Doing the Politics

The University of Texas football team hosted the Texas A & M squad the same weekend in the mid-1990's the Association for Experiential Education was in Austin making my first visit to the State capital a real blast. Yep, Austin is a college town, and holy longhorn, I felt at home with all the young adults parading along Congress, ambling up Guadalupe and careening 6th Street side to side. (A & M won, by the way.) There was a lot to experience that weekend: the history of Texas, the night-life of our host city, challenge courses in schools and experiential pedagogy in academic classes. But, the single most salient happening resonating the deepest in me then was the consistent chorus from the alternative school folks there: Do the Politics.

Collectively it was said: new private schools always need friends in public places; however, the need of friends in public places is far greater for new alternative private schools than for conventional schools; further, new alternative private schools serving special needs children require an even greater representation.

First off, as I recall the alternative school folks saying, friends are truly needed in Municipal, and even County and State, government to reduce opposition to the project by convincing other public officials that the need for the education service outweighs any prior tax revenue from the property on which the school is to occupy and from the sales the school undertakes-remember, schools are non-profit, tax exempt organizations and, especially, a school purchased property will remove it from the tax rolls. Additionally, friends could assure an intended school siting meets local land-use and zoning requirements, especially if variances are necessary.

Friends could intercede with the various commercial and residential community interests to ease any potential friction siting may create. Further, as most folks tend to be afraid of anything “alternative” and anyone labeled “special needs”, friends accepting the unconventional education philosophy and practice and the efficacy of the alternative in helping special needs children could do a great deal to demystify the school, its students and the education processes the school uses significantly lowering barriers to community acceptance. And, of course, if there is a spot of bother, friends can mediate, restoring good feelings between the community and the school. Implied in the advice of making friends in public places-at least I was hearing it-was the strong suggestion that friends would connect the school to the money folks who donate to various local charities and, of course, to the political friends. 

 

So, with the onset of summer 2004, in anticipation of initial community outreach in the very near future, I journeyed through the representative politics of my communities to find some friends for the concept, such as it was then, and me. I ended up with Lew M. Simon, Queens County Democratic

Party Leader for Part B of the 23^rd Assembly District which encompassed my Breezy Point. In Queens, District Leaders have several important duties, such as selecting County candidates for local elected offices and endorsing candidates for City & State-Wide and National offices. But, in actuality, these vote outcomes are preordained in that the County Executive Committee selects and the County Leaders do what is expected of them. The real work of District Leaders is to assure the required signatures on election petitions placing the County selected candidates on the election day ballot and fully help support County operations by attending all County fund-raisers. Lew Simon does his Leadership duties and has consistently collected the highest number of petition signatures in the County. However, he looks to be the old ward healer, interceding with City powers to help resolve individual constituent problems in exchange for their votes and other favors. 

 

The good here is that over the years he has actually helped many, including us, to resolve as much as possible City government connected problems, but the bad is that the situations on which he cares to work are calculated to garner the obligations of those he helps. He puts the favors in his pocket redeeming them at his leisure for free goods and services and for votes when he runs to maintain his Leadership and when he has sought election to the City Council. But, if he sees a situation holding no prospect of obligation, he will ignore the constituent's plea for help. If this cynicism wasn't enough, he has what I call a learned ignorance being bothered never to know anything about municipal operations other than who to call with what City government problem, which is to my mind okay as far as it goes but it rarely goes far enough, especially when dealing with community-wide problems, such as local school district issues, mass transportation, road repair, land use issues and the like. 

Indeed, he never engages in finding solutions to community-wide issues because he has no personal interest in any; rather, he favors stoking constituent grievance as much because it relieves him of any responsibility to know anything substantive as much because he believes it brings him votes when he runs for elected office. There are many other really not-too-good aspects of Mr. Simon's personality, including verbally abusing-and I mean really debasing-those working with him, those he feels are against him-which are legion in number-and everyone in City agency leadership positions. He is foul-mouthed, selfish to the extreme and immensely self-absorbed. 

 

I was willing to put up with all of this-until November, 2013-for the access to folks in City government and in local party politics he provided who might befriend my school project and me. From the very beginning he said for me to forget about the school; and over the years he did not lift a finger to be a friend of the school project keeping to his uncaring sentiment to forget the project entirely. However, working with him allowed me enormous access to the Queens Borough President's office and the City's Department of Education, especially when I was looking to go the State Charter School route with Rockaway College. 

 

However, the most beneficial introduction was to our then City Councilman, Joseph P. Addabbo, Jr. The more Mr. Simon took me around to the many community meetings, the more the City Councilman and I talked with each other; over time the many conversations became a base for a friendship good enough for me to begin a quiet approach to Twice-Exceptionality and the total lack of education service for these children. The piecemeal approach of mini-conversations at meetings became insufficient for him, so very early in 2008 the City Councilman asked me to write a paper outlining the issues and recommending solutions. This I delivered to him May 8^th. While I mentioned that neither Federal or New York State Education Law excluded direct education service to twice-exceptional children if a school district wishes to identify these youngsters and provide appropriate service to them, the complete absence of it throughout the State, including New York City, and the absence of any indication of a single thought to even say these children exist strongly made the point that only changes in State law could remedy the situation. I called for State legislation recognizing the existence of Twice-Exceptional pupils and for ordering the State Department of Education to insist each local district devise identification schemes and appropriate programs. He accepted the paper, understood the issues and agreed with the recommendations. But as City Councilman he said he could do little more than pass it on to our local State representatives. He did.

And then he ran to unseat the incumbent State Senator later that year. He won and in early 2009, he said for me to write the legislation working with his Legislative Director to polish the language. The new State Senator did not have a definite time-line; so I took my time. Indeed, I wanted to get it right. I put together a kind of advisory writing committee which would steer me in getting it right. The folks responding to my requests could not have been more expert and more generous in sharing their expertise, time and advice. On the ad hoc group were Melissa Sornik, Lois Baldwin, Kris Berman, Wendy Eisner, Susan Baum, Christy Folsom and Miriam Cherkes-Julkowski.

Working with Frank Scaduto, Senator Addabbo's Legislative Director, the bill was finished. It does what we wanted to do: recognizes Twice-Exceptional children as a distinct category of pupil requiring teaching/learning different from the mainstream and according to Twice-Exceptional characteristics, instructs the State Department of Education to insist local school districts and to help local school districts to establish identification procedures and appropriate education programs, and establishes a State-Wide advisory council supervising it all.

The Senate bill and its Assembly companion were originally introduced into the State Legislature in 2010, re-introduced in 2011, and reintroduced in 2013 as S1875 and A1522. Unfortunately, the economic state of New York placed barriers in the way of the accomplishing State mandates in mainstream education no less than those of special education. As Assemblywoman Cathy Nolan, Chair of the Assembly Education Committee, has said to me on more than one occasion: there isn't enough money to fund regular education...And you want me to create a mandate and funding for yet another special group?! Late last year, 2013, State Senator Addabbo modified the language of these bills to include funding for regular education. Frankly, I went a little crazy as I saw the changes as yet another way to screw the Twice-Exceptional while seeming to be doing right by them. But, Sen. Addabbo calmed me down by saying the inclusion of regular education funding in the bills was an inducement for Assemblywoman Nolan to look favorably on the bill. Having been told by the Education Committee Chair that she was very disinclined to agree with the sentiments in the bill, I have to wonder if even these inducements will work. But, our good State Senator and his legislative colleagues co-sponsoring the bills continue to work to get them considered and passed into Law.

In the end, Doing the Politics accomplished little on the ground. Yes, there is the legislation, but it remains stuck...going no where fast. And, yes, the access to the powers that be in the Queens Borough President's office and, more especially, in the City's Department of Education ultimately enabled me to intimately understand the processes, procedures and personalities in the City's drive to re-structure its schooling. And the access to local civic leaders and elected officials provided me insights into the issues, politics and governance of municipalities, and, particularly, of our local area. But, the expected connections, especially, with the money folks, to facilitate organizing and fund-raising my Rockaway College just did not happen.

