Community School Lynne Martin Describes How It Was When Teachers Were Teachers

Tried and True Alternatives to NCLB, CCSS, Amplify, Pearson and the Current Corporate Catastrophe...

One of the ideas behind our school was to do the very best we could in hopes that it could also serve as a kind of beacon to other schools.  Not in the sense that we were better than others but because we had some kinds of freedom that the public schools did not have.  We hoped we might be helpful in that sense.

Books were published on our curriculum during the early days.  I still have some of them and they are so precious to me that I’m scared to lend them out. 

 The Course In History

The Morning Exercise As A Socializing Influence

The Social Motive In School Work

All of these were part of a series entitled, Studies In Education, meaning to summarize and reflect on what was being done. Flora Cooke wrote the introductions.

The Morning Exercise was our daily getting together of the whole school.  These grew from Francis Parker’s practice of holding town meetings with the students.  It started as the entire school coming together everyday at around 10:30 for about thirty minutes. 

The program would be some grade sharing something they had learned, or were studying, either through music, drama or poetry.  It is a lovely tradition however you can manage it.

Let me give you an idea of how things could work.  I am reminded of one time when one of my kids brought into school a dog’s head…a VERY dead dog’s head.  He’d found it in Lincoln Park and it stank but it was a treasure!  So, after the beginning of the day I put it in a plastic bag and hung it outside the window so it wouldn't smell up the room. After that, the Science teacher came and he was just great about it.  He took it home and boiled it and then brought it back and here was this beautiful, little skull which was so nice for the kids to see. 

There also was a time when I required that at least once a week, everyone would bring in a drawing they had done of any natural thing.  It could be a leaf or could be a shell; anything really because I had the idea that city children do not see.  There is an awful lot that is ugly in a big, bustling city and there are so many things that no one wants to see.

 I think there is value in the simple things, simple things like making leaf prints or rubbings with a flattened crayon.  Bring to their attention any kind of thing that you run across like a wasp’s nest, a piece of lichen, or a mushroom that you pass when walking down a sidewalk.  This practice is particularly important for city kids.

As for planning, I just assume that a teacher has in mind a prepared skeleton of first ideas she intends to present and explore.  I used to get kind of scared of those people listing endless objectives, as if they knew EXACTLY what they were going to teach.  More it is about putting a question out there and then seeing what comes of it with the children. 

This is how we discover what they need to be thinking about.  Over the years, I developed a series of binders outlining and detailing the sequence and activities by subject.  Here is one for Geometry and another filled with ideas related only to Math.  I had one for Language that might not include every activity for an entire year but certainly those ideas that got me thinking about a new or good way to go at something.

A teacher’s skeleton might include some of the ideas she thought were terribly important for children to have thought about on a particular subject.  I would start by thinking about what interested me, as an adult, about a topic.  And then I would try and try and remember what caught my interest as a child.  The resulting list wouldn’t necessarily mean that they would investigate everything. 

Teacher would also have a clear idea of a progression she intended.  For instance, by the end of the year in Math she would expect that three fourths of the children could do the such and such following operations.  She would build from day to day, creating the spelling lists central to whatever theme or topic was under study.  She would identify the age-appropriate scientific questions for experimentation.

I saved the children’s writing for them in a file until the end of the year.  I always kept my own records and I gave my own tests.  I reminded them that I was testing to see how well I was teaching something.  If they did not know an answer, it was not because they were dumb or weren't paying attention; it was because I wasn’t teaching well.  I gave a lot of tests that were open book…you could go and try to find the answer.  It is very important for kids to have a chance to learn how to do that.  From time to time let’s say, I’d give a little test on the multiplication tables and I would keep a record of what they had or had not mastered.  We wrote narrative reports and there I might say that “he tests in the upper 4^th grade level within a very able group of students.”  Or, “he is in excellent shape in all things with highest in ____and lowest in ____.  

But I notice…”

I never read the record of a child before school began.  I didn't want to be impressed by what somebody else thought about a certain child.  I wanted them to come fresh and new to me.  But I did tell the parents, 

“I do want to know anything you would want me to be watching out for or to be aware of.” 

4^th Grade studied the Greeks.  When I started teaching it, I brought in the other ancient civilizations out of which the Greeks began.  I concentrated on the Greeks in 2^nd semester.  We would do plays in costume and I did not use textbooks.  I used original sources.  I would read to them Greek tragedies.  We started out with the formation of the earth and then primitive humans, cave paintings and things like that.  For forming the earth we’d go out and look for fossils and discuss possible evolutions. 

I had loads and loads of pictures and always put them up.  We would go over to the park and sketch the bison, comparing it with the Lascaux cave paintings.  And then we moved on to Egypt not because it was the oldest but because it was the simplest of ancient civilizations to approach as a thematic unit.  We learned about the Fertile Crescent and I would have them pick any Old Testament bible story that they wanted to research and write a report on it.  We had children from many, different religions so we used these stories as literature.  For instance, they could use the flood story and I would then tell them about the excavations at Ur where there are traces of a once great flood. 

We studied Hammurabi around the time of Abraham. I had them keep a time chart of key characters and I gave them important dates to include, with details.  We’d add on to these every few days and used them to think in terms of time and how things change but not in the sense that they had to memorize it all.  I used to create crosswords using dates they could then look up on their time charts.  Using the cross number puzzles was a way of helping some of those dates stick without requiring that they learn them by rote.

