What does it mean to be prepared?

I just spent three days at a wonderful independent school in Columbia, South Carolina. The students there are the types of young people you want to meet and hand over the keys of the world to — smart, thoughtful, and generous of spirit. They’re also the kind of community that is asking all the right questions.

I was most struck by a billboard they commissioned, shortly after their most recent graduation, in which the class of 2014 throws their mortarboards into the air, and the image is accompanied by a single word: PREPARED.

What a powerful way to convey the essence of what a school exists to do, and be. And what a singularly useful word for calibrating what we want our schools to continue to be about.

But here’s the thing: defining what it means to be “prepared” is like a shoreline at high or low tide — always shifting. What, then, does it mean to prepare young people for the rough waters of young adulthood, and how can we build a solid foundation on a shoreline of shifting sand?

Schools like Hammond are actively exploring that question, despite their proven track record in the previous era (e.g., make kids take lots of AP classes and extracurriculars, and then get them into well-respected colleges).

What is your school preparing young people for, and how is your definition changing with the times?

Hammond

A Public Charter School Is Trying to Model Itself After A Private School: Is That A Good Thing?

Yesterday, Senator Lamar Alexander stuck his foot in it when he suggested that not all charter schools are, in the end, public.

“There are some private charter schools, are there not?” Alexander said at a Brookings Institution event about school choice.

In fact, charter schools are publicly funded, privately run entities, although the extent to which they err on the public or private side of the equation has become grist for an increasingly contentious public debate about the future of American public education.

That debate matters greatly: after all, charter schools exist to inject more creativity and autonomy into perhaps our most sacred public trust: our public schools. Yet there’s also another side of the debate that is much less contentious, and much less talked about – the extent to which public charter schools can learn from, and then export, some of the best ideas that undergird our nation’s most outstanding, innovative private schools.

It was this impulse that led Marlene Magrino and Emily Bloomfield, the founding principal and executive director of Monument Academy, a not-yet-opened new charter school in Washington, D.C., to spend a few days in the bucolic Pennsylvania countryside late last fall.

Magrino’s and Bloomfield’s school is designed to be a residential boarding school for children who have experienced stress and trauma – especially young people who are either in foster care or in contact with the child welfare system. As a start-up school, they have no students, no staff, and, until last month, no building. What they do have is a well-thought-out idea about how to provide the requisite supports and services that can help their targeted student population learn and grow. And so they were in Pennsylvania to observe the inner workings of the Milton Hershey School, a private boarding school that works with children with acute financial and/or social needs, a school with more than a century of history, nearly 2,000 students, and an endowment of nearly six billion dollars – making it one of the wealthiest schools in the world.

At first blush, such a visit could quickly feel like a fool’s errand – or an inadvertent lesson in discouragement. When you have nothing, and you’re trying to make something, does it help or hurt to see an example of someone else that has everything?

But Bloomfield and Magrino didn’t spend their time traversing Hershey’s lush campus and endless resources feeling overwhelmed; they spent it taking notes on what design principles could most easily be borrowed in order to improve their nascent, public project.

“I started thinking about this school after getting involved in trying to close the achievement gap,” Bloomfield explained. “What I saw was lots of charters that were doing good work – but there were still all these kids who were falling through the cracks. And a lot of those children were either homeless or in the foster care system.

“That led me to wonder, how might we create a public school that could give those kids the sort of round-the-clock treatment and support they needed to become successful? And that question led us here.”

Magrino, fresh from a tour of the school’s expansive auditorium, agreed. “This hall will probably be the size of our entire school,” she said. “But being here is helping me think about how to maximize the spaces that we will have – and how to make do with less in order to provide our kids with as many opportunities as possible.

“This school has a dance studio; will we have a dance studio? No. But setting up electives like Tap Dancing aren’t expensive. Can we sponsor a band? Probably not. But we can probably afford to establish a choir. We can match the people, and we can match the practices, even if we can’t match the money. It’s thinking about what’s most important, and then figuring out how to make that work on our scale and with our resources. So it doesn’t make me wish for things we don’t have. It makes me think about how we can choose wisely about where we’re putting our resources.”

Monument will open its doors for the first time in August 2015, with an inaugural class of just forty students. Its ability to translate the essence of a model like Hershey, and to make it available to increasing numbers of underserved young people, remains to be seen. But its willingness to try is precisely the sort of bet the charter experiment is designed to incentivize people into making.

So let’s keep guarding against the proliferation of for-profit entities in the charter space, and insisting on financial transparency, and demanding that charters and districts find ways to work collaboratively. And let’s start seeing how well some of our most celebrated models of private education can be transported into our most sacredly held public spaces.

In the end, having some public charter schools with the right amount of private in them might actually be a good thing.

In Reimagining School, What Must We Hold Onto – & What Must We Let Go Of?

Think about all the ways in which our brains are already hard-wired to think about “school.”

Desks. Chairs. Tests. Lectures. Lunchrooms. Hall Passes. Freshman (or Sophomore or Junior) years. AP (or Geometry or Spanish) classes. The list is endless.

All of these things came about in the creation of a model of education that was designed for the Industrial Age, when we were trying to answer a different set of questions: How can we batch and queue unprecedented numbers of young people through a system and into an economy that will be largely fixed and known? How can we acculturate waves of immigrant children into the core values of American society? And how can we do all of this in the most efficient, orderly manner?

Say what you will — but at the time when they were being asked, those were probably the right questions to organize a system of schools around. And clearly, they are no longer the right questions today.

Not all of the symbols and structures of our Industrial-era model of schooling need to be jettisoned. The question is, which ones are no longer serving their purpose?

We now live at a moment in history in which the world young people will be entering is both fluid and unknown; when the time between asking a question and finding the answer is almost instantaneous; and when the mark of a successful school is less about the knowledge you put into your students, and more about the wisdom you are able to pull out.

What would it need to look like if a system of schools was truly aligned around a different set of organizing questions — where the goal is not to standardize, but to individualize; where the objective is not uniformity, but uniqueness; and where the feelings “school” arouses in the majority of us are not endless shades of grey, but wild and inspiring spectrums of color?

If these were our objectives, how would the structures and aims of our schools need to shift? And once they shifted, what would we need to hold onto from our past ideas about school, and what would we need to let go of — so something new and improved could have the space to come into being?

The first step towards that sort of paradigm shift is simply to think about all of the current symbols and structures of schooling — and to decide if it’s something we will need to hold onto and carry forward, or let go of and redesign.

For example, age-based cohorts: hold on, or let go?

Hall passes and cultures of permission between adults and young people: hold on, or let go?

Grading: hold on, or let go?

Subjects: hold on, or let go?

The act of choosing is its own form of clarity.

What, then, would you choose?

A Murmuration of Student Interest? That’s a Thing?

Last week, I spent three days at a remarkable independent school in Atlanta. It’s on the verge of designing a new building for its upper school, and I’m part of the team that is lucky enough to help them think about what such a space should look like — and what ultimate purpose(s) it should serve.

The current building is a rather traditional space — wide hallways, classrooms, a gym, a library that is slowly losing its raison d’être. But the vision of the school is something else entirely — a fusion of aspirational habits, cultural norms, and principles about teaching and learning that are designed to unleash the full potential and interest of every student.

Which leads to a really interesting question: If we begin to reimagine the spaces in which learning occurs, how could we construct those spaces so that the movement and flow of human bodies is closer to the improvisatory choreography of a murmuration of starlings in summertime– instead of, say, the tightly orchestrated machinery of an army of soldiers in wartime?

What would a murmuration of student interest and passion look like in practice? What would it engender?