, and expect nothing better than a superficial attempt and little gain in time.
Lebanon Superintendent Jim Robinson conceded that some changes will need to be made, such as restoring some vocational courses. But he said the district will forge ahead without the Gates grant.
"We are staying with it," he said. "My personal opinion is that they skated too quickly. It never feels good to have people give up on you, especially when we are on the cusp of seeing people risk more of themselves."
Good. In spite of challenges, here's one Superintendent who is willing to fight for what's right, whether Gates money (or similar) stays in the hopper.
Posted on September 03, 2006 in Small Learning Communities | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Here is the full URL for the comment that Anonymous left:
http://thinklab.typepad.com/think_lab/small_learning_communities/index.html
'Amen' to anonymous - the design of the school building doesn't change anything about what goes on inside.
Jen,
Actually, the design can help. I was surprised how much easier it was to work with my fellow academy teachers and students once we were all relocated into one hall. Just one example.
Also, having windows in the Pub room does allow the plants to live. :)
Cheers to you on your African adventure!
LOL - thanks! I guess I should re-phrase that: the design of a building doesn't automatically change anything about the school. It's only one piece of a huge puzzle.
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