Linda F. Nathan

As I look around the country, I get more and more concerned that our state and federal mandates have caused us to ignore the idea that education is about empowerment and the ability to make change in one’s own life and community. Vito Perrone, my mentor and a mentor to hundreds of educators around the country, wrote in his book A Letter to Teachers about how quality education is about the ability to connect learning from the community to school and the school to community. Perrone wrote that education is about “build[ing] bridges…” and not just about reproducing the materials and expectations of our current society. He asked, “What do we most want our students to come to understand as a result of their schooling?” Perrone urged us to think about “setting ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement.” By that he meant the opportunity to discover joy and play and the power of community. Perrone didn’t shirk away from recognizing the devastating impacts of poverty, poor nutrition, unemployment, or racism, but he pushed us as educators not to allow the trauma surrounding so many of our students’ lives to prevent them (and us) to think about aesthetics and authentic learning. Perrone used these terms before they sounded trite to our 21^st century politicians. He exhorted us to think about larger possibilities for learning, and not to settle for quick fixes and test scores. He often paraphrased Dewey, especially in the ways that Dewey thought about the importance of habits of mind, heart, and hands. For Perrone, vocational education, project based learning, was for all students not just those who couldn’t “do school.”

Recently, I learned about the Workshop School in Philadelphia http://www.workshopschool.org/, which is a small school that focuses on solving real world problems. The four co-founders are Dr. Matthew Riggan, Executive Director and engineer, Simon Hauger, Principal, Dr. Michael Clapper, teacher, and Dr. C. Aiden Downey, the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Division of Educational Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

The web site describes how the school is different from most schools because “students spend their days working on meaningful projects that solve real world problems.” Vito would have loved this school. Simon Hauger, one of the school’s founders and an engineer says, “We believe learning should be interesting, even fun. The Workshop is a place where your ideas matter.  Sure, we focus on all of the stuff you need to be successful in school, like reading, writing, and math. And we definitely work hard. But we also learn the things you need to be successful in life. Like how to ask the right questions, push through adversity, make positive change, and work well with other people.” Projects run the gamut from building a solar powered house to investigating topics such as immigration or climate change. Students say that the school feels like “family.”

In today’s high stakes turnaround approach to learning, “family” is almost seen as a curse word. At the very least, it is seen as being “soft on standards.” We are not allowed to talk anymore about the trauma and pain that our kids come to school with. Double periods of English and math and scores on tests are all that is measured and all that is reported. But we know that when school is truly about engaging young people, learning really occurs. Schools like this might show us the way forward.

When I first began at Fenway High School, Vito Perrone suggested that we visit Ann Cook at Urban Academy in NYC. Vito wanted us to see how they did Project Week.  We borrowed many of Urban’s ideas and introduced Project Week to Fenway in the early 1990s.  One of our essential questions was: “What makes a good museum?” 250 students fanned out across the city to study this question in various forms. At the week’s end, we reported out our findings to museum directors, city councilors and other interested officials. It was an exhilarating learning expedition for students and teachers. To this day, Fenway continues Project Week and Boston Green Academy (another Boston Public School) also has introduced Project Week. It has morphed a great deal and is not necessarily one essential question that everyone studies, but it continues to be a high point of the year for everyone. I vividly remember one of our earliest discussions after Project Week with Vito. As he listened to our excitement about all we had learned he asked, “Why not have Project Year and School week?” That question has stayed with me.

I had always hoped that the Boston Arts Academy would find a way to bring “project week” into the school’s curriculum. Finally, under the leadership of Anne Clark, BAA’s headmaster, and Monika Aldarondo, Creative Director, “Intersession” was born at BAA. Students and teachers offered 33 different sessions. In the proposals the leader had to describe the goals of the learning experience as well as the activities and the community partners (if any) involved. “Think about all the actions you can take to understand and experience a topic more deeply. In addition describe all the ways your experience will allow people to learn to explore, create, investigate, make, do, engage, perform, play, question, connect, practice and deepen.” These words and their meaning are so compelling to me and to students.

Some of the projects included: Site Specific Dance (students studied exhibits at the Museum of Science and then responded in dance), Mini Musicals, Youth Activism, Documentary Film Making, Healing with Music (including learning about Alzheimer’s and performing at a senior citizens home), Cooking, CosPlay which allowed students to study anime characters and construct their costumes, Exploring Local and National Monuments, Study of the Caribbean, Sculpting Fashion, Basics of Owning a Car, Jewelry Making and the list goes on and on.

