Home > Fall Forum > 1998

1998 Fall Forum Opening Speech

November 4, 1998
Amy Gerstein

Thank you Alicia and Tom, and the Park Hill High School Jazz Band. I am delighted to be here! Last night Ted and I met with Alicia and Tom - they asked us a few Essential Questions about our work: where did the Principles come from? What is the purpose of CES? Why do we have the Fall Forum? How big is the Coalition going to get? We tried to ask them questions, but they controlled the conversation. What tremendous examples of CES practice! Thank you to Cheri Shannon and the folks from Central States CES Center. You and the local design team have done a wonderful job and have been working hard for months. A special thanks and recognition to Christie Kilgus and Mary Arkins. They make the Fall Forum happen. Both Christie and Mary, two old-timers who work from our Providence office, have been with CES and coordinating the Fall Forum for five years! We are thrilled to have them on our CES National staff. As of June, we have a new National Office located in Oakland, California, with eleven new staff members. While we have a new face and a new phone number, we're still the same but also different. I'd like to introduce the CES National staff. We hope you'll try to get to know them over the next few days.

One thing the Coalition is always known for is how we honor the local wisdom. We talk all the time about how no two schools are alike. How what works in Kansas City won't necessarily work in St. Louis. How kids differ, communities differ and schools differ. Race, class, culture, gender, geography, and experience all factor into creating unique communities. We appreciate local innovation - in fact we strive for it. We know context matters. We encourage all of our schools to develop bold examples, diverse models of what the 10 Common Principles can and should be. The Fall Forum is devoted to learning about how different schools have interpreted the Ten Common Principles - we look forward to this event each year! Valuing community-based reform is at the heart of CES - and it will always be so.

However, what we don't often talk about -especially- in the Coalition is what, beyond our Principles, should be shared across all schools and across all communities. And most importantly for us, what should be shared across all CES schools and communities. Our commitment to inspiring and supporting local expressions of our principles will not waver. But I believe it is now time for us think about, in a rigorous way, what we believe should be shared across our schools and communities.

Tonight, I'm going to ask some Essential Questions. Then I'm going to tell some stories to help us get at the balance between what we need to share and what should be different about our schools. And finally, I'm going to issue a challenge about the kind of stand that we need to take in our Coalition. Because I believe getting clear about what should be shared and what should be different is key to understanding what it means to promote democracy and equity in our schools.

First, let's think about two Essential Questions:

- What should be the same about all CES schools?
- How should all CES schools be different from one another?

Asking these questions is essential because of what often gets touted as necessary to share across all schools. Here is a brief list of my least favorites: the same curriculum for all students; the same bell schedule for all schools in a given district; the same standardized tests administered on the same day throughout a state; the same architectural plans for all school buildings; the same grading systems. These things must be the same, we are told, for reasons of equity - it would not be fair, we are told, for some schools or classrooms to be different. But does sameness really promote equity? I challenge us to ask this question, When does sameness serve equity? And when does sameness contribute to inequity?

First, I'd like to challenge the notion that all curriculum should be the same. When I was a student teacher in a small city in New England, my classroom overlooked a river. Across the river was a factory that had pipes that pumped yellow, brown and green gunk into the water below. Through the windows, we could see how the color of the liquid varied from day to day. I taught Environmental Science and the textbook I was using included chapters on "wetland ecology" and "pollution". Charged with teaching the entire text, I tried hard to engage my students and capture their imaginations. So, I developed a water pollution investigation unit. I asked students to work in teams and sent them off to different parts of the river and to collect samples of water and adjacent plant life. Running tests on various aspects of the "health" of the river, we charted our findings. As we had suspected, the river was polluted, and the sections of the river nearest to and downstream from the factory were in the worst shape. Outraged, my students then drafted letters to the Mayor, the CEO of the factory, and thus began a small civics project. Sure, we didn't do as much on air pollution and a few other topics, while we went into depth on water pollution. But my kids learned how to do serious scientific inquiry and they learned how to explore their local environment and how to get political. The local context mattered! If I had been teaching in Iowa, I might have put aside river ecology and done a big deal unit on the erosion of topsoil. In Seattle, in the shadow of Mt. Rainier and Mt. St. Helen, I might have emphasized volcanoes. Our courses should be different depending upon where we live.