Square Pegs, Solutions, Part 5

Hi, I’m Leo Fahey and I’m looking to start a school serving our square pegs. I've named it Sands College. Its Mission is to cultivate the intellectual gifts of the bright Learning Disabled youth from Breezy Point to Belle Harbor by providing them education environments dedicated to re-setting emotional and academic readiness to take responsibility for their own learning and to the exercise of that responsibility. These environments are to provide all youngsters individual and collective empowerment, mutual assistance and respect for individual interests, abilities and rates of social, cognitive and emotional growth. As I have pointed out, a sizable number of our bright children struggle daily. They possess ways of knowing at great odds with whom their present schools say they ought to be; their instinct to take responsibility for their studies, to learn in their own way, in their own time, is constantly surpressed. The cost of going against their instincts and trying to academically succeed using ways of knowing alien to who they are produce plummeting self-esteem, depression and learned helplessness leading to academic failure. Sands College would return to these bright youngsters the trust in their unique ways of knowing and the impulse to take responsibility for their course of study creating the conditions for academic success within each youngster.

Sands College would empower responsibility and academic success in four integrated levels representing a sequential growth from elementary education through junior college study. The levels are: The Primary School, The Venture Challenge, The Lower School and The Upper School. The Primary School uses an Open Classroom setting to establish a prepared environment. Children take responsibility for their learning as they engage the prepared environment through their unique interests, abilities and learning styles and collaborate with teachers in setting readiness and academic goals. The Venture Challenge, an intake personal growth program for the secondary education of The Lower School, creates community led outdoor adventure teams where youngsters take responsibility for trek organization and for the many outdoor chores necessary such as cooking and clean-up as well as land navigation and first-aid. The Lower School requires a high degree of personal responsibility as youngsters engage an intergrated curriculum through self-selected inquiry projects exploring Science, History, Arts, Letters, Performance and Foreign Language Arts and as each help others achieve individual learning goals. The Upper School enlists collective responsibility to create, maintain and facilitate Great Question explorations into the received knowledge coming from written tradition, Western and Eastern. Taking responsibility remains incomplete unless youngsters are empowered to manage their learning spaces. Sands College would employ a community governance model where youngsters and staff together make policy decisions at each developmental level and at the school-wide level. This is quite an abitious project, but all our children deserve all our best.

Feedback: 1) I want to thank Chris Stokes, President, Point Breeze Association, Donna Trotter, President, Roxbury Association, and Terry Cassidy, President, Rockaway Point Association, for allowing me to talk with their members at recent meetings. 2) I’m in the process of getting a meeting place for the first of a series of information/organization meetings to put Sands College together. The meeting will be in the evening on either September 20 or 27. Look for the announcement within the next week.

Square Pegs, Solutions, Part 4

“…it is the integrity and ‘gathering power’ of the pine tree that draws together language, science, mathematics, social studies, art, history, mythology, and on and on…This pine tree possesses…question[s]…It draws our attention…It evokes…It stands before us as a sign…From the pine tree, learn of the pine tree. But, also from the pine tree, learn of ourselves...this pine tree comes forward as the nesting point of a vast interconnecting network of relationships and it is the integrity of such a network which bestows integrity on the integrated curriculum.” (David W. Jardine, “On the Integrity of Things: Ecopedagogical Reflections on the Integrated Curriculum”, in “Current Concepts of Core Curriculum” from the National Association for Core Curriculum, p. 34) As the pine tree stands as a nesting point so also do things like tidal pools, cities, or spider webs and concepts like luminescence, alienation, or metaphor. These “themes” framing the curriculum stand as the immediate causes for secondary education inquiry: students would select from a community generated list one theme at any one time from which to develop a research question to concentrate inquiry. Early college students would also use a thematic curriculum but unlike the individuality of secondary education project study, early college study would be collective in seminars within a course structure equivalent to the rest of higher education and meant to satisfy common core university requirements.

The themes subject to seminar study are to be called “Great Questions”. An example of a Great Question might be, “What is the Eleventh Dimension?” This Great Question would examine the concepts of space from Euclidean to the mutliverse of String Theory. A second could be, “What is Nature?” This traces the changes in understanding from Aristotle to Einstein to present Gaian ecology. Taken together, Great Questions, emerging as a direct expression of the propriety, interest and necessity of the early college community itself, would launch explorations into the history, science, literature, sociology, political economies and philosophies of periods from Classical to Modern. Not to worry! Our older adolescent Square Pegs can do well with such heavy intellectual lifting. Leon Botstein, President of Bard College, argues in Jefferson’s Children that youngsters between the ages of sixteen and eighteen have reached a maturity where they need this kind of stimulation and challenge. Indeed, one witnesses such successful adolescent academic engagement in Simons Rock College of Bard in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and in Bard High School Early College here in New York.

Feedback: 1) I’ve said to some that Fort Tilden could host these programs. I’ve since learned Gateway will only agree to a public school open to all NYC children. It becomes clear a venture meant to be a private not-for-profit, non-BPC affiliated endeavor, serving the children of the three communities of the Breezy Point Cooperative with the possibility of enrolling additional children from Neponsit and Belle Harbor cannot be at Fort Tilden. 2) There is a powerful resistance in the Coop to having any school here, I’ve learned. To those folks I plead: the youngsters in need in our three communities ought not to be denied their lives because there are no alternatives for them. And the plain, simple fact is that there are no suitable, alternative schools on the Peninsula, or in the rest of NYC for that matter! We pride ourselves as a community caring for its children, as most families are here to raise their children within the safety provided here. Then I say, let us demonstrate that commitment to their safety by dissolving the resistance in favor of the proactive support our children need.

Square Pegs, Solutions, Part 3

“The recovery time is proportionate to the hatred their last school gave them.”, A.S. Neil said on page 5 in his 1960 seminal book, Summerhill. This is true enough for our youngest square pegs, but it hits the center of the bull’s eye for our adolescents. Indeed, angry teenagers forced to accept academic work behave through their madness, as we have seen. Even placed in a special education class or transferred into another school, they continue to sabotage their own success. Thus, placing these angry youngsters directly into the academics of the scholastic program to be highlighted in this and the next article, which means to take bright, troubled adolescents through a combined high school and junior college experience with a diploma and an Associate‘s degree earned at the same time, without providing a time for healing, of taking off the pressure, would set these youngsters and the scholastic program itself for sure failure. These older children, like their younger brothers and sisters, need a time to reset their emotional and academic readiness. A mixed age, responsibility based outdoor education cooperative community program for age’s 12 and up would through team, trust and community building in outdoor activities such as camping, hiking and backpacking, greatly resolve feelings of failure and self-loathing, replacing them with growing feelings of success and self-worth, and would replace the internalized, oppressive norms of the uniform school with those of an empowering, responsibility based cooperative community culture preparing them for successful secondary academic study. More, working closely with each youngster would offer staff opportunities to understand the unique emotional and learning characteristics of each student and would enable them to assist in any remedial work necessary.

Youngsters when feeling confident and empowered would, then, move themselves into an ungraded, responsibility based, cooperative community secondary education academic program. This program would integrate the received knowledge coming from written tradition, Western and Eastern, into six general studies areas, Science, History, Letters, Arts, Performance and Foreign Language Arts, and place each branch of knowledge into a cooperative learning lab setting for concentrated study in the desired area. Intellectual curiosity and the natural differences in abilities, interests and communication style would drive student engagement with the learned world and participation in the learning labs rather than that of uniform, mandated curriculum and subject class assignments. Inquiry Project Based Learning and Performance Assessment would be used exclusively by students to acquire interdisciplinary skills and content knowledge. Projects would be developed, implemented and evaluated in the learning labs where group members act together to achieve individual project objectives. All students would have instructional staff mentors thoroughly versed in the cooperative, responsibility based academics of the secondary education program and in the unique cognitive styles of the school’s population to assist in setting and achieving personal and academic goals. And like their younger colleagues these youngsters would in community with staff take governance responsibility deciding such policy as project performance standards, or requirements for graduating secondary education students into the early college, or community norms and methods dealing with their violation. Indeed, this healing and empowering secondary education academic community is desperately needed for our bright teenage square pegs.   Look for an Information/Organization Meeting date coming soon to establish here the primary program and the secondary education early college as real brick and mortar.

Square Pegs, Solutions, Part 2

No parent is sure if their child will be turned into a square peg when kindergarten begins, although pre-school might give indications. But, if the uniform elementary school does its damage, then an immediate need arises for the child to be transferred into a learning environment re-setting emotional and academic foundations, restoring to the child his natural instincts to take responsibility for learning and his trust in his own way of knowing. An ungraded, open classroom, responsibility based learning community for children age’s five to eleven is well suited to do all that for our square pegs. And it fully satisfies the learning environment criteria set down last week.

