Smaller Schools

When I worked as an education reporter some years ago, my coverage area had unexpected crisis: a sudden surge in high school enrollment leading to massive school overcrowding. This was driven, in part, by the growth of the immigrant community, which threw off the county's model for calculating population by living in larger households than the average American family.

The school board and central administration had two solutions: adding on to six existing high schools to raise their student populations from about 2,000 to about 2,500 and building a new, 2000-seat high school for between 70 and 80 million dollars.

All my instincts screamed that both of these were the wrong solution. What the school system needed to do, I thought, was acquire small buildings here and there and set up perhaps 10 new high schools of about 500 pupils. The community I covered had a charming old brick school building, that would have been perfect for such a project, needing a few million dollars for a new roof and other repairs. (This versus $70 million for a new school ... $3 million each put into ten smaller buildings would be ... $30 million ... at least something for the frugal to ponder.) The high school in that community, which was slated for a 600 "seat" (not pupil, but "seat") addition, was already well past what experienced people agreed was its former its optimal size of about 1,200 students. It was, in many ways, dysfunctional despite the best efforts of teachers and administrators to run a good school.

While I couldn't "prove" anything, what I saw, in both the above county and a neighboring more affluent county, was that once schools pass a certain size, they tend to become impersonal, bureaucratic places. Administrators can't know all the students, and kids end up herded through the system in the most efficient way possible, which often doesn't meet their individual needs. I sometimes witnessed students being treated rudely by harried school staff. I could hardly blames the staff, but also had the uncomfortable feeling I wouldn't want my children spoken to that way.

Yet, parents clamored for the larger schools with all the bells and whistles. To send a child to school without the same state-of-the-art gym as the best school in the county, and without a full-blown music program and six languages to choose from was seen as unacceptable. To have all these amenities in one place meant building large schools.

But are these the most important things? I often feel as if I am sister from another planet, and somehow miss seeing life the way the rest of the world does, but how is a state-of-the-art gym better than a small, caring community dedicated to knowledge and to knowing each student personally? Obviously, it would be ideal to have both, but as Gym Ex illustrates, students' bodies can be well served through the simplest exercise technologies.

I wish we could focus more on the soul of our schools than on their material attributes. Are students nurtured and known? If that element is in place, and academics are taken seriously, learning will follow. Quakerism, in general, with its emphasis on "small is beautiful," is well-placed to be a leader in this alternative way of thinking.

Quaker Education

Note: I started writing this before Jeremy's comment, which I will refer to later ...

When I was an education reporter, I covered home-schooling from time to time and couldn't help but notice that many home school parents wanted to do more than teach their children "at home" all the time. Many homeschool parents networked to provide enrichment for their children and a whole industry had arisen around providing classes to homeschooled children during regular school hours. For example, I did one story on a women who had made almost a full-time job out of offering Latin I through IV to homeschooled high schoolers--classes that enrolled anywhere from eight to 16 teens.

I realized that many homeschool parents were not rejecting the classroom model per se, but the constraints and problems of public and private education. Some homeschool mothers I interviewed would have liked a private school for their children, but either had too many children to afford it or too little income. Others homeschool parents tried private schools but found they mirrored too much of what they didn't like in public schools, such as discouraging substantive parental involvement or dismissing parent concerns or not teaching phonics. In other words, at least some homeschooling parents would have been glad to place their children in a school, could they have found an affordable school that lived up to their expectations.

At one point, I covered a homeschooler's "school," and I can't shake it from my mind. This school was parent run, started by two women who wanted more for their children then the loose homeschooling group they were part of. To make a long story short, they banded together, found some other interested parents, borrowed Sunday school rooms in a large church, chose a curriculum and held classes for their children two days a week, with the rest of the at-home school week structured around lessons arising from the classes. By the time I arrived, the school, which still met twice a week, had grown to cover grades 1 through 12, and enrolled 125 students.

Parents ran the school--there was no administration, though there was a parent board--and parents were clearly heavily involved in the day-to-day activities of the school. The school cost $1,000 a year per student, and students who created problems or who could not keep up with the curriculum were asked to leave.

I think about this school because it was as "out of the box" an enterprise as I saw during my time as a reporter. (There's one other one, but that will be a different post.) This was clearly a case of parents a school to fit their children's needs, not setting up a school the way a school "should be" and forcing children to fit it and parents to pay the price.

It dovetailed with other thoughts I have had over the years, chiefly involving Quaker education meeting Quaker family's needs. The biggest need I have seen is affordability. So I would suggest starting there. Find out what parents can afford to pay and work around that, rather than what a school "must" have at ... 10K or 12K a year ... or more.

I can envision a scenario in which, say, nine Quaker families decided they could each put $1-2K a year into a pot to educate their 15 elementary age children. Let's say they ended up with $17K, including donations from Quaker organizations, and some in-kind donations of supplies, etc. The first step would be for all the parents to become approved homeschool parents, and the second would be to get together and fashion a set of goals and principles. I would strongly recommend a first principle being "serving other people's children," to weed out the parents who are only it in for what they can "get" for their own offspring. Third, I would see how much collective education the 17K would buy and work from there. Maybe the parents could obtain free use of Quaker classrooms connected to a meeting. Maybe they could rent at very low cost, say $1,000 a year, from a church or community center. Maybe they would designate another $2,000 a year for supplies and opt to keep $1,000 in reserve for emergencies. This would leave $13,000.

While I don't know the details of all this or what insurance liabilities would be (and perhaps this would all have be done in homes ... I don't know) conceivably, the school could hire a part time teacher for 6K a year total--kind of an adjunct--3K a "semester" who would come in and lead school for 21/2 hours a day two days a week. This could be supplemented by a parent-run meeting for worship before the teacher began her day, and followed by parent-run recess and lunch. And to be part of the group, each parent might be required to offer a few hours of enrichment each year/quarter to all the students ... and that would be a start. Maybe a weekly service project would be another part of the school. Perhaps the rest of the money could pay someone to coordinate the school. Accreditation would not be a problem as all the parents would be homeschoolers. The key point is that it would start with affordability.