At the New Country School in rural Minnesota the students discovered that frogs in the local area were deformed. This launched their interest in genetics and they undertook an in-depth study of mutations and the environment. A colleague of ours, who works in a city school, uses the statistics from the newspaper to teach mathematics. She uses social issues to frame real problems. Rather than thinking about how long it will take for Billy and Juan to build a house, they think about the scale of poverty and homelessness in their city. At Mission Hill Elementary School in Boston, students are spending an entire quarter investigating the history of the community in which their school is located. All students, ages 5-13, will conduct oral history interviews, study geography and historical documents. These teachers are making choices about what to include in their curriculum based on their understanding of their kids and of their communities. Even though each teacher has textbooks that are supposed to serve as the common curriculum, we can invent strategies that support learning. This is something we know well in CES. We believe curriculum ought to differ in order to engage our kids to think hard about important things.

And we know that more than just curriculum should differ. In my earliest days working for CES over a decade ago, I visited a Mid-western urban district where we had eight CES high schools. There were twenty high schools in the district all using the exact same bell schedule. One of the Coalition schools wanted to change their schedule - they wanted to create long blocks of time for instruction so that their students could be workers and the teachers could coach. The district said no. The school principal persisted. The district office arranged for a meeting with the school leaders, district staff, and the company who did the computer programming for all of the school schedules. The district had told the school that the decision about changing the schedule would be up to the computer programmers. I was visiting at that time and so I went to the meeting. I did not really believe that computer programmers would determine whether or not a school could change its schedule. I was na?ve. The programmers and the district explained that there was no way for that school to be different.

This school really wanted to be different so that it could better serve its students. In this case, equality - defined as all schools using the same schedule - might, in fact, cause even greater disparities because students would continue to fall through the cracks in that large comprehensive high school. Without new, different structures that supported knowing students well, this school was hard pressed to implement the Common Principles. This is only one example of dozens I have collected over the years where it is not acceptable to be different.

Serious problems arise when folks try to make everything the same. Perhaps the most worrisome area in which schools are being asked to be the same is around standards and assessments. The current standards movement has a kind of simple answer to the challenge of holding communities accountable for student success. In an effort to promote high expectations for all students, states and districts are creating lists of discrete content standards and accompanying assessments. When specific, mandated standards and high stakes assessments are the main thing that schools share - then we run into serious trouble. In fear of consequences for doing things differently, teachers and schools may abandon personalization, imagination and creativity. Even schools where innovative practice that increases student achievement has been the norm for years, are running scared in today's climate - some are thinking of going back to old ways.

A vocational school I know spent the last four years restructuring. They merged academic and vocational courses into "tech-ademic" courses. Teams of teachers worked across the traditional divide between academics and vocational studies. They organized the curriculum around Essential Questions and themes. High expectations for student success reigned. The graduation requirements got stiffer. Not only did attendance improve, but also kids started to perform much better in all of their courses. More students chose to go on to college than had before. But, none of the data that the school had generated about student progress and achievement could convince that community that their kids would fare well on newly adopted state tests. Recently, the principal of that school told me about how these standards and assessments were forcing teachers to question the good practices they had instituted. In fear of how the students might do on the new state imposed tests, the teachers were systematically undoing the hard work of integration and team teaching. They eliminated tech-ademics in order to teach to the tests. This is another case where mandated sameness is working against what's good for all kids.

While I critique what I call the "sameness movement," I want to be absolutely clear: we have a lot in common with those most concerned about standards and accountability. We want to hold all of our students to high expectations and we want to know how well we are doing at helping all kids to be successful. Around this issue we are the same. What is different about the Coalition of Essential Schools is that we are redefining the conversation - to be one about democracy and equity. We are reclaiming the notion that standard setting can happen locally. We are adamant that progress needs to be measured in ways that honor our students rather than punish them. This sameness movement calls for homogenization of America. But we, in CES, know better.

