Category: Community & Education Interview Series

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Debbie Meier Exclusive to AERO on CPE Conflict

You may know Debbie Meier as the central figure in the recent Amy Valens documentary Good Morning Mission Hill. It is about an innovative public alternative in the Boston area that Debbie started after leaving the New York City schools. I first met Debbie when I saw her at Central Park East Alternative School decades ago. The school still stands as a testament to what is possible in the public schools. In 2007 Debbie and I went to Russia to participate in the memorial of Alexander Tubelsky, who had started the experimental public school called The School of Self Determination. While there we had hours of communication and discussion to find common ground. Her approach is focused on empowering teachers. My approach is more focused on empowering students. Subsequently Debbie has keynoted several AERO conferences, most recently in 2014 in at LIU Post in New York. Here is her statement about the most recent conflict at CPE.
 
-Jerry 
 
Here is Debbie's Statement 
 
"Well you know where I stand:
With the majority of parents and staff.  It's hard to sustain a school for democracy in a system committed to hierarchy.  But CPE survived a lot of indifferent and hostile administrators – in part because it's had friends even in high places. The CPE community needs to unite under interim leadership while it recommits to its original dreams – a school in East Harlem that offers all children what they need to be powerful members of the ruling class–which everyone by right belongs to. 42 years after it was founded is a good moment for such a recommitment.  We can't let one more progressive school succumb."
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Round 2 of the Discussion with Diane Ravitch and Whitney Tilson, on who’s the status quo, charter schools, and testing

Because of its length, we’ve agreed to break it into two parts: Round 2 is below and will cover the first three topics. Tomorrow we’ll release Round 3, covering the remaining three.
 
Enjoy!
 
Whitney
————————-
Hi Diane,
 
I really enjoyed our first exchange of ideas. Thank you for engaging.
 
Since you had the last word, the onus is on me to respond – which, frankly, makes me feel overwhelmed because we’ve already touched on so many enormously complex and difficult issues that we could spend weeks discussing just one of them.
 
So, I’m going to approach this following the old maxim, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” I’m not going to try to respond to everything, but rather just a few things and hopefully we can build from there.
 
So let’s talk about two things, one high-level and one nitty-gritty: 1) tone, language and motivations; and 2) the Vergara case.
 
Tone, Language and Motivations
Here’s another thing we can surely agree on: we (and our allies) have far too often let our rhetoric get away from us, leading us to make ad hominem attacks rather than sticking to the issues. Randi throws kids under the bus on behalf of her members, you’re motivated by a personal vendetta against Joel Klein, I’m part of the hedge fund cabal that wants to privatize public education for our own profit, reformers are anti-teacher, etc.
 
Can we just stop? Please?
 
Let’s agree to disagree without being disagreeable. It diminishes all of us. It blinds us to the many things we agree on. And it makes it much harder to reach compromises, which are usually necessary.
 
No doubt there are some folks on “your side” who, for example, are more focused on more jobs, higher pay, better benefits and job security, etc. for union members than on the best interests of kids, just as there are people on “my side” who wrongly bash teachers and are more focused on earning higher profits (like the online charter school operators) or busting unions than on the best interests of kids.
 
But it’s been my experience and observation over 27 years (I know, I know, that makes me a rookie!) that the vast majority of people engaged in this debate are motivated not by self-interest, but by a deep passion for ensuring that all children in this country get a good education that gives them a fair shot in life.
 
So let’s stop the rhetoric about “defenders of the status quo” and “throwing kids under the bus” (from my side) and “the billionaire boys club that demonizes teachers and wants to privatize public education for their own profit” (from your side).
 
DR: Whitney, I have to stop you here, to clear the record. I know that "your side" refers to anyone who believes in public education as a "defender of the status quo," which is frankly absurd. The "status quo" is your side. You and your compatriots have controlled the U.S. Department of Education for the past eight years (at least). You got your favorite ideas imposed on the nation via Race to the Top. You were able, through Race to the Top, to get almost every state to agree to hand off public schools to charter operators, some of whom-frankly–are incompetent and fast-buck entrepreneurs–and to agree to evaluate teachers by the test scores of their students. You got whatever you wanted through Arne Duncan's close association with your reform movement. So, yes, there is a status quo, and it consists of high-stakes testing (which American children and teachers have endured for 15 years) and privatization via charter. The charter movement has promoted free markets, competition, and consumer choice, which opens the door to vouchers, which are now found in some form in nearly half the states. Add this all up, and you have a disruptive status quo that is highly demoralizing to teachers, destroys unions, and rattles the foundations of education without improving it.
 
