How to Fix Public Education; an Open letter of Greetings and Hope
January 4th, 2011Dear Friends,
If you are interested to read my Open Letter to the new interim Board of Education CEO, Terry Mazany, please go to the BeyondToday.org website where it is posted. I was amazed and delighted to hear Mr. Mazany being interviewed on Bob Edward’s NPR radio program last Sunday. In it, he reveals himself as a thoughtful and progressive educator, and perhaps signals that the dawn is coming after the long dark night of No Child Left Behind, test-and-punish mandates.
Pete Leki
To: Terry Mazany, CEO of Chicago Public Schools
Date : December 29, 2010
Subject: How to Fix Public Education; an Open letter of Greetings and Hope
Dear Mr. Mazany
This is an open letter to you and my community to welcome you as the new, if temporary, leader of the Chicago Public Schools. The example that you set, by volunteering your services for the token salary of $1 per year speaks to your dedication and the unique perspective you bring to this job. You join the scores of parents and neighbors in our community that selflessly give their time that our school and community should be better and more whole. Thank you for your service.
I know what to do to improve our schools ~ all of them. I didn’t come up with these good ideas. They were passed on to me from some visionary educators that have carried them on from a millenniums-old tradition that includes John Dewey, the craft guilds of the middle ages, farm families and indigenous tribes everywhere. The most important feature of this venerable and proven approach to education is that it educates the whole child within the context of a caring, learning, working community. It is really that simple. When a child is surrounded by a community that is working together to improve our prospects in this life, when academics are linked to real life problems, initiatives and solutions, education come alive, and students need no external motivation to seek knowledge, experience and skills.
This has been the method employed by all working, effective communities since we left the caves. Young people are our students, but they are also our extended family, our village. If what they are learning in school is not en-meshed in what is vital to the life of their family and neighbors, it becomes a battle of wills between schools and child. If the lives, knowledge, experience and resources of our communities, however humble they might be, are not a welcomed resource in the school, families and their children will find themselves alienated and lost.
The methods of this kind of education have been thoroughly elaborated and documented by well known educators and researchers (see references below). This kind of education works, but its currency rises and falls with the tides of political struggles within the government. Chicago in the 1990’s were a time of joyous and energetic school reform, with unprecedented powers given up to Local School Councils. Local school leaders slowly and cautiously took up the reins of leadership. Supported by generous grants from the Annenberg, DeWitt Wallace, Prince and other foundations, they began the joint adventure of learning how to build a successful neighborhood school. At that time innovation was rewarded by the BOE. Long-term partnerships were sealed between local schools and Education Departments in our Universities. Lengthy and sometime lavish (for teachers!) professional development opportunities gave teaching staffs the chance to work with colleagues, consider their own practices, and courageously make changes in order to set the intellectual flame in their students ablaze. Parents were invited to the PD table to hear the debate among the practitioners and the theorists, authors and researchers. The doors of the schools were thrown open for the world to enter, and for their students to venture forth on real, and vital explorations.
This was our experience at Waters Elementary from 1991 through 2000, where I served as chair of the LSC, parent educator through National Louis University’s Center for City Schools, and later as full time ecology coordinator. Our Principal, whom we hired and evaluated, created a space for teachers to renew themselves and their practice, searched out and provided support for vigorous PD, field outings, and collaboration. Teachers were re-assured and urged to pursue “the good stuff”, the teaching and learning experiences that captured their students’ curiosity and innate desire to learn more. High stakes tests were required by the State, but they were never the focus of instruction, not even rudimentary test prep. And yet, our small, 95% poverty, 90% Hispanic, local, shamelessly run-down school showed a steady march upwards in test results. Scores and scores of our parents learned, through participation in workshops, the elements of the school’s teaching philosophy: collaboration, book circles, writing and sharing, acting on social concerns, integrating the subject areas, performing in the arts. These are same activities that their children were involved in at school everyday. Parents became part of the teaching and learning team.