Thinking hard about what should be shared and what should be different, I feel deeply proud of the work of this Coalition. Not only have we always taken a stand around what needs to be different and why, but we are beginning to talk more about what needs to be shared and why - without creating sameness.

What has been true about us from the beginning is our deep commitment to our Common Principles. That is fundamentally what all CES schools share. Our passion for high expectations for all students - is shared. Our belief about the ways in which our school system is broken - is shared. Our understanding about what best helps kids learn - is shared. Our stance on the value of difference - is shared. And this is complicated. Because just as we believe that schools need to honor difference - we feel deep dismay about the uneven success rates of our students. Because we believe some kinds of difference is not acceptable. It is unjust for some of our students to consistently under perform. It is undemocratic for income to predict, indeed, determine the achievement gap. And it is criminal for race to continue to mediate success in our world.

People critique the Coalition for not describing what the Principles actually look like in practice. And we need to find more ways for teachers among us to have the time and tools to document powerful practice. We do have compelling images in Ted's books, beautiful cases written by CES researchers like Pat Wasley and Joe McDonald, and the many rich examples in Horace. But we have not, as an organization, really provided indicators of successful implementation over time. We have not done a great job of providing guide posts along the way. Why not? We haven't done this work because we have been reticent to be swept up in the sameness movement - for good reason. The sameness movement would like to blur distinctions we find essential to our work. The sameness movement would like to deny the significant differences that each community enjoys. And the sameness movement can paper over issues of inequity by suggesting everybody gets and deserves the same treatment regardless of their interests, aptitudes, and needs.

But we do agree with one aspect of the sameness movement: we should know how our students are doing. We should be clear about what we want all of our students to know and be able to do. CES has always argued for that. But many of us haven't been doing a good job of tracking that - insuring that all kids are successful. Simply arguing that the current measures are insufficient, that they don't measure habits of mind, for example, won't help matters. We need to follow student progress in ways that promote equity and give compelling information about what we really care to know. This is why we crafted a Tenth Principle to add to our first nine. Because we need to hold the world and ourselves more accountable to insuring that all students are succeeding.

The sameness movement would have us believe that we are only being rigorous when we all take the same test. We must demonstrate that rigor can mean something else. It can mean holding our students to high expectations; graduating them only when they are able to exhibit their knowledge and skills. We are not willing to accept as sufficient the definitions of what is to be shared across all schools. We must, however, demonstrate that we have high standards for all kids and we have sophisticated and powerful ways of measuring how they are doing.

Over the last ten months, dozens of people throughout our network have been trying to craft a set of "indicators" or benchmarks that reflect the work of the Ten Common Principles. This represents an effort to look at what, beyond our Principles, is and should be the same about us. Teachers, Center Directors, Congress Delegates, National staff and other folks from the field have been trying hard to devise a tool which could provide a picture of what "it" looks like in our schools. This work is in a very early stage and is at the heart of the CES National Congress' agenda.

Today, the 5th CES National Congress examined one draft benchmark - complete with dozens of indicators. The conversation was both about the content of these indicators and how they might be used. At the end of the day, the Congress expressed its excitement about the possibilities. They decided that a working group should continue to revise this draft further. They suggested folks in the field pilot test this benchmark to generate more feedback about content and use. Feedback from this pilot testing will be reviewed at the March 1999 Congress. We will post the revised indicators on our website for you to consider in the coming months.

Why bother? The reasons are many. First, as I said earlier, we need some concrete ways to measure how we are doing, what kind of progress we are making, and what intermediate steps along the way might look like. Second, we need to demonstrate how our differences promote the values we share. That is, we need to demonstrate that it is our flexibility and innovation - our attention to our students as individuals - that allows us to hold unwavering, high standards for all of our students. And third, using benchmarks will create a better context for our work. Benchmarks will give us a powerful and persuasive way to describe our work to each other and our critics.