WT: I agree that we reformers were able to get some of our agenda implemented under Obama and Duncan, but completely disagree that we have become the status quo. (By the way, I know you object to the term “reformers”, but I don’t know what else to call us; if I use your preferred term, “status quo’ers”, all of our readers will be confused.) I looked it up and it’s defined as “the existing state of affairs, particularly with regards to social or political issues.”
 
How can the status quo be anything except the existing K-12 public educational system, which is the 2nd largest area of government spending (exceeding our military, trailing only healthcare) and by far the largest employer in the country at 7.2 million jobs (plus add 3.8 million more if you count higher ed) (per this data from the U.S. Department of Labor)?
 
I also disagree with your characterization of our agenda, for a variety of reasons.
 
DR: The existing public school system is saddled with high-stakes testing because of “your side.” It is saddled with policies like test-based evaluation of teachers because of Race to the Top (“your side”). Thousands of teachers and principals have been fired and thousands of community public schools have been closed and replaced by privately managed charters because of the policies of “your side.” Your side is in charge. Your side makes the rules and the laws. Your side demonizes teachers and public education.
 
WT: Charter Schools
I think high-quality charters are an important piece of the puzzle in improving our educational system. This is a topic on which I know we will forever disagree and it’s a big, complex one, so let’s agree to return to it in more depth in a future discussion – but in the meantime, if you (and our readers) would like to read my response to your critique of charters, I published an open letter to you on 12/3/10 that is posted here. Though I wrote it more than five years ago, I think it’s still quite timely.
 
Briefly, you always refer to them as part of an effort to privatize public education, which drives me crazy (I’m sure you’ll be pleased to hear) because charter schools are public schools! They receive public funds, are often situated in public school buildings, aren’t allowed to have admissions criteria (unlike many public schools like Stuyvesant) (yes, some charters cheat; so do many regular public schools), students have to take the same state tests, etc. They are simply public schools that aren’t overseen by the central bureaucracy – rather, by a board of directors made up of private citizens – and aren’t subject to the centrally negotiated union contract. This makes them different – but they’re still public schools, ultimately accountable, directly or indirectly, to elected officials the city or state in which they’re located.
 
As for charters opening the door to vouchers, I think, if anything, they’re a substitute. But regardless, I generally favor both – but the devil is in the details. I share your opposition to awful for-profit online charter operators like K12, but think we should expand high-quality charters that, as I noted in our last exchange, are willing to play by the same rules as regular public schools (e.g., take their fair share of the most disadvantaged students, backfill, etc.).
 
DR: Charter schools are not public schools. They have private boards; they are not required to have open meetings. Their finances are opaque. They choose the students they want and push out those they don’t want. When hauled into court or before the NLRB, their defense is always the same: we are not public schools, we are not state actors, we are private corporations operating schools on a contract with government. I am convinced: they are not public schools, because they say so themselves. They are neither transparent nor accountable. They leave the neediest students to the public schools, even as they drain resources from the public schools. They weaken the public schools by cherrypicking the most motivated students, excluding the neediest students, and taking away the resources that public schools require to function well. Charter schools are harming the education of the great majority of students, who are enrolled in public schools. We had a dual school system before the Brown decision of 1954; we should not go back and recreate a new one.
 
It has to be a little disturbing to you to realize that your agenda for charters is shared by all the Republican governors, as well as a few Democrats like Obama, Cuomo, and Malloy. You are also allied with Scott Walker, Rick Scott, Rick Snyder, Mike Pence, Paul LePage, Jeb Bush, and the Tea Party of North Carolina. Every Republican legislature loves charter schools, as it is an opportunity to resegregate the schools. The far-right American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) loves charter schools and has model charter legislation which is shared with their members in every state, as well as model legislation to eliminate collective bargaining and standards for teachers.
 
WT: Testing
Regarding testing, we actually agree on more than I expected. I agree with your critique that we reformers haven’t implemented it very well – which has certainly helped the anti-testing crowd give us a political drubbing. I share your concerns about testing (from our last exchange a few days ago: “teaching to the test, narrowing the curriculum, cheating”) and agree that “they favor those who come to school with advantages,” “that most testing should be designed by the classroom teachers, not by outside testing corporations,” and that standardized tests shouldn’t be given “more than once a year.”
 
