I guess the
other peculiarity, and this would probably not happen in a
public school, is that you positively get a lynch mob going
in a situation because in the second week we had people
calling us to fire this woman, you know, really being -- we
toned them all down and even some of the other parents would
say to the really rabid parents, "Isn't it fair to give her
a little time to get adjusted?" But indeed they expect
that; in fact, some of the kids who come in to complain
about a situation with a teacher, honestly come in here with
the idea that the only solution is to fire the teacher, and
I really don't think that's an expectation when you run into
these things in public schools. Granted, I haven't been in
public schools below the university level for nearly 12
years, but still I think we've got a pretty exaggerated
response here. The ______ seems a little larger because the
expectations are so much higher.
Q. Do you feel an influence from colleges on, say, curriculum
and decisions that you make?
A. Certainly on decisions I make in helping individual families
steer a course through curriculum, for example, in making
some decisions about activities the kids are going to
participate in.
Q. How much influence do colleges have on course offerings and
curriculum here?
A. Very significant. The state regents, first of all, because
although it used to be that two-thirds of our kids went out
of state to college, as the money crunch has grown, more
significant. By the way, I think the money -- the sense of
economic crisis that is causing these other responses that
I'm talking about, every dime people spend is much more
precious, even much more so than ten years ago because their
fear of the future is so much greater financially. But as
that trend has grown, we're reaching a point where about
half of our kids now are staying in the state for college.
So we know that our graduation requirements must satisfy the
demands of the state regents at the very most minimal level
for graduation. So we had to redesign our lower level
physical sciences course. Our previous course was a very
solid introduction to physics and chemistry but it was
called Introduction to Physical Sciences and no course that
treats those two sciences in that way, in that introductory
way, is allowed by the regents' physical sciences
requirement. So we developed a course which the science
faculty developed in state workshops and kind of unison with
the outreach program of U of A, we developed a sophomore
level conceptual physics course that does satisfy that
requirement. Now that conceptual physics course is, in
fact, quite a lot less challenging than the IPS that we used
to give. Nevertheless, it's accepted by the regents. A lot
of the time you can get into situations where you simply
have to change the title of your course in order to satisfy
that requirement. So it does affect the way we do things.
Public high schools still allow earth sciences and IPS for
their own personal graduation requirements. We don't allow
anything to fulfill graduation requirement in any way that
the regents wouldn't also accept, which is the ground level
that we go in on. We obviously have the majority of our
students taking three or four years of sciences and foreign
language and math anyway, but we want our minimum
requirement to ensure the students' academic performance is
satisfactory to get into the universities in this state.
Q. Much of my research is directed at a current debate in
education in which particular researchers say that private
schools have -- allow teachers greater autonomy to innovate
and adapt curriculum in better meeting the student needs and
parent expectations.
A. I think that's probably true.
Q. And they are primarily influenced by students and parents,
not a bureaucracy.