First, it must be acknowledged that emotional readiness to accept a learning task comes well before the task. Forcing a task when a child feels angry, powerless or stupid, as do our square pegs, just frightens, discourages and deepens helplessness and failure. Formal learning re-setting emotional readiness to learn must provide a time for healing, a time of taking off the pressure, of reassurance, as in time our children will gain the energy and the courage to accept any task. As sustained, self-selected imaginative play is the best means of taking off the pressure, of providing a healing time, the open classroom, accordingly, would provide suitable spaces with lots of materials like Lincoln Logs and blocks, games and puzzles, sand and water tables, costumes and theatrical makeup, paints and crayons, newsprint and paper, books and magazines, etc. There would be performance spaces and kitchens, store/home props and appliances. There would also be indoor/outdoor playgrounds. Children would engage in imaginative activity, individual or group, organized or ad hoc, self or staff initiated, for as long as they wish. Although principally intended to re-set emotional readiness these activities re-set academic readiness as well in that such activities as block building, cooking/baking, exchanging play currency, drawing/painting, acting, even shooting baskets, tap applications in Geometry, Arithmetic Functions, Measurement, Chemistry, Physics, Language, among others, providing children an experiential base from which to build their academics. Children feeling ready would, then, engage the resources of the Academic Stations which would center on the learning skills of Literacy, Language and Calculation and in subjects of Earth, Space and Life Sciences, History and Geography. Teachers working closely with each child would help each develop readiness and academic goals.

Although the course of elementary study would be individualized to each child, as each engages the open classroom through his distinctive interests, abilities and learning styles, a common goal for all would be the development of competency in receiving, processing and communicating written, oral, graphic and numerical information re-setting academic readiness for secondary education. These competencies would emerge through a need to gain additional tools to explore more of the academic resource rich open classroom than through mandated mastery on or before a time or an age certain. And, finally, children have the capacity to fully participate in school governance and along with staff make policy for their community. Community norms as well as methods dealing with their violation, or graduation requirements allowing youngsters to pass out from the primary program are examples of policy items determined by staff and students together. Indeed, this healing and empowering primary school environment is desperately needed for our youngest square pegs.

Square Pegs: Searching for Solutions, Part 1

Valuing our square pegs in who they are, looking to them in how they engage the school world, gives us the criteria for evaluating any learning environment meant for them to grow healthy and successful. Remember, the square pegs profiled, Charlie, David, Christopher and Jonathan, were all angry to the point of madness, very bright and willing to take responsibility for their own learning and the methods to learn and in possession of different ways of learning-otherwise called Learning Disabilities. Therefore, any appropriate environment should place the highest priority on emotional healing and wellness, fully allow for the differences among children and permit them to grow in their own way and in their own time, provide the greatest exercise of personal responsibility for what they learn and how it is learned, make available abundant intellectual resources and widest possibilities of companionship sparking creative engagement of the academic world, and offer the guidance, the understanding and the help to see to each child’s ability to achieve in his and her own way.

The purpose of this five part series, Searching for Solutions, is to look across the education field uncovering and reporting on learning environments meeting the criteria. The odd thing about this search is to have discovered that every one of the solutions to the challenges of our square pegs is in use in one school or another. So, I’ve taught in the kindergarten Open Classrooms and the mixed grade elementary classes of the Berkshire Hills Regional School District in southwest Massachusetts. I’ve seen enhanced student achievement in project based learning and in performance assessment through the advocacy and the practice of the schools of the New York Performance Standards Consortium and of the Big Picture Company. I’ve found effective integrative curriculum organization from the National Association for Core Curriculum. I’ve witnessed first hand the power of Simons Rock College of Bard to successfully challenge the minds of adolescents in their middle teens. I’ve observed play therapy’s ability to restore mental health to young children and Aspen Education Group’s Wilderness Programs to transform at risk teens.

The fly in the ointment, sort to speak, is that the solutions the series will spotlight are spread over many different schools in places other than Rockaway. Actually there are no schools taking whole any of these empowering environments on the Peninsula, in Southern Queens or in the rest of New York City. The schools closest to creating like learning environments are the private Brooklyn Free School, which is responsibility based, and the public Bard High School Early College in Manhattan which combines high school and junior college study. But even these schools implement only aspects as well, as the Brooklyn Free School accords light attention to intellectual development and Bard High School Early College, quite uniform, severely limits responsibility. So, in the end the solutions the series outlines at present exist out of reach of our children and do not a bit of good for our square pegs. But I’d like you to wonder what if all these solutions were in one place, in one school, right here for our children. Just imagine the lives made whole, the happiness and the eventual success in life brought to our children now being made mad by the uniform school.

As usual, comments are encouraged and can be e-mailed to me at ljfayhee@gmail.com.

Square Pegs, Part 6

(Author’s note: This is the final part in the series, Square Pegs: Education’s Canaries in the Coal Mine. Next week begins a new series, Square Pegs: Searching for Solutions.)

Fierce anger turned inward is one of many characteristics our square pegs Charlie, David, Christopher and Jonathan share. The astonishing thing about these youngsters, whose stories I’ve told these last four weeks and who I’ve taken to represent a whole class of square pegs, is that they are really good kids. It is nearly impossible for them to physically hurt other people, yet they need to strike out, to vent their anger. So, they turn the anger on themselves. But the uniform school cares not a bit for their mental health as it continually forces them to comply with the same demands making them mad in the first place. These very bright children are highly capable of focusing their great intelligence when given the opportunity do so. But, they must abide by the needs of the uniform school which obliges them to dumb themselves down, to go along with content beneath their native insight and with the pace of instruction slowed to a crawl. I mean, in how many ways and how many times can a child be called stupid before he believes it and hates himself for being defective. And this self-hate leads, as always, to self-destruction.

Self-motivation is another common characteristic of these youngsters. They possess a powerful instinctive desire to know about every thing around them and to take responsibility for what they need and want to learn and for the means by which to learn. But the uniform school dictates outcomes and methods, denying these youngsters have any innate passion to know or any ability to make good learning decisions and to acquire the skills necessary to follow through to achieve learning goals without constant coercion from teachers, principals and family. Again, the denial of having value in who they are is taken personally as a positive judgment of their worthlessness.

Not all but most square pegs have “Learning Disabilities”, “disorders” labeled Dyslexia, Disgraphia, Discalculia, Attention Deficit Disorder and Attention Deficit Hyper-Activity Disorder. These are not learning disorders, I say, as these bright youngsters do in fact learn and learn well, but the way they learn is at odds with the uniform school’s way of needing youngsters to be. These afflictions should be refocused onto schooling placing the emphasis where it belongs and relabeled as “Uniform Schooling Disabilities”.

In the end, these square pegs are at biological odds with the school’s one way of demanding them to be. And if you think these angry, self-destructive children are only from Arverne or Far Rockaway, I urge you to think again. They are here; they are our sons and daughters, our kith and kin. Or if you think all these kids need is “discipline”, or the moxy to suck it up, I urge you to also think again. In fact these children are given all the discipline adults can put on them and yet they return to the classroom every day-if they are not courageous than no one is. The uniformity of schooling and the enormous force exerted by teachers, principals and family on children to comply are destroying young lives, not the lack of discipline or fortitude. There is a desperate need for change, for formal learning allowing these children to develop in their own way.

Next series of Square Pegs will explore how our bright, angry children can find healing and schooling success. Comments encouraged; e-mail at ljfayhee@gmail.com.

Square Pegs, Part 5

Jonathan is the hardest square peg about whom I will write as his tragic story strikes very close to home. He was placed in a special education class because the administrators of his high school couldn’t figure out what to do with him. Everyone agreed he was very bright. But his long purple hair, his black, Johnny Cash wardrobe, and his penchant for being non-compliant and disruptive demonstrated to these folks an outright defiance of the uniform school and an adolescent in need of discipline. I caught up with Jonathan when he was in the tenth grade. Over our time together he told me of his grade school experiences which were horribly familiar.

Printing and scripting were very painful, he said. Homework, almost all writing, took an average of six hours nightly. He said he continually had poor grades as all tests demanded hand writing. Teachers continually scolded him, and complained to his parents, about his “laziness”. He also said teachers kept on telling him he was dumb for being unable to read aloud. He read silently with excellent comprehension but was always placed in the slowest readers’ groups. Even middle school teachers considered him a slow reader because he stumbled through reading aloud, in spite of the fact, as he pointed out, that many of his seventh and eighth grade classmates had him to thank for passing their English tests without having read the books: he said he read the books at home passing along over the phone a daily in-depth synopsis to each classmate calling.