Where we disagree, I think, is how the tests should be used. You wrote that “standardized testing should be used only diagnostically” and that it “should not figure into…the teachers' evaluation.”

Regarding the former, I’m not 100% sure what you mean by “only diagnostically,” but I believe that we need to use the results of standardized tests as one important measure – though not the only measure! – of how teachers, schools, districts, states, and our entire country are doing in achieving our goal of ensuring that every child gets a good education.
 
DR: Tests are diagnostic when they show what students know and don’t know, so instruction can be adjusted to help them do better. Today’s standardized tests have no diagnostic value. They rank students without giving any information about what they do and don’t know. Imagine going to a doctor with a sharp pain in your side. Your doctor says to you, “This is bad. You scored a 2 on a scale of 1 to 4. You are in the 30th percentile. Goodbye.” What you really want is a diagnosis. You want to know what is wrong and you want medicine that will stop the pain. Tests today are pointless and useless. All teachers learn is where their students rank, not what they need more help with.
 
WT: When tests show that half of black and Latino 4th graders are “below basic” readers (at least one year below grade level, often far more), this is critical information about this national disgrace. Of course it’s a separate discussion about what to do about this, which is rooted in how much of this problem is due to ineffective schools vs. other factors like poverty, but it’s critical to do the testing every year so, as a nation, we are regularly reminded of the problem, can take steps to address it, and track progress.
 
DR: We don’t need to test every student every year to know that kids need smaller classes and intensive help. Their teachers know that. No high-performing nation in the world tests every child every year. Testing is a measure, not a treatment. If we keep pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into testing without changing conditions in the schools, we will get nowhere. Whatever we need to know about student performance can be learned from NAEP (the National Assessment of Educational Performance), which tests American students every two years in reading and math and reports on state results and disaggregates scores by race, language, gender, disability, etc. The current onerous tests—lasting eight to ten hours for little children—are unnecessary.
 
WT: For similar reasons, it’s critical to know if the vast majority of children in a particular district, school or, yes, even classroom are, for example, reading or doing math far below grade level. I agree that it’s not necessarily a high school’s fault if, say, 90% of students are below grade level and the graduation rate is only 50% – that’s what tends to happen when students enter 9th grade three years below grade level – so the test results must be used carefully (and I know sometimes they’re not), but that’s not a reason to eliminate standardized testing or limit its uses. If there is no learning going on in an entire school – and there are, sadly, a lot of them – then we really need to know that!
 
DR: Be aware that 50% of students are always below grade level. That is the nature of grade level; it is a median. In any district where 80-90% are below grade level, you can be certain that there is a high concentration of poverty and racial segregation. Why assume that the teachers are bad? The root causes of low test scores are the same everywhere: poverty and segregation. What can be done to reduce those two harmful conditions?
 
As for classroom-level data, we surely agree that it may not be a teacher’s fault if every child in her class is reading below grade level – they likely entered the class that way. But if they spend a year in a teacher’s classroom and still can’t read or do math (or whatever the subject is) better than they could at the beginning of the year, then something is wrong and we (broadly defined: the department head, principal, superintendent, parents, taxpayers, etc.) need to know that so corrective action can be taken – so, again, while it’s important to use data and test results correctly, we need the data!
 
DR: Your faith in standardized testing is greater than mine. I served on the NAEP governing board for seven years, and I saw questions that had two right answers or no right answers. Children have talents and skills that are not measured on these tests. We have been testing everything that moves for 15 years and we have very little to show for it. It is time to think differently. We should give more thought to how to help students and teachers and less money to measuring them. The nature of standardized tests is that they are normed on a bell curve. Half will always be below the median. If we gave drivers’ licenses that way, half the population would never get one.
 
WT: Now let’s turn to the issue of using standardized tests as part of teachers’ evaluations, a hugely complex and contentious issue.
 
I think standardized test results should be used as part (and only a small – less than 50% – part) of a teacher’s evaluation – while simultaneously acknowledging the validity of your many objections to this. Good testing should be able to measure, at least to some degree, what really matters: growth. The concept is simple: if students start the school year at a certain level, they should be at a higher level by the end of the year, so let’s measure that.
 
