I shared a couple of tiny pieces of statistical data yesterday in Part Five, taken from a 2013 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center — claiming that 66% of American adults felt either that our education system needs to be completely rebuilt (21%) or that it requires major changes (45%). American women generally had stronger feelings than men about the need for improvement, according to the Pew survey: 73% of women wanted a major, or complete, overhaul. The percentage looking for a major fix was nearly identical regardless of political affiliations (Democrats 67%, Republicans 65%, Independents 67%)
These numbers are, in my opinion, essentially meaningless, because the Pew researchers did not ask what changes, exactly, the American people would most like to see.
Did the people surveyed want to see more testing? Or less? More focus on mathematics and science? Or less? A longer school day? Or a shorter one?
More importantly, perhaps, did the people surveyed actually know what is going on within our education system? Or were they reacting to rumors and gossip?
I knew very little about how the Archuleta County schools were required to operate, 18 months ago when the Pagosa Charter School Initiative assembled its original board of directors and began exploring the idea of opening a charter school, here in Pagosa Springs, in the fall of 2017. Yes, I’d been attending school board meetings, and writing about school district politics for 10 years, and yes, all three of my own children had attended Pagosa schools (and come out reasonably unscathed.) But I had only vague ideas about the level of federal and state regulation and funding priorities that control, to a significant degree, what our local school system can and cannot do within its classrooms and gymnasiums and auditoriums, and on its playgrounds.
There’s probably nothing like trying to start a charter school, to give the average citizen a real education about the government’s regulation of childhood in America.
In Part Four, I wrote briefly about a Minnesota-based organization called Designs for Learning, which has lately been helping the Pagosa Charter School Initiative write the first draft of our 300-page charter application. Designs for Learning had been created by Minnesota educator Wayne Jennings and his colleagues back in the early 1990s to create a new and somewhat radical type of school, as part of the first Bush administration’s “Break the Mold” initiative.
In other words, Designs for Learning — the company — was created in 1991 to help accomplish exactly what 66 percent of Americans now, twenty-five years later, believe needs doing: a complete overhaul of the nation’s education system.
You can read a summary of the “Community Learning Centers” concept, that Designs for Learning developed and tested during the 1990s, by downloading this PDF file.
From that document:
The Community Learning Centers plan provides a systemically changed model for the 21st century. This top-to-bottom transformation of current education addresses all aspects of schools with a detailed framework to guide serious educational reformers. This fresh approach to principles of learning, curriculum, staffing, facilities, student as resource, parent roles, technology, staff development and more makes it possible to accomplish for all students the three major goals of education: responsible citizenship, productive work and lifelong learning. Generated with a large grant and based on sound research, the Community Learning Centers program gives courageous school and community leaders the background and practical information to create high performance schools.
The model school the company designed — the Jennings Community Learning Center — is still operating in St. Paul, Minnesota. You can visit their website here. The school’s five-word vision statement is remarkably simple, yet ambitious:
Global Experiences to Change Lives
Twenty-five years later, the nation’s approach to education has indeed changed in certain ways, but perhaps not exactly in the direction that Wayne Jennings envisioned. Instead of a system where students have been given more responsibility for their own education, and where schools are more involved in the surrounding community, and where productive work is central to the education process — we have a system that is, more than ever, under the control of the federal government and, more than ever, focused on standardized test scores and “data storage” rather on than individualized instruction and student responsibility.
Even Designs for Learning has changed. Instead of functioning mainly as a designer and builder of innovative schools, Designs for Learning now operates primarily as a “service” company. Here’s a short excerpt from my interview last month with Designs for Learning CEO David Alley, when we were talking about the key difficulties parents and teachers face when they attempt to create an innovative charter school:
“Back in the 1990s, charter schools had a lot more freedom to operate on the basis of what teachers and parents wanted — but even then, there were struggles, because teachers, and all of us, have been kind of programmed to accept this archetypal view of what a school is, and how it operates; it’s kind of ‘in our brains.’
“What we found was, [charter schools] were getting tripped up by the fundamental technical details, of what it takes to actually be a school. ‘We’ve got these great ideas — we’re teachers and we’re parents, and we’ll just put this together. We don’t need those administrators. We can ignore all the finance rules that the state has.’ Turns out, that’s not the case. And very quickly the state government started cracking down and really pushing charter schools to conform.
“So what we found was that, providing assistance and helping [charter schools] to handle their finances in a way that the state would approve, and to handle [employees] in a way that would keep the school from being sued, was most effective. And most recently — as you observed, correctly — Special Education has become one of the most challenging areas for small charter schools to deal with, because they are required to — and want to — serve the needs of all students who show up. And students these days are showing up with a lot of specialized needs, but schools can’t really afford to staff up, to have specialists in all of these areas.”
So rather than designing schools per se, Designs for Learning has ended up developing a range of specialized services that can support a variety of charter school and private school types, working within the context of their own educational models — helping the schools get past some of the huge technical challenges imposed by state and federal bureaucrats and legislators.
David Alley:
“At the end of the day, we are a business, and we need to be able to respond to the needs of our clients.”
Helping kids learn? That’s a piece of cake. Kids are natural learners. Most American children are able to develop a fairly complete understanding of English grammar and vocabulary, and absorb much of their culture’s value system, by the time they are five years old — before they ever attend a public school.
Helping start, and operate, a charter school? Not so easy.
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.