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'60s Ideals Find a Way to Meet the Millennium

Type: Example from Schools Author(s): Kathleen Cushman Source: Performance. #3. Mar. 1994.

SCHOOL WITHOUT WALLS
480 Broadway
Rochester, NY 14607
(716) 546-6732

175 students, 15 teachers
Grades 9¯12; 52% minority

This school teaches kids to pursue their own learning goals but insists that they work hard and show progress in essential thinking skills.

Even its name rings of the sixties, when School Without Walls was conceived; but in the 1990s this place still has an air of freedom one seldom associates with schools. Students come and go freely from the small grey cinderblock structure in downtown Rochester, New York, on their way to classes at local colleges or the district's multimedia studio, to community service commitments at art museums or nursing homes, to internships at television stations or law offices. Inside, they call their teachers by their first names; they vote on their own rules; they set their own schedules. For two decades the walls of traditional schooling have given way, in this magnet school of some 175 students, to another vision ?of connectedness, of choice, and of unlimited, independent learning for kids of high school age.

But this decade has brought new pressures even here, where success has long been judged by different measures from the usual "seat-time" and test scores of many public schools. Rochester itself has become a hub of national school reform: its teacher contracts a model of empowerment, its district deeply involved in the national push for new standards and assessment. New York's New Compact for Learning now calls on local schools to define specific performance standards and document how students meet them in a range of ways; and the state education department has chosen this Essential school and a dozen others as exemplars of how to do it. Not least, the school's student population now reflects the changing face of Rochester and the country: 52 percent nonwhite and with 33 percent qualifying for free and reduced-price lunch, it no longer fits the "bright white liberal" image of its early years.

"The Coalition of Essential Schools has been a major force in pushing us to think through a lot of things again," says principal Dan Drmacich. In particular, working with CES's exhibitions project director Joe McDonald and with assessment expert Grant Wiggins, formerly a Coalition researcher, has moved this school toward a new emphasis on setting and measuring concrete performance outcomes.

The task is complicated, partly because from its beginnings the School Without Walls devised a remarkably ingenious and successful way of motivating and measuring student progress. Like most districts, Rochester requires all high schoolers to accumulate Carnegie unit credits in various subject areas; but in most public schools, a kid can pull out a passing grade and gain full course credit even if performance in some quarters was unsatisfactory. In a bold early move, School Without Walls shattered that convention by deciding instead to grant credit quarter by quarter?so a poor performance could mean a student would end the year with, say, .75 instead of 1.0 in English credits. The catch comes if the student decides to transfer out to another school, because other schools don't accept what they regard as partial credit. Though by taking additional semester courses SWW students can accumulate sufficient credits to graduate within their own system, kids say they spend a fair amount of time calculating how to do it. It's easier, in the end, to work hard and do well?so that's the option most of these students choose.

For its part, this school has dedicated itself to making their experience an engaging and meaningful one. School Without Walls's schedule gives two and a half hours in the morning, four days a week to year-long "extended classes" with titles like "Justice," "Violence," "Compar-ative Religions" and carrying dual credits in different disciplines when the year is through. Once a week, students also use the period for school decision making, from voting in new rules to deciding how to allocate the budget. Once a week, while the teaching staff meets, kids go off to their community service obligations. In the afternoons, they disperse to hour-long courses in biology and Spanish, reading and writing and algebra and art. If a course they want to take doesn't exist, they can create it, either by finding someone in the community to teach them what they want to know, or by signing up at a local college?though before any arrangement begins SWW insists on a written proposal, including learning goals and evaluation criteria.

As for assessment practice, a robust performance culture prevails at School Without Walls. No one gives tests, it seems; instead, students complete projects, stage debates, and otherwise demonstrate in hands-on ways what they have learned. New York's prestigious Regents Diploma with its yearly honors exams is virtually ignored, though students pass the minimal competency exams that board administers. And instead of the traditional transcript with its number grades and class rankings, SWW issues quarterly progress reports evaluating time management skills, independence, problem solving, coping with frustration, decision-making skills, and communication--the goals of the school as they have been articulated since its beginnings.

The capstone of four years at School Without Walls is the eight-month-long required Senior Project, designed to demonstrate independent learning and problem solving and as much oriented toward sustained process as it is to final product. Whether the project is the renovation of a historical landmark or a study of sports reporting, a graduation committee must judge that it expands the student's learning limits.

"We look beyond the topic to see what it means in the life of the individual student," observes Drmacich. "A high-achieving but introverted student may grow more from a project where she goes out and learns to tap dance than she would by a traditional academic project." That emphasis on understanding and developing students' value systems, individual rights, and community responsibilities permeates this school's culture, and has largely shaped how it determines student success.

"If a student transfers out of here because she realizes she needs more structure in order to accomplish what she wants to," says school counselor Mike Roche, "does that mean she's not a success? You tell me!" Indeed, the school's leadership does not consider its 20 percent transfer rate a problem; besides reflecting the usual factors like population mobility, Drmacich argues, it indicates that SWW standards exert meaningful influence on its students.

What Is Success?

In the accountability climate of the 1990s, meanwhile, this school must answer whether its diploma guarantees those students can read, write, apply mathematical reasoning, and solve complex problems at a competitive level. Once, the answer may have been implicit in the SWW transcript's real-world, behavior-oriented categories (like problem solving or time management), or in the interdisciplinary, project-oriented nature of the curriculum, or even in the accumulation of credits in the range of subject areas the district requires for graduation. But now, demands by state authorities and local stakeholders for demonstrated mastery in content areas and process skills have shifted the focus to a new kind of accountability, one which requires this school's staff to re-articulate and amplify its original vision.

A committee of staff members is drafting a new statement of what SWW graduates must know and be able to do?including items like "listen, speak, read, and write in a foreign language," "interpret the literature and history of the United States and other nations from multiple perspectives," and "use a variety of methods to analyze and solve problems." Still on the list are many of the school's long-held goals like conflict resolution and awareness of community resources, but they are framed in somewhat more concrete terms: graduates, for example, may be asked to show a working knowledge of the Bill of Rights. And the school is working toward a system of graduation by portfolio, whereby students would present not only the Senior Project but a number of other performance tasks demonstrating mastery in particular areas.

Mixed into the faculty's attitude toward these new procedures is a certain bemused resentment?the conviction that this school has long practiced authentic tasks, long demonstrated its success in ways the educational bureaucracy has only recently begun to honor. Attendance figures here are second in the district, and dropouts are rare; 80 percent of graduates go on to college, many to prestigious institutions. But teachers and kids prefer to offer less formal proof of the return on their investment.

In one extended class, kids talk about the results of a survey asking what they would tell someone thinking of coming here. The most common response: "It's hard work." Don't come if you want to goof off, this class tells a handful of visiting eighth-graders; get ready for a lot of reading and writing. "It teaches you responsibility," one student wrote on the survey, "and how to do things for yourself which you will need later in life. Why not start young?"

This resource last updated: May 14, 2002

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