Now, before you go off on me for saying this, I’m well aware that, in practice, it’s not simple at all: tests are imperfect and results are inconsistent year to year; many subjects (like art) areas don’t lend themselves to measurement by tests; sometimes a class has more than one teacher during the year; some students move between classes; etc. I also agree that reformers could have done a better job of implementing the process of tying student test scores to teacher evaluations.
 
But I view these problems as good reasons why test results shouldn’t be weighted too heavily, should be based on growth/learning, not static scores, and need to be balanced by comprehensive reviews by peers and administrators – but not as reasons to completely reject using test results in teacher evaluations.
 
DR: Test scores should not count at all in evaluating a teacher’s performance. As three major scholarly organizations (the American Educational Research Association, the National Academy of Education, and the American Statistical Association) have said, test scores say more about who is in the class than about teacher quality. Those who teach students with disabilities, English language learners, and gifted students will not get big score increases, may see flat scores, and may still be good teachers. Those who teach in affluent suburbs may look like superstars, even though they are no better than those teaching in the inner city schools. Value-added measurement, as it is called, has not worked anywhere. It is invalid, unstable, and unreliable. A teacher may get a high score one year, and a low score the next year. A teacher may register gains in math, yet no gains in reading; does she get a bonus or will she be fired?
 
I think you should know that 70% of teachers do not teach tested subjects. Only 30% teach reading or math in elementary and middle school. How do we evaluate the majority? They are evaluated based on the test scores of students they don’t know and subjects they don’t teach. That’s neither fair nor rational. So it may sound simple to say that teachers should be evaluated on whether scores go up or down, but it doesn’t work for the 70% who don’t teach tested subjects and it doesn’t work for the 30% who do because they are not teaching randomly assigned and comparable students. I urge you (and your readers) to read this article by a teacher who quit: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/melissa-bowers/7-reasons-you-might-not-want_b_9832490.html.
 
WT: It would be like evaluating basketball players without looking at points scored per game. Of course this one statistic needs to be placed in a broader context (how many shots the player takes; rebounds; assists; steals; defensive prowess; whether someone has a good attitude and enhances (or diminishes) team cohesion, etc.) – but you gotta look at it!
 
DR: The purpose of playing basketball is to score points and win games. The purpose of education is not to get high scores but to develop good citizens who can think and act wisely, work with other people respectfully, love learning and continue learning when school is finished. What matters most can’t be measured on a standardized test.
 
WT: In summary, I really fear that the anti-testing backlash will put us on the path back toward the bad old days when school systems could give poor and minority students the worst schools – and even good schools could put such students into the low-expectations classrooms with the least effective teachers – without anyone being the wiser.
 
DR: After fifteen years of high-stakes testing, the conditions you fear are still in place. Poor and minority students are still in the schools with the lowest test scores. The achievement gap remains stubbornly large. Testing hasn’t helped the neediest children, because their needs are not addressed by standardized tests. We keep learning the same things every year, but doing nothing to change the causes. The anti-testing backlash, led by angry parents, will continue and grow. They don’t want their children to be labeled failures in third grade. They don’t want them to spend most of their time preparing to take tests. They don’t want them sitting for tests that take longer than the law school exams. And they don’t want their teachers fired if their students don’t get high scores. Why must this be inflicted only on public schools? If private schools were required to take these unnecessary and pointless tests, the rebellion would be joined by their parents too.
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Are KIPP schools Racist?

Ed:

Please send any comments on this to Jerryaero@aol.com​

I follow Whitney Tilson’s blog. He is a hedge fund manager who also sits on the board of KIPP schools. I disagree with much of what he posts but agree with other parts. And I’m always searching for common ground in the movement. He is a strong supporter of KIPP and the charter school movement. He gave me permission to post what I wrote to him and his blog in response to an attack on him by a teacher at the Calhoun School, a progressive private school in Manhattan:

 

FROM WHITNEY TILSON BLOG

Things like this make me groan and hold my head in my hands. Steve Nelson, the head of Calhoun, an elite, highly progressive Manhattan private school, in an essay he published in HuffPo (that I agree with!) decrying racism in this country, attacked me and “no excuses” charter schools, naming KIPP, Success and Democracy Prep:

