A Storyteller's license

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge.
That myth is more potent than history.
That dreams are more powerful than facts.
That hope always triumphs over experience.
That laughter is the only cure for grief.
And I believe that love is stronger than death.

Spoken Meditation by Robert Fulghum

All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate-school mountain, but there in the sandpile at Sunday School. These are the things I learned:

Share everything.
Play fair.
Don't hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don't take things that aren't yours.
Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.
Wash your hands before you eat.
Flush.
Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
Live a balanced life-learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
Take a nap every afternoon.
When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.
Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup-they all die. So do we.
And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned-the biggest word of all LOOK.

Sermon

I used Robert Fulgum's popular Credo statement he first published as a church newsletter column because it speaks so eloquently the importance of the simple truths even a five year old can grasp. Yet today most people need a minimum of 16 years of school to get a decent job and often another two to four years of education to get professional work. Whether or not we retain and use all the information we acquire is doubtful but we certainly seem to need a lot more than what we learned in kindergarten to get ahead these days.

This need for an educated citizenry has been around since the founding of this democratic nation. Many years of schooling has not. It has only been since World War II and the technological "space race" after Sputnik that we have encouraged all students to continue their education much beyond learning reading, writing and arithmetic. I believe we have more and more kids completing high school and going on to at least a community college because it is common knowledge if you want to avoid spending your life flipping hamburgers, you need to stay in school. Not only are more kids completing their high school education, but they are also taking more and more advanced classes. It is quite common now, for example, for calculus, advanced science and literature classes to be taught in high school. The need for quality education has never been stronger.

At the same time as education is ever more valued, our public school system is perceived to be failing us. The most common way this is measured is through standardized test scores such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test or SAT. But more informally there is a pall cast over the public schools as stories circulate of unruly disruptive kids and chaotic classrooms which compromise the ability of teachers to teach and students to learn. We are appalled by surveys published by newspapers which reveal the ignorance of common knowledge found in some high school seniors. And the worst schools are found in the inner city. Whether these statistics and anecdotes reflect educational reality is seriously debatable and challenged by some important research. Be that as it may, the public perception is otherwise. The seeming hopelessness of our public schools is symbolic for many of big government out of control.

The state of public education concerns me as a citizen but much more so now that I have a child in a Liberty Elementary School kindergarten class. I was raised in Newark, Delaware, home of the University of Delaware, with an excellent public education and I want nothing less for my own son. So when I browsed Deborah Meier's book, The Power Of Their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem, which I found on the coffee table while we visited my niece Kathleen near San Diego, I became very excited and interested in getting a copy to read. The book discusses the amazing success of a small group of schools in Harlem where 90 percent graduate from high school and 90 percent of those go on to college. These are schools which are not only working well for the students preparing them for college but also teaching American society some very important lessons we need to learn.

The first school in this group of experimental schools called Central Park East was founded in 1974 at a time of cut-backs and school closings in New York City. The student body is about 85% African American and Latino from low-income and poor families with a full range of academic strengths and handicaps. Meier began CPE with a vision that these kids could excel if the expectations of the parents, students, and the teachers could be challenged:

...through offering a rich and interesting curriculum full of powerful ideas and experiences aimed at inspiring its students with the desire to know more, a curriculum that sustains students' natural drive to make sense of the world and trusts in their capacity to have an impact upon it.[1]"

While most schools aim at doing this and certainly individual teachers can sometimes pull it off, success at this kind of idealistic view of teaching is unusual in the inner city. What sets Central Part East apart isn't the natural ability of the staff or the students but the system of education they have created together. It is that system which I find so remarkably affirming to the spirit in which this country was founded.

The foundation for learning at Central Park East begins, surprisingly for many, with school choice. All the parents and students must select the school to be admitted. There are no fancy requirements or examinations to pass, only a desire to choose the school. Meier feels choice of school is very important because it is the seed of commitment to the school. In the world of poverty driven by survival and necessity, the gift of choice is extremely meaningful to parents who want the best education they can get for their children too. Building commitment to education is a central value cultivated by the school in many different ways.

Probably the most critical component in the design of Central Park East was its size. CPE is intentionally designed to be small. The school it replaced was broken up into three schools of only 250 students with each separate school located in the same building. Meiers feels the optimum size for a school allows all the students to be seated at the same time in the auditorium and all the teachers to be able to meet in a circle. The small size of the school allowed almost all the resources to be put into the classrooms. When they first began, Meier taught along side all the other teachers. They soon discovered this wasn't workable and Meier became primarily the director of the school and hired a secretary. But Meier was still never far from the classroom. She would regularly observe classes, counsel students and even substitute for her teachers. How often do you hear about Principals substituting for their staff? She feels her closeness to the classroom is essential to keep connected to and build trust with the students, the parents and her teachers.

Unlike many schools where all the power flows down from the Principal, CPE is run democratically by the teachers who strive as much as possible to operate using consensus. The teachers together decide who to hire and what curricula and teaching methods will be used. The teachers control the decisions about how the school is run in consultation with students and parents. This wasn't easy at first for teachers used to closing the classroom door and cherishing their autonomy but were grateful for an opportunity to have a say in how the school would be run.

Stimulating engagement and commitment is vital to getting teachers to teach and students to learn. Part of developing commitment has to do with participation. If you get to help make the decisions which directly affect your education, you are much more likely to be attentive and motivated in your schoolwork. All of the meetings at CPE by the teachers welcome participation by students and parents, creating a climate of openness and accessibility.

