I was listening to NPR today (it is somewhat depressing for me to think that at my age, I consider commercial radio to be crap and am tuning to NPR, the old people’s station.) and caught an All Things Considered piece on “Big Picture Schools.” While the story isn’t specifically arts management connected, it is related to something arts people know about–passion.
As you might imagine, the schools, the flagship of which is in Providence, R.I., are alternative high schools where the class size ratio is 15:1. The surpring thing is though that they are wildly successful running only on the same public funding that every other school gets and running admissions on a lottery system. The criticism of most alternative schools is that they are tuition based and that they can pick and choose to admit the best and brightest insuring high test scores.
The Met School in Providence has 65% of its students qualifying for free/reduced lunch. They may be best and brightest, but it isn’t immediately apparent. One student interviewed admitted she initially acted out and hid under desks because she didn’t know how to cope with the transition from “regular school.”
Students are allowed to follow their passions and do internships two days a week with different organizations whose work they believe they are interested in. The teachers work with the students and internship sites to answer that age old protest–“I am never going to have to use this in the real world” by emphasizing the applications of math, science, etc.
Every 9 weeks the students have to participate in a portfoilo review of materials that relate to what they have learned and their internship experience. The evaluation is gradeless. The teachers provide lengthy written feedback on a number of elements, including the student’s development.
The results are impressive. 100% are accepted to college, 85% choose to go, 75% graduate a post secondary program.(The national rate is 6% chance of graduating college if you come from low income setting regardless of race.) Their placement on standardized tests improves every year. They have an extremely low rate of absence, a high rate of parental involvement and the second lowest percentage of students reporting that someone tried to sell them drugs in school in the state.
The thing that really stuck with me was a comment co-founder Dennis Littky made in one of the audio extras NPR provided on their website. He talked about the fact that even in the good schools, the kids who do well may just have learned how to play the game. How to generate the product that will get them a good grade. In many cases, they are more excited about the afterschool activities than what they are doing during the school day.
Littky posits that if you asked the students who did well if they were passionate about learning, they would probably say no for the most part except for a few subjects they might have been particularly interested in.
I can relate to all this to a great degree. I can point to papers I wrote in high school and college that I knew would fit the criteria for getting a good grade and nothing more. There were classes where I got a C on the first test and then all As because I figured out what type of facts were important to study.
On the other hand, if there was ever an open ended option for a paper or an essay to take what I learned and say what happened next or write in the style of time, etc, I always took that option. It was chancier than giving 3 examples of irony, but much more exciting, even in a timed testing environment.
I still have the paper I wrote almost 20 years ago in a freshman seminar where I extended Homer’s Odyssey. “The grammatical errors are legion” the professor wrote. But he was very impressed with my ability to passably mimic Homer’s translated writing style. The second most memorable B I have ever gotten. I haven’t looked at the paper in years, and I still remember the comments and the grade.
My most memorable B was on a paper where, inspired by Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I argued against grades and for extensive commentary on papers. The professor took me at my word and didn’t grade the paper but invited me to her office to discuss the paper further. She had to give me a grade and said she would be bound totally by whatever grade I assigned it after reflecting on her comments. I gave myself the B.
It is this sort of fair treatment that set me up for disappointment. I minored in education and was certified to teach in NY. I left for grad school soon after but ended up teaching in college. Most of my classes were great, but the Theatre Appreciation class with 400 students that thought it an easy A killed me a bit inside. (You think my theatre horror stories are bad. Don’t get me started on teaching.) Not only the talking and disrespect during class, but the calls from parents because their kids were failing a course they weren’t showing up for! Argghhh!
If schools like this one keep popping up and also produce students adept in subject areas standardized tests don’t examine like social sciences, it might renew my idealism about what teaching and learning can be.