create good curriculum, and I support them and
give them all the encouragement in the world to be able to do
that. Create and write and revise and improve, and I would
stimulate _______________ department heads to examine that; I
have brought ______ exams from Japan and Germany -- examine
what we're doing related to international standards. And it's
theirs, it's not mine, I'm not going to tell them what they
should be doing, but stimulation has to always be there to
continue to think and revise and to do what other people are
doing and see if we can do it any better. On the other side
of this, I think the curriculum still should reflect the
individual strengths of the particular faculty members. For
example, we have a Paul _______, a really great teacher in
biology, but his approach to the teaching of biology is very
much his own and he does far less laboratory work than other
people do, he believes much more in the conceptual level of
biology, works very hard on genetics and evolution, and he
turns out students who really have tremendous mastery, not
only ______ but the very concept of ______. Now if I were to
say to Paul, you've got to homogenize this thing more, I want
more lab work, I want more of this and more of that, and I
want you to take some multiple choice exams and I want you to
get a certain score on them, I'd kill that program. He would
walk out and we would lose a great teacher. But our
superintendent of schools that have all these damn test scores
and are supposed to present to people that are a very low
level productivity, and that's what is being used to judge the
system.
Q. Do you not give the standardized tests?
A. We give the College Board and the Advanced Placement Test and
the College _______ Achievement Test. We do a little bit with
the private school testing, the New York Educational REcords
Bureau, we do a little bit with the ninth grade students in
mathematics to see where they are at in those areas.
Q. Compared within your own school or compared with to the
national?
A. The national exam. Of course, it's the national private
schools actually.
Q. How much influence do you feel you have on determining
instructional methods in the classroom?
A. Again, when you talk about what proportion of the teaching
____________, what proportion is didactic, what proportion is
coaching, and we have -- as a way of trying to get the faculty
to different percentage of those kinds of instruction, we get
better results. We had a workshop here in the fall where
someone named XXX who is in the _______ school
district and spoke on cooperative learning. At the same time,
I was in (city name) with our history teachers listening to
historians. The history department and the administration ---
very disagreeable. (inaudible) I would like to get them into
the values of cooperative learning, using very good material,
and the cooperative learning together a tragedy of Shakespeare
can be an experience that might be a better way to grasp
Shakespeare than ________, so I want to try and keep that part
of it alive. We have a -- it's not self-consciousness and
maybe has to become more self-conscious, we have -- you could
basically take the approach in education that the public
schools have been taking for a very long time, and that
corporations and businesses have been taking, the boss-type
management. And the Japanese figured out quite a while ago
that it doesn't work, and the same guy, Deming, who taught the
Japanese how to do it, tried to teach the American
manufacturers how to have a different kind of management, and
oh it was terrible. Finally, the American manufacturers -- my
son is in New York now, heading the department of Wall Street
with about 75 people, and he is constantly hounding me about
new management techniques and what he is learning and trying
to bring this group into a team, into a group of teachers who
are going to be far more productive and creative as workers
because it isn't a boss-style management. If the management
style of the school is boss of the school system in the sense
of bureaucracy, it can be that way in the classroom, too. So
the classroom becomes coercive and penalty ridden and
adversarial. We have a lot of people who know not to do that,
they just know it, but we still have some people who try to
work with to try to get them to lean away from that in other
ways. Again, you can't coerce people to do that, either.
It's funny, and the private schools have known this for a very
long time and they have always -- take the vast majority, and
when I say private I mean the National Association of
Independent Schools, (inaudible), the teachers love working
in those schools because they have a great deal to say about
what happens, a great deal of freedom in the way they run
their programs, and that's -- it's a model, it's 300 years old
in this country, and I think the public system can't do that,
it doesn't work.
Q. Someone in education, not at any of my study sites, but he had
some familiarity with private education, said that an
endowment that gives a school its autonomy when it comes to
private schools. How do you feel about that?
A. You mean natural financial endowment?
Q. Uh-huh.
A. We don't have one.
Q. That without endowment you can't have real autonomy because if
the parents aren't pleased, they take out their kids, and it's
harder to take a stand.
A. This school is without endowment. I understand what's being
said is that you simply have to run a school to please
everyone in order to keep them coming in and paying the
tuition and you're in the market where you have to be very
pleased and very popular. But those aren't the principles on
which we operate. We operate on a very solid set of
principles, try to make it very clear to families coming in
here what we are and how we do things, and we have a number of
families who after they come, they never apply, because we
tell them ____________, you know, if you're not going to come
in with that kind of -- if you don't want to seize the
opportunities that exist here and _____________, then don't
come here because it wouldn't work for you. If the student
has been consistently uninterested in school, his chances of
doing well here are very, very poor. In the seventh grade, we
can work with the younger child. We make it very clear.
