The Search for Gold
Dear friends,
Perhaps it’s a good thing that we keep looking for someone, somewhere who has created the utopia we’e dreaming about. In my lifetime I’ve lived through a number of grandiose claims: Russian communism (for some Fascism), various third world utopias, then Cuba, and of course, China. And many in-between. Ditto for schools. We keep reinventing “success” rather than exploring the history of our past successes. Instead we let them die for lack of support whenever a new fad rolls in.
Even the ones–the schools– I co-created with friends young and old in NYC and Boston were always short of what I hoped for. Having been through it personally I laugh when others are heralded not because they don’t “deserve” it but they deserve it usually for every reason except the one acclaimed: their high test scores or graduation rate, etc Like Obama’s peace prize, I got a MacArthur for the success of our CPESS secondary school in NYC before it had anything but 7th graders. I appreciated it because it gave me just the extra leeway I needed to actually become a 7th-12th grade success–until finally it too succumbed approximately a decade after I moved on. But it enabled me to go from being a lowly elementary head teacher to a very wise and renowned
Perhaps it’s a good thing that we keep looking for someone, somewhere who has created the utopia we’e dreaming about. In my lifetime I’ve lived through a number of grandiose claims: Russian communism (for some Fascism), various third world utopias, then Cuba, and of course, China. And many in-between. Ditto for schools. We keep reinventing “success” rather than exploring the history of our past successes. Instead we let them die for lack of support whenever a new fad rolls in.
Even the ones–the schools– I co-created with friends young and old in NYC and Boston were always short of what I hoped for. Having been through it personally I laugh when others are heralded not because they don’t “deserve” it but they deserve it usually for every reason except the one acclaimed: their high test scores or graduation rate, etc Like Obama’s peace prize, I got a MacArthur for the success of our CPESS secondary school in NYC before it had anything but 7th graders. I appreciated it because it gave me just the extra leeway I needed to actually become a 7th-12th grade success–until finally it too succumbed approximately a decade after I moved on. But it enabled me to go from being a lowly elementary head teacher to a very wise and renowned