A. I would say that's mostly true. You know, everything from
those day-to-day, minute-to-minute needs you're kind of
solving this issue, too, the way we look at curriculum and
they ultimately -- ultimately we're trying to see what
parents need and those needs may be defined in terms of
clearer explanations of what we're doing and why we're doing
it or in terms of making those changes. So, yes, parent
understandings have a lot to do either with the way we shape
curriculum or with the way we explain what it is that we are
doing. Often we're doing what they want anyway but they
don't understand it. But it does have a lot to do with
that. Unfortunately, that also means that the most truly
innovative private schools have some difficulty. We have to
work on the conservative side sometimes. The _________
school in Wilmington, Delaware, about 15 years ago, started
what it calls a NOVA system, which is very much like the
Colorado College block system, which you may know about, the
study of a single subject for three weeks and then moving on
to the next subject. There is a lot of supportive research
that suggests that even if you have math or language in
those first three weeks of the year with total immersion
eight hours a day for three weeks, your pre-test result the
following September will be as good or higher than the
average student who went through the regular curriculum, the
regular sequence of language or math all year long. The
forgetting and retention rate over the summer is still
greater for those who didn't have total immersion. Despite
those kinds of research results, that kind of program makes
people nervous. When a secondary school tries to innovate
in that way, they're going to get responses such as, What
will colleges think of this? How will people read the
transcript? How can we make sense out of our kid's
progress? So, of course, the needs for testing and
diagnostic pre-testing are going to be much greater but,
quite simply, those kinds of innovations tend to get
pressured out of existence because the bottom line for
private school is that there's virtually no leeway. Only a
handful of the private schools in this country are endowed
in any significant sense of the word. So tuition and
admissions are the life blood of the school and if the
perception is that this is a pattern that may suit some kids
but doesn't suit my college preparatory Harvard-bound kid,
then they're not going to like it. So that's why, I think
(end of side one of tape) --
Q. -- so what you're always looking at is the bottom line
dollars --
A. No, I don't want to put it that way. I don't want to
pretend, in that respect, when I described the chaos of our
everyday lives, I don't want you to think that we're just
running ________ through the situation. We do have a
philosophy, we do try to make decisions on that in terms of
trying to give kids a really excellent background, doing for
them what will enable them first to know the world better
and make use of it more effectively and more knowledgeably
and with greater respect. And in terms of the kind of
personal responsibility we want kids to take for their own
lives and for the decisions that they make on behalf of
quite a few numbers of people. Those kinds of -- that
philosophy does guide us in decisions that we make and
people do choose us, we hope, in most cases, because we're
making those kinds of changes. But we still -- we do have
to work on the conservative side in bringing in new courses
into the curriculum. We also know that no matter how we do
that, we can't please everybody. The pendulum swing to
Latin had worked propitious for a number of years for us to
try to get our middle schoolers in Latin. We ran into two
difficulties once we instituted the curriculum. One was
that it's very hard to find good Latinists who have good
experience with that age group. And we have been willing to
look for a less good Latinist if they had very solid
experience and effectiveness with middle school kids. We
get applications for a job like that from a very rare and
small number of people and they are all going to be
Latinists who have very little experience with that age
group. So that was one of the problems. We ran into a
situation where we were looking for the very best, the
person who taught absolutely the best in terms of how you
plan and develop a curriculum for younger kids, but if you
ended up not really being successful just because of that
lack of experience with the middle schooler of the 90s who
is even more hyperactive than the middle schooler of any
other generation we have dealt with. So that was one
problem that we had with that program. The other was that
as soon as we had it in place, we got a number that was
equal to the number that had tried out for Latin saying,
"Well, isn't it much more useful to just give these kids
Spanish in the Southwest?" and "Isn't Latin really much too
difficult?" And we were using good results, we weren't just
responding to whatever the market would bear, I sincerely
wanted Latin in our curriculum. I read very carefully the
information on just SAT scores alone and the improvement in,
if you give kids a sense of word roots from a very early
age, but it wasn't the scores even that I was looking for,
it was, in my view, another attack on the tendency of kids
to grow up in our society bombarded by noise which doesn't
necessarily need to be listened to in any precise detail.
And anything that we can do to get people attending the
language will enable us to preserve it, and I think that
we're losing, we're losing literally in an Orwellian way,
our ability to make certain kinds of discriminations because
we have lost the language; we don't have the vocabulary to
do it anymore, and we're literally seeing ideas drop out of
our language. Now kids will start to tune into this at the
area where I pick them up in the one course I still teach in
their junior year, but you've already lost a great deal, and
I think that anyone that we do to heighten the language
sensitivity and language awareness is a positive building
block toward these higher level thinking skills that people
are talking about. That's why I wanted it in the
curriculum. It wasn't just because I knew people -- you
know, what I saw though was that because the pendulum was
swinging in that direction, we could do something that was
right to do anyway.
