in short:
The Common Principles (abbrev.)
- Learning to use one's mind well
- Less is More, depth over coverage
- Goals apply to all students
- Personalization
- Student-as-worker, teacher-as-coach
- Demonstration of mastery
- A tone of decency and trust
- Commitment to the entire school
- Resources dedicated to teaching and learning
- Democracy and equity
If I've got your attention, and I hope I do, I intend this diary to introduce those of you who don't know about it to the Coalition of Essential Schools. This diary is not officially a part of Education Uprising, our effort to redesign our American education, but we would be remiss were we not to look at one of the more successful efforts at changing how schools are structured.
The Coalition of Essential Schools comes from the work of Ted Sizer, who has been Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, headmaster at Phillips Andover (but too late to be blamed for our current president), and Founding Director of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform. He founded the Coalition contemporaneous with the publication of the first of his "Horace" books, Horace's Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School.
Some of the most important figures in the attempt to reform and save American education have chosen to affiliate with CES, including Deborah Meier and George Wood (Federal Hocking High School), both among the Convenors of the Forum for Education and Democracy.
I want to offer two of the ten common goals in their completeness, then explore about CES a bit more.
We seem to have a tendency in our current national and local policies on education to want to cram more and more into the school day, and the school year. "Coverage" of more and more topics is mandated, and this is supposed to be evidence of rigor. CES has a different viewpoint, visible in the 2nd common goal:
- The school's goals should be simple: that each student master a limited number of essential skills and areas of knowledge. While these skills and areas will, to varying degrees, reflect the traditional academic disciplines, the program's design should be shaped by the intellectual and imaginative powers and competencies that the students need, rather than by "subjects" as conventionally defined. The aphorism "less is more" should dominate: curricular decisions should be guided by the aim of thorough student mastery and achievement rather than by an effort to merely cover content.
And of course, our national policy seems to be focused almost exclusively on high stakes tests as a measure of everything. It should not surprise you that CES has a different point of view. Please note especially what I have put into BOLD
- Teaching and learning should be documented and assessed with tools based on student performance of real tasks. Students not yet at appropriate levels of competence should be provided intensive support and resources to assist them quickly to meet those standards. Multiple forms of evidence, ranging from ongoing observation of the learner to completion of specific projects, should be used to better understand the learner's strengths and needs, and to plan for further assistance. Students should have opportunities to exhibit their expertise before family and community. The diploma should be awarded upon a successful final demonstration of mastery for graduation - an "Exhibition." As the diploma is awarded when earned, the school's program proceeds with no strict age grading and with no system of credits earned" by "time spent" in class. The emphasis is on the students' demonstration that they can do important things.
It will probably not surprise regular readers of my diaries to know that I am on the email distribution list of CES. While I was doing my Master of Arts in Teaching at Johns Hopkins I wanted to spend time at the one school in Baltimore then affiliated with CES, but Hopkins could not work out the details. Anyhow, let me offer the list of topics in the current email update, received earlier this week:
CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE
- National Exhibition Month
- Small Schools Summer Institute
- Fall Forum 2007
- CES Action Alert Update
- EssentialVisions DVD Series
- Horace Volume 23 Call for Submissions
- The Theodore R. Sizer Dissertation Scholars Grant Program
- CES Wants You! Job Postings
- In Common Call for Submissions
- Professional Development Opportunities from the CES Network
- New Leaders for New Schools Seeking Applicants
- Imagining Tomorrow Creative Writing and Video Contest
Just a quick glance at the topics should enable you to realize that this isn a systematic and well-organized network. They have summer institutes, a fall forum, professional development opportunities. They have grants for people doing related dissertations (and I had briefly considered doing a dissertation on a CES school, but at the time I was exploring topics there was no such support, nor was there such a school readily accessible to me).
In our explorations of education, both officially as part of Education Uprising and unofficially as many here have tried to find ways to improve education, far too often we act as if serious and effective efforts had not already taken place.
I am offering this diary not because I expect that it will necessarily get a great deal of attention, although I can always hope. But I want it out there so that perhaps a few more people will take time to explore one of the more interesting - and successful - attempts at school reform, one that certainly has a lot of the values that matter to me as part of its core understanding of what schools should be. Rather than arguing about class sizes, CES emphasizes teacher loads: no more than 80 students per teacher at the secondary level, 20 at the elementary level in order to personalize instruction(I currently have 153, which is the lowest number I have had in my years at my current school). Goals 3 and 5 really hit the mark as far as my beliefs:
- The school's goals should apply to all students, while the means to these goals will vary as those students themselves vary. School practice should be tailor-made to meet the needs of every group or class of students.
- The governing practical metaphor of the school should be student-as-worker, rather than the more familiar metaphor of teacher-as-deliverer-of-instructional-services. Accordingly, a prominent pedagogy will be coaching, to provoke students to learn how to learn and thus to teach themselves.
I am posting this diary to encourage people to explore the CES website, consider the goals. It is clearly far easier to implement this approach in a charter school than in the standard public school, and yet, a school board and superintendent with guts and vision might be able to find a way to approach much of what the Core Goals attempt to achieve within the confines of state mandates. Some already have: Federal Hocking is a public high school.
So take some time, explore, and then perhaps offer some commentary. I'm not going anywhere else tonight.