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?"