He complained about the boredom of elementary school and the trouble he got into. He said he would complete enough of in-class assignments to let him know he knew the lessons. Then, he would want to do other things. Teachers would refuse him additional things to do until he “finished” his assigned work. He would roam the room or drum on his desk or talk with classmates instead of returning to the assignments. Teachers scolded him into returning to his seat or ceasing drumming or being quiet, but no matter the volume of voice he refused to return to his work hearing from teachers an implicit judgment of being stupid and in need of relearning lessons. One day in first grade, he said angrily, he became so bored he immediately switched from the spelling drill and practice the teacher required the class to be doing to working in his math workbook. He said at the time he liked Math. He finished the remaining pages, well over half the book! The teacher finally discovered the project. She had him erase all he had done from the end of the book to the place where the class had left off. She scolded him loudly in front of the class saying she had not given him permission to go beyond the class nor had she given him permission to do something other than what the rest of the class was doing! This same teacher, he bitterly reported, couldn’t abide by his way of using his fingers to get correct math answers: she kept on calling it “baby” and scolded him for it. Thus, he said, by the middle of first grade his pleasure in Math was destroyed and he had begun a long resistance to doing math correctly. He had many more such stories.

Jonathan arrived at high school broken and beaten. He blamed himself, after all the uniform school demonstrated to him how stupid he was for all his years in school. Yet, he knew deep down he was very bright and capable and the way he was treated since the first grade was very hurtful and wrong. He turned to alcohol, marijuana and cocaine to cope with the inner conflict and its awful pain, and they eventually destroyed his brain turning him psychotic, a state within which he must live for the rest of his life.

Square Pegs, Part 4

Charlie, our square peg from last week, used non-compliance to demonstrate how he felt being out of place. His grades suffered dramatically. Unresolved grievances led him in a downward grade spiral. He certainly was bright enough but his growing madness compelled him to stop trying. David, on the other hand, was growing as mad but as an authentic genius he always came away with good grades. Actually, he drove his middle school teachers nuts as his intelligence, grades, charm and good looks made it difficult for them to punish him for his antics.

David and I started our friendship at the start of his seventh grade. Conversations on the finer points of history, or politics, or media, with the young collegiate adults I taught were fully energizing and enjoyable. However, as you might expect, it is very difficult to have that level of conversation with seventh graders. But, David brought that kind of energy and enjoyment to our talks. The disturbing fact was that most of time when he was talking I was instructing the whole class. Shortly after the period started, he would rise from his seat and slowly tour the classroom making his way in a grand circular fashion. He would stop to stare out a window but for only a moment, then he was on the move, again. He would engage me in conversation during these sojourns. We had many chats outside the classroom, but unfortunately his favorite moment for conversation was about ten minutes into a lesson.

When he saw he couldn’t stop instruction he would quietly leave the classroom, always without permission. He roamed the halls landing in either the computer lab or the library-in this school they were located one next to the other. There he would make himself busy with whatever he chose. He was quiet and well behaved disturbing no one. He would return a minute before the bell rang to collect his belongings.

David had disgraphia, an inability to write by hand. His hand writing was painfully slow. He had developed an aural compensation so all he had to do was listen for a minute to know the intent of instruction for the day, and his genius allowed him to quickly learn the content of that lesson. As it turned out no one took seriously his troubled hand writing because there is this crazy notion in some of the education profession which believes that if you’re intelligent you have no problems as problems come only to those less gifted. In the end David’s antics were an avoidance technique to cover his hand writing deficit. For me, anytime I needed him to write I excused him to the computer lab, where he was going anyway, to do his composing on the computer. More, exams I gave which required writing were given orally and, of course, he “Aced” them all.

David continued his antics in the eighth grade but his genius did little to protect him when it came to the eighth grade state tests which he passed, barely, and protected him no longer as he moved into the uniform high school where daily full period attendance and serious pen and paper testing trumped all need for computer lab time and oral examination. I moved on from the school as David was in the middle of ninth grade. I saw he was on the verge of either dropping out or of being severely punished for his continued avoidance of being in the classroom and for his continued inability to write by hand.

Square Pegs, Part 3

Charlie, our square peg from last week, used non-compliance to demonstrate how he felt being out of place. His grades suffered dramatically. Unresolved grievances led him in a downward grade spiral. He certainly was bright enough but his growing madness compelled him to stop trying. David, on the other hand, was growing as mad but as an authentic genius he always came away with good grades. Actually, he drove his middle school teachers nuts as his intelligence, grades, charm and good looks made it difficult for them to punish him for his antics.

David and I started our friendship at the start of his seventh grade. Conversations on the finer points of history, or politics, or media, with the young collegiate adults I taught were fully energizing and enjoyable. However, as you might expect, it is very difficult to have that level of conversation with seventh graders. But, David brought that kind of energy and enjoyment to our talks. The disturbing fact was that most of time when he was talking I was instructing the whole class. Shortly after the period started, he would rise from his seat and slowly tour the classroom making his way in a grand circular fashion. He would stop to stare out a window but for only a moment, then he was on the move, again. He would engage me in conversation during these sojourns. We had many chats outside the classroom, but unfortunately his favorite moment for conversation was about ten minutes into a lesson.

When he saw he couldn’t stop instruction he would quietly leave the classroom, always without permission. He roamed the halls landing in either the computer lab or the library-in this school they were located one next to the other. There he would make himself busy with whatever he chose. He was quiet and well behaved disturbing no one. He would return a minute before the bell rang to collect his belongings.

David had disgraphia, an inability to write by hand. His hand writing was painfully slow. He had developed an aural compensation so all he had to do was listen for a minute to know the intent of instruction for the day, and his genius allowed him to quickly learn the content of that lesson. As it turned out no one took seriously his troubled hand writing because there is this crazy notion in some of the education profession which believes that if you’re intelligent you have no problems as problems come only to those less gifted. In the end David’s antics were an avoidance technique to cover his hand writing deficit. For me, anytime I needed him to write I excused him to the computer lab, where he was going anyway, to do his composing on the computer. More, exams I gave which required writing were given orally and, of course, he “Aced” them all.

David continued his antics in the eighth grade but his genius did little to protect him when it came to the eighth grade state tests which he passed, barely, and protected him no longer as he moved into the uniform high school where daily full period attendance and serious pen and paper testing trumped all need for computer lab time and oral examination. I moved on from the school as David was in the middle of ninth grade. I saw he was on the verge of either dropping out or of being severely punished for his continued avoidance of being in the classroom and for his continued inability to write by hand.

Square Pegs, Part 2

(Authors Note: Sensitivity to the feelings of the children and their families requires the anonymity of the square pegs whose stories are told here as well as acknowledging the necessity to select youngsters outside our close knit community as representative of the many like square pegs including our own. Nonetheless, please be assured that the four children you will meet are youngsters I have encountered as a professional educator discharging duties in the last six years.)

Charlie was a bright, smiley fourth grader. Every day we would find ourselves enjoyably talking about many things, but he had one subject of great interest, baseball. In fact, he would talk baseball even in the middle of winter when everyone else was in basketball mode. However, it didn’t take long for me to understand that while his interest in the sport was genuine, as well as his interest in talking with me, he was respectfully changing the subject. Whenever I would request he be about doing his school work he would engage me with his baseball talk. And when finally he saw he couldn’t talk anymore he would do something else, something definitely not school work.

Frequently, for example, he would engage me in talking baseball when he was to be working on math problems collaboratively with a classmate. I would re-direct him to his task and he would stop talking. However, he would then quietly rise from his seat, amble about the classroom examining all he found interesting before returning to me wherever I was in the room to continue the conversation. In gym, as the other youngsters were standing quietly having complied with my request for silence to give directions for the game to be played he would loudly start-up on baseball. I would ask him to listen rather than talk and he would agree politely. But, then he would quietly move to the bleachers, sit and, indeed, not talk, until the game for the period began. There were many such digressions none of which were malicious and all resulting in politeness and very little school work being done.

For Charlie the problems were about being made to read dump stories about silly people doing silly things- that was the way he stated complaints about English Language Arts-about being made to do stupid games, “like” cross word puzzles or matching columns, about being made to do endless boring math “problems”. He had a long list of complaints about “being made to” and all using the epithets, stupid, silly and boring.

