Presidio Hill School: What is a Progressive School?

A few months ago (October 5 – 6, 2007), the teachers at Presidio Hill School joined other progressive educators from around the country for the first national Progressive Schools Conference in more than a decade. You’ll be happy to note that we helped to host the event by sponsoring 15 progressive educators at the school for a lunch and tour. Many of the other area progressive schools were involved with the conference planning, including San Francisco School, Park Day School in Oakland, Blue Oak School in Napa, and several others. Two of our own teachers presented at the conference, talking about progressive practices and what they are up to in their classrooms.

As I have often said, progressive education is less about regurgitating rigid content standards (although content is very important as students mature) and more about creating habits of mind that make life-long learners successful. Progressive Education is also democracy in action.

Thinking about Presidio Hill School as not only the oldest progressive school in California, but also as one of the exemplars of progressive practices, I put together some questions that people ask me about our school. The questions serve as a starting point for this discussion.


What are the hallmarks of a truly progressive school?
Progressive schools value the social-emotional growth of students. Progressive Schools also value collaboration over competition, which is part of both democracy in action and our social activist heritage. Also, progressive schools promote depth over breadth in all content areas, which spurs student interests and helps students pave their own way into a particular subject or discipline. Additionally, many Progressive Schools either de-emphasize or just don’t give grades as a way to tell that a student is progressing. Written comments take the place of just having grades only.

Don’t many other schools do this?
Absolutely, comments and commenting is a hallmark of not just progressive schools but most independent schools in general. What’s unique about our school is that parents, teachers, and even students are in on the conversation. It’s not just a one-way monologue, but the whole community is engaged in the discussion. Comments serve as a way for teachers, parents, and students to understand what can be done to improve and how we all can work together to usher that improvement along.

Who decides what gets taught at PHS?
At many independent schools, the school decides. It is the school’s curriculum. It is what the school values.

At PHS, teachers have great autonomy on what is taught, what is added, and what is taken out. The school (in teams of educators) does “scope and sequence work” to determine what should be taught where and when in the curriculum. The school audits what we teach by having conversations around what students know and should know, and what skills they have or should have from teacher to teacher and year to year. Nearly all our teachers belong to national and local organizations where best practices (and even standards) are shared. Our teachers present what they know at conferences, workshops and staff meetings and learn from each other and from conferences, workshops and other means all the time. We don’t rely on textbook companies or the state to tell us what gets taught when.

In what other ways do teachers collaborate?
Teachers discuss students constantly. This is a very important point: teachers know more about students and their world—socially, emotionally, and academically—than at any other school that I have worked. I have worked in traditional schools, progressive schools, and alternative schools. Teachers also tend to know other students that aren’t in their classroom, too. The great thing about being the size that we are is that we get to know one another well.

Last question, my child really loves PHS, can I go to school here?
Absolutely. Many parents and adults involved with PHS report they get so much satisfaction from engaging the students they love with what they are learning. By attending the Corporation Meetings, Follies, driving on field trips, going to Dialogue Circles, volunteering at the auction, and many other kinds of endeavors gives parents and the adults in the community a progressive school education too.

REPRINTED FROM MY BIMONTHLY
FRIDAY LETTER 10-19-2007
(http://www.presidiohill.org/news/archives/from_the_director/)

US Presidential Candidates On Education: Dennis Kucinich

Dennis Kucinich is the progressive's progressive. He's sort of a throwback to the populist presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan with more than a little bit of a whiff of the accused anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti . Kucinich is like your crazy uncle who everyone is embarrassed by because of his odiferous gas, but you can't help but be enamored by his willingness to call a spade a spade.

This is where USA Today says that Kucinich stands on education...

Dennis Kucinich on education

On No Child Left Behind law
Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, doesn’t hide his contempt for the education law known as No Child Left Behind and its reliance on test scores to judge performance. He voted for the bill in 2001. Kucinich told the National Education Association in July 2007 that he wants to reduce the amount of testing and give schools greater flexibility to use other ways of measuring student achievement. “We need to make sure children can read, but we do not want to defeat the learning experience and make it all about testing, because then all you have is a generation of test takers,” he said.

On making college affordable
Kucinich says he wants to make public college tuition-free and would pay for it by cutting the defense budget by 15%, or $75 billion. He voted for a bill that would cut the interest rate on student loans by half, to 3.4%, and increase Pell grantsfrom $4,310 in 2007 to $5,400 by 2012. President Bush signed the bill into law Sept. 27, 2007.

Other education priorities
Kucinich wants to establish pre-kindergarten programs for all 4-year-olds. He said this and other education initiatives can be paid for by cutting defense spending.