I remember that around the time of Christmas somebody would ask, “Now what was happening in Egypt around this time of year?”  I had histo-maps.  Do you know those?  They are wonderful things.  You can get them at the Field Museum.  They show histories pictorially, histories of civilizations.  So, we studied the Fertile Crescent up to about the time that the Persians were poised, at their peak, looking toward Greece.  Then we went all the way back at 2^nd semester and studied the Minoans, the Miceneans and then historic Greece up to the death of Socrates.

Here is a source I used during 1^st semester, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to Old Testament, Editor James B. Pritchard, Princeton University Press 1955. 

I would use this and shorten some of the most ancient stories and then produce one as a play for a Morning Exercise performance.  I did a lot of summarizing, cutting down, mimeographing and giving children copies of the original versions of ancient things.

I had a strong feeling that if you were asking them to write beautifully, you needed to give them the experience of beautiful words.  In 4^th grade we learned cursive so our daily handwriting practice, wherever possible, came out of the literature of the people we were studying.  Inevitably, during the formation of earth, someone would say, “There ain’t nobody to be quoted.” (Laughter)  So, I always gave them, 

“And the earth was without form and void…”  Lines like that are what we used for handwriting practice and I kept them all in a binder full of typed quotations, spanning historical topics for the year.  This gave them short fragments of something lovely to work with.

I built up quite a collection of artifacts.  I’ve got everything from lava that Leakey found in a gorge to reproductions of very old things.  After a few of the more fragile got broken, I learned just to carry them around so children could look and touch.  It is very important to do this.  And it takes time to build up good supplies and to know which you really are going to need and use.  None of this should be rigid because things change as the teacher learns something new about a subject and incorporates it.

Parents were given the dates, roughly, for when we would celebrate a birthday like Apollo’s and for that a father came in with his little Irish harp and played a fragment of ancient Greek music.  Once parents come to know they really are respected, you come to find out that they have talents that bring great value to the classroom work.  We’d put out a notice saying, “This is the theme.  Is there anything you might be able to contribute during this quarter, related to this topic?”

After I’d been teaching the 4^th grade unit on Greece for awhile, there was a magazine article saying that I’d never been there and it quoted one of my students as saying that when he grew up he would be sure that he took me to Greece.  About six months after the article appeared, I got a letter from the Greek government inviting me to come for a visit.  So, I toured for six weeks.  Pure Cinderella!  I went during the summer, visited a camp and met with their country’s head of education.  

I inherited the 4^th grade Greek theme but I could make it anything I wanted to.

Lynn Martin was a teacher for 30 years at Francis Parker School.  She was noted for her teaching of the culture and history of Ancient Greece.

The government of Greece honored her in 1960 with an all-expenses-paid trip to that country. 

Interviewed  August 20, 1989 by Kathy Irwin 

Community School Diary of A City Kid

They are shooting in the projects again, and my neighborhood looks like a bullet-ridden section of Sarajevo, only here there will be no peace-keeping forces to provide us safe passage. On the first day of school we will walk or ride bikes over spent shell casings, shattered glass, bloodstains and abandoned auto parts, hoping we don’t get caught in anybody’s crossfire. Other kids with shiny faces just like mine, in nicer parts of the city, will travel safely and confidently to their education destination. There won’t be one ounce of fear swirling in the pit of their stomachs, no hyper-vigilance, no need for eyes in the back of their heads. I pretend I am a stealthy Ninja with secret powers. I breathe deep from the core of my being and try to remain calm and alert because that is how I will stay alive.

When I get to school, if I get to school, breakfast will be waiting. It will be a good breakfast which I don’t want to lose due to a nervous digestion. Last year, someone at headquarters tried sending us donuts and sugary cereal but The Moms would not have it. There were big arguments and tons of rowdy meetings which resulted in The Moms retaining control over our meal program. That means my morning menu will include some rotation of true scrambled eggs, homemade biscuits, sausage or bacon, juice, sliced fresh fruit cup, pancakes flipped on a grill, hash browns from peeled potatoes, toast out of a toaster, tacos rolled by hand, oatmeal with raisins and cocoa scented with tiny marshmallows. In other words, real food prepared from scratch by real people. Maybe this is the love + nutrition that we require in order to survive the violence outside. Lunch is much the same with salads we actually eat and an absolute minimum of processed foods. Believe me, I dream of these meals and I smell them in my sleep, when I can sleep, which is when the gunfire isn’t so loud and relentless.

Lots of schools around here won’t open this year. They have been turned into private academies, charters or sometimes even into condos. Once they were known by famous names like Harriet Tubman Elementary or Cesar Chavez Junior High or Julia Richman Senior High but that’s all gone and forgotten. Others were bulldozed to make way for apartments that no one around here will ever be able to afford, leaving us surrounded by strangers with historical and social amnesia. Last week some kids got letters saying their district was out of money and couldn’t say for sure when things would start up. Parents and teachers marched down to city hall and picketed with big signs but so far, nothing has changed. The Moms call it a standoff that we are lucky to be out of but now I worry every time the mail arrives that we may be next.