A prominent hedge fund manager in Manhattan is a leading advocate for "no excuses" charter schools, such as KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program), Success Academies and Democracy Prep. Well-documented reports reveal that children at KIPP have been punished by being labeled "Miscreants," students at Success Academies have wet their pants due to stress and the refusal to allow them to go to the bathroom, and children at Democracy Prep have been shunned, branded by wearing yellow shirts and literally forced into silence, with other children and adults forbidden to speak to them. This "reformer" is on the record saying that these means of discipline are necessary because these children, nearly all of color, "need it." His own daughters attend Nightingale-Bamford, a highly selective, expensive, majority white, girls school on Manhattan's Upper Eastside. Please indicate the way you believe he might respond if any of his daughters reported such experiences during their school days.

Nelson is someone who should be our ally because he clearly cares deeply about the vast racial inequalities in our country, especially in education (in which we have a K-12 system where the quality of the school a child attends is primarily determined by two factors: the color of their skin and their zip code). Yet instead of championing high-quality charter schools that are addressing this very issue, he attacks them for being racist. Ya can’t make this stuff up!

What he writes is so wrong-headed in so many ways – but I guess that’s not surprising since the extent of his knowledge and research seems to be limited to reading Ravitch’s blog. (I surely hope that Mr. Nelson is a better model of intellectual honesty, curiosity and rigor for the students at Calhoun than he shows here.) He certainly doesn’t know me nor did he attempt to contact me (I’m not hard to track down – try WTilson@kasecapital.com or (646) 258-0687), nor, to my knowledge, has he ever visited any of the schools he smears so ignorantly (for example, far from being “branded by wearing yellow shirts and literally forced into silence,” the students at Democracy Prep wear these shirts with pride for civic events like its Get Out the Vote campaigns). If he truly wishes to understand these schools, he should visit them – they’re all less than a 15-minute cab ride from his school and I’m certain they would welcome him (here’s the contact information for each: KIPP, Vicki Zubovic, vzubovic@kippnyc.org; Success: (646) 597-4641; Democracy Prep: Katie Duffy, kduffy@democracyprep.org).

As for Nelson’s implication that I’m racist because, he claims, that I believe that cruel “means of discipline are necessary because these children, nearly all of color, "need it."”, this is absurd. I don’t believe nor have I never said any such thing.

Notice that he only quotes two words (“need it”) (presumably from one of my emails) without providing any context – a classic way to dishonestly smear someone. Imagine, for example, that I published an article in which I wrote: “Steve Nelson punishes students at Calhoun by labeling them ‘miscreants’, which causes them to ‘wet their pants due to stress.’” He, in fact, wrote the words I quote in his HuffPo article – but of course the sentence I’ve written is false, dishonest, and the exact opposite of what he actually believes.

I’ve searched all of my ed reform emails for the past five years for the words “need it” and couldn’t find them (though they appear many times in various articles I forwarded in sentences like “We need to get extra help to students who need it”, but nothing related to discipline).

My best guess is that he’s referring to something I wrote long ago in which I observed that my daughters’ school doesn’t have slogans like “Climbing the Mountain to College” painted on the walls, whereas many high-performing charters do. Why? Because my daughters and their classmates, from the day they were born, have been surrounded by adults who all graduated from college. It would never occur to them not to go to college or not to finish college because they don’t know anyone who hasn’t done so. It’s in the air that they breathe. But, it goes without saying, it’s most certainly not in the air in the lives of most of the children most charter schools serve – so the charters have to instill it.

Or maybe he’s referring to another email I sent in which I shared a conversation I had with Joanna Belcher, the rockstar principal of KIPP’s Spark Academy elementary school in Newark (Dale Russakoff writes about her glowingly in The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools?). I observed Joanna and her staff teaching the little children to walk quickly and quietly in line. Time after time, one or two children would get distracted and start talking or fall out of line and they’d all have to do it again.

Afterward, I told Joanna, “You know, there are a lot of folks who’d watch that and think that what you’re doing is overly harsh and militaristic.” She laughed and said (I’m paraphrasing from distant memory), “When I first started teaching, I thought so too. But then I learned. We only have kids for a certain number of hour every day – and we (and they) can’t afford to waste a single minute. Our kids are moving between classrooms, to lunch, etc. a dozen times a day. Imagine if we wasted five minutes each time – that would be an hour a day down the drain!”