(inaudible) We need endowment and we're working on it. We
need endowment scholarship money so we can go out and seek
even more kids -- we need endowments for the faculty salaries.
That is where I think endowments are more important --
salaries for faculty.
Q. How much influence do you feel you have on allocation of
funds?
A. Just about complete. I present the budget to the board. I
ask everyone to tell me what they want and then sort it out,
share with a couple of people on the finance committee, and
then we take it to the board and the board just --
(inaudible).
Q. How much influence do you have on hiring new full-time
teachers?
A. Well, the process by which we hire a teacher is first to the
department head, and then if the department head likes the
teacher, then he has everyone else in the department meet the
teacher, and if everyone else in the department says, you
know, we really like this teacher, then it goes to Norm,
the assistant head, and Norm says to me, Look,
this is what has happened so far. Okay, now it's yours, you
make the decision. Here are the recommendations.
Q. They might recommend several or would they recommend one?
A. Usually they -- they do a lot of interviewing. Last year for
one position they interviewed 14 people; they spent hours and
hours and hours and finally settled on one person. Sometimes
-- a couple of years ago, there were two people and they
couldn't decide on one, so they said "You call it; we don't
know which way to go," and so I made the decision.
Q. Do they do a paper review?
A. Cross-check to see if it agrees with what they say they are,
double-check references before we even get involved in the
process. I'll tell you, I had a situation this year where --
it was one of the toughest ones I have ever had, a good
teacher, in fact, came to me _________, she had been here
seven years before I came here, and said "I can't live with
this any longer." (inaudible).
Q. My research is directed at a current debate in education ---
private school teachers have greater autonomy to innovate,
adapt curriculum and teaching to meet the needs of their
students, and that in doing so, they're primarily influenced
by the students and the parents and not by school bureaucracy.
They also say that public school teachers are subjected to a
variety of influences and pressures that restrict their
autonomy in meeting student's needs. Among these influences
are state and federal regulations, teacher's unions, court
orders or the threat of litigation, organizational rules
called bureaucracy. What do you think of all of this?
A. What a question! I think that Chub comes down too hard ----I
don't know what he's given market courses such a halo but he's
given them that, if you just respond to those you would fix
education. Because the creation of our program is basically
not created through the influence of parents or students.
It's created through the intellectual educational convictions
of our faculty and what's important, and what part of this
heritage is really important for us to hand on to our young
people. If we were to turn to our parent body, for example,
and asked them to choose our curriculum, we would end up with
a mismatch of stuff that would look like a great retail store.
We had a parent who came in the other day because we put out
our course offerings, and the advanced French -- the
conversational part of this course -- we're talking about a
college parent who translated this as, my God, here we are,
you're in a French class you're teaching in college because
you're a bunch of liberals. That's brainwashing right there.
If we ever turned over this curriculum to any kind of parent
bodies, we would not have _________, so it doesn't come from
them. Naturally, we are responsive to kids in the sense that
we want the kids to feel that what's happening here is really
a good experience. It makes a difference in the quality of
their lives. It makes a different in the day-to-day
experience and eventually it makes a different in the long-
term because of the college and graduate school and things
that go with it. But school life -- that has to be the
student input, but the way you do it is to make them proud of
themselves, proud of the quality of work they're doing, not --
and the kids knows what they need, they know what decent work
is, they know what second-rate stuff is, they know what good
quality is, they're very perceptive of that. So that's the
kind of student you want and those students are the ones who
stay ________. (inaudible) As far as the public school
teachers are concerned in the development of curriculum, in
the early stages of my career when I taught in the English
department in a public high school, we had tremendous
autonomy. We had a superb department head, we had teachers
who worked very well together, and we were very proud of the
program we created. And while we had some attacks from time
to time, we always had the backing of the principal. I think
there are some very public schools that have a whole lot of
autonomy because of the principal and the superintendent of
the district. I think it depends upon those two people. I
think most of the teachers in the XXX High School here
in XXX, which is a fine selective high school, I know some
of them have great autonomy with materials; where they have
the problem is in the bureaucracy like budget allocations --
they have to wait forever to get the materials they want, the
slowness. But the intellectual part of it, they don't feel
that.
Q. Chub and Moe maintain that as an independent school you have to compete
in the marketplace with other independent schools. So you
compete -- I guess you take a stand and this is your
philosophy and this is the mission of our school and the goals
of our school, if this is your goals, parents, you would
choose my school. You don't do anything different to compete
with someone else, do you? You say, this is it, or do you
look at other schools, oh, my goodness, they have this, they
have this, they have that, we had better compete. Or our test
scores have to be higher?
