My wife is a product of public schools. I went to public schools from kindergarten through eighth grade (and entered high school better prepared than the kids who’d gone to Catholic grade school). My two kids went to public school until sixth grade and benefited from the marvelous Spanish immersion program of the Robbinsdale district.
But a couple things happened that eventually sent me to an open house at Breck. My kids’ school was fond of sending home little slips of paper that needed to be signed and returned and which told us in some detail of some behavioral problem afflicting our child. Matt got his first one in second grade. We were notified that he had been wandering at random around the classroom. I needed more information so I called his teacher, and she kindly informed me that he wasn’t being disruptive and that he was finishing all his work and that he was a perfectly nice boy. “So why is he wandering around?” I asked. “He’s probably bored,” she answered.
It turned out that the class was being given 45 minutes to do 100 addition problems, and that since Matt had grasped the concept of exponents by the time he was seven, 100 two-digit addition problems were taking him about three minutes to complete. “Why don’t you give him some different work?” I asked. Or better, why not group him with the faster math students and let them work ahead? “We don’t group students by ability level,” answered the principal, whom I had asked to join us. (To their credit they have since amended this practice.) “So,” I asked, “does the class then move at the speed of the slowest student?” Yes.
Two more such missives linger in my memory. In one, Matt was reported for jumping from the second step all the way to the floor as he was coming down the stairs, which was nine inches more of a leap than the rules allowed. Jane was reprimanded for throwing snow during recess. “Did she throw a snowball at someone?” No just up in the air. When I asked Jane about why she was throwing snow, she answered, “Well, they won’t let us play tag.” “Why not?” “Someone might fall down.”
I read the results of a Harvard study recently about why kids drop out of school. One of the main reasons cited was boredom. I wasn’t surprised. The teacher-time that must go into writing notes about step-jumping and snow-throwing must leave precious little opportunity to create scintillating lessons. And if this is the sort of thing teachers must do in the public system, why would anyone in their right mind want to teach? According to this same Harvard study, students want a “more active intellectual learning engagement, rather than passive learning.” If that’s going on in your public school, which has been under the effective mandate to have standardized teachers shove standardized lessons down the throats of standardized students so they can pass standardized tests so they can have standardized lives, would you be surprised? I would.
So how do good schools swim upstream? Many public school districts offer more challenging options, such as Robbinsdale’s Spanish immersion program and the International Baccalaureate (IB), a more rigorous high school academic program. But the IB is available only at two high schools in Minneapolis, three in St. Paul, and in several suburban districts. Language immersion is limited to one school in a few districts, although St. Paul is adding a French immersion school to its existing Spanish program next year.
The Minneapolis school system is currently in the final planning stages of what it is calling its “High School Transformation” campaign, which consists of creating “small learning communities” within the high schools by grouping students according to interest areas such as automotive, liberal arts, fine arts, and aviation. These programs will debut this fall in all Minneapolis high schools.
Why are they doing this? Because studies show that kids learn better in smaller groups which are joined in a common interest. “We believe this will help us meet our graduation goals,” says a spokesperson for the Minneapolis Public Schools. Although this strikes me as a little like a Soviet Commissar announcing the latest five-year plan, she also mentions that the schools would be “stressing academic rigor and achievement.” Aside from the obvious question of what the hell have they been stressing up to now if not academic rigor and achievement, does that mean the publics are gearing up to measure themselves by the same standards as the privates?
What are the standards of a successful private school? I got two radically different answers when I asked two top private school administrators. The first, from a school which sends 50 percent of its graduates to colleges ranked in the top 50, replied: a happy faculty, financial health, and more applicants than we can accept. The second, from a Catholic school, which has had its share of Ivy Leaguers but usually sends a plurality of its grads to the state university system, cited discipline and unity of purpose. Perhaps because this particular Catholic school administrator has plenty of money and applicants, he didn’t feel the need to mention them, but as a practical matter, that ideal happy faculty, financial health, and the large applicant pool grow out of a reputation for maintaining focus on the school’s academic goals.
When he further explained what he meant by discipline, it became clearer what he meant by unity of purpose. “We obviously don’t have the discipline problems of public schools,” he said. “If a kid is a consistent problem, we just expel him. But what really enforces the discipline is that the kids understand what we believe here, and they don’t tolerate people who are disruptive any more than we do.” And what is that belief? “That academic excellence is the priority, and that translates into excellence in everything we do.”
The schools which are known for their academic excellence have a surprisingly similar curriculum-one that demonstrates a core adherence to a liberal arts model and a persistent policy to group students according to ability in a variety of subjects. The Blake School, for example, has 13 distinct high school math offerings, 13 science courses, and six levels each of French, Spanish, and German. As a freshman each student takes a core course in World Literature combined with World History. As a sophomore, it’s American Lit and American History. After that, there are electives for juniors and seniors. Add about 30 different arts, music, drama, and speech courses and it begins to look a lot more like a liberal arts college than a high school. Of course, if you look at the tuition at Blake, Breck, or The International School, it looks a lot like college as well.
Is the preparation students get at schools like that worth it? If your aim is only to get your kid into a top college, the answer seems to be: It depends. Blake sent four 2002 grads to Dartmouth, three each to Harvard, Georgetown, and Northwestern. At the International School, Carleton, Cal Tech, Grinnell, Syracuse, and Macalester topped the list. Breck has five going to Georgetown, four to Carleton, and two to Harvard and Yale. But when I spoke to admissions directors at Harvard and Carleton, they all maintained that the high school per se has no bearing on their admissions decisions, except insofar as the high school provides opportunities for the student to develop a distinguishing talent that will interest a top school.