In summary, schools that successfully educate the most disadvantaged kids and give them a fair shot in life need to do a lot of things differently vs. schools like Calhoun and Nightingale that serve almost entirely the most advantaged kids. It’s not because they’re racist, but because different students have different needs that need to be addressed in different ways. Steve Nelson, before you publish any more rubbish about some incredible, inspiring charter schools, take the time to come see them and learn the truth.

If he visited a KIPP school, maybe Nelson would meet someone like this and the scales would fall from his eyes:

My name is Wydeyah Hay and I am a TEAM Academy (KIPP New Jersey) founding class member, part of the first class when TEAM opened in 2002. This fall, I returned to the classroom as a Relay Resident at KIPP’s Seek Academy. Through this program I’ll be on my way to earning a master’s degree by apprenticing in a well-run classroom. It was because of the values that KIPP helped instill in me that I was inspired to become a teacher and support my community.

While some of the things I’ve read have said that reform has failed in Newark, or that it was a “wash” for Newark’s kids, I am living proof that this is not the case. Over the last five years, KIPP has opened four new schools in Newark and has grown to serve roughly 2,000 more kids. And politicians need only to see what I see in my school each day, that’s no “wash” for the kids in these classrooms. 

Coming from Newark, people often have the perception that it’s unfriendly or that if you stay here your future will be limited. My teachers and school leader at KIPP New Jersey helped me realize that there was more than being another statistic. To be blunt, I believe they saved my life. And now I’m back in my community to do the same.

My teachers at KIPP always enforced extending my education and climbing the mountain to college. With their support I got into Immaculate Conception High School (ICHS) in Montclair, NJ after graduating from TEAM Academy middle school in 2006. I went on to attend Virginia State University (VSU). I was determined to stay in school and I always made great grades. And KIPP helped support me every step of the way both emotionally and financially.

It is because of them that I graduated from college with honors.

 

JERRY:

Hi, Whitney!

I'm essentially on the other side in this discussion but I try to be open-minded.

The reason why I tend to disagree is because we have been instrumental in founding democratic schools that have a sliding-scale tuition, and therefore, have a high proportion of minority students. And those students do very well with this approach and clearly don't need the kind of discipline you described at Spark Academy. I believe that all students can do well in freedom, in an environment in which students are empowered to make real decisions about their school and their life.  

If you follow our work you know that we also support the POTENTIAL for charter schools (although too many now look like regular disempowering mainstream schools) and the concept of school choice. So we are not on either of these "sides." we are on the side of the children. 

Yours, 

Jerry

 