Yesterday, a shooting happened right in the middle of a basketball game at the community center. Two guys were killed so now that gym is off limits and there is yellow, crime scene tape everywhere you look. I am sick of it. I want someplace safe to play where parks aren’t gang turf, ball diamonds aren’t vandalized, and recreation workers aren’t furloughed leaving us with no bats, no balls and no umpires. Is that too much to ask? I’m trying to have a childhood here. What playground space there was at my school, got turned into a parking lot. It wasn’t much to begin with since the junkies used it at night for shooting up, leaving infected syringe litter all over the blacktop. Our adults had to sweep all that away which was yuck, to say the least. But then one morning drug guys came roaring around the corner, leaning out of car windows with sawed-off shotguns. Their fire fight got so crazy that staff cars took bullet holes the size of frisbees and that was the end of off-street parking. Now if we want “recess”, the neighborhood men escort teacher and students a block over to a green space where we run like the wind, while they watch our piled-up jackets so nobody steals them.

The grownups look proud of us when we step out into the community and they should because they have lots to be proud of. Plenty of them own their own homes and keep the front sidewalks as clean as a kitchen floor. They plant flower and vegetable gardens and run businesses like tire shops, sandwich shacks, beauty parlors, parking lots, car repair, even an old hardware. I take walkabouts, I pay attention, I listen and I ask questions. I’m curious about what they do and how they keep it going year after year. I know just where to go when a class project calls for batteries, magnets, pulleys, mirrors, scales, electrical switches, sandpaper or seed packets.

We even have a library that sits in the middle of a burned-out block. It looks more like a bombed-out block but at least it has stayed open and busy for nearly 100 years. Its name is the Frederick A. Douglass branch, with art deco designs on the first floor and a theater in the basement. Yes, a theater for stage plays with curtains, microphones, lights and speakers that let audiences hear what is being said. Last year a rich man came to visit us at school. He said he had grown up nearby, with a dad who was killed in an accident and a mom gone all day at a factory where she sewed clothes. He didn’t have much to do for fun so he hung out at this library. They got to know him so well that the ladies collected books about things that interested him which was mostly snakes. No matter how lonely or invisible he was feeling, he knew there would always be snake books waiting for him at the big, circulation desk. That made him feel like somebody and eventually, he grew up and became somebody. I believe his story because this library acts the same way to this very day.

The violence I encounter takes place inside my safety zone, on streets I know very well, in front of people who recognize me and look after me. I’ve memorized how to duck and cover and I have a choir of angels making sure I stay in one piece. But what about the kids who have lost all that? How many of them will get hurt before someone figures out that it is never safe to make children strangers in a strange land? Their nearby schools have been shuttered and where they now must go, they have never been before. When something jumps off, because it always does, what then? Who has their back and who protects their heart from feeling frightened, lost and alone? It is scary enough to walk past a familiar homeless center, housed in a church basement, and watch angry men with sticks and clubs push down the steps and into the shelter looking for someone they want to beat up. What if you don’t know the location, the director and the clients, like I do? It is a peaceful, positive, protecting program…most of the time. But when that’s not true, a child’s imagination takes over and nightmares begin and the journey to school turns terrifying and everything connected to learning becomes just one, long-lasting anxiety attack. And don’t get me started on the rival gangs, their colors, signs, turf and trouble. Ask around because the parents of these kids are affiliated members who don’t like each other and who kill each other regularly. That definitely will not change anytime soon.

Mary was a little lamb

Her fleece was white as snow

She got assigned to a dangerous zip code

Where grown men feared to go.

So we followed her to school one day

It was against their rule

But who would route her life this way?

Only a bureaucrat or a fool.

It made the children scream and shout

When the bullets hit the wall

We tried to cover Mary, but too late,

We watched her fall.

Community School Visits Mrs. Murphy's Sunflowers

Mrs. Murphy's Sunflowers is a unit of study found in Ellsworth Collings' 1924 edition of An Experiment With A Project Curriculum.  Might this be the book used for inspiration by the Corporation For Common Core Curriculum Craziness as they constructed their test riddled unit on Early Civilizations?  No, probably not.

Back in 1924 Ellsworth Collings was not driving data points into the hearts and minds of little children and he was not abusing his status as "expert" by dictating courses of study and exam content for human beings he had never met and knew nothing about.

Sure, standard subject matter was actively in the mix, but it was never weaponized to precisely and intentionally destroy student development. Collings threw the education machine into reverse and then paid close attention to what happened when human beings were guided to select activities and PURPOSE their own learning based on interesting, immediate, everyday life.

One day Carl called a group meeting of his fellow 6-8 year olds and asked why did they think Mrs. Murphy was forever growing big sunflowers at the BACK of her vegetable garden.  It didn't make any sense to him.  The other kids agreed.  Weren't flowers intended for flower gardens or front lawns?  Iona said she had no idea what a sunflower looked like so if they wanted her help, she would need a first-hand visit to Mrs. Murphy's.  So off they trooped armed with two questions.  Why was Mrs. Murphy growing these sunflowers at the rear end of her vegetable garden?  How were sunflowers different from her other flowers?

Next day, Mrs. Murphy walked everyone out back and introduced them to the color, shape and distinct seed of the sunflower. She had them inspect the stem, the leaves and explained that she planted strategically so her cucumber vines would be protected from the hot, late afternoon sun.  To the children's delight, she actually cut off the head of a big sunflower and pitched it over the fence to her chickens so the class could watch the flock devour the seeds off the flower head.  "Homegrown poultry feed," she announced matter-of-factly.

Later, back at school, of course there were paintings and drawings of beautiful sunflowers and many, detailed, written accounts.  These were enhanced by reading and researching flower guide and nature study books but also by uncovering stories and poems about sunflowers in traditional texts like the Elson Readers: Book Three and several others. Lantern slides and stereograph pictures of wild flowers were also put to good use.