He said at one time, all he wanted was to be in a place which “made sense”. At his tender age he couldn’t get beyond that slogan. But he knew being forced to expend his energies doing “stupid” and “silly” nonsense was a waste of time. Yet, in the uniform school the only way Charlie could express his being out of place was to be non-compliant. Countless numbers of times did I see him being escorted to the Principle’s office by one teacher or another. Indeed, the more discipline these folks put down on this youngster the greater his non-compliance. The amazing thing about Charlie during the time I worked with him was in his ability to keep his anger in check. No matter the provocation, he would remain polite, non-compliant but respectful. However, this lad did not keep that mental balance as being out of place with no alternative available continued to exert an ever greater cost: eventually, in middle school he turned mean.

SQUARE PEGS: Education’s Canaries in the Coal Mine, Part 1

Solidly we are in the era of school uniformity where accountability law, state and federal, requires all children in public schools to essentially achieve the same results at the same time to the same degree. Here in New York City we have a uniform curriculum with a largely uniform way of instruction and accountability testing standardized throughout the public system. Even in the new small public schools and Charter schools created over the last decade the foundations of teaching and learning, the assumptions of the need for children to move along a set path at a certain speed from grade to grade, and the testing to assure the conformity of student outcomes, are just as much the force in the these schools as in their regular cousins. The private system of schooling here pretty much follows the public in curriculum, instruction and testing. All this leads to uniformity across educational institutions within the City, with The Rockaways no exception.

There are children who are just fine with this standardization. But we can see there are costs to others in having to comply with uniformity, being forced by school and family to submit to the denial of their basic biological differences which are the hallmark of being human. I mean, we adults take for granted we are different one to another, different in talents, capabilities, motivations. I can very easily find my way around a thick, dense book on some obscure Far Eastern philosophy but can’t figure out how to repair my car when it breaks down. I can replace a burnt-out light bulb but in no way could I do the electric upgrade our house needed a couple of years ago. Even in academics, all Media Studies comes as easily as breathing but with higher math like Trigonometry or Calculus, man, I’m lost forever. Yet, we stubbornly hold in the belief our children ought to be able to do every little academic thing equally well and be as capable in achieving success to the same level at the same time as all other children.

We can see the problem with forced uniformity in the square pegs, children who cannot fit into the round hole of the uniform school. Indeed, the force of uniformity for all too many of our children makes them into square pegs. There are square pegs who are charming rascals full of life, energy and mischief protesting in so many “cute” ways. You have to love these youngsters for they have not a mean spirited bone in them. But these young folks have not yet been made mad, mentally ill. They in time might as these protests are in reality what are called mal-adaptive coping behaviors, pathologies which can lead to quite serious self-destruction as are the circumstances of the square pegs already made mad. These square pegs are education’s canaries in the coal mine warning us of the eminent dangers of uniformity and showing us the need to make changes to schooling systems.

In this space in forthcoming weeks we will be looking at some of these square pegs, the mad and the not yet mad, to learn from them what changes are needed to the round holes, public and private, so all square pegs can find their rightful schooling space, and be allowed the opportunity to learn in their own way and in their own time for a full and healthy life.

Not All Better Mousetraps Find Acceptance

Having finished my Democratic Education early childhood through early college concept proposal for the bright neurologically diverse, the Twice-Exceptional, by the Fall of 2005, and since there was so much of a push in the City at the time to establish Charter Schools, I thought to explore the possibilities of taking Rockaway College the Charter School route. Obviously, I knew an application like the School for Democracy's would not work. Still, I wondered since the school would be for a “disabilities'” group, the Twice-Exceptional, latitudes in design would be granted and thus a synthesized Democratic Education, Montessori and Open Classroom learning environment would find acceptance. Whether differentiated learning and quality differentiated outcomes attending to the individual intrinsic motivated learning of a Democratic Montessori-Open classroom would find friends was an open question, but I thought as the aphorism says, “nothing ventured...nothing gained”. I went deep into the process for almost the entire '05-'06 school year. I spoke with any one who was anyone in the Department of Education having any responsibility for Charter schools. Indeed, during the nearly nine month process: I learned the intricacies in the Charter Law, the application procedures and the criteria for successful application; I made friends and advocated for the concept. 

 

Five things became definite by the time I neared the end of the process: 1) the Charter School application required a committee of folks, especially from the neighborhood where the school was proposed to be sited, as much to demonstrate community support for the school as to assure authorizers there were folks deeply involved who knew what they were doing and could satisfy the pledges of the application; 2) the governance and administration structures of these schools excluded all students-in fact, governance and administration were quite conventional; 3) Charter school authorizers would not sanction early colleges; 4) the Charter, at base, was a trade-off agreement to be renewed every five years between the State and the Charter School governors and administrators where the Charter school folks would assure adequate yearly progress in ever higher mandated State-wide test scores for an independence from local school district oversight, especially in hiring, wages and work rules; and 5) the head of the school-whether called Principal or Director-the one most responsible for establishing the school which included the hiring, firing and supervision of staff and instruction-was required to be a State certified Administrator.

I had been unable to enlist anyone along the way to help with the project. But then I hadn't undertaken a concentrated effort. So, while I thought having a development committee was problematic, I thought it could be resolved through a recruitment drive in the Rockaway communities. That Charter rules went against Democratic Education's inclusion of youngsters in school governance and the possibility of students in school administration was not that problematic to me in that I was willing to forgo student inclusion in these areas for letting the individual intrinsic motivated and negotiated learning of a Democratic Montessori-Open Classroom to happen. Likewise, I was willing to re-structure the concept extending the Secondary Education Program and eliminating the early college, again, as long as the self-directed and negotiated Montessori-Open Classroom structure remained. However, demanding to make ever increasing scores on mandated State-wide tests the measure of success of the school and essentially the sole criterion for continued existence of the school was diametrically opposite the mission of Rockaway College; in this regard there was no way to work around this and, thus, by itself ruled out Rockaway College from being a Charter School-but there were other requirements just as obnoxious. However, the one about the person most responsible for the school, staff and instruction having to possess a State Certification as an Administrator put it in personal terms: I did not have such a Certificate, nor did I have the money to take the required degree classes to qualify, and therefore, I was ineligible to oversee my own school. I mean, I was not going to do all the work and then give it away!!!

But, as it turned out, Charter Law of the State of New York forbids Charter schools to be established exclusively for special needs populations:  This was the single requirement which actually extinguished any hope for Rockaway College as a State Charter as Rockaway College would be proposed to Start authorizers to directly serve the bright neuo-diverse, the Twice-Exceptional, a disability group. 

 

Summer 2006 was approaching and so I turned to Plan B, establishing the school as a private, independent community school like so many of the schools I got to know through NCACS. I turned to Alan Berger's method of organizing: I authored a series of articles in our community news paper, The Rockaway Point News, and followed up with informational meetings where I could recruit Pointer parents to form a core of the development committee. My thought was to get Breezy Point, where I live, on board and then leverage the core committee from Breezy to recruit the west end of Rockaway; and, then, if necessary use the West End committee to recruit the rest of the Rockaway communities.  I figured to publish the articles over the summer when Breezy swelled with residents and visitors taking the pleasures of the sun and the beach. (Breezy Point is a beach community located at the western tip of the Rockaway Peninsula which stretches into the Atlantic Ocean along the southwestern Long Island shore.)

I did not have the pleasure of a progressive organization and the neighborhood the likes of the Cooperative and Park Slope. In fact, Breezy Point, was, is and, I suspect, will always be very much right-of-center, that is, rock-ribbed Conservative and Republican. Knowing my neighborhood, I surmised-obviously, I still think correctly-the freedom to learn and adult non-coerciveness attending learning freedom just would not resonate favorably with anyone here. The appeal I thought to devise which should work would resonate with the parental need to find alternate school settings for their children struggling in their current schools. Conversations over the years with many neighbors had told me that this community held many troubled youngsters. So, I figured there was an audience for my messages and a real possibility of the articles generating the interest necessary for development committee recruitment., and with the committee, the school itself would become a reality. 

 

The first series of articles written, Square Pegs, told the stories of four struggling youngsters. I was relying on parental identification with these children to spark interest in the concept of an alternative school for their distressed children. Immediately after the stories, I penned a second series, Square Pegs: Searching for Solutions, which outlined schooling capable of yielding healthy, happy, self-regulated and self-actualizing young adults. Naturally, the supportive school outlined was the initial version of Rockaway College re-named “Sands College” for this effort.

