Adults Make A Connection in the Lives of Impressionable Teens
MetroWest Daily News
July 3, 2005
By Charlie Breitrose
Every day, Principal Charlie Sposato begins the day at the Media and Technology Charter School in Boston by welcoming all his students with a handshake, and at the end of the day he bids them farewell, but not until they have told him one thing they learned that day.
The personal connections he and his staff make with the students at MATCH is key to creating a successful school, Sposato said. He does not stand alone in his opinion.
The other participants at the MetroWest roundtable discussion on Reinventing High School -- Framingham Superintendent Chris Martes, Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School Principal Teri Schrader and Daniel Greenberg, a founder of and staff member at the Sudbury Valley school -- all said teens need to make a real connection with an adult at the school to make the most of their time in high school.
"The key to learning is to establish a relationship with students," Schrader said. "They need to have a real place to be, a place to learn from their mistakes and their experiments."
The schools run by Sposato and Schrader look much different from most public high schools. As charter schools, they are publicly funded, but are much smaller, with students counted in the hundreds, not thousands.
The large high school model used in most communities in the United States is failing, according to Microsoft founder and chief executive officer Bill Gates. In his address to the National Governors Association, Gates said most high schools use an outdated model and fail to prepare students for college or to work in the modern global economy.
Students attending Framingham High School have a class schedule that looks much the way it did when their parents were in high school, Martes said. The 2,000 students take several classes at a time and move between periods when the bell rings. That does not mean the school operates the same way, however.
The school, which was awarded the Commonwealth Compass Award this month for its innovative programs, has several ways to reach students and give them some extra attention. Martes pointed to the Academic Development Center where students can go during school hours to get academic help from fellow students.
Also, the school runs a couple of programs for students struggling to make it at the school. Resiliency for Life challenges students to do better academically, as well as to do community service. Those who need more of a personal learning environment can go to the Thayer Campus, where they get an intense program in a small setting.
"In many ways we have taken a very large high school and broken it down, not as one academic structure but with lots of different programs," Martes said.
After hearing about Sposato's school, Greenberg said it sounds very different fron his school but also shares some key similarities. At the Sudbury Valley School, students decide what to learn and when. They also have to take as much of a role in running the school as the teachers and staff, Greenberg said, with each one getting an equal vote in the school meeting (based on the Town Meeting model).
"If they have to make consequential decisions in their life, they can handle it," Greenberg said.
Students from most schools do not get to make major decisions until after college, Greenberg said, and they often feel lost.
"Face it, when they reach 18, 21, 25 (years old) there is no one out there to help them," Greenberg said. "Talk to the average college graduate -- they are afloat."
Big schools can find ways to create smaller environments in a large building, said Dennis Shirley, a professor at Boston College's School of Education who studies school structures. Shirley applauded the efforts of Gates and his foundation to create smaller schools focusing on preparing students for college.
Two schools in Boston, Roxbury and Hyde Park high schools, have split the schools into smaller groups with specializations.
The new-look Boston schools offer programs where students work on projects outside school, as well as ones where they can learn about business or health.
"It works as long as it's not overly specialized," Shirley said, adding that there are some things all students must learn.
More important than the school structure, Shirley said, is reaching each student.
"A lot of good curriculum reform is about personalizing, to customize learning to all different types of learners out there and take account of their cultural differences," Shirley said. "Smaller (size) allows you to do that, but smaller does not necessarily mean you will do that."
In contrast, Douglas Sears, dean of Boston University's School of Education, said he thinks too much is being made about Gates' push for smaller schools.
"Many people are fixated on the size of schools," Sears said. "There is a whole lot of chatter about small learning communities and breaking big schools into smaller ones."
He has experience trying to reform a large urban high school. The BU School of Education was put in charge of turning around the Chelsea public schools in the 1990s. In the first effort, Sears said, they tried putting in teams and other strategies to create smaller groups in the school, but, he said, the real key to student success boiled down to the basics.
"Students need to know how to (do math), have a good command of the language and they have to have good habits -- work habits and habits of character," Sears said.
Strong standards and testing of students' knowledge of the standards is important, said Sears. He noted that the high-stakes MCAS test has grabbed the attention of Bay State high school students and has made them learn enough to pass the test.
Schrader said she worries the movement toward standards and testing is an attempt to create a one-size-fits-all educational system. Greenberg said the emphasis on the MCAS has frustrated many teachers.
"It is like the middle school model, with the teams," Shirley said, referring to the practice of having a small group of teachers work with a set of students who stick together throughout the day.
"I've talked to a lot of teachers discouraged by the inability to deviate (from the state requirements)," Greenberg said.
Sears also bristles at the words "global economy," which Gates often refers to. Rather than talking about technology and other ways to compete with other countries, Sears said it is more important to learn a foreign language, and learn it well.
"Show me a (public) high school in Massachusetts that has a requirement to be fluent in a second language -- there are none," Sears said. "They have to know how to do business, negotiate contracts, not just say 'bon jour.'"
Getting a school to change the way things have always been done can be a major challenge. To reform a school, teachers must have the freedom to change and the willingness to do so, Shirley said.
"Probably the first thing needed is a respectful attitude with teachers," Shirley said. "Most teachers feel reform is something they have done to them, not something they feel they have a hand in."
Parents must also be part of the equation, Shirley said. He suggested finding ways to invite and attract parents to the school, such as offering English as a Second Language classes for immigrant parents, night classes or even legal services for low-income parents.
"The school can kind of be a community center," Shirley said.
Sears said change will be slow, if not impossible, with the way that public schools work these days. Unions make it difficult for school leaders to bring in teachers who can change a school, Sears said.
"There needs to be the freedom for principals and superintendents to hire and fire and compete," Sears said.
To get the best science and math teachers, Sears said, districts should be able to compete in the job market by offering higher salaries for these high-demand and hard-to-fill positions.
In many schools, however, Sears sees the biggest obstacle to learning being good old-fashioned peer pressure.
"Our pop culture makes it unattractive in many schools for students to do well -- they are called geeks and nerds," Sears said. "Students get jackets for being good athletes, and points for looking good, which makes it so difficult for students to do well in school."
Having a small school does not guarantee success, Sposato acknowledged. A lot of hard work is required. In an effort to give students more time to learn, Sposato's school stretches out the school day and the school year.
"Time is such a valuable commodity," Sposato said.
MATCH students attend school for 195 days a year, 15 more than the state minimum that most public schools follow. The school day ends at 5 p.m., and students often stay later. Sposato said the pupils get 1,300 hours of instruction a year, and sophomores get 200 more hours on Saturdays to prepare for the MCAS. Most public school students get only slightly under 1,000 hours.
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