And what did Carl make of this adventure?  Well, here is what he reported in cursive handwriting, accompanied by a detailed, scientific illustration of the sunflower.

The Sunflower

Mrs. Murphy uses her sunflowers to shade her cucumber vines.  The sunflower has a big yellow flower.  Mrs. Murphy's chickens like sunflower seed.  She gave us some seed to plant. Sunflowers make pretty yard flowers.  I am going to grow some in my cantaloupe patch next summer to shade my cantaloupes.  They grow best in a rich soil, sunshine and moisture.  They are easy to grow.

Community School Bathe The Baby

In another time and place, curriculum and NOT incarceration was the prescription for what ailed us.

Dezzy was one, out-of-control bundle of beautiful.  When she smiled the entire world illuminated and a hyper-vigilant intelligence beamed from her deep brown eyes.  But she was Dezzy and that spelled upset most of the time.  The uncharted, non-standardized curriculum adventure was to find interests that became the absorbing object of her attention, anything that sustained concentration was a starting point for this three year old.

            Her world really was a Ghetto, a violent one where she embodied the trauma and vibrated from repeated, parental power struggles which inevitably melted down into screaming, yanking, spankings and puddles of hot tears.  Naturally, her reflex was to reproduce the drama but this dynamic did not serve either her growth or her gifts.  Birth order was a big problem as she longed to be an only child but instead was wedged between an older sister and a toddler brother.  Attachment between daughter and mother was tenuous and the tug and pull of wills was something to behold. However, our darling girl loved babies and baby dolls and desperately wanted to be viewed as competent and to be complimented on her skill set. So, no surprise that one of her favorite roles became that of reliable caretaker, otherwise known as Queen of the Baby Minders.

          Queen Baby Minder was equally regal and bossy. The other children rightfully objected when she seized the community water table ordering everyone about, hence the purchase of a bathing basin where she ran the show without interference. Ours was not a Baby Beluga requiring fathoms of deep, blue sea so Dez learned to measure safe amounts using a calibrated plastic lab beaker.  Were we boiling potatoes or replicating the Polar Ice Cap?  Of course not, so which number on the thermometer constituted a moderate lukewarm?

          Babies need accessories, lots of them and the use of each item helped Dezzy comprehend the household economy of cost, care and conservation.  Our Bathing Cabinet eventually included sponges, infant soap, shampoo, oil, washcloths, hooded towels, diapers, powder, wipes, baby scale, bulb ear and nose aspirator and an oral medicine syringe.  Each item had a name with a vast universe of language and experience attached to it. Over time, this Three acquired a much more sophisticated vocabulary than the unrelated, alphabetized list of reform-driven sight words that the Special Treatment children rebelled against regurgitating every single morning on their Kinder carpet.

            Bathing the Baby allowed Dez to soothe herself, to behave lovingly, to memorize the lyrical emotions of bath and bedtime lullabies and to practice the gentleness that she was too often denied in her own stress-filled family.  Slowly, her fragmented self became integrated enough to join groups of others who welcomed her into their learning and their play.  Tantrums vanished as social negotiation emerged.  Exclusion or banishment to an isolation tank would have made her estrangement that much more acute, reproducing her affliction but not remedying it.  She became a student of life by remaining in the company of others and acquainted with herself while in pursuit of what interested her.  

Community School Investigates Special Treatment!

We have been told that this student is not legally entitled to any more “Special Treatment” so we are returning him to Kindergarten.  At this Title I school, a four month sentence in administrative isolation is called Special Treatment.  J-Block is what they call it in the adult prison system.

SPECIAL TREATMENT

A five year old boy shut up in a tiny room from November to March.  Imagine!  Each and every day meant no recess, no Circle Time, no eating at a big table with other children.  The simple, socializing joys that he so urgently needed were extinguished before ever being experienced.   

His special treatment was a purgatory called In School Suspension where he was cycled through the same worksheets day after day, memorizing how to count and color Pilgrims, Native Americans, cornstalks and hay bales.  On a b&w gingerbread house, he graphed crayon-coded gumdrops, candy canes, sugar plums and butterscotch wafers.  He cut and pasted columns of numerals in ascending and descending order.  Over time, he got very good at this flat work. 

In the early days of his confinement, he defied the ruling junta by grabbing a chunky-chubby black crayon and scribbling over every detail with such ferocity that he shone with perspiration before finishing.  One day I pried the frustration from his fingers and smoothed his determined grip into a relaxed receptivity.  “Let’s start again and make one of these beautiful.”

We began by taking turns, bent over and absorbed as if collaborating on a paint-by-number, John Henry Man Versus Machine. We chatted away like the most synchronized of study buddies.  “I think I’ll make my sky mostly blue with some white mixed in.  May I borrow the green when you’re finished with it?  If we cut right along the big, fat line I think the teacher will be able to read the numeral.  And remember we’re only using baby dots of glue.  Baby Dots Not Glops! That’s our motto.” 

This was satisfying work, repetitive but civilizing and the only preparation there was for a return.  It took all of November to gentle him and after that he followed every rule of customary deportment but still was not permitted to even visit the Kingdom of Kindergarten until the end of February and only then with me as bodyguard. 

But then came the March Declaration of Special Treatment when he was abruptly dropped behind enemy lines, told to sink or swim, and forced to jump with no back-up parachute.  It was a perilous insertion.  I would hear him wailing in protest across the vast, central rotunda., screaming and kicking in protest as he was drug, adult escorts on either side, always back like a boomerang, no matter how successful the launching. 