US Presidential Candidates On Education: Rudy Giuliani

This post is taken directly from USA Today's on-line segment that shows where the candidates stand on various issues.

Rudy Giuliani on education:

On No Child Left Behind law
Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani has not explicitly criticized the education standards law known as No Child Left Behind. Signed by President Bush in 2002, the law requires every state to test students annually. Schools failing to make academic progress over several years could be closed or have their faculty replaced.

Giuliani talks about giving parents more control over decisions affecting their children’s education, instead of giving it all to the federal and state agencies that are central to the law’s structure. “My mother did a much better job with my education than a government bureaucrat could do,” he said on his campaign website.

On making college affordable
Giuliani doesn’t offer many specifics, except to say he wants the competitive marketplace to sort things out. “Give people more of the decision-making about education and schools will become more competitive,” he told Scholastic News Online in September 2007 during a stop in Houston.

Other education priorities
Giuliani’s mantra on the campaign trail is to talk about school choice, such as more charter schools and vouchers for low-income families to pay for tuition at private schools. He has said repeatedly that the federal government should not be telling local schools what to do.

(Note: I wrote USA Today for permission to use their content, yet they never returned my message. Therefore, I will link back to the original on-line article. To see the original article go to: http://asp.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/issues.aspx?i=8&c=6)

US Presidential Candidates On Education: Joseph Biden

Joe Biden is the first candidate that we'll examine. His stance on No Child Left Behind is, like most of the other candidates, that it is under-funded. He favors innovation and retaining good teachers, while proposing a sizable increase in funding to schools. These sound like good ideas, except where are we going to get that money? Raising taxes?

The following, taken from the candidates website, represents what Biden believes about Education:

Education: A Promise For The Future

“My mother has an expression, children tend to become that which you expect of them. I want a country where we expect much from America’s children. Every child must graduate from high school. Every child should go on to higher education. Today, just two-thirds of students entering high school graduate, and about two-thirds of those go
on to college. We are losing too many children in this country, wasting too much talent, leaving so much potential untapped. We know what we need to do: First, stop focusing just on test scores. Second, start education earlier. Third, pay educators more. Fourth, reduce class size. Fifth, make higher education affordable.”
-- Joe Biden

To build a 21st century education system, Joe Biden would:
1. Move Toward A Sixteen Year System
2. Focus on Retaining And Training Teachers
3. Reduce Class Size

______________________________________________________________________

1. Strengthening Our Education System: Moving Toward A Sixteen Year System Joe Biden would replace the 20th century 12-year school system with a 16-year system. He would start education earlier so that every parent who wants to can send their child to two years of preschool and make sure that students can afford at least two years of higher education.

2. Support and Retain Our Teachers
Research has consistently shown that teachers are the single most important factor in determining how well a student performs in school, yet we can’t keep talented teachers in the classroom. Teacher attrition costs our schools $2 to $7 billion a year. Each year 270,000 of our 3.2 million public school teachers leave the field. Every school day, over 1,000 teachers leave the field for reasons other than retirement. Teachers leave for a wide range of reasons – from low pay to burn out.

3. Reduce Class Size
Create a national initiative to reduce class size: Joe Biden would hire 100,000 new teachers to reduce the average class size to 18 students, particularly in the early grades. Students in small class sizes in kindergarten - 3rd grade are as much as half a year ahead of students from larger classes in reading, math and science by the time they get to 5th grade. Smaller classes will provide teachers with the resources they need to create the opportunities for learning that our students deserve.

Progressive Education: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Progressive Education has come a very long way since the 1940s--or has it?

Open Space: E-Portfolios

Nearly two weeks ago at the Progressive Educators' Network Conference in San Francisco held the Whitcomb Hotel (October 4 – 6, 2007), a group of educators came together in an “Open Space” dialogue to discuss portfolios in schools. Most of the folks that came to the open space session had some knowledge of portfolio assessment, yet the groups’ familiarity with using portfolios to assess students ran the gamut from “we use portfolios a lot” to “I’ve heard a bit about portfolio as an assessment tool and I’d like to learn more.”

This particular blog entry attempts to start the conversation about portfolios between those people who want to enter the dialogue in this “Open Source” community. By Open Source, we mean anyone is free to join in the conversation (in a respectful way of course). Eventually, we’ll talk about moving traditional class content into portfolios. Later, we’ll talk about e-portfolios (electronic portfolios) and give some ideas about how many of the people within this community can join in the discussion. Finally, we’ll distill some of the thinking that we at Presidio Hill School have been doing in thinking about portfolios, particularly e-Portfolios, with an eye on their further use in our classrooms and beyond.

