What would an Ideal School Look Like?: 

Inspired by Rethinking High School – by Daniels, Bizar, & Zemelman 2000

 

“From a kid’s-eye view, looked at as a place where a young person might grow and develop, they are usually boring, frequently a waste of time – and sometimes a danger. We are brought to the sad but inevitable conclusion: America’s high schools are failing all of our kids some of the time and some of our kids all of the time.”

The ideas in this book remind me of what Lorraine Monroe described in her book, Nothing’s Impossible, where she wrote about how her and a few other “crazy and creative” teachers would ponder what they would do if they got to start their own school or if they got to run one themselves. This is something that still drives me to this day, "what if?" I am still working on developing my own “Best Practice High School” that I want to take to the neighborhood where I started my teaching career and one that captured my heart – the Fountain Square Neighborhood.

Even in our better urban public schools, they are afflicted by the ails of violence, high mobility, low engagement, and a lack of success on standardized testing due to the lack of essential, basic skills of the students. What if we could be one of those insane educators-turned-entrepreneurs? What if we could take the chance to make a positive change in American education, especially for those who have been under served and under motivated? That is something I have been working toward doing and something that the authors of this book has done. In the process, they took a chance and come up with a school with a very (horrible) suitable name.

Formulating a Great Curriculum:

Part of what the school curriculum and purpose was based on was the call for a kind of learning depicted in the national curriculum standards: Student Centered; Experiential; Holistic; Authentic; Expressive; Reflective; Social; Collaborative; Democratic; Cognitive; Developmental; Constructivist; & Challenging. The application of these ideals is in the research and models that make up any great school. The founders of Best Practice looked for ways to implement these ideals and found some help in the guiding principles as laid out by the Coalition of Essential Schools and their view of the purpose of schools: Intellectual development; studying a few subjects deeply; high expectations; personalized learning environments; students involved in constructing meaning; Teachers acting as coaches and guides; students ability not test scores; families are essential to school life; teach kids not subjects; schools as model democracies; schools may need to omit some other functions to obtain these goals. 

We could all learn from these dreamers and think, "What if?"