Let me illustrate what I am describing with a few examples. One of the draft benchmark indicators for our Principle number one - a focus on students using their minds well - calls for the "curriculum to be aligned with developing habits of the mind." If we think about how that plays out from classroom to classroom we know that it will look different. What will be the same is our effort to develop habits of mind. Think back to the curriculum examples I gave earlier. Whether teaching a river pollution study or about the mutation of frogs, we strive to design curriculum that develops inquiry and curiosity, encouraging students to seek evidence, consider viewpoints, look for patterns. The point is not that everyone teaches about water pollution but that everyone cultivates habits of the mind through the curriculum.

One indicator for Principle number four, or our focus on personalization, calls for "a schedule that supports small learning communities." Again, the earlier example of the school that wanted a different schedule would have been able to demonstrate how they were addressing this principle with their schedule. The flexibility to demonstrate how a school approaches our goals remains - what is new is a clear and compelling statement that we need schedules which support the kind of teaching and learning we are after.

Our newest Principle, number ten, about democracy and equity, asks for us to hold a kind of balanced posture around sameness and difference. One indicator, for example, describes students as "performing at high levels regardless of race, class, ethnicity or gender." Another indicator for Principle number ten calls for "a data collection and analysis system that is used to address issues of inequitable distributions of student achievement." We know we need to have the same standards for all of our kids, and we know we'll need a million different routes to get them to standard. And we'll need to devise systems that help us know how we are doing relative to this important goal. This would be a bold and courageous practice and commitment to share.

Using indicators of what our principled practice looks like could really help CES. It might help us maintain a kind of grace in these turbulent times. We know we are right to pursue principles rather than models and we know we are right to worry about results. And we know we need to have a kind of courage to assess our own progress. The aggregate of our deliberate work is powerful indeed.

In recent months we, at the National level, have had the good fortune of being part of conversations in which we can advocate for the work we are all doing. A principled approach - which honors difference and holds shared standards for all kids - is gaining increasing favor. United States senators and the Department of Education have asked us for our views - have sought our counsel - and it has been joyful to promote our work. But it will be easier and more substantively helpful if we can all say yes, these are examples of courageous practice and here is a network of schools where each and every child is flourishing.

Let me recall the two Essential Questions I asked at the beginning of this talk:

-What should be the same about all CES schools?
- How should all CES schools be different from one another?

I hope some answers are clearer now. Let us not be seduced by the sameness movement. We never have been. We in this Coalition stand for what is different about all of our children and all of our schools. But let us clarify our direction. Let us demonstrate that CES students are achieving. Let us describe what that looks like. How we do it! Let us hold each other accountable for making progress as we implement the Ten Common Principles.

And most important of all, let's be focused on insuring that each of our students has a shot at a successful life. Because all of the kids who walk into our classrooms need us to believe in their future. They need us to prepare them for this very tough and unfair world. And the best preparation we can provide is to treat them as individuals - which means differently - but what will be the same is that we push them. Because we have the power in this work to push our students to reach and stretch beyond what any of us thought possible. As educators this is our most profound opportunity and our most serious responsibility. CES schools are poised to demonstrate that we can have very high standards for all kids and we can have different ways to get them there. That our curriculum, our school structures, and our assessments will vary just as our students vary. Across the board, no matter what our bell schedules or our textbooks, we push for all of our kids to achieve.

I have argued tonight for some sameness. I have called for the use of benchmarks and indicators. For ways to talk with each other and the public about our work--about how we make progress--about how we collect data to demonstrate when our students hit and don't hit the standards. But always at the heart of our work in CES, is tailoring our schools to serve our amazingly unique and different young people. And we know that is not easy! But Maya Angelou, in her poem "On the Pulse of Morning," reminds us of its importance, especially in the face of the desperate injustices suffered by so many of our children.

"History, despite its wrenching pain, Cannot be unlived, but if faced With courage, need not be lived again. Lift up your eyes upon This day breaking for you. Give birth again To the dream."

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