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Going for Depth Instead of Prep
BY MICHAEL WINERIP BOSTON IMAGINE a school where the principal hates tests as much as the kids do. Easy school, right? "A lot of work," said Jonathan Howell. "I stayed up a lot of nights to finish my reports." Last year, as a seventh grader at Mission Hill elementary and middle school, Jonathan failed social studies on his first try. His oral presentation did not impress the school's adult assessment committee and he learned a hard lesson. "I learned it's good to use note cards," he said. "If you forget, you can look at cards and get back on track." One recent morning, Dennisse Rorie arrived at school and was given two hours to prepare an oral presentation on Eleanor Roosevelt as part of her final history grade. She was required to use at least two library books plus the Internet for her three-minute talk. The committee wants to be sure students - not their teachers or parents - can do research. Glancing at note cards, the seventh grader spoke expertly of Mrs. Roosevelt's work with the National Consumer League, her push to make labor leaders more receptive to blacks, her newspaper column, and it was easy to tell this was Dennisse's report. Asked how Mrs. Roosevelt had accomplished so much, Dennisse said, "She had great connections because her husband was president." Dennisse also presented her three-month-long research paper on the women's suffrage movement, discussing Lucy Stone, the Grimkes, Elizabeth Stanton and, of course, Susan B. Anthony, who "had respect for herself, she carried herself as a woman, she didn't walk around like Christina Aguilera." At Mission Hill, if teachers want to know how Catherine Taylor has progressed in reading, they have a more reliable measure than standardized test scores. There is a tape of Catherine reading aloud several times a year, starting in kindergarten on Sept. 20, 1997, when she cannot pick out a single word in "Caps for Sale," and progressing to November 2002 in fifth grade, reading "Johnny Appleseed" fluently. This small, predominantly African-American public school in one of Boston's poorest sections, has the markings of a top-flight private school and is the latest master work by Deborah Meier, a past winner of a MacArthur "genius" award, founder of the Central Park East elementary and secondary schools in Harlem and one of the more original thinkers in American education. Children here are pushed to examine topics in depth, whether it is ancient Egypt, social justice or the moon. And when it is time to assess whether they are ready for high school, a committee of teachers and community people questions them as if they are middle school doctoral candidates. How do you make Susan B. Anthony as real as Christina Aguilera? You go deep and give it your all. In January, a blue, plastic, footwide Nile River appeared along the 400-foot main hallway (emptying into the Mediterranean by Kathy Clunis's kindergarten) and for the next three months, every grade studied ancient Egypt, according to its ability. For the social justice unit, Matthew Knoester's class researched famous African-Americans, then turned themselves into a wax museum, that included 11-year-old Grace Zutrau with a fake mustache in a freeze pose, as Thurgood Marshall. To understand the moon, a teacher, Joyce Stevens, took small groups into a dark closet (the universe), spun them around in a swivel chair (the rotating earth) and shone a flashlight (the sun) on a foam ball impaled on a skewer held over their heads (the moon), and thus helped Walter Pultinas, a seventh grader, finally grasp why people never see the dark side of the moon. Priscilla Rorie, a parent, who has two daughters at Mission Hill, believes it is a major improvement over the Agassiz, a Boston public school that the girls attended through fifth grade and where Ms. Rorie is a teacher. "Everything at the Agassiz is teaching to the state tests," she said. "It's deadening for teachers and kids. They follow the state testing curriculum block by block." This is what Ms. Meier, 72, is fighting, "top down standardization," bred by state testing programs that she sees as pushing public education toward mediocrity. She is offended that many politicians leading the standardized testing charge, including President Bush and his brother Jeb, the governor of Florida, (graduates of Phillips Academy in nearby Andover, Mass.), are products of private schools that are exempt from state testing. "It's like they're saying a safe, mediocre education is good enough for public schools. After 35 years, I'm not willing to settle for that. We can make city schools as good as good private schools." In the mid-1990's, she almost got her shot. In the wake of the "genius" award, plus her Central Park East fame, she was given an office by New York City officials and a mandate to open a network of small schools that would create their own assessment systems and serve 50,000 students. But before she could get it off the ground, the tide changed, there was a new city chancellor, Rudy Crew, and a new state education commissioner, Richard Mills, both big testers. Today Ms. Meier is back where she was in 1974, principal of a small urban school. She still gets out the word, through her latest book, "In Schools We Trust." Hundreds of educators visit each year to see how it is done. She lives next door to the school and does what she can to protect it - from the state tests. While Massachusetts has one of the most aggressive testing programs, Ms. Meier has studied the law, concluded that elementary and middle schoolers do not have to take the test, and so only those children whose parents want them to take the test, do (about half). The school does virtually no test prep. Still, if there is one thing they learn at Mission Hill it is that just because you are not prepping all the time, it does not mean you cannot get smart. Every year from a third to half of the eighth graders pass the city exam for the elite public high schools - including Jonathan Howell and Julie Rorie this year. As Julie says: "At my other school, we prepped like crazy, we'd take the test and forget it. Here, we always take a step back and look at the work we did. We just don't throw away the history we learned last year. We bring it back." |