A dancer working on a site specific dance showed me his duet on balance. “I went to the exhibit about the human body and spent a lot of time learning about the ear. My dance is an exploration of how the ear helps us balance.” Another dancer showed me her quartet she had finished choreographing about planets and their inter-relationships. “We spent a full day at the exhibit learning, reading, playing, choreographing. We made our dance right there. No one wanted to be Uranus at first, but we had to figure out how that planet was interacting with Pluto and Neptune. It was fun to learn about planets in a different way.” The idea of interacting with a museum exhibit through dance was exhilarating and challenging for these young dancers. I’m certain they wouldn’t have spent so long at an exhibit if they hadn’t had the chance to use their passion and their way of experiencing the world—through movement—as their medium for understanding.  One of the students in the cooking group talked about how much he had learned about shopping on a budget and how you could still eat nutritious food but how planning was so crucial. A small group of girls (with a male teacher) studied pregnancy both from a scientific and emotional perspective, reading literature, studying reproduction and even carrying an 8lb weight around to learn about the physical dimensions to pregnancy.

I believe that because students to chose their projects (and even volunteered to lead projects) the level of enthusiasm and engagement was breathtaking.

But while I was thrilled to see Intersession at BAA, I also was sad. This kind of open-ended exploration with joy is not generally the norm in schools. We are continuing to feed our students a steady diet of discrete and disconnected facts and text book learning. We seem to avoid the obvious: when students are engaged they will learn. When students are included and asked about what they want to study, they will respond. This doesn’t mean that students should never be exposed to stuff that they don’t like or don’t want to learn, but at least half the day should be spent engaging in activities that directly relate to questions students are asking.  This is what Vito meant when he talked about the “larger purposes of school.”

Check out these pictures from intersession. I hope you can begin to ask, “How can ice skating be part of school?” Or “What does it mean for musicians to study abstract painting?” Or even better, “What does it mean when students are leading the sessions?” We must not settle for what currently passes as schools. We must keep pushing ourselves to ask how our classrooms can become more open to real community and interests of our students. Then, and only then, will school be a place where we all want to belong as a family.

Vito and me

This student group learned to figure skate during intersession.

Students learned to make their own candy and constructed a “candy land.”

Learning to make jewelry

Who would have known that an informal theatre program for young children in the early 1980s could yield such fertile ground.  I had been teaching an after school theatre program that had achieved some notoriety.  A visionary principal began to believe that he could turn around his K-5 school by providing arts for all students.

The first task was starting a middle school so that the school would grow to be K-8, and very few K-8s existed in that era. The school was located in one of the worst housing projects in Boston. The community was ravaged by violence, drugs and high rates of teen pregnancy. Busing was in full effect but few students from outside the neighborhood wanted to come to this school. Yet eventually, we worked across all grades to ensure that every young person in that large elementary school had daily arts experiences.

The principal knew that the arts would be a strong draw. He gave us another challenge: Make the middle school a bilingual middle school for the arts. Ensure that graduates were competent and conversant in both Spanish and English and also had skills in theatre, stagecraft, dance and music.  At that point, our visual arts program was almost non-existent.

A group of committed teachers worked for months to plan an interdisciplinary curriculum that would create multiple opportunities for students to experience science and arts, math and arts, English/history and arts. We had autonomy to create our own academic curricula and also to think about ways that arts and academics might enhance learning.  And we did it in Spanish and English, which may have been most important. To get a speaking part in a play, students had to speak both languages. Although students professed to hate the academic study of English or Spanish, those courses became some of our favorite since so many students wanted to be in a play.

Others who wanted no part of being in front of an audience became expert carpenters, lighting or costume designers, or stage managers. Family members helped with sewing, make-up, posters and general chaos control.  Folks had no precedent for bilingual musicals by 11-13 year olds, including Man of La Mancha and West Side Story. Yet we packed the auditorium every night. Since most families had had no experience with live theatre, we had to do considerable audience education.  People learned, for example, that they shouldn’t throw things onto the stage or call out in the middle of a song or an actor’s lines.

That school was meant to be the feeder for an audition-based high school for the arts. Two other strong magnet arts programs emerged during this era, but none could create the impetus for a true arts high school. Many other cities were opening such schools, often called magnet schools, as a way of stemming white flight and keeping the middle class invested in public schools.  Various attempts in Boston to organize the arts community brought tremendous resistance to opening an audition-based high school. The desegregation court order still controlled much of Boston school politics and there was no appetite for taking on what might be seen as an end-run to that order.

Without thoughtful dialogue the doubts became barriers to any action. Various proposals eventually died. The middle school arts programs languished with leaders who felt only their fingers in the dike of public school chaotic policies. The teachers in the individual schools knew programs like their own existed across the city but felt isolated and without a sense of agency to create a strong network. We kept hearing that we were the groundwork for the new high school, but we could barely do our own jobs let alone create a political force for real change.

We were all very committed teachers who made huge inroads with community organizations and families, but we had no authority or even protection to keep growing our school. Slowly we watched as our well-laid plans began to evaporate and our administration became interested in other programs. Our school began to look like a Christmas tree with one program or ornament being added each month. Our arts focus was just one of many things we were trying to do. Raising student achievement by any and all means became the new mantra. Funding and energies dissipated. Many of us began to look for new opportunities to effect change in schools. Then our own principal left and another arrived who didn’t share our zeal for a bilingual middle school for the arts.