I can safely say that he remained in this disruptive dance until May. Another boy from the same grade level remained in ISS from November until June, a total of six months. No field day for this one, no end-of-year picnic, no parade through the hallway with happy noisemakers and hip-hop music to celebrate the going home.  The piped in soundtrack was joyous and my young sidekick sparkled with an excited grin as he showed me his talented dance moves while dutifully stationed in his chair. 

Most importantly, this was all off-the-books.  The district software repository for registration data, grades, attendance records and disciplinary infractions revealed that none of the in-school months of classroom separation were ever recorded for official eyes. Intentionally, the long haul was virtually untraceable by state and federal authorities.  No one will ever know that no one knows what they are doing.

This organization hurts children.  It retards growth and it injures spirits. The logical conclusion of its terrible trajectory is a chaotic country full of incapacitated citizens.  But the reality is that situations like this are scattered across poor neighborhoods throughout the United States.  Led by CEO's/Chief Education Officers and propped up by well-paid corporate consultants, policy wonks and super-rationalized schematics for "school reform", these folks don’t intend to be re-fashioned or fixed.   In fact they financially benefit in a very personal way from funding formulas that follow their failure. Here, terrible is profitable and a good way to go. 

We can whenever, and wherever we choose, successfully teach all children whose schooling is of interest to us. We already know more than we need, in order to do this. Whether we do it must finally depend on how we feel about the fact that we haven’t so far.
Ron Edmonds Telling It Like It Was And Like It Is!

Community School Frances Pockman Hawkins At Work With Water

The Logic Of Action
Young Deaf Children At Work
Frances Pockman Hawkins


Everyone tried his hand at the water pool this morning.  Phillip, unaware of anyone's scrutiny, would fill his large plastic syringe with water by pulling out the plunger while the tip was submerged, and then shoot the water to the opposite side of the pool.  He was expert at controlling the force and speed on his plunger as he aimed the small stream.

Janie kept watching Phillip's actions.  Quite obviously she wanted to do the same thing with her syringe, but she was unable to fill it with water.  Finally, she turned again to watch and she thought about it.  This time, with syringe out of the pool she pushed down the plunger, then put the tip in the pool and slowly pulled up the water into the transparent syringe.  The final part of the sequence, shooting water across the pond, proceeded, but Janie's success in using eyes, hands, and mind to fill the syringe was for her, I submit, an achievement of equal merit.  To write about it is in some degree to share her pleasure.

Community School Water Table Watsu

Christopher is 4 years old and frequently grown-up angry.  One morning he stomped out of his classroom and into a restroom area down the hall.  Suddenly aware that I was nearby and watching, he turned to me with a jerk and shouted, “If I am mad at somebody, I just look at them and say, ‘Hey Bitch!’”

I clamped my hand over my mouth to keep from laughing and considered carefully before responding, the fewer words the better.  “Guess I just never say it.”

“What?” he replied in a rapid-sharp voice.  “What do you mean you don’t say it?”  Surprised I wasn't reprimanding him?  Wondering if I was telling the truth?  Curious if I had an alternative to his harsh way of talking?

“I simply don’t speak to people that way. It does not come out of my mouth.”  I delivered this with a silent, shoulder shrug and pretended to get interested in a developmentally inappropriate, preschool worksheet stapled to a bulletin board.

Since his outburst didn't provoke me, he immediately abandoned it and became absorbed in the water fountain, turning it on and off and diverting streams of water with his tongue and his fingers, in other words, exploring the properties of water.  It was a soothing diversion and ultimately calmed him enough that he could walk back with me to rejoin his friends.  Too bad there wasn't a water table set up as a workstation for this little man with the mouth.  But those also have gone by the Leave Every Child Behind wayside.

Alternately, Jorge healed himself at a water table.  He arrived for a visit, having lived in 10 different foster homes before his fourth birthday.  His hyperactivity and anxiety were so extreme that no family could soothe him or survive him, therefore he rotated from one placement to the next.  Prescribed a steady dose of Clonidine, you wouldn't have known it from the way he ran directly at a solid wall, smacking full force, face-on and then collapsing in fit of giggles.

It was the water table that drew his attention.  The girls usually commandeered it, washing baby dolls or dishes, transferring liquid back and forth from tea kettles to jam jars.  Most days, boys weren't allowed but somehow everyone knew Jorge was different and for him the rules did not apply.  He spent two weeks standing behind the crowd of girls listening in on their conversations.  He always wore a smile, sometimes nodded his head in agreement with an opinion expressed but never edged past the periphery of bodies to join in the fun.

Then the earth’s orbit shifted and his hands slipped into the delicious drench.  There was no moving him after that.  He was polite, always patient and ever alert for that perfect moment when it would be okay to slide into place.  He had figured out the human arrangement and was careful to comply in ways that guaranteed access to the dreamy drink.  There he would vibrate in endless delight, stuttering less and speaking more, solidifying an identity and a circle of friends who did not fail him.  In the water he learned how to become.

Community School Helen Keller Could Have Seen It Coming

I stumbled across Eva who could not read a lick.  I found her tucked up in an empty classroom, sound asleep.  She was snoring peacefully in second grade.  No one knew she was missing in action and no one cared that she was alone, separated from the herd and dozing on her lunch hour.  

