schoolyard subversion

2000-10-29 [< * >]

In the Oct. 9, 2000 New Yorker, there was an article that drove fear into my heart. Entitled "Uncharted Territory: How to make money off failed schools" it described Advantage Schools, a company which attempts to make money by opening up school franchises in poor neighborhoods. As I can only hope to aspire to the literary quality of the New Yorker, I will quote from Elizabeth Kolbert's words:

One morning, I arrived at the school in time for a second-grade reading lesson. The teacher, Brian Stiles, told the students to get out their textbooks; he himself picked up what appeared to be a huge spiral notebook. "Find lesson seventy-eight," Stiles told the class. "Touch column one. Word one is 'seagulls.' What word?" He snapped his finger. "Seagulls!" the students answered, in unison.

[The teacher] seemed like a nice enough person, and also probably a competent teacher, but since so much of what he did was scripted it was hard for me to tell. At the end of the reading class, Stiles showed me his notebook, and I saw that the entire lesson had been printed out for him, including the cues when to snap his fingers.

This system is called Direct Instruction, and focuses heavily on the learning of basic skills. Advantage claims they chose the method because research shows it as the best, but this claim is highly exaggerated at best, and likely due to the fact that DI encourages rote memorization, a method which does well on tests, but does not mean that the students actually comprehend the material. The curriculum focuses on highly basic skills, leaving little time for much else:

I saw a schedule for second graders. It showed them spending three and a half hours a day on Direct Instruction in reading, writing, and spelling, and another hour on Direct Instruction in math, which left just over ninety minutes to be divided up, according to a complicated weekly rotation, among gym, Spanish, science, art, music and history. Missing almost entirely from the schedule were the exercises in self-expression and discovery typically associated with elementary school: the illustrated reports that get tacked on the walls, or the scraggy seedlings groping toward the window. In Stiles's classroom, there were some simple cutouts of hot-air balloons hanging from the ceiling; these were the only student-made decorations in the room, and he told me it had been difficult, given the rigors of the curriculum, to find time to make them.

Much like a fast-food franchise, an Advantage school comes as a package, and to sign on with the company is, at least in theory, to accept this package in a McMuffin to McFlurry sort of way. Advantage students [...] are required to wear uniforms[...], to pass through the halls silently, in single file, and to obey the rules posted in every classroom: "Follow directions the first time they are given"; "Get attention the right way"; "Don't work ahead."

I talked to dozens of students[...]. A few of the kids had complaints. One serious-looking fifth grader told me that she missed the regular public school she used to attend. "The other school had more activities and projects and trips," she said, adding that she had once won a prize for a project on a woman she admired. Many more, though, said they were happy. Another fifth grader, with pigtails, told me, "I love this school. I was about to stay back, and this school gave me another chance." Over and over again kids talked about the violence they had seen, or even participated in, at their previous schools, and how much more secure they felt [here].

If one considers the public schools a primary institution of democracy, it is hard not to be discomfited by this separate-but-not-altogether-equal philosophy. Everything I saw in Advantage's Boston office--the emphasis on drive and risk-taking and innovation--reflected a corporate culture that was fundamentally at odds with the cookie-cutter, don't-work-ahead design of its schools. Answering on command and respecting authority are not entrepreneurial virtues, though they do have a place farther down on the economic order. It struck me as not insignificant that, while Advantage schools serve mostly black and Hispanic kids, everyone I met in the corporate headquarters, except for a single receptionist, was white.

Yet dwelling on this discomfort may itself be a luxury. [... If] these parents choose to send their kids to Advantage, if only because they feel that the kids will be safer there, who, in the end, can blame them?

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