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Q&A With Stuart Grauer

In August of 2014, a journalist from Saegyoyuk, the educational magazine in Korea, contracted Stuart Grauer for a feature interview on the topic of Small Schools. Saegyoyuk is published by Korean Federation of Teachers’ Associations, the largest coalition of teachers nationwide. Below is the transcription of the interview.
1. What caused you to start the small school movement?
For over 100 years, schools have consistently gotten bigger: bigger schools, bigger classes, and bigger districts. Working in seven schools and accrediting schools for many years, I started noticing that the students and teachers were happier in the small school than other schools, and so I began researching. The more I learned, the more alerted I became: there is almost no research to back up the efficacy of larger schools, and yet billions of US dollars are spent to develop them every year.
2. What are the merits or advantages of small schools?
A small school is a real community. Small schools are not “less” by virtue of their size: they are more. We have now been formally been researching small schools for 4 years, consistently. What we have found is clear and unequivocal regarding: safety, achievement, connectedness, dropping out and happiness. Small schools are safer physically. There is almost no violence, but also students “feel” safer and less threat. Small school students show higher standardized test scores. Teachers do not quit as often—they stay in the profession. Teachers, students and parents all feel more connected in and across groups.
3. Some say that the success of the school is up to the teacher competency, not the size of it. They don’t agree with the insistence that small schools achieve good results in terms of educational effectiveness. What do you think of this opinion?
First we have to look at school and organization size and secondly, we must examine class size.
Since there are few small schools, the Small Schools Coalition studies organizations of all kinds. There is a great deal of research on the dynamics of small organizations and groups. We now know that in groups of around 150 (we’ve found up to 230 or so, but not more), people are more connected to one another. They are tribe-like. There are relatively few cliques—there is a sense of inclusiveness. One of the worst problems we have found in small schools research is that districts have created schools of over 400 students and not found them to be significantly different. Then, they declare that “small schools don’t work.” The problem is that once you are over 230 students, and most definitely once you reach 400 students, the small school advantages drop off. At 400, it is not a small school. We have found that you can preserve many of the advantages up to this size, however.
Of course, teacher competency is not only determined by school size, it is determined by class size. We know from research that small schools tend to have smaller classes. The research that we have found on class size is terrible. Typically, a district will reduce class size from 35 to 25 and it won’t work. So, they declare that “small classes don’t work.” This is ridiculous! This is why I have stated: Don’t throw out a great theory because of poor implementation. Class size reduction always brings significant change if you are under 15 students in class.
4. Some point out that the students from small schools are not motivated enough to study and show low performance on sociability development. What do you think about it?
There is absolutely no research anywhere which points to this. A high performance environment is high-trust and low-threat. Without question, the sense of safety and connectedness characteristic in small schools is a great motivator for students and teachers. Motivation is a function of quality of relationships students develop at school. In small schools, students and teachers spend much more time developing those relationships. They feel personally responsible and committed to one another. Small school students are accountable, connected, and motivated.
5. Teachers from small schools have even more works to deal with compared to those who work at bigger schools. What do you think of it? And how do you cope with this issue in the Grauer School?
Teaching is one of the hardest jobs in the world. People routinely underestimate the complexity of the job. It is true that small school teachers might have more “Preps”—they might have 3 different courses to teacher rather than one or two. However, it is much easier to assess your students in a small school because of the closer relationships teachers can form with students. The quality of life at a small school is preferable because of the close relationships we develop. At The Grauer School, we have 35 fulltime teachers and not a single one of them left over the past year. Our faculty just voted The Grauer School “one of the top 10 places in the country to work” in an anonymous, nationwide survey. People don’t mind hard work if they feel they are making a real difference and it is leading them to a high quality of life. Our teachers and administrators have close, caring relationships and that more than makes up for the additional “preps.”
6. Do you think school management should be different depending on where the small schools are located: in big cities or rural places? If you think they should be treated differently, what would be the differences?
I am not aware of management differences from city to country. Obviously, cities have to deal with more people, more crowds. For this reason, it has traditionally been more of a temptation to create larger, more comprehensive schools in cities. Naturally, some small or large schools have longer distances to travel, creating transportation challenges. Either way, it’s all about building a real community.
7. Korean government carries forward the merger and shutdown of small schools to save the national expenditure on operating and personnel expenses. What would be the breakthrough to this financial issue?
This is going to be a long answer, because it is extremely important:
Shutting down small schools does not save money unless you leave out the following questions:  What is the cost of retraining new teachers who leave the profession? What is the cost of higher drop-out rates? What is the cost of increased depression, suicide, violence, and gangs. There is absolutely no question that all these are game-changing issues that make small school costs more attractive.
Our reviews of the scholarly research indicate that larger schools with enrollments in excess of 1,200 have not produced expected economies of scale that result in better results for less money when compared to true small schools. Comparing small schools (less than 300) with big schools (1,000 or more), research reveals that big schools have:
·       825 percent more violent crime
·       270 percent more vandalism
·       378 percent more theft and larceny
·       394 percent more physical fights or attacks
·       3,200 percent more robberies
·       1,000 percent more weapons incidents
(Source: U.S. Department of Education, 1999)