This climate of openness and accessibility doesn't come without a cost. Time must be set aside for meetings. But when a problem arises, because of the small size of the school, a meeting can be called quickly, a solution arrived at and a plan of action put in to place in a matter of days, even hours. In a big school a task force might need to be appointed and report presented to the school board or principal before an out of touch decision is made and handed down. Being small, CPE can easily experiment with new ways of doing things or pause to be responsive to individual events and needs, to mourn or celebrate. If there is a crisis or something to celebrate, the whole school can make time for it. The small size of the school and the regular engagement in shared decision making facilitates the building of personal connections, of caring between teachers, students and parents. It is that caring, the feeling of being known and appreciated that helps build the student's enthusiasm for learning and commitment to the school.

Just as teachers are given the power to run the school, the student is, as much as possible, put in charge of his or her own learning experience. Partly because of the background of the children and partly from educational philosophy, the school is less interested in "coverage" than in instilling intellectual habits. In the traditional view of schooling, the students are treated like a vessel into which knowledge needs to be poured. Every student needs to graduate knowing all the elements in the periodic table, the capitals of each state, read some Shakespeare and our Constitution, how to solve algebra and geometry word problems and, say, name the presidents. How many of the well educated people in this room can do that? Rather than emphasize the ever growing body of knowledge people expect kids to know, CPE focuses their energy on teaching intellectual habits.

The idea for this partially comes from Meier's first teaching experience in a kindergarten class which she compares with graduate school. Only on both these ends of the educational continuum are the student's natural self-directed love of learning cultivated. In her words:

Kindergarten teachers know that helping children learn to become more self-reliant is part of their task--starting with tying shoes and going to the bathroom. Catering to children's growing independence is a natural part of a kindergarten teacher's classroom life. This is , alas, the last time children are given independence, encouraged to make choices, and allowed to move about on their own steam. The older they get the less we take into account the importance of children's own interests, and the less we cherish their capacity for engaging in imaginative play. (In fact, we worry in kindergarten if children lack such capacity, while later on we worry if they show too much.) In kindergarten we design our rooms for real work, not just passive listening. We put things in the room that will appeal to children, grab their interests, and engage their minds and hearts. Teachers in kindergarten are editors, critics, cheerleaders, and caretakers, not just lecturers or deliverers of instruction... "coaching" is second nature in the kindergarten classroom.[2]

The focus for Central Park East is not coverage but teaching intellectual habits which are naturally cultivated in kindergarten but usually discarded in the later authoritarian model of the bare walled, desks in a line classroom. They have refined the essential habits down to a list of these five:

that should be internalized by every student, and used no matter what they are studying about, both in school and especially out of it! These five "habits" include concern for evidence (how do you know that?), viewpoint (who said it and why?), cause and effect (what led to it, what else happened), and hypothesizing (what if, supposing that).

But the most important of all is the 5^th habit: who cares? Knowing and learning take on importance only when we are convinced it matters, it makes a difference.[3]

These habits are not just for the student to learn but are used to run the school. As much as possible the problems which arise in the running of the school are analyzed and discussed by the teaching staff much the same way a student would be asked to do it for a report or oral presentation. The habit of exploring viewpoint, evidence and cause and effect are especially needed because of the diversity of culture, language and national origin which precipitates many of the schools misunderstandings and problems. Meier explains how this works in these words:

The deep immersion in a value system that places mutual respect first and encourages a climate of diversity and disagreement becomes enormously powerful over time, and not just for the staff. The kids know [by practicing what we teach] we are serious. It rubs off.[4]

These are just a few of the many successful innovations in education practiced by Meier and the teachers at Central Park East. I wish I had another 20 minutes to tell you of the many powerful insights and lessons Meier packs into her slender book. We should be proud her publisher is our own Beacon Press. I recommend the book highly and hope we use her ideas in our own religious education program.

What is so remarkable to me about Central Park East is how it challenges popular prejudices. The quality of education these students receive which many might be tempted to label unteachable rivals New York's elite academies. Most of these kids do not inherit intellectual culture from their families and friends as I did growing up the child of a professor playing with the children of professors. The school is able to transmit the value of education because of the many leveled climate of care and respect in which students are taught. These values and habits are instilled by intentionally engaging the learner within which knows no racial or cultural boundary. These intellectual habits well learned give CPE graduates even an advantage when they attend college where these habits are prized.

The lessons for America from these small schools in Harlem are very important for us to hear. Even the disenfranchised, troubled, poor can succeed with proper support and encouragement in our system of education and by doing so join the mainstream of our culture. It isn't a matter of how much money is spent on them that makes the crucial difference. Make no mistake, money is still desperately needed in our schools but it needs to go to the teacher in the classroom who, here in Florida, are often forced to buy needed supplies out of their own pockets. What makes Central Park East work is a design which doesn't get in the way of teachers and parents working together to love the kids so they can allow the greatness within each of them to flower.

We cannot afford, by our lack of caring, to allow the social sickness of poverty to destroy our youth. The optimal place to break the cycle of poverty is in our public schools. The road isn't easy by any means and the barriers of racism, distrust, and self-doubt are enormous. That is why the success of Central Park East is so important for us to hear. Yes, the powerful intellectual habits cultivated of learning in an environment of respect and publicly shared power can be effectively engendered. What makes it all work isn't adding more fear into the lives of children who are already ruled and numbed into apathy by it. What makes it all work is what is often missing in their lives, which is love and trust in their inherent worth and dignity.

Copyright (c) 1997 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore. All rights reserved.

[1] Meier, Deborah, The Power of Their Ideas, Beacon Press, Boston, 1995, ISBN 0-8070-3110-0, p16
[2] Meier, p 48
[3] Meier, p 41
[4] Meier, p 58-9