Despite her illiteracy, there would not be any intervention for her, no tutoring, no read aloud, no big books or story dictation.  In fact, there would be no reading instruction for her of any description.  Second grade does not count on the accountability scoreboard and therefore, is not heavily proctored   

Thousands will be spent this year on a series of no-nothing, "school reform" consultants, who themselves know zippy-zero about reading as a process or a passion.  They will wander in and out like the contract zombies they are, drawing down dollars triggered by testing mandates for 3^rd grade and beyond.  

Helen Keller could have told them back in September who would be failing come January.  But everyone at this location turned blind, deaf and dumb when it came to the cause of Eva. Since Eva knew hopeless when she experienced it, she responded by curling up in The Back Of The Bus and surrendering to a dreamless sleep.  

Years of here, there and everywhere leave children like Eva undisturbed and unlettered.She has been allowed to float like a beautiful flower in a big pond, not a ripple approaching from any direction to dislodge her and prevent her from sinking into the treacherous waters of insensitivity and indifference.  Had she been growing up in the Sea Islands back in January of 1957, she might have been scooped up by Esau Jenkins, Bernice Johnson or Septima Clark and taught to read at the back of a beat-up school bus or in the midst of a busy, beauty parlor.  Their make-do movement imagined literacy and democracy walking hand-in-hand and ultimately exploded into a nationwide uprising against the entrenched, Jim Crow suppression of voting rights.  But Eva is enrolled in a data-deranged Public School, not a Citizenship School and she will never chase Esau across the sandy, marshy low country of Johns Island.

Community Schools & The Eight Year Study

The Eight Year Study came out of a democratic tradition of struggle for both change and the freedom to change.  That struggle has a long history.  If we stood on the steps of the original Jane Addams Hull House on Halsted Street in Chicago, we could see the outline of the Hart, Schaffner and Marx building.  Knowing the history of labor activism in this country, we would be reminded of the battles that went on in the early years of the garment industry, in Chicago, New York and elsewhere.  These were battles to achieve adequate wages and decent working conditions.  If we didn't exactly welcome immigrant labor, we at least allowed them in and embraced their work ethic, knowing it made Team USA that much stronger economically.

As a pioneer in the American settlement house movement, Jane Addams found herself living and working in neighborhoods that were isolated, ethnic enclaves.  Lithuanians claimed one section of Halsted, Greeks another, Italians yet another.  These were people insisting upon remaining distinct and separate in terms of a positive cultural identity, yet needing at the same time to work together on the common problems of housing, work, health and education.  Hull House provided that place for collaborating.

One testimony of Hull House's ability to value the differences while using them to build a common ground, are the maps drawn by community people that today are displayed in the front hallway of Hull House Museum.  Immigrants went out and canvassed the neighborhoods to discover who lived there.  Their findings  were then translated into beautiful, color-coded maps.  Go stand in front of these maps because they are absolutely riveting!  Today we can only imagine how such a project was organized.  From all the ethnic enclaves came people speaking no common language, yet finding the words, the time and the energy to compile a record of who they were and where they lived.

It was a collective effort issuing from a common place.  There was desperate need in those turn-of-century times for such places and so, when Graham Taylor, his wife and children, and a cluster of graduate students from the University of Chicago decided to establish a settlement house, they called it Chicago Commons.  What happened at Hull House and at the Chicago Commons was also what happened at settlement houses in Boston, Baltimore, Des Moines, Jersey City and Fort Worth.  The conversation centered around human problems and the social value of a democracy that MUST shape solutions to those problems.  A kaleidoscopic range of individuals came together to exchange ideas, voice needs and coordinate action.  To make the exchange as extensive and inclusive as possible was a challenge.  Hull House met that challenge by numbering among its friends such people as John Dewey, Florence Kelley, W.E. B. DuBois, as well as Russian tailors, Italian factory workers and Bohemian seamstresses.  Wish we all could have been there!

If we stretch to identify a similar institution dedicated to many of the same ideals and values, only one comes to mind - Public Schools.  It therefore comes as no surprise that during the last decades of the 19th Century and early decades of the 20th, as settlement houses cropped up in urban settings across the USA, we see as well the stirrings that were to lead to the formation of the Progressive Education Association and finally, to the Eight Year Study organized under its auspices.

As the settlement house workers had an expansive notion of what education could do and be, so did the pioneers of progressive education.  Both were concerned with blunting the raw edges of industrial civilization and with reinvigorating human community.  Both were discovering the forms of human association that could nurture individuality.  They were concerned with demonstrating the necessity and efficacy of freedom as a wellspring of personal and social growth.  Just as the settlement house workers had to deal with the destructive human consequences of harsh and mindless factory labor, so the progressive educators were moved to eliminate the factory as a model for organizing the work of classrooms.

The growth of the progressive education movement really began in the years following the end of  WWI.  In 1919 a group of educators founded the Progressive Education Association.  In the same year, Carleton Washburne became superintendent of schools in Winnetka, Illinois.  This was a post he held for 25 years.  Under his leadership came The Winnetka Plan, which enabled children to learn at their own pace.  It eliminated failure based on age-linked standards and placed strong emphasis on group activities that strengthened the school and its community.

In this same period, Harold Rugg, Director of Research at the Lincoln School in New York City and professor at Columbia University's Teachers College, developed his Social Science Course - six volumes complete with workbooks and teacher editions.  The Winnetka schools were among the first to pilot the Rugg series.  In his texts, Rugg asked students to think together about issues like the invasion of Native American lands by Europeans, the engineered dependence of Puerto Rico, and the contradiction of slavery as an institution in a "free" society.  Not surprisingly, the series became notably controversial and was even burned in some American towns.