You know, the failure in the individual
classrooms, I lost all the way around, and then we get the
counter ________. But, yes, many limitations, the many
constraints that we have, are bottom-line dollar kind of
restraints, that's true. That doesn't mean we sell out to
the dollar; it does mean sometimes that we have to give in
or buy in where we would prefer not to. But not when it
comes to really selling out. We are not going to equivocate
about moral and ethical issues if we believe that those
are -- if we have valid motives for doing what we're doing.
But we aren't willing to see the school close. So it's a
tricky line, but I would hate to see it off written off as
simply looking at the bottom line dollar in every decision
we make.
Q. Do you think public high schools with similar students,
scaled down to the size of Verde Valley, could they ever be
like a private school, a public high school?
A. I don't see why not. If they were -- you say scaled down
to this size?
Q. If they were the same size as a typical private school.
A. Yeah, they could, they probably could. Anytime you get
smaller classes and anytime you're at a smaller size such
that parents do not feel quite so alienated from the
process, as some do in the larger situation, then I think
you're going to have an improvement in quality. It's very
hard for even the poorest of teachers to completely fail in
a small class. Of course, a teacher with few effective
management skills and very little rapport with kids can fail
with one student, that goes without question; but you don't
have to be the genius, inspirational, charismatic kind of
person to succeed with a smaller class in ways that you
might not do with a much larger class. So I think a lot of
the ______ could be similar. There's a vast misperception,
misapprehension, and I see it a lot in new teachers who come
here, a lot of our teachers, a majority, all but about four
come here from public school teaching, not private school
teaching, and initially what they see is lots less red
paper, lots fewer forms to file, lots more direct ways of
getting things done, and that is true. However, it doesn't
necessarily, just because we have fewer ropes to jump, it
doesn't necessarily translate to faster response time
always, because you're needing a response from people who
are doing such a vastly greater number of jobs. So, you
know, the tone issue, it's definitely much more personal,
it's definitely almost more a personality matter than a
bureaucratic one in the way things happen, but you're often
dealing with people who are already -- you're needing
something new from a person who is overtaxed already with
whatever today held. In a public school those people are
overtaxed already, not because -- they also have a
multiplicity of jobs -- but they've just go so many more
people to deal with. I suppose if there was some happy
solution to the clearer organization of the public school
setting, but with many smaller numbers to deal with than you
would have, you would also have a bureaucratic nightmare, I
guess, because you've got far too many administrators. But
I think any school with truly unlimited resources and
smaller sizes, smaller numbers to deal with, could be more
successful with more kids than the larger public high
schools of today. The public high schools do an awfully
good job in the magnet schools, I think, because of the
special kind of commitment they get from the teachers in
those kinds of situations and the special reasons people go
to that -- the science magnet university high school, those
kinds of schools, I think, are very successful in their own
way. Most of those schools aren't necessarily working for
all of the things that we're working for. So that's a
factor and you have to look at -- it's not a one or two
variable issue that you're looking at when you're trying to
define the campus tone or ethos. The issues in most private
schools, I think, are that you want the kid to develop in
whatever ways are appropriate to him even if he may be
unable to achieve excellence in every single objective you
have throughout the school. And a public school has more --
I mean, a private school has more opportunity to reach out
to the creative personality, for example, and find ways for
him to succeed and excel, and to also work on the academic
deficiencies that various creative personality issues almost
naturally impose. You're able to very easily say to a math
teacher, for example, "This kid is actually a math _______
if he doesn't have to take his exams in a 60-minute period."
So we'll let him take his exams in the office for as long as
he needs. And you can't do that, I don't think, very easily
in a public school unless you have one with a special
mission of doing that. So I think that we can reach a
greater number of needs and, of course, right after
graduation one of the things you will hear is about you did
most those needs. Sometimes the teacher didn't even know
that you ____________. Occasionally you don't know how
significant it was until they come back and tell you many
years later. But that, I think, is something that you can
responsive to but it is also why our lives are so chaotic
because not only can we be, but we feel it's our duty to be,
so when we're doing that we may not be meeting the deadline
for our annual evaluation report to be dated. So it's very
hard to talk about all of the things that make any given
public school setting different from any given private
school setting. But definitely the smaller, personal sense
that people who choose to be here have made a vocational
choice, our salaries will never be, no matter how much
better they get, and they are getting better, they'll never
be exactly what those same people could be earning on the
public market. And people choose this teaching situation
because they like this kind of personal relationship with
the kids they are dealing with and with the families, even
though that means that people are going to be mad at them in
more different ways more frequently.