Institutional support for our experiment evaporated in the new millennium, when a new national administration demanded test driven accountability, punishing schools with the most challenging circumstances and comparing them unfavorably with selective enrollment schools and schools in affluent suburbs. The tide of innovation and reform was replaced by an atmosphere of threats and punishments, demands for data and accountability, abandonment of School Visions and partnerships in favor of the demands of National, State and Local mandates. Our school has struggled valiantly thru the cold winds of this first decade of the millennium, to stay true to our Mission and Vision of progressive education, in the face of these chilling demands. Today we still hold the banner of whole- child, collaborative, community-based education with strong University partnerships and a multitude of arts and science collaborators. Many schools were not so fortunate as ours and were racked by high teacher and leadership turnover and finger-pointing, set adrift in a sea of recriminations.
Mr. Mazany, here is what schools need:
1. Stability ~ an opportunity to pursue their SIP, their Vision, with support and understanding over an extended period of time. Teachers, students and the school leadership need to feel safe and nourished, not hounded and despised.
2. Partnerships ~ most importantly, with visionary University Education Departments that can bring their outside expertise, energy and creativity into a long term professional relationship with schools. But also, partnerships with civic, environmental, arts and business organizations to provide extra funds, opportunities and sense of excitement and hope for the school community.
3. Families and communities must be invited into the school’s learning adventure. A climate must be built that welcomes everyone to learn and grow, to try new things without fear of recrimination. Schools that work well with families give their students the gift of out-of-class support and understanding, and help to create educational mobility and hope for poor and working class parents.
4. A recognition by the BOE and the Government that impoverished students from stressed out homes and unsafe neighborhoods cannot compete favorably with safe, healthy, well-fed and cared for children of the wealthy. Rather than blame schools, teachers, and parents for students’ failures, authorities have to demand:
Full health care for all,
A job for anyone willing to work,
Affordable, safe housing for families in need.
These three things, if guaranteed by the government, would create the conditions necessary to make it possible for our local schools to bloom and flourish.
We are aware that the BOE or the City cannot guarantee these things by themselves. But, if our educational and political leaders gave voice to these demands, their words would resonate powerfully up and down the streets and alleyways of our city. Rather than point fingers of blame at embattled schools, secure their neighborhoods and families with help, with life support systems. Harvard researcher Alfie Cohen once noted that hi-stakes test scores correlate directly with the kind of automobiles owned by the community. The testing we do these days is not about accountability, but about ranking: the creation of winners and losers, the sorting of our miraculous and creative youth into winners who will “compete in the global marketplace for hi-tech jobs” and the losers who will descend into a life on the edges of our communities and those condemned to work forever at the bottom of the service industry.
Our vision of education is not to “turn out” well trained workers to fill the “jobs of the future”. It is to nurture creative, confident, curious thinkers and doers, who love their community and seek to find a better way to live and serve in it. They will create the jobs of the future and a new world, based on the values that we have taught them: hard work, cooperation, mutual assistance, justice, kindness, courage, creativity, joy, love of nature and art, and respect for all people, particularly the young and old.
Mr. Mazany, you are uniquely situated to speak out publicly in support of a new vision for public schools ~ one that calls on our government to provide the safe space and basic necessities for success, and challenges the schools and neighborhoods to take the future in their hands and make it beautiful. I await your call!
Sincerely,
Pete Leki
2546 West Hutchinson
Chicago, Illinois 60618
Cc: Titia Kipp, Principal Waters School
Waters School Local School Council
BeyondToday.org
Waters School Eco-volunteers
Waters School Garden Newsletter
Riverbank Neighbors
Linda Luden, Chicago Public Radio
Gene Schulter, Alderman 47th Ward
Ted Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer Foundation
Richard Turner, People’s Gas
Catalyst, Foundation for Education
Footnote:
Methods That Matter, H. Daniels and M. Bizar, Heineman
Best Practices, H. Daniels, S. Zemelman
The Art of Teaching Writing, L. Caulkins
In the Middle, Nancy Atwell
Writing With Teachers and Children, Graves
Invitations, Regie Routman
Punished by Rewards, A. Cohen