A. When the school opened in 1980, the major competitive school,
________ school, and when I looked at Greenfields, they did
not have an athletic program, we will have an athletic
program; we will do practically nothing with fine arts, but we
will have a superb athletic program. So, yes, we feel we have
to compete. (inaudible)
Q. So they had no competition until then?
A. Right now we are considered stronger; part of it is not
program, it's location. The positive for this school is that
it is on the right side of XXXXX, they are located in an area
which is growing with mobile homes and lower/middle class
income families in the area, and this is the area where the
middle and upper come from, the foothills. The proximity of
the school is very good. We are looking at major competition
as far as the XXX building a new high school; it will
open -- the ninth grade will open next fall, not in new
buildings but it will open next fall, and they are advertising
themselves as being a very high quality preparatory school,
and that public school will be in direct competition with us.
We think in a couple of years we will see some fall off our
enrollment while people sort out whether it's that kind of
school or one of our kind of schools. In the meantime, we are
heavily recruiting in other districts of the city to help
balance off the losses we are going to take there. 28 percent
of our students come from the foothills.
Q. So XXX has the benefit of being in the right location?
A. Yes.
Q. Well, I guess the disadvantage of that future high school
would probably be size.
A. Size and funding -- for example, the new principal told me
they can't have any classes under 200; that's going to cut out
Advanced Placement, probably physics, probably the fifth year
of languages, because XXX High school with 1200 students
can't even get 20 in those AP classes and advanced language
classes, so they aren't likely to be able to do that. You
know, you're just not going to be able to match the kind of
atmosphere you have with 200 or 300 kids compared to 1000.
Every child feels that he/she belongs -- they feel the
importance of it and there's a very important need to fill it,
so a lot of public school kids find the support sometimes in
band or music or drama, but so few of it find it in the
classrooms, and I think that's probably one of the chief
reasons why they drop out, they just don't get ________. (Our
classes -- students are important and the class is very
important -- just the opposite of them.)
Q. Is XXX High School going to be a school of open to
choice in the district or is it still within these boundaries
of the students who go to this school?
A. I think they are initially going to be bound by only the
students in the district. But a number of these students now
cannot go out of the district to YYY High School.
(inaudible) They can go out of the district to ZZZ,
which has a good reputation, and ZZZ is no longer
going to accept tuition-paying students. They're over-
crowded. They can't handle any more. It's interesting -- in
the market here, the market forces ___________. To me, if I
sit back and wish I were a public educator, two things that
would please me about it: I wouldn't have to recruit any more
students and secondly, I wouldn't have to raise money anymore.
I would know what I had every year to deal with, so there
would be -- those are the parts of this job that are very
taxing.
Q. Do you think that public schools could every be like private
schools given Chub and Moe's proposal that public schools
receive site-based and allowed to compete in the open market
for students?
A. It's difficult, because we live by choice, this is the way we
live as a school. And to say that every school should have
choice seems contradictory, yet I think, as you say, what's
going to happen to the inner-city schools? And if you have
people who don't get any money at all (inaudible) -- who are
going to be the parents who help weak students get stronger.
One of the things that I worry about that we do here is that
we take a number of people out of the public school community
who would be begging at the doors asking for something better,
they were forced to stay there. I think that's probably the
negative impact that we have. (inaudible) I think the
magnet school concept makes a whole lot more sense to me, but
they are within a limited range.
Q. That would still attract a variety of students?
A. Yes. But I do think that the key to the public schools right
now is probably the school principals, and if you can get them
back in the position where they can really work with their
teachers and really hear them, the teachers are the people who
really know -- their voices can become sources of much of the
program policies and its created from themselves, not from
some central bureaucracy. (inaudible) Get rid of the
stereotype principals who you find on the golf courses.
(inaudible)
Q. I'm wondering if there are any advantages to those teachers
associations that private school teachers miss out on. Are
there any?
A. Probably -- I think probably the -- we do have _______ in
(city name) (inaudible) but I don't think that's true _______, so
yes, in that sense, they do lose those benefits. And I think
it's too bad that the teacher associations are in the process
of becoming unions and not give in to -- we do not want to
become places ___________. We want to be a union -- an
association of professionals, and one that has great pride.
The unions really started in the 1960s and I was teaching in
1967, and at that time, the very good teachers in the schools
were parts of the teachers association. A division started
taking place between those strong teachers who did not want to
_________ and those teachers who were union at all cost. I
saw a real division take place in this high school, and the
really good people wanted nothing to do with the people who
belonged to the union, and the union people just accelerated
through the 60s and became very powerful. (inaudible)