“When I first moved here from Denver for the job, there was nothing here but a dirt lot. That was a little scary.”
Montessori teachers Mandi Prout laughed as she thought back to her arrival in Carbondale ten years ago, to begin work at a brand new charter school in a mixed 1-3 grade classroom.
“No grass at all. Just a dirt lot… except for the building itself. Just dirt, dirt, dirt. So at recess, the kids played in the dirt.
“But it was fine. Everybody was happy…” Mandi added.
That was ten years ago. The exterior of Ross Montessori School now includes a real playground… with basketball courts, and grass lawns, and a paved parking lot.
The school facility, however, is still a collection of modest-looking modulars.
We had just started our tour of Ross Montessori, one of the five charter schools our subcommittee was visiting during a three-day trip last week. The five schools exhibited a wide range of facility choices — and facility challenges. Ross has been operating out of modular buildings, but they are now at the tail end of a huge fundraising effort — and about to break ground on a new $6 million facility. Vision Charter Academy in Delta is augmenting its attractive, custom-built — and now, overcrowded — school building with one large modular building with moveable partitions.
Two Rivers Community School is leasing a former U.S. Postal Service facility in Glenwood Springs — a massive, 22,000 square foot concrete structure that required $300,000 in upgrades and modifications before the school opened last August.
Carbondale Community School — the most mature of the charter schools we visited — has been serving its students out of a colorful and intriguing, architect-designed building since 1998.
Mesa Valley Community School is housed in an office building on the outskirts of Grand Junction.
Our tour guide at Ross Montessori was parent Randi Lavelle, who also serves as the school’s Communications Coordinator. Randi had previously worked at Carbondale’s Montessori preschool, Mount Sopris Montessori; since 2009, she’s worked at Ross in one capacity or another — substitute teacher, classroom assistant, and now in the front office.
As we chatted with Mandi and Randi, it didn’t take long to get around to possibly the most controversial topic in education: standardized testing. I had asked if the school was operating under a “strict” Montessori model, or if Ross used a “blended model” — mixing together various educational approaches, as some charters are doing.
Mandi Prout:
“I would say it’s fairly strict Montessori. Of course, we still have to do testing, and meet the state standards. But lots of different Montessori associations have meshed the Common Core standards with Montessori. And they really match up quite well; in fact, Montessori education exceeds a lot of the standards.
“When Maria Montessori developed the materials, 100 years ago, children weren’t being taught certain things, like, for example, ‘probability’. So we’ve had to create hands-on materials that meet those particular state standards…
“So we still have to meet the standards, and administer the standardized tests. But what happens in the classroom is very much Montessori.”
Our Pagosa Springs charter school group — the Pagosa Charter School Initiative — is just starting to become familiar with the various educational models used by the fast-growing charter school movement. As I understand Montessori, so far, standard operating procedure is to group students into multi-aged classroom, where older students can assist younger ones with academic learning and character development. Apparently, something about the system is working at Ross, at least in terms of standardized test scores: Ross is currently one of the highest ranked elementary schools in Colorado.
Maybe this would be a good time to discuss a little of the history of charter schools, which, here in Colorado, are public, tuition-free schools open to all families and funded from the same property taxes that fund our conventional public schools.
In April 1983, the National Commission on Educational Excellence published a scathing assessment of American education, entitled A Nation at Risk. The risk, in the Commission’s view, was mainly that American children were falling behind the world’s other industrialized nations in academic skills.
From that report’s Introduction:
Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. This report is concerned with only one of the many causes and dimensions of the problem, but it is the one that undergirds American prosperity, security, and civility. We report to the American people that while we can take justifiable pride in what our schools and colleges have historically accomplished and contributed to the United States and the well-being of its people, the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur — others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments…
Already in 1983, America was losing the Race to the Future. Something needed to be done. But changing a monolithic institution like the American education industry is no easy matter.
Maybe America needed a radical solution?
In an address to the National Press Club in 1988, American Federation of Teachers Union President Albert Shanker referenced an idea that had been proposed a decade earlier by University of Massachusetts education professor Ray Budde: namely, the creation of “charter schools” — publicly funded institutions that would be given greater flexibility to experiment with new methods of educating students. At the time, some conservative education reformers opposed the idea, saying we already knew what worked in education. Today, the positions are reversed: conservatives largely embrace the idea of charter schools, while teachers’ unions are mostly opposed.
According to Wikipedia, we now have about 6,400 charter schools operating in the U.S. — serving about 2.5 million kids. And from what I can tell, the charter school movement is being encouraged by both the state of Colorado and by the federal government.
There’s a famous quote by Mark Twain. “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
I might suggest a slight paraphrase.
“Whenever you find yourself on the same side as the government, it is time to pause and reflect…”