Fast forward to the early 1990s

During this era Massachusetts experienced far-reaching education reform legislation that brought state testing (MCAS) and charter schools. The ProArts Consortium (a group of private and public colleges of the arts in Boston) was ready with a proposal to found a charter school for the arts. The State rejected that proposal as too expensive. Simultaneous to the legislation that brought charter schools, Boston Public Schools, the Boston Teachers Union and the Mayor’s office agreed on an innovative contract provision that allowed the formation of  “in-district charter schools” called Pilot Schools.

ProArts immediately applied for pilot school status and in 1995 Boston Arts Academy (BAA) became one of the first pilot schools in Boston, although we would not open for three more years until a facility could be found. I was then the co-director of Fenway High School which was the founding member of the group along with Greater Egleston, Health Careers, Young Achievers, Lyndon Elementary and Boston Evening Academy.   That group of six schools paved the way for what would later become Horace Mann Charter Schools and Innovation Schools in Boston and across the state.

Later, as the founding headmaster of BAA I met with all of the ProArts presidents to hear about their visions for this long-awaited and long-fought-for school. Ted Landsmark was the president of Boston Architectural College, one of the members of ProArts. Landsmark was the city employee captured in an iconic prize-winning photo that depicts him outside City Hall being stabbed in the chest with the pole of an American flag by someone opposed to court-ordered busing. Our meeting had special meaning for both of us. Landsmark never referred to the photo.  Instead, he talked about his vision for a school in Boston. Because of the rigors of an arts education, it would allow students, perhaps for the first time in our city’s history, to cross racial, socio-economic and language barriers and create meaningful work together.

Boston Arts Academy today

The arts created an environment where explorations of polarizing issues could be the norm. Young people grow up in an atmosphere that both validates their own backgrounds and experiences while simultaneously teaches about “other.”  BAA has done this for the past 16 years. Young people confront their own issues, and they learn to accept and even embrace the issues of their classmates and their history. This happens in the arts studios and also in math, science, language and history classes.

The culture of experimentation in new media, of risk-taking, striving for excellence and of collaboration permeates all classrooms. Students talk about how BAA is a “writing school.” They mean that everywhere, no matter what class, students learn to express themselves with written words. Students proudly discuss the values of the school, which include “passion with balance,” “vision with integrity,” “community with social responsibility,” and “diversity with respect.” These concepts, which can be difficult for most adults to live by, are infused in all aspects of the BAA community.

Students and parents are also quick to point out that a stellar faculty make this remarkable school possible. In fact, the deep ownership and pride of teachers for BAA has fueled a successful leadership transition to a wonderful new Headmaster selected by teachers, parents, students and Board members, who was also a founding faculty member.  Teaching at BAA requires lots of debate and meetings that allow teachers considerable control over what is closest to them: curriculum, assessment, schedule and working conditions.

Today, BAA is part of a growing number of autonomous schools in Boston. Pilot schools were the first to guarantee autonomy in six key areas: governance, budget, hiring, curriculum, scheduling and school calendar. Some autonomous schools are developed through a contractual agreement with the teachers’ union and the district. Others are legislated through new state education laws, and still others are part of federal “turnaround” policies.  While some slight differences exist within these autonomous schools, the principle of teacher ownership has remained the same.

From founding principal to a broader world

In my new role in the district, I work to better clarify what these variations in autonomies mean to different constituents. Some schools haven’t yet figured out how to ensure that teachers feel a strong sense of ownership. Other schools operate almost as if they don’t belong to any district. Collecting the evidence of the variations and the areas of tension has been fascinating.

Most exciting for me has been the opportunity to connect with young teachers and administrators who, as with myself over 30 years ago, embrace the challenges of public education and use autonomy as a way to ensure the creation of the best school possible.

Rochelle is an alum from BAA whom I visited recently. She works for another Boston public school, spearheading that school’s new destiny as a proposed Innovation School. I sat with Rochelle and her team of teachers, her principal, and students. They described their vision of a school with a focus on entrepreneurship, job development and the arts and new media. We talked about how to create a curriculum that was “hands-on” and project-based. What about a woodshop class where students made things that could be sold? What places of intersection exist between arts and entrepreneurship? Could students imagine starting and marketing their own business? As one student said, “Though I am senior and won’t be part of the new school when it starts, I give my full support to the idea… I believe that [this school] is what Boston is lacking right now. I have a little brother going into high school and [I’m glad] there will be a school like [this] for him.”

Whether or not faculty will vote to transition from a traditional school to an Innovation school is still uncertain. Still, the ideas shared around the room held great promise for young people who have not experienced success in school. Rochelle spoke about her vision for this school. “I learned so much as a student at BAA. I know the importance of creativity and collaboration. I was trusted to do a senior project as a high school student—and the topic was something I was passionate about—not an assignment a teacher gave me. I want to bring that same sense of excitement and ownership of learning to these young people.”  Rochelle described the transient population at her school, and how many students arrived with limited English skills. She was certain that by engaging them in the arts and entrepreneurship school might finally compete with the streets.  I look forward returning and seeing what Rochelle, her colleagues and her students have created. I have no doubt it will be magnificent.

A few weeks ago, I attended the 10^th reunion of the BAA class of 2003. The founding ProArts presidents and founding faculty would have been thrilled to see this group, some whom had traveled great distances to get there. Students spoke to one another, or used American Sign Language, since this class had a number of deaf and hard-of-hearing students, about their challenges and their successes. A surprising number were in law enforcement or the military. Others were teaching. Some worked as professional artists as church accompanists and choir directors or writers or after-school teachers or in nonprofits. Still others were in marketing. Some were still finding their way taking classes part time, working and raising a family.

Little judgment existed among these young people about what “making it” really looked like. I felt only a sense of camaraderie and support and evidence of the lessons we had taught in high school. Students reminisced about whether RICO—refine, invent, connect and own, still held true 10 years later. “I use it every day with my staff,” said a young woman program director. “RICO’s not just an academic skill. It’s a way of looking at life, learning and how you do just about everything.” Even with some concerns about how some alums were faring, I had the strong sense that they would stay connected and continue to create an even better Boston or Raleigh or San Jose or wherever they were living.

The shared values we struggled to inculcate in our community seemed alive and well within each one of them. Many of them would end up, like Rochelle, likely creating their own schools, or business, or organizations. They would feel strongly about the importance of collaboration. They would value knowing others different from themselves.  They would emphasize the balance between the importance of autonomy and the power of being part of a greater whole.

I have just made a huge decision to leave the school house and join the district office. I don’t think I ever imagined I’d work “in town” but we have an interim superintendent, John McDonough, for whom I have enormous respect. He has been working with Boston Pilot Schools since day one to help provide budget autonomy, and we have succeeded in that area. But there have been too many other stumbling blocks. Too many places when we haven’t gotten it right. I’m excited by the chance to try and help more schools gain the autonomy that I have enjoyed as a principal. I’ve included a link to my personal letter to my school community.

When I was on my book tour, an insightful school committee representative from a city in North Carolina said to me, “I really see what a good school yours is. And I know lots of good schools. But can you have a good school system? Or just a system of good schools? Do you see my question?” I’m not sure I really did.

But as I take on a new challenge with the Boston Public Schools to look at the possibilities of autonomy for all schools, I am asking lots of those questions. As autonomous schools in the Boston Public Schools have increased (we are now almost 25% of the schools), the district administration has not shrunk much. In fact, little has changed in the way the district and schools see one another, even though we have incredibly talented individuals working in our district. I hear this critique across the country: “The district office is too big; the district can’t get out of the way; there is too much bureaucracy; too many rules…”

What is the right relationship between a district office and individual schools? What is the right balance between autonomy and accountability? How do we come to these decisions? These are questions I will investigate during this coming year, through continued conversations with teachers and administrators across the Boston Public School system. We envision this year as one of collecting data and then making some proposals that can be the basis for policies moving forward.

The pilot schools (and Mass. charter schools) were founded on the principle that with autonomy comes accountability. There were five areas of autonomy: budget, hiring, schedule and calendar, curriculum and assessment, and governance. Each of these is complex; together they are indeed representative of what can make a great school. But we have seen that having these five autonomies doesn’t make schools automatically better. Of course, part of the challenge is defining “better.” Does that just mean better test scores? What are the more intrinsic ways of thinking about “better” and about what it means for a school to succeed? These autonomies we have been given may be necessary but they are not sufficient ingredients for success.

Then there is the question of Turnaround Schools. Is this a sustainable strategy? These schools, like pilot schools or in-district charters or Innovation Schools (in Massachusetts), get an infusion of money and the promise of autonomy. Within two or three years they are supposed to be transformed, and by transformation we mean higher test scores. But is there any evidence that these changes can be sustained, especially after the money goes away?

What about the teachers’ union? That is a question I’ve been exploring a lot these days as I take on the exciting task of editing a book about school reform and the role of unions. What have we learned about the ways in which teachers unions both support and detract from school reform efforts? Again, is there a balance that we might pursue that could lead to more harmonious and mutually beneficial relationships between the schools and the districts?

I will try and document my experiences this year, including what I learn, where I see the tensions, and what forms of balance we can achieve. I hope you will give me ideas of questions to ask and that you will keep your own questions coming. I am passionate about public education and there is so much at stake right now. I invite you on this journey.