To start, portfolios and even electronic portfolios are nothing new. Many schools have been using both kinds of portfolios in a way to help “authentically assess” what a particular child does on a specific project or within a given discipline. Some schools even attempt to capture a learner's work and reflection in a wholistic way across disciplines.

Perhaps we should begin by having some common terminology. I don’t mean to offend anyone or even talk down to people, but I want to make sure that I’m not assuming anything by using terms that could mean something very different for someone else. The “comment” section on this blog is a great way to correct or clarify any of the assumptions that I may make.

Let’s start with a definition of “portfolio.” A portfolio is a collection of work by an individual or group. The work can be used for purposes of securing a job (by showing a body of work), as a collection of learning samples, or can be seen as a keepsake for future observers. Oftentimes, portfolios show people’s best work or it shows how work has evolved over time. Portfolios are popular in the creative fields because to show someone work over time in a visual or auditory way (like song clips for a sound artist), is a good way to track progression.

Moving on to discuss the term “authentic assessment." Authentic Assessment is assessing students on what they actually know or want to know rather than on what someone else (a teacher, school, district, test company, state, or nation) wants that student to know. For instance, a student does a report on Caesar Chavez. The student, often in conference with the teacher, comes up with what s/he wants to know about the Chavez, and the student completes the project with the teacher as the guide. Assesment occurs all throughout the process with clear expectations (perhaps a rubric) and at the end with the actual product. Another definition of “authentic assessment” is that the person being assessesed calls in people from outside the school community to provide contextual feedback (i.e., a panel of evaluators, maybe the teacher is involved, maybe not)>

Many of the people at the PEN sessison talked about ways in which portfolios were used to either assess or to have students reflect upon their learning. Students reflecting on their learning is one of the most powerful ways that teachers can take students far beyond the moment in their learning and into the realm of connecting their thinking to some larger purpose. Some questions that students may have are: Why is this particular artifact (in the portfolio) relevant? Does the piece (that I’m reflecting on) show what I want it to show? Does it answer what the teacher/facilitator would like me to answer? Is this my best piece? Is it a piece that I’m proud of? Is it just one piece in the journey of the piece? How did I create the piece?

This last question is one that begins to get into metacognition, which is when students begin to reflect on how they came up with the processes involved in creation. Metacognition are the whys and hows of a particular assignment.

The next blog entry will focus on ways that traditional class content may be archived as well as using portfolios to assess student work and/or have students refelect on their thinking.

Open Source Learning Communities

LA days are so far away from today, nearly a generation as the crow flies. As a beginning teacher back in 1990, I needed to learn how to learn. By the time I left full time college in 1984, I believed strongly that I was done for good with school--no looking back. Yet, I found myself trapped in the whirl of the school I graduated from, working in a pyschiatric hospital to dull the pain of feeling like a failure. How many people thought that when they left college? How many people saw that school had let them down or worse, they had let school down. Yet, I loved school, or parts of it: the reading, the discussing, the camraderie.

The spiral of history means that learning happens over and over again. Some folks call it karma, but it's more like loop the loops in a rickety World War I bi-plane or circling the globe for months on end, over and over and over again on the space shuttle--sometimes the terrain is the same but often times it is different.

I've been speaking to my colleagues about this concept of open source learning communities. It's not necessarily up to us to create it, we believe. We are all a part of creating something new. That's where you, the reader, comes in.

Open Source Learning Communities, like open source computer code, means that you get to share ideas and change what works to suit your needs. Learning is it's own dialectic. Sometimes the swoop and concept of history even changes. For those of us who believe in Democracy, particularly the Democracy that is the Internet at this moment in history, our lives reflect bringing a sense of community to the public K-12 education space, with real people, who have real challenges. There is also an ideal, too. It's a priori and relative.

The Open Source Learning Community is not about exploiting people or making money or creating skilled workers for a better tomorrow. Rather, open source learning is about giving what we create away so that other people get to take advantage of what has been created. They in turn give away what they have created, and so on, and so on. The world then becomes a more transparent place with an ethos that counters the notion that people are broken and not fixable. At this point I'm not pointing to socities that have it down and can give us what we need if we study them well. I'm also not positing that the notion of Capitalism is bad. Listen carefully, we have solutions to fix the world's problems and we will need all of the tools at our disposal to heal them, even some of those things that created the so-called problem.

In future installments, we'll cover what works in education and what needs more time to be developed. Part of the mission is to weave in the loop of history that is memoir, storytelling, and parables to illucidate what can be.

Story tells truth always, in all ways.