The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future has developed a “Teacher Turnover Cost Calculator” so that districts can compute the added costs of replacing teachers who leave the profession—far more large school teachers leave the profession than small schools teachers.
If the high school students who dropped out of the class of 2011 had graduated, the United States economy would likely have benefitted from nearly $154 billion in additional income over the course of their lifetimes, (Alliance for Excellent Education). Over a lifetime, a high school dropout will earn $200,000 less than a high school graduate and almost $1 million less than a college graduate.
Researchers at New York University’s Institute for Education and Social Policy examined 128 high schools using school-by-school budget information for 1995-96. They found that schools with fewer than 600 students spent $7,628 per student annually, $1,410 more than was spent by schools with more than 2,000 students. The cost per graduate, however, at the small schools was $49,553, slightly lower than the per-graduate cost of $49,578 at larger schools. This is because dropout rates at the small schools were much lower—64 percent of small-school students graduated in four years compared with 51-56 percent of the students in large schools with 1,200-2,000 or more students. (Stiefel, L., et. Al)
And finally, Smaller schools provide benefits of reduced discipline problems and crime, reduced truancy and gang participation, reduced dropout rates, improved teacher and student attitudes, improved student self-perception, student academic achievement equal to or superior to that of students at larger schools, and increased parental involvement.
The only way to have an economy of scale in education is to not have kids!
8. The number of small schools in Korea is increasing rapidly because the population of students decreases. It is said that schools need some strategies for their own to attract students to enroll in. What advice would you give to teachers and principals?
The most effective small schools seem to have themes. If each small school offers a theme such as high-technology, the arts, sports, vocational education, etc, then the school becomes like a magnet to many people. Large schools try to be all things to all people. I tell principals and school designers: if you try to be all things to all people, you cannot succeed. What great corporation operates like that!!!  Each school can be unique and engage the local community.
9. In the case of Japanese education policy, there are schools which have ‘the only student’ or are closed for a while when there are no students. What do you think about this system or policy?
I am not familiar with this issue.
10. Students from the Grauer School show higher performance on advancing to the universities. What are the keys to improve the academic ability?
There are three keys to high performance: relationships, relationships, and relationships. Our students get into 89% of all universities they apply to. They average over $300,000 each in unsolicited merit scholarship offers—this is data that most people would not even think is possible. Every graduate of ours will tell you the same reason: great, trusting relationships with teachers. Our students learn the most important thing of all: the reason to study is not to get into a university. We learn because it is a beautiful thing to do, it gives us choices in life, and it enables us to engage in meaningful relationships. Who cares about the name of the university!
11. What is the education system the Grauer School introducing as a small school? Could you tell Korean teachers the distinctive policies or systems which only small schools can adopt?
Small schools teachers can know their students better, so there is mentoring going on. The lines between student and teacher break down more than in large schools. With this trust, we can try more things in the classroom. For instance, there are chances to go outdoors with the students, maybe travel places together. We can get out of the “race.” If a lab is not working well, we can focus on the negative experiment rather than the prescribed finish. We can allow for deeper discussions. Most important, we can be curious about our students. The Socratic Method was introduced 3000 years ago and it is still unsurpassed in developing intrinsic motivation among our students.
In addition to all this, small schools can tell their teachers that they will be evaluated not just on the test scores of their students, but on how much they and their students are team players. Maybe you think these things are hard to evaluate, but does that mean we should ignore them?
12. Are there any special aspects in operating the curriculum from the Grauer School?
The small school curriculum is not much different. What is mostly different is the methodologies teachers use. At The Grauer School, our motto is “Learn by Discovery.” We can listen more. We can work on empathy and creativity—these two qualities are in grave risk in a new era pushing technology and mass produced, online learning at all cost.
13. What advice would you give to parents who are wondering if they let their kid go to a small school or not?
Parents today often parent out of fear. They think that their child has to pass all the tests and score high or they will have no future. They put their fears in front of their child’s happiness. Here is what I have to ask parents:  Why is your child sleep-deprived and what is the long-range impact of that? Do you really want a “standardized child?” Why are you so afraid that your child might find his own, personal passion that is not on the test?
Parents: I know you say that you prefer your child to be helpful, kind and a good team member, but your kids don’t believe it.
Parents cannot hide their true feelings from kids. Why are parents today so fearful?
14. Please make any comments if you have any other advices to teachers, principals, and policy makers in Korea.
You do not need to close large, comprehensive schools. All you need to do is break up the large schools into units of 200 or 300 students each. Give each unit it’s own theme and its own graduation requirements. If your school has three floors, make each floor a “school within a school.” Smaller learning communities, even if they are just parts of larger learning communities are safer, more connected, more entrepreneurial, and happier.
Check the Small Schools Coalition (SSC) website for excellent data. I am available for consulting with schools districts and corporations and am easy to reach through the Small Schools Coalition. My book, Real Teachers, is an entertaining and extremely eye-opening picture of what the teacher-student relationship can look like.
Stuart Grauer is a teacher, founding head of The Grauer School in Encinitas, Calif., and founder of the Small Schools Coalition. He accredits and consults for schools worldwide. He is the author of “Real Teachers” and is launching his newest book, “Fearless Teaching: Collected Stories” through Aero Press in November 2015. Visitwww.fearlessteaching.com for more information his newest book.