(For those interested in the articles I have posted them in successive order immediately following this post.)

Walking through Breezy during the run of the articles I was complemented by at least one or two folks every time. But, in the end my assumptions on the ability of Breezy parents to identify with the children portrayed were proved false as conversations with parents, especially of parents of children I had previously known to be struggling, demonstrated either that they could not acknowledge their children's distress or that they did not believe they actually had the power to create a different way of schooling capable of reducing or eliminating their children's hurt while establishing schooling success. More, the follow-up meetings were poorly attended bringing in the merely curious far more than the serious. 

 

With Fall, 2006, well underway, I closed-up any further attempts to organize Breezy Point. For the rest of the '06-'07 school year, I took my concept to as many civic meetings as possible talking it up with parents and non-parents as well as teachers, school administrators and civic leaders whenever I was given an opening to talk about it. Non-parents, educators and civic leaders had no knowledge of Twice-Exceptionality; but the disturbing element here was that, with one very important exception, no one was interested in learning about these children. Equally distressing to me were the overwhelming negative attitudes toward individual intrinsic motivated learning and the all-consuming belief in the total adult power over children, which says children must be forced to do everything, especially learn what is told to them to be learned in school and in the way the teachers demand they learn.

But the most disappointing were the parents. They kept on falling into one of three categories: one set of parents said they were satisfied with where their children were placed and thus found no need to help develop a school they had no intention of transferring their child into; a second group of parents said that it was about time that children were told what to do otherwise they would do nothing as children are by nature lazy and must be forced to do everything and, thus, they would not be bothered helping to start a school based on children making their own decisions; a third group of parents said that if the school were already on-going they would be interested, but since it wasn't they weren't as, they said, they did not want their children to be lab rats and, thus, they saw no need to work to develop anything. 

By October, 2007, I was so discouraged and disappointed, I halted all outreach. I began looking for a conventional full-time teaching position, but I only came away with a Substitute Teacher job at the Upper School of The Kew-Forest School, one of the most traditional academic schools in Queens. I took the off days over the next six months to restructure the proposal adding a budget and began a very tentative second community outreach. But, by late 2008, with no interest in the project shown by parents or any one else I button-holed, I put the project away taking it out only if I thought someone would be interested.

The Vice-Principal Finds Fertile Ground in Park Slope

Our public school Vice-Principal was as much taken with the learning freedom basic to Democratic Education as the rest of the group and yearned to bring an Albany Free School-like, non-coercive learning structure to youngsters in his Park Slope, Brooklyn, neighborhood. As the Democratic Education start-up group polished its new, small school proposal late 2004, Alan Berger began publishing a series of articles in the Park Slope Cooperative community newspaper emphasizing the appeal of individual child freedom to learn whatever the child wished to know and of adult non-coercion in the learning process undertaken with this Freedom to Lean approach to formal education. (The Park Slope Cooperative is a member supermarket featuring natural, organic and as much as possible locally sourced food situated in the heart of a family gentrified section of Brooklyn, NY.) With the very first article, I believe, he made the neighborhood aware of scheduled informational meetings he was holding at the Co-op. His compositional seeds found fertile ground in Park Slope as the meetings yielded strong parental support for the Freedom to Learn approach to formal education; more, he found he was blessed with parents agreeing to work hard to get this type of school up and running. He formed his steering committee and immediate work began on fund raising, finding a suitable location and gathering learning material for the Brooklyn Free School (BFS).

I went to help Alan and his BFS project when the Democratic Education school start-up group all but folded in early 2005.  I thought the best place for me to be in the start-up process was on the fund-raising sub-committee where I could collaborate to generate the thousands of dollars required. I was seeing in my own school planning the need for hundreds of thousands of dollars and while the BFS was to be a far smaller enterprise, it still needed to be well funded.  Indeed, if a school is to insist its students choose what to know-which is fundamental, especially, in Free Schooling-I was thinking, then, the school had better have access to the widest possible knowledge sets and the widest possible ways of acquiring the knowledge from which to choose, potentially a very expensive undertaking and thus the need for as many thousands as it could get.  Every member of the sub-committee, including me, knew how to do the small amount fund-raising the likes I did in Boy Scouts which gave the troop the few hundred dollars needed to do our program, even to accomplish our deep winter/snow camping training and trekking. But, we, the sub-committee folks, needed to know how to raise the really big bucks. So,  I agreed to take as many of the free fund-raising classes given by The Foundation Center in Manhattan, reporting back what I learned so the sub-committee could adjust its strategies and get the big bucks.  I agreed to the undertaking as well to educate myself to what my project would need to do to acquire the cash.

The most important single thing I learned from these classes was that organizational fund-raising is a team sport: fund-raising fails when it is undertaken by only one individual as there is just way too much work for an individual. Unfortunately, at the time, the folks on the sub-committee were not in the frame of mind to be a team, so the needed big fund-raising was not going to happen. As I considered myself “just a visitor”, not having any children in the venture, I felt uncomfortable pushing the team sport fund-raising issue. Seeing no profit in my being on the sub-committee I scaled back my involvement to work getting the rented spaces cleaned and ready for opening, September, 2005.

It became apparent as I left the project when the first students were getting use to this new way of being schooled that almost all of the funding for the enterprise was going to have to come from parents taking a flier with their tuition in hopes that everything would work out in the end. Although the school stumbled greatly through its first three years because of being drastically underfunded, I think one could safely say that largely the parents' faith in the project worked out as it continues to this day having been successful enough to have bought its own building in another fashionable Brooklyn neighborhood. Unfortunately, the BFS remains underfunded, parents, staff and administrators agonizing yearly over meeting expenses, but, the BFS lives on in the fertile ground of parental faith in the Freedom from the adult over child power relationship of conventional schooling and in Alan's Brooklyn Free School.

A Far Better Mousetrap

Over time, during the two years of weekly work on the School for Democracy, I found I was learning far more about organizing human relationships through school structure than I thought I would contribute by what I had done on my own before being invited to participate in the NYC Democratic Education school start-up group.  However, the one area I believed I knew better than anyone was the NYC new, small school application process and the criteria for successful application to be one of the City’s new schools.  My role in the group, as it turned out then, was the gadfly challenging SFD concepts I thought the City would find unsupportable.  I do not think folks in the group were all that happy with me when I spoke; so, I tended to shy away from speaking all that often.  And when I did pipe-up with some objection or other, Jerry Mintz countered with arguments assuring every one of the acceptability to the City of our Democratic/conventional education synthesis solutions.  In the end, it would appear my understandings trumped Jerry’s enthusiasm.  Nevertheless, engaging as the gadfly required me to rather quickly develop a near expert level understanding of Democratic Education relationships in learning and governance systems and their expressions in structure. 

I learned quickly and became well conversant, although later work with other Democratic Education school projects would deepen knowledge in every aspect of intrinsic motivated learning communities. Nonetheless, my own version of self-directed learning positioned me well when in mid-2005 as the group was disbanding I began full time work shaping-up my Democratic Education school concept for Twice-Exceptional children in preparation to take it to my local community for start-up.  I took six months committing the project to writing.

Nearing the end of its writing, I thought the project to be taken seriously, especially, by parents and donors, required a formal sounding organization.  So, since I figured the school would be sited in Rockaway around where I lived and include an early college program, I named the school Rockaway College and christened the organization the Rockaway College Project.  And I listed me as its Director.

To give readers a flavor of the school, I’ve included here an excerpt from the Executive Summary of a White Paper about Rockaway College I penned in March, 2013.  The concept has undergone a few refinements since I completed the original proposal but by and large what is read here is what was then penned. 

Elevator: Rockaway College when fully established would form an interconnected early childhood through early college institution constructed in five highly supportive responsibility-based programs in two small private, independent Democratic Education schools for the bright neurologically diverse, especially for the Gifted in cognitive areas other than conventionally structured academics, the Talented in human expression and the Twice-Exceptional-also called Gifted Talented Learning Disabled-providing them learning environments developing affective health and cognitive dexterity.

Executive Summary: The Mission of Rockaway College is to cultivate in all its students a solid psychological foundation for future growth and a cognitive deftness for adaptability to life’s challenges by providing its students a highly supportive Learner-Responsibility-Centered education.