The explosion of experimental activities in American schools during these early years of the 20th Century is impossible to summarize in a few sentences.  Perhaps the best way to capture some of the animating ideas of the progressive impulse is to cite the basic principles adopted by the Progressive Education Association at the moment of its birth in 1919.

1.  Children should have the freedom to develop naturally.

2.  A child's interests should be the basic motive for all her school work.

3.  Teacher should function as guide and not a task master.

4.  Record-keeping empowers sympathetic and scientific study of a child's development.

5.  Schools pay equal & active attention to ALL facets of children's development.

6.  The school and the home MUST be active partners in meeting children's needs.

The Eight Year Study began as a conversation at the 1930 P.E.A.Conference.  Two years of further conversation followed.  Initially there were no foundation dollars involved and people participated at their own expense.  Beginning in 1932, support from Carnegie and the General Education Board helped underwrite the expenses of what was called the Commission on the Relation of School and College.  It was this commission, created by the Progressive Education Association, that designed and directed the Eight Year Study.  Its first action was to conduct an assessment of American secondary schools.

The Commission found that students were graduating with no sense of what it meant to be a citizen within a democracy.  They found no connection between daily community life and the fundamental human values intended to guide that life.  Student concerns and school curricula were miles apart.  Where to begin?  What to change?  How best to change it?

As a starting point, the Commission focused on the freedom to change.  That may have been one of the wisest decisions it ever made.  It was clear to all members that high schools were most powerfully and extensively regulated by college admission criteria.  So the Commission sought and won the agreement by some 300 colleges and universities to waive their existing criteria for graduates of the experimenting group.

It was also clear that experimentation could not and should not be the exclusive right of a few private and privileged schools.  There had to be diversity of character, economic class and geography.  And so the roster of participating schools included Altoona Senior High in Altoona, PA; Roosevelt High School in Des Moines, IA; Tulsa Senior and Junior High Schools in Tulsa, OK; Eagle Rock High School in Los Angeles, CA; and Shaker Heights High School located outside of Cleveland, Ohio.  On the private side were such schools as Francis Parker in Chicago, North Shore Country Day in the northern Chicago suburbs; several Quaker schools; Lab Schools like those at the University of Chicago, Ohio State and Wisconsin; and other private institutions like Milton Academy, Baldwin School and the Winsor School.

In the fall of 1933, all schools began building new curricula.  The process was intriguing and it varied dramatically from school to school.  Institutions affiliated with the P.E.A. had been dealing explicitly with the following questions for years.  What are democratic values?  How do we recognize them in practice?  How do we test such values publicly?  How do we teach the ability to think deeply and critically about the social issues and problems of the day?  How do we construct a descriptive yet dynamic portrait of a student's personality and character?  How do we use that portrait to understand a student's needs, actions and feelings?

As bold and fascinating as it all was, it also was a very human venture just as it would be today.  Complexity and the frustration of false starts were all part of what was to be explored.  The English Department at Altoona High replaced required reading lists and book reports with literary parties, discussions, impersonations and book clubs.  It also designated one day a week as a free reading day.  No one ended up reading as few as the 14 books formerly required.  Student were reading because they wanted to read.  A junior high school math teacher in Altoona organized an insurance company run by students.  It insured students against loss and damage to school books.  The need to invest premiums led to a study of banking and investment because the students had money to invest, not because it was demanded by a grade level course of study.

Radnor High School in Pennsylvania addressed program needs for non-college bound students.  They developed a senior curriculum known as the Cooperative Course.  These were tryout training opportunities for students in one or more vocational fields.  Each tryout lasted two weeks.  Local business people agreed to provide some form of introductory experience or training in a given field.  These field experiences amounted to something between a part-time job and an apprenticeship, where instruction, supervision, evaluation and reports to schools became routine practice.

In 1936 a group of nine men began working across the country as Eight Year Study consultants.  They served only at the pleasure and invitation of individual schools.  The consultant did not stick around for long and it was not her role to dictate or impose.  Instead, she assisted by NOT having an ax to grind or a stake in the local broils.  Like a Pony Express rider, each carried news of work in other schools.  They visited classrooms, gave demonstration lessons, and served as a mobile clearinghouse for research, ideas and materials.  Often they helped school people move their own mountains just by taking the time to leave a well-placed word of encouragement and understanding.  In short, they were summoned to assist teachers in discovering their own ability to act and change. 

There is renewal of interest in the Eight Year Study today because we still have educators who believe that American Schools must once again become innovative and lively places.  The essential value was democracy.  This feature, more than any other, sets the Study apart from contemporary school reform movements propelled largely by appeals for increased test scores, accountability and productivity.

We get our possibilities from one another - simple and inescapable.  This means we must have well-funded, public and not privatized or stratified charter schools bent on separating us and making us strangers to one another.. Public schools nurture a democratic citizenry wherever kids from diverse backgrounds arrive to learn with and from each other.  

Good teachers are once again stepping up and speaking out in protest over the dis-information, disorder and dis-ease now being inflicted on public schools 2013. It is guided from above, by a technocratic mindset adept at junk bond trading, corporate takeovers, bank bailouts and economic dominance.  But for those of us committed to the democratic tradition, the Eight Year Study is both our ancestor and ally.  It reminds us that the idea and broad practice of democracy comes with a price.  If we want it to remain as the centerpiece for citizens, teachers and students, then we're going to have to fight for it.  Eternal Vigilance is an action and not a slogan.