Q. Do you think the teacher's sense of autonomy and how much
control they have over their curriculum, instruction,
discipline, communications with parents, differs that much
from public school?
A. Yes, I think that does. Of course, again, when new teachers
come here from the public school they may perceive even
greater autonomy than we're able to give them. They may not
yet have ever dealt with the parent responses or the
___________ that they're going to get in a private school,
somebody may offend somebody, but we do try to provide that
as a philosophical issue and when we run into a conflict on
it, we will work it out by talking about it rather than by
simply requiring a teacher to change what he's doing and
rather seldom have we had to tell a teacher that, when he
was doing something that we all agreed was achieving the
goal of his curriculum but choosing a divergent way to do
that, if it also achieves all of our other goals for college
preparation, things that we are trying to be sure we are
doing for the kids, we're able to allow more autonomy and
we're able to try to work with parents in terms of informing
them in a more cohesive way, making changes immediately
because they didn't like the book we were reading this week.
The perception again, as I said, because of the monetary
factors alone, because of fewer people doing more different
jobs, some of the autonomy is not quite as great as one
would like. We definitely have to know what's going on all
the time and we can't have teachers making separate
decisions about discipline and never informing us about that
until some parent calls to complain and we find out
something has been going on for a month that we didn't know
about. But we -- teachers have much more to say about the
direction of their lives and I think that's partly why they
like this kind of teaching.
Q. And if we went back to this fictional public school, the
same size as Verde Valley and similar student body, would
those teachers have increased autonomy or equal autonomy?
A. That would depend on what kinds of other masters they're
having to respond to. Obviously, they still have
administrators who have to be responsive to an even greater
bureaucracy above, and the State Department of Education and
all of the, you know, the entire legislature, so I think it
will be harder to feel quite that level of autonomy. But
the small size, so that everybody could talk to each other,
would certainly improve the autonomy, very definitely. Oh,
I think -- a fascinating case about, and this is a story, I
suppose, that relates -- it cuts across the lines of several
things that we've talking about, is the case of this new
XXX School, which might almost be worth it
for you to study as a separate issue. I don't know whether
you know about it or not.
Q. I know it's new or going to built --
A. It's being built, it will be opening this year, but it
doesn't have its physical plant in place yet. The head of that
school was hired 18 months ago and given a budget, I
don't want to commit myself to a number because I don't
remember it accurately and I would misstate myself, but
it is in the millions of dollars that he was given to
hire faculty and to develop a curriculum. Now
developing a curriculum according to a very interesting
sort -- using really state-of-the-art research,
multicultural education, cross-curricular team
teaching, systems approach to education, and the public
outcry has been enormous, because my kid may not be
educated so he can go to college and he might not get
this and he might not get that and I'm not sure what
they really mean when they talk about team teaching and
I don't know whether I like these block classes, and
absolutely everything we're telling ourselves about
what we ought to be moving toward in education, has
been looked at, sifted through, sorted out, in an
effort to come up with a really top-notch curriculum
for that school. And that school is in a neighborhood
which, in a region of our city, which is almost by
definition going to be more affluent, very college-
directed, you know, upper income level families,
because that district was segregated by its very
nature, I mean, people who have been to the foothills,
those are expensive places to live, that was the place
that began to need schools; for years they functioned
going through the eighth grade only and then paying
district money to go out to other public schools within
the city, because we have five public school systems,
and that was all subsidized by tax money from that
region. So they're building in an area which is de
facto a somewhat selective population, and these are
people who are themselves rather well educated, who
have been successful, who presumably read and ought to
know what's going on, and we're getting really massive
parent response to what's new and what's best. And
there's somebody doing it and being given the funds to
do it on a pretty large scale. So that we could say
that here's a school that has set about achieving a new
curriculum, a new kind of autonomy within the public
system, this ought to be the best of all possible
worlds.