Rockaway College Project proposes constructing five sequential, highly supportive, responsibility-based programs in two small private, independent Democratic Education schools for the bright neurologically diverse ages three to nineteen.

The highly supportive environment centers on psycho-cognitive, behavioral and social supports being through student-staff and, if necessary, mental health professional, counseling. All students of the targeted population, the full range of Gifted, Talented and Twice-Exceptional, especially the Twice-Exceptional, need the supportive service of deep mentoring relationships with those thoroughly versed in the unique social-emotional and cognitive styles of the school’s population, in the negotiation between native inclinations and credentialing decisions and in the individual intrinsically motivated self-directed and cooperative Democratic Education culture of the school to assist students in maneuvering through the channels of the academy and to help them help themselves to work through their natural inclinations and individual differences to achieve schooling success and healthy personal growth. Each child, adolescent and young adult in every program would be required as a condition of attendance to be mentored by a program staff member for as long as he or she is in residency, and if necessary be counseled by a mental health professional.

Responsibility-Based program construction is through Democratic Education as taken from Yaacov Hecht which grounds itself in certain views on child development and learning and on organizational governance fully allowing the play of this unique group’s social, emotional and cognitive dynamics to best grow them to be healthy, happy, responsible and self-actualizing.

All children, Democratic Education maintains, have different gifts and talents which powerfully drive individual knowledge seeking, acquisition and use without the coercion to do so and without the severe negative effects of forced behavior visited on children attempting to comply with demands in opposition to their basic inclinations, instincts, drives, capacities and innate curiosity. Indeed, the child’s individual neurological construction, abilities, interests, reflective capacities, communication style and rate of social, emotional and cognitive growth provide daily opportunities in Democratic Education constructed schools for individual responsibility, self-selecting what is learned, when it is learned, how what is chosen is learned, the scope and depth of learning chosen and the duration spent on individual aspects of learning ultimately creating a high quality individualized and emergent rather than a questionable uniform and mandated course of study for each over a term and over a school residency.

As it turns out, the student population of Rockaway College possesses powerful drives to know at times in narrow directions and other times in broad directions and the reflective capacities to highly self-direct, to take full responsibility for their course of learning. Democratic Education structured programs such as those proposed in Rockaway College would provide the necessary working flexibility satisfying these youngsters’ innate capacities without the negative psychological impacts other approaches to formal learning develop in them.

Organizational governance within Democratic Education is school self-governance where adults and children of the learning community have equal voices and equal decision-making powers on questions open to community decisions providing the opportunity for children to take full responsibility for and full ownership of the collective goals of the community, truly learning to be Democratic by being Democratic.

Rockaway College Project would construct its programs within two schools, Rockaway College School and Rockaway College. Rockaway College School, to be developed and established first, would house an early childhood program and a primary education program; Rockaway College, to be developed and established in time for the initial graduates of The School to continue their formal learning within this structure, would hold an outdoor venture intake program for secondary education, a secondary education program and an early college program.
 

The ungraded Early Childhood Program in The School would develop the regulation of children’s social-emotional dispositions and cultivate their natural learning instincts through engagement with a toy enhanced Montessori prepared environment for mixed ages 3 to 5. As well, Rockaway College School would include the ungraded Primary Education Program integrating a Montessori prepared environment for mixed ages 6-11, an inquiry freedom of an Open, Democratic Classroom and a cooperative norm based form of community governance continuing executive functioning self-regulation and social-emotional management while developing competency in neuro-compatible Literacy and Expression and cultivating topics of interest.

Rockaway College would house The Outdoor Venture Intake Program for Secondary Education, The Secondary Education and Early College Programs. The Intake Program would offer an ungraded personal growth outdoor education experience within a cooperative norm based community governance for mixed aged students new to or having not yet finished secondary study to uncover and develop social-emotional and cognitive strength awareness, to adapt to the secondary education program’s cooperative self-directed learning culture and to cultivate topics of interest. The Secondary Education and Early College Programs like Bard High School Early College, in New York City, would combine secondary academic and junior college Liberal Arts education so upon graduation young scholars would receive both a high school diploma and an Associate of Arts degree and be prepared to enter a Bacheloriate program to complete their undergraduate education. The Secondary Education Program would offer ungraded mixed aged integrated interdisciplinary thematic study, individual project based learning and performance assessment through subject discipline cooperative learning labs within a democratic community governance structure providing high quality academic skill development according to the individual’s Neuro-Learning Style, along with the cultivation of topics of interest. The Early College Program would offer an ungraded mixed aged collaborative Socratic seminar course structure within a cooperative norm based community governance to engage deep, cooperative, scholarly study into questions of curiosity, interest and passion and to satisfy common core university requirements.

For anyone wishing to go into depth on this school, I suggest consulting the Annotated Index of Rockaway College Posts where I list concept paper sections I’ve posted on this blog.  The Index was posted March 19, 2012, and the sections were posted from February 16, 2012, to March 17, 2012.  I’ve checked and all of these posts are available under Archives.

Not All Great Ideas Fly

In late January, 2003, I heard Jerry Mintz over the local public radio station in Great Barrington, MA, talking about the recently ended International Democratic Education Conference (IDEC) in Albany, NY. IDEC, he reported, brought together folks from around the country and from around the world to celebrate formal education through individual intrinsic motivation and learning community self-governance, which taken as a whole is called “Democratic Education”.

He explained, as I recall, and as he has done many times since, children are natural learners endowed by a powerful curiosity about all the things and the people of the world. This natural instinct compels knowledge seeking, acquisition and use, he argued: adults need not force children to learn. And growing children to maturity by way of their natural inquisitiveness, i.e., their intrinsic motivation to learn, he asserted, grows children to be healthy, happy, self-regulated and self-actualizing, most beneficial outcomes, everyone would agree. However, the conventional adult selected, directed and ordered learning of traditional schooling, AERO’s Director stated, destroys this natural process transforming competent, confident, independent development into a learned helplessness.

He went on to point out that children feeling an ownership in their collective learning environment through their full participation in school governance assures they will grow in their natural way. School governance, he outlined, is by way of the Democratic Meeting where the community comes together in regular meetings of the whole community to decide issues open to community decision. Adults and children have equal rights to speak and to persuade within these community forums. Each has a single vote on questions up for community decision and decisions are majority ruled. The community can decide policies on such as curriculum and assessment, individual or group or school projects and assignments, graduation requirements and ceremonies, expectant behaviors consistent and inconsistent with the norms of the school as well as the means by which inconsistent behaviors are resolved.

I had been very much attracted to the ideas of Maria Montessori and John Holt who both saw intrinsic motivated driven learning the best way of structuring formal education. So, my attention fixed on the radio as I heard this fellow saying some of the same things Montessori and Holt were saying. More, Jerry Mintz referenced A.S. Neill's Summerhill, Daniel Greenberg's Sudbury Valley School  and Mary Leue's Albany Free School, if memory serves, as exemplars of this type of schooling.  I knew of Neill, his school and the book he wrote on it, but I had yet to read the volume; my earlier association with NCACS introduced me to Sudbury Valley and Albany, but I had only a fleeting understanding on what they were about.  The next day I got a hold of a copy of Neill's Summerhill, read it and recognized from where Democratic Education ideas had their genesis. I also delved deeper into what was going on in Sudbury Valley and Albany.

I should point out presently that there is a class of student for years known as Gifted Talented Learning Disabled, currently known as Twice-Exceptional.  Our son Sean should have been found Twice-Exceptional and schooled according to Twice-Exceptional characteristics.  But, he wasn't on all counts and suffered greatly.

I had been wondering about the exact structure of a formal learning environment suiting our son and all other Twice-Exceptional children since I began looking at alternative education in 1994.  So, while I was generally looking at Montessori and Holt and talking with folks in both AEE and NCACS, I was thinking on how to use what I was learning to better the lives of Twice-Exceptional children.  By the time I heard Jerry Mintz, I had formulated a general outline of a school for Twice-Exceptional children employing Democratic Education constructs and thought it would be of benefit to engage him in starting it.  Well, when I contacted him and told him of my desires, he invited me to join a school start-up group he was forming in NYC to develop Democratic Education schools in the City.  For about a year, I motored between our Great Barrington residence and start-up group meetings.

Now, my father having passed in 1975 left my mother to herself and to her many friends.  But, by 2004, at age 87, she needed someone in the house.  We decided since she would not move in with us in southwest Massachusetts we would move in with her. Karen obtained an apparel industry position in NYC and in May, 2004, we took up residence with my mother in her house in Breezy Point, and I became her primary care giver allowing me to more easily participate in the NYC Democratic School start-up group and develop my school for Twice-Exceptional children.