Community School Morris L. Eisenstein United Community Centers Brooklyn, NY

I'm not non-partisan.  Instead, I'm here to convince you about a point of view.  I have a point of view.  I believe in it. These are the basic assumptions from which I start and I am making them public. That is what you do in a democracy. Hidden assumptions signals a hidden agenda.  The first assumption is that education is an organized, directed, conscious process of preparing people to deal with their world, to deal with the world in which they live.  I am therefore saying that any kind of learning which is not conscious and not directed toward the goal of preparing people to deal with their world is not education. If it hobbles, stratifies or diminishes people so that they can not deal effectively with their world then it is not education.  There may be learning about a separate and unequal society going on but not education.

Curriculum is the organized way in which we try to achieve educational goals.  Anything which is not intended to achieve those goals is not curriculum and should not be called curriculum.  There are educators who speak of "hidden" curriculum.  I say there isn't any such thing as "hidden" curriculum.  There is only curriculum.  EVERYTHING that happens in the school is part of curriculum.  Everything that happens in a school is deliberate and intended, whether admitted or not.  Everything that happens in a school is an outgrowth of the goals of education in that school, whether written down or not.  Everything that happens in a school which affects children is part of that curriculum. So, emaciated curriculum or a testing tyranny that reduces all learning to boring bits and pieces that alienate and sublimate the development of creative human beings is deeply and fundamentally intentional.

My assumption about the learning process is that people learn what they experience, not what they hear.  Children learn what they experience, not what is told to them or what they read. If they cannot experience it firsthand, or if nothing is related to their immediate experience of the world and how to shape and humanize it, then we can't call it learning.  The learning process entails the interpenetration of learning and teaching.  I believe in the process of learning where the  student becomes a teacher and the teacher becomes a learner.  The fundamental process in the school is the relationship between the teacher and the child.  Child and teacher stimulate one another.  Each recognizes and stimulates in the other the learning and the teaching. Remotely-authored and imposed, corporately-constructed "goals and objectives" for teachers and students who are routinized, objectified and thereby made strangers to one another, does not constitute learning.

Because people are social animals, the basic assumption is that the individual achieves her highest development in relationship to other people.  We receive our possibilities from from others and not from our insides, nor from bureaucracies operating outside our circle of daily life and activity.  Integration and education are inseparable because there can be no education in which people do not have their education in relation to one another and develop themselves and their understanding in relation to their total worlds. When we separate children and families into multi-tiered educational sectors of have's and have-nots, it is called an institutionalized caste system.

What would be the implications for policy in a school organized on the basis of my assumptions?  There would have to be a policy of conscious consistency between verbally expressed beliefs and overt behavior.  To put it in plain old language, put your money where your mouth is.  A school which teaches one value system, and then behaves on the basis of another value system, teaches what the kids experience and not what the school says. A free public school system in support of nationwide democracy would look radically-to-the-root different from our current arrangement.

Another policy would be the rejection of perfection as a goal for both youth and adults.  People are always in the process of becoming.  No one is ever a finished product until you put that person in the box and throw dirt over the lid.  Therefore, the emphasis is on struggle with people around the kind of a world we live in.  The policy of such a school would be to develop a positive identity within the class, race and nationality groups among the students.  There would have to be the recognition that minority and working class cultures have positive contributions to make to the development of all children.  There would be an atmosphere where young people feel free to explore differences with the help of sympathetic adults, who though they may disagree, help young people to explore the realm of  possibilities. Banished would be all directives which test, judge, label, segregate, humiliate and destroy the human potential that schools are pledged to protect and promote.

The classroom would be defined as the world we live in.  This would give school what so many people love to call relevance, which is real and not contrived.  Biology teachers in this community are only 15 minutes from one of the finest laboratories, right here on Sheepshead Bay.  Yet students from Thomas Jefferson High School tell me that some of them have never been on a field trip to that Bay.  There are a million and one new possibilities.  It requires the desire, the commitment, the understanding to move out and deal with a concept of education which involves young people and teachers as partners in a process which is of the utmost importance to them and to their world.

Give me a group of kids, and the whole Bay, and I'll keep them there for a week.  United Community Centers once ran an interim school and teachers from Thomas Jefferson H.S. who taught in our interim school said, "This is an ideal school you have created here."  It was the first time those kids ever went down to the Bay.  They spent hours there, exploring the life of the sea, the ocean, the intertidal zone.  We have kids going there now, studying the ecology.  There are a million things you can do if you want to study, are not afraid, have some imagination and are aware of what's under your nose."

Thomas Jefferson was one of 7 public high schools in New York to receive a M.P. Moller pipe organ for their auditorium back in the 1920's when beautiful music was just one of many investments that public budgets considered inspirational.  Famous alumni included Howard Zinn, Shelley Winters, Danny Kaye, Steve Lawrence and Jimmy Smits.

In the fall of 2002, Thomas Jefferson High School was named one of 7 low-performing Brooklyn high schools scheduled for restructuring.  In 2004 it was announced that Jefferson would no longer accept incoming 9th graders.  Closed in 2007, Thomas Jefferson was broken into several different schools due to low graduation rates. Morris Eisenstein's vision of an ideal school was silenced and shuttered.