The main goals, I believe, for a Quaker school is transmitting Quaker values and serving Quaker children. Much thought needs to be given to what those values are and to what serving Quaker children means. I write this as someone whose children are past the need for this type of schooling--who are two years from high school graduation.

Jeremy Mott went on a similar track when he wrote: "Someone might try to get a little
grant from the Clarence Pickett
Fund---see website---to develop a course on Quakerism for
Quaker parents who are home-schooling their children (I think there are many of them now.) The course could also be used by any of the numerous new Quaker schools which have no Quaker teachers; but
that wouldn't be the emphasis, for Friends Council on Education already tries to help them. The
material might be based, in part,
on what Max Carter of Guilford
College has done to develop curricula on Quakerism and on world religions for the upper grades of the Friends Schools in
Ramallah in Palestine (You can
find this info in their latest newsletter on the web.) There have
got to be ways to make Quaker education less expensive, even in
the U.S.A."

What do you think? Would you be willing to trade in the "bells and whistles" for a school built around Quaker values? What should these values be?

Quaker Education 2

I'm here at the beach, thinking about Quaker education and John Woolman.

In "Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes," written in 1746 and published in 1754, Woolman argued that one of the drivers of slavery was parents' overblown affection for their children. The natural desire to give one's children good things--including a comfortable inheritance--helped people rationalize the slave trade.The economics of slavery allowed people to amass fortunes from the profits of the cheap labor of slaves, and people justified this ownership by contending they had to take care of their families.

"If we do not consider these things aright, but ... conceive views of interest separate from the general
good of the great brotherhood, and, in pursuance thereof, treat our
inferiors with rigour, to increase our wealth and gain riches for
our children; What then shall we do when God riseth up?
and when he visiteth, what shall we answer him ? did not he that
made us, make them? and did not one fashion us?"

Earlier in the essay, he writes:

" It appears by experience, that where children are educated in
fulness, ease, and idleness, evil habits are more prevalent than
is common amongst such who are prudently employed in the
necessary affairs of life. If children are not only educated in
the way of so great temptation, but have also the opportunity of
lording it over their fellow-creatures ... how can we expect otherwise than that their
tender minds will be possessed with thoughts too high for them ;
which gaining strength by continuance, will prove like a slow
current, gradually separating them from or keeping from acquaint-
ance with that humility and meekness in which alone lasting hap-
piness can be enjoyed.

Man is born to labour, and experience abundantly showeth,
that it is for our good : but where the powerful lay the burden
on the inferior, without affording a Christian education, and suit-
able opportunity of improving the mind, and a treatment which
we, in their case, should approve, in order that themselves may
live at ease, and fare sumptuously, and lay up riches for their
posterity; this seems to contradict the design of Providence, and,
I doubt not, is sometimes the effect of a perverted mind ; for wdiile
the life of one is made grievous by the rigour of another, it entails
misery on both."


Do we also make idols of our families?

And does this get to the heart of Quaker education?

I have read in the newspaper quotes from administrators at elite Quaker schools distressed about helicopter parents who want their teenage children protected from facing any of life's rigors. Of course, we don't want our children abused by teachers or classmates, but graduating entitled nincompoops who think life will give them special protection might not be the best idea either.

I was an education reporter for a few years, covering a county with a large minority population. That meant witnessing white flight from that school system to nearby school systems with "higher test scores" and "safer schools" and white flight to "independent" schools. Of course, the question frequently arose: shouldn't families support the public schools instead of fleeing? Yes, but having covered public education, I would say that individual families simply can't take on the school system. I've seen many families try valiantly, with mothers (it's usually mothers) heading PTAs, safe school programs, working on academic committees and fundraising drives, and ultimately having to throw up their hands and yank their children from the schools. The schools' problems are a symptom of a deeper social and spiritual malaise that must be addressed first.

I would also say that entering elite public or private schools isn't totally the answer either. What we need, for starters, I would argue, is an "independent" school option that's less elitist than much of the private (and elite) public school strata. Many Catholic schools, I believe, do this well. Some are elite schools, but many are modest schools serving average people. Of course, it could be argued that Catholics--here I speak of Roman Catholics--who comprise a quarter of all Christians in the United States, have vastly greater resources than Quakers. At the same time, Quakers have a history of achievements disproportionate to their numbers.

Another thing we possibly need to rethink is pitting public versus private (they're now called "independent") schools. There are elite public and independent schools and down-to-earth public and independent schools. Public is not necessarily more virtuous than private and vice versa. If we have our children in public schools in an affluent county (as our family did for years) or in a top magnet program in a less affluent county, we could be more elitist than a family sending its children to a modest independent school. I have heard parents say things to their magnet school children such as "You are in a school where the kids really want to learn." What does this teach but that "you are more deserving and kids who don't achieve don't want to." Is either true?

Quaker schools can excel, I believe, by practicing the Quaker testimonies, putting Christ at their center and emphasizing education--and life-- not as a way to get "a competitive advantage" over others, but as training to serve. They could change the world. I dream, but enough independent schools practicing Woolman-like principles could at least gradually change the education system in this country. But how many do? Olney does, yet does that fact mean many parents will reject it for its simplicity?

Conversely, to the extent that Quaker schools appeal to the social or economic elite, does that mean they are not in full compliance with Quaker values? Would Quaker schools that really practiced the Quaker values espoused, say, by John Woolman, appeal to elites? Or would they flee from such schools as too austere? Not taking good enough care of their children?