Keeping Progressive Schools Alive
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
Happy New Year and a special thanks to those who respond to past blogs about choice, et al. I always mean to respond to each comment.
They helped my thinking a lot. And, I have decided to start a new political tendency: “The ‘It Depends’ Party.” I find it is my answer to so many of the issues facing us in life, and in schools.
For example, school choice can be very useful, or very dangerous, it depends. Ditto for small schools, although I worry less about its misuse.
But self-governance, my third principle, I think holds up best. (However, I can think of examples of where I would be against it and that is why in some cases we need a law against any “it”).
Watching helplessly as some of our wonderful New York City small, self-governing schools of choice have been destroyed, I have learned a lot. But not yet how we could have avoided it. Rereading Seymour Sarason’s last book, The Predictable Failure of Educational: can we change reform before it’s too late, I wish I could confer with him. At the time I just thought that if I understood him right I could avoid the mistakes. I didn’t. I thought, for example, that in the absence of a strong movement behind us I would have to rely on powerful allies. It worked for 30 years. But that was not enough.
Some of those schools we started in the 1970s and 80s have survived. So we need to explore how they did it. In some cases their original leaders are still there, hanging on tenaciously for fear that they to will fall prey. Some have succeeded perhaps by being so invisibly unnoticeable that they made no enemies. In contrast, many of us were very noisy about our beliefs hoping to encourage a movement.
In Boston, the Pilots were protected for a while by the local union’s support and our existence in the labor-management contract. But Boston has gone through several leadership changes since the Boston Pilots began and each time we are nervous. And the original idea was that the autonomies offered the Pilots would expand over time to the whole system. We had modest success in a few areas.
At the heart of the failure is our weak belief in democracy, the absence of a larger CONTINUE READING: Keeping Progressive Schools Alive | Deborah Meier on Education