Bryan Heading in the Right Direction

A Public School Guy's Experience in a Private School
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5439-6132-4
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 282 Seiten

In 1995, a group of courageous educators, parents and children came together to create a school with a simple - perhaps simplistic - assumption: that things that often alienate people from one another - ethnicity, skin color, socioeconomic class - might instead be tools that bring people together. Referred to for years as 'a social experiment,' New Roads School in Santa Monica, CA became an example of what is possible when people from different cultural groups come together to create a community - to learn together, play together, solve problems together, To this day, New Roads remains a beacon for educators and others: an invitation to students, their teachers, their parents and those from the larger community to show up as who they are, join hands, and make the world a better place for all of us.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bryan, David

Leseproben

Preface

In September of 1995, New Roads School, a not-for-profit, independent school located in the Los Angeles area, first opened its doors to 70 middle school students. I was privileged to be one of its co-founders, and the Head of School for the first eighteen years of its history. During those years, the school grew from a relatively small middle school – grades 6, 7 and 8 – in facilities leased from a local Boys and Girls Club, to a K-12 school with nearly 700 students on several campuses. Nothing particularly new or exciting about that: another independent school in Los Angeles, a place seeming littered with private schools.

(For those less familiar with the world of non-profits and schools, a bit of clarification seems warranted. A non-profit organization is granted that status from the United States government, because it serves a public purpose. It is not necessarily the case that non-profits are either ‘poor’ or ‘self-less.’ In fact, some of the most enduring, most successful, and wealthiest institutions in the culture are not-for-profit. New Roads School was not one of them.)

(And another point perhaps better placed in a footnote: The term “independent” is used interchangeably with “private.” For many people independent sounds better: less exclusive than private – as in “private property, keep out.” Many of those who work in the private school world come to realize that one of the good things about private schools is that they are able to make decisions “independent” of some of the bureaucratically entangled regulations that flow from public school administrations.)

Although New Roads shared the features of many other schools – classes and subjects, teachers, and students - work, assessment, teachers, and students – it was also a place that went out of its way to ask questions about the value of all those features, and quite intentionally tried hard to blur the lines that are usually so strongly guarded and rigidly enforced at so many other places, schools and otherwise. As you will read, New Roads was quite intentionally demographically unique. Those of us who founded the school did not do so because Los Angeles needed yet another private school for parents who could afford to send their college-bound children. On the contrary, our goal was to open the doors of independent education to more people whose families could not hope to afford those very high tuitions private schools charge. And we would do so – again, quite intentionally - in a school community that, as much as possible, more accurately reflected the racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and quirky population of Los Angeles.

In order to “open those doors,” New Roads created one of the most aggressive financial aid programs in the private school world. We offered no scholarships; every student’s family paid tuition, although not necessarily the same tuition as the family of the student sitting next to them. No less that 40% of our budget – and sometimes more than 50% - went to need-based financial aid. That quantity of aid is almost unheard of in the world of private school education, unless that school has an ‘angel’ patron or two. New Roads did not: not one, not two. That meant we needed to watch our pennies carefully and ask people for money… a lot of people for a lot of money.

As is the case with many schools, New Roads served different roles for different people. For some, it was a wonderful school to send their children because, more often than not, learning felt the way it ought to feel: an exuberant romp from one experience to the next, from idea to idea, from class to class, and not the drudgery kids and teachers felt elsewhere, from chapter to chapter, text to text, test to test, grade to grade. For some, it was a wonderful place to work, because the environment seemed to offer an invitation to everyone to “show up as who you are.” For some it was a demonstration that young people and their teachers can begin, right now, to address some of the challenges in our world, rather than have school be a place to wait until they’d learned enough to one day be ready to take on the world. For some it was a school where kids had fun and got accepted to college, that prize on which they kept their eyes - a fun school, a ferocious education. And this list continues.

But all this tells only a bit of the complex story of this unique place. So much more went on in those 18 years than I can fit in a single piece of this size. Many talented people who did wonderful things for the New Roads School community are nowhere to be found in what follows here. My hope is that the pages ahead offer enough of the rest of that story to convince you that New Roads School and the bold experiment – and let’s be clear, bold and successful experiment - is worth paying attention to and worth learning from: its philosophy, its approach, its practices, and its people.

What to Read, What to Skim, and Where’s My Name?

As I’ve alluded to, this writing thing is hard. It certainly is for me. Of course there are all those lessons I always struggled with in English grammar classes: “I know it sounds right to you, but it sounds wonky to me.” Even more of a struggle was the question of voice: “How do I maintain a single voice over hundreds of pages, six drafts and the five years it’s taken me to go from the first sentence to this finished piece?”

Did I succeed? No, I don’t think so.

But is it worth your time trying to read it? I hope so. But a bit of help might be nice.

If you want to hear me wax philosophical - some might use the word ‘pontificate’ although I would prefer the term ‘muse’- by all means read the introduction. It tries to speak about the ideas that informed New Roads School. At the same time, those ideas are embedded in the many stories that fill the chapters thereafter.

Some chapters are more heavily story-based. Others read more like essays with a bit of story sprinkled in. I wish I could say this was intentional. In fact, I can blame it only on the less than facile skill of this novice writer. If you just can’t stand essays, by all means, move forward. There are more stories ahead. Then again, if you can manage to stick with it, I think I have a few insights worth considering. (But then again, I would; I wrote it.)

“Yes, but where is my name? Where am I?” - A Word About Names.

I was quite astonished by the numbers of people with very strong ideas about whether or not I should use people’s real names.

“But not every story is complimentary,” I said.

“Everything you wrote is true, right? Well, then use their names!”

“But honestly I have no desire to embarrass anyone?” said I.

“No! Of course you should not use people’s real names!” said someone else.

“But, it’s not like I’m making things up.” I responded.

“Do you really want to fight that lawsuit?” they asked.

Where did I land on this? Many of the names are made up and the particulars are modified so as not to embarrass the (very) real person about whom something is written. I used real names when what I spoke about was thoroughly positive or enhances the story being told.

A Word About Time