Altogether from mid-2003 to mid-2005 the group detailed a public Democratic Education school and took it the City in application for it to be one of the Department of Education's new, small schools. The City's DOE had undertaken to open dozens of new schools each school year since the early 1990's and we were working to make our endeavor one of them. On board for this application were the then principal of The Renaissance Charter School, a public junior/senior high school, Monte Joffee, the AERO Director, Jerry Mintz, a public school Vice-Principal, Alan Berger, a public school teacher, Roger Dennis, a college administrator, several parents and me.

I had actively pursued making application to the DOE for my school concept during the several years prior to our initial relocation up to southwest Massachusetts. I kept contact with DOE folks thereafter just in case we moved back to the City. So, I had a really good idea of the application needs the DOE required to be met. More, I had seen first hand the types of new schools being opened. (I actually was a substitute teacher in one.) Unfortunately, each school was structured exactly the same. My conclusion at the time (and remains today) was that the powers that be were looking for what would amount to magnet schools where themed subjects classes would be the draw to keep youngsters in school to receive the traditional core subjects. Teaching/Learning, student evaluation and cohort movement through grades were to remain exactly the same as in the older, large schools. The main difference between the established big schools and the new, small schools rested in the limited total student enrollment of about four hundred, ideally, allowing class size to be small, between 15-24 youngsters, but in practice it ballooned to 32-35 students in most cases.

Against this background, I thought it would be a very hard push to get any school organized along different principles passed into public brick and mortar. But, as the slogan of the New York State Lottery says, “Hey, you never know!”

According to the group's application to the City, individualized learning through a personalized curriculum based on the student's individual interests, talents and needs would be the foundation of the “School for Democracy” (SDF), the name of the proposed school, rather than the uniformity of curriculum, teaching and learning of all other public schools. Students in SFD would select what they wanted to study and the way instruction was to be delivered. Subject content would be interdisciplinary and integrated, meaning thematic; and, learning structures could be any one or combination of teacher-led classes, student-led classes, one-on-one tutoring, peer-to-peer learning, small group study, individual independent study, internships, field trips and community service. Each student would set down decisions in areas of subject content and on instructional means in an Individual Learning Map (ILM) at the beginning of each term. During the ILM composition process students would meet with an adviser who would negotiate with the student to see learning moved along a positive growth line and to assure the inclusion of state standards.

SFD's application was rather general on evaluation of student learning. However, it stated that SFD students would take all mandated New York State assessments pledging improvement in scores at a rate at or above the average of comparable students. Beyond this, the application looked to informal weekly conversations between students and teachers where students self-evaluated against their ILM's; additionally, twice yearly-once in December and once in June-teachers would be required to compose a narrative to describe the progress in academic and “other” areas.

I remember I argued that the proposal we were handing to the City contained internal contradictions impossible to reconcile. The most problematic were implementing a personalized curriculum while assuring the City the SFD would adhere to State learning outcomes, employing an integrated interdisciplinary, thematic content learning while satisfying state standards and pledging to provide more than adequate yearly progress in mandated test scores while keeping an intrinsic, self-directed personalized curriculum and non-test evaluation measures.

The personalized curriculum driven by intrinsic motivation, I stated, would result in content study different from student to student across the entire student population leading to what I call quality differentiated outcomes. NYC public schools, however, demanded a common subject content student to student within grade levels, especially for core subjects, and a narrow range of common outcomes across student populations, I explained, and the City authorizers would not agree with such differentiated learning resulting in potentially a wide variety of different learning outcomes. On the other hand, if the SFD actually adhered to State standards' outcomes, I maintained, students would be severely limited by them to the point of having the curriculum essentially being dictated to them by their advisers contradicting the whole point of intrinsic and self-directed learning so foundational to Democratic Education. Perhaps marking the coincidence of student selected learning and certain State standards' outcomes would allow the scope and the breath, the differences, of a personalized curriculum, but, I argued, the City authorizers want to see a definite commitment to State standards driven teaching, learning and outcomes. I just could not see a compatibility between the personalized curriculum and a State learning standard driven outcome process.

While State standards of the time in academic skill areas were formulated in surprisingly general terms for each grade level, the subject content standards were quite specific for each grade level. Advisers with little or no agreement with the student could include academic skill standards coincidental to the student selected content learning without doing much damage to the self-directed learning process or to the State standards so broadly drawn were they, but State content standards being so particular would require direct statements of specific discipline content in ILM's providing the distinct probability of teacher insistence and student acquiescence, thus defeating the purpose and the function of the individual intrinsic motivated personalized curriculum.

More, none of the State content standards allowed the type of integrated interdisciplinary content study proposed for SFD students. Thus, to satisfy state content standards, I argued, would require students to forsake aspects of connection between, among and across disciplines in favor of specific discipline knowledge and to be demonstrated to have been achieved as if each student was in the specific grade consistent with the standard. Yes, through an honest negotiation between adviser and student both recognizing the wisdom of the other would somewhat mitigate the antithetical to Democratic Education adult over child power dynamic kindly guiding the student toward State academic skill and content standards' satisfaction; but under the intrinsic self-directed impulse foundational to the School for Democracy, I argued, adherence to State learning standards could never be assured with every student all the time, a criterion necessary for City application success.

Third, with the student selected, integrated interdisciplinary learning in SFD so different than what is assumed by other public schooling, I wondered in what manner SFD students would be able to demonstrate State learning standards on mandated standardized tests. To achieve the application goal of more than adequate yearly progress on State tests, so much of SFD curriculum would have to correspond with the expectations of content on State tests as to severely narrow self-selection of what is to be learned to that in State standards, thereby, largely negating both the individual intrinsic motivated personalized curriculum and its integrated interdisciplinary character. More, SFD students would have to be so accustomed to test taking as to require testing as an integral assessment strategy which the application implies is rejected for other types of assessment.

Point after point I made arguing that assuring the City of SFD's intention of maintaining State standards, assessments and outcomes would in practice reduce so much of Democratic Education elements as to destroy the project as one based on individual intrinsic motivation and self-directed learning essential to Democratic Education, not to mention school community self-governance which the City did not, does not and will not recognize at all. I argued strenuously that to get the City to approve the SFD the school would have to look like all others and destroying the project that way wasn't worth it. Jerry Mintz, however, assured me and others of the group that working with State standards and mandated testing regimes would leave enough student choice in determining the individual content of student learning as to guarantee individual attainment of health, happiness, self-regulation and self-actualizing in each youngster.

I had great doubts as I had witnessed first hand the crushing power of City authority to structure its public schooling to other principles, definitely not to Democratic Education's. Having students taking SFD's proposed kind of responsibility for basic learning decisions, providing them with such a large variety of learning structure options and relying on informal and narrative evaluation of learning, not to mention the self-evaluation elements, was directly against each and every successful application where each applicant based their schooling on adult decisions on what children were to know, how they were to acquired the knowledge and how they were to demonstrate they knew the content they were suppose to know. Even the magnet subjects were organized by way of complete adult direction. Yes, students could choose which magnet classes to take but the teaching, the learning and the evaluation of student learning were all teacher-directed.

But, as it turned out, while these contradictions did not win any fans, the rejection of SFD's application was most attributed to the school's structural design. SFD, the application stated, would pioneer the concept of “micro-schools”, very intimate educational settings reminiscent of one-room school houses. When fully established SFD would consist of five micro-schools, called “pods”, each growing to a maximum size of seventy-five students covering the conventional grades of kindergarten through twelfth. Each pod would be located at a different site. The pods would be semi-autonomous but would also work together as an entire school unit whenever suitable.

Essentially, the City said, the separate pod structure would replicate by five the needed resources just to serve only a few students, thereby costing the City more money per student than when all youngsters are served within one building. As Monte Joffee reported the City public schools Chancellor, Joel Klein, as saying, SFD possessed “diseconomies of scale”. Indeed, the schools authorized then as now were the usual one building, multi-classroom structured units.

So the moral of this story is when it comes to public schooling in the City of New York, not all great ideas fly, certainly not ones which so differ from established, conventional thinking. Yet, I wondered if my Democratic Education school concept for Twice-Exceptional children would find acceptance as a New York State Charter school or as a private, independent community school.