Q. And what school is that?
A. It's XXX School District. So we're in a
situation where, in fact, we aren't getting as many
inquiries out of there as I thought we would, but I've been
cautioning all along that these are people who are looking
at private schools for the worst possible reasons, it's
curriculum _______ we're getting, and I am very sorry to see
it. I have serious interests in curriculum and the in the
way kids' brains are developed and serious concerns -- I was
at a recent workshop at an NAIS convention where I heard a
woman iterating in some psychological research that indeed
we're undergoing cerebral evolution in our time, we're
adapting to different conditions and our brains are being
changed that, and I've believed that for more than 20 years,
but I'm not a psychologist and I don't do psychological
research, I have only studied hundreds of individual
examples that pass under my tutelage and I think it's true.
And I think some of that change is very dangerous and needs
attention; and other of those changes mean that we also have
to adapt what we're doing in order to reach this population.
And people who want to take us back to the one-room
schoolhouse are probably wrong, you know, and so I have a
lot of concerns about that. I'm also not all gung-ho about
every experimental idea that comes down the path. But I
deplore an outcry in this way by the circumstance by the
one, this guy at XXX High School. And that's more
parents of the 90s too. They're afraid, they know things
haven't been working, so they want to cling to some old way
of doing it. I mean, it's -- it also comes back to the
feeling, I think it's always been true in education, at
least since the 50s, maybe the 40s, and that is that
everybody's been through school knows more about education
than people who were in school, it's sort of as if everybody
who had ever had brain surgery could go out and do brain
surgery.
Q. That's a really interesting --
A. -- we couldn't also compete with a desire to be in a really
fresh, brand new situation and be in on the ground floor of
creating something. So very fine educational minds were
sought in formulating that curriculum and hiring those
people to do it, and it would be very interesting for
somebody to be studying that school on the eve of its
opening.
Q. When is it supposed to open?
A. Well, as I say, it'll open in one of the middle schools this
fall. This will be the first year that they will have
classes, but they don't have their own buildings built yet,
so their campus is still under construction, I think at
XXX School, but -- all through that YYY
district, not this far west because we're over in the
ZZZ District on this side and people in these
foothills that face us in this direction are actually going
to see the old established ZZZ District high
school, but on the -- for the rest of the city, on the most
easterly side of these mountains as we go around and turn
the corner around the mountains right here at WWW Road,
you're looking at people scattered across those miles, both
in width and breadth of the mountains, so it's a far formed
district but it's one that has been polarized for years in
every election for the last 20 years about whether they
would even go to high school in existence, so they finally
got -- it was just four years ago that they finally passed
that bond election, a subject that came up for heated debate
every time they had a board election and every time they had
an election for bond issues, and they have been so much
divided that they couldn't even get a school going. so
that's the same kind of deal you have -- you finally get
your majority and get the school going, and you're hearing
from the minority who possibly didn't ever want a school.
That may be part of the group that are the detractors now;
they were happy going down to University High or to XXX or
to one of those schools and didn't want a new school, didn't
want to be doing these new things.
Q. Who selected the principal?
A. I suspect the Board of Trustees did. I don't know what the
process was. One of our parents who is on the board of
trustees, is chair of the board of trustees for that
district now and was one of those who did want a -- who has
fought for a high school all along, two of his daughters
have gone here because they didn't have, the fourth
daughter, unfortunately, wants to come here but probably
won't be able to because he won't be able to send his
daughters to Verde Valley after, you know, after all the years
he has put into the fight to build the high school, but --
End of Tape