The central pillar of what we've been doing with our pilot program is a faith—a hope? an assumption?—that our best ideas and practices will find traction in the school's policy and direction. The optimism coexists with a highly realistic sense of the practicality of institutional change. When it comes to changing directions, even moderately sized institutions are like aircraft carriers at full steam.
Unfortunately, it's much harder than just spinning the wheel to port, and the metaphor breaks down here anyway. We don't just want to nudge the aircraft carrier. We want to reorganize the sailors, redesign the engine, and refit the hull. Ever try to swap out the propeller of your carrier without slowing the ship down?
We got to visit the
Ross School, and what they have is the kind of school you'd end up with if you had a billionaire benefactor and could build from the ground up. Even the architecture matches the ambition of the educational mission. They have a cultural history curriculum that's the core of each year, and science and English classes are content-connected to that cultural history. Your science, English, and history teacher all get together to discuss cross-disciplinary projects, so you don't end up bouncing from class to unrelated class all day.
They also rely on project-oriented assessment throughout their curriculum, all the way from elementary school up through a culminating senior project at the end of high school. Students are involved even in the assessment of their own projects, typically by developing their own rubrics early in the process.
So after this day of being bombarded with very cool ideas and best practices, we're left with the daunting task of thinking about what we can bring back to a school that's structured fundamentally differently. How do we replicate what's great about the interdisciplinary class structure when are class sizes are literally twice as large as Ross's? And when we have 450 kids in a grade instead of 60? And when we have a tracked curriculum?
Sometimes I despair about discussing meaningful, substantive reform when it would almost certainly require at least a modest reduction in class size. The district is actually
talking about reducing the teaching staff, so it can feel hopeless to discuss a more student-centered approach when I'm imagining my class of twenty-seven eleventh graders growing to a class of thirty or more.
Still, we soldier on, right? This community has a strong history of supporting its educational system, and investments made in class size, reform, and better teaching more pay for themselves on a dollar-for-dollar basis in the long run by increasing property values, lowering crime, and upping students' earning power. And they also pay off in non-economic ways that are harder to measure and more elusive, like happiness, better options for schools and careers, and the satisfaction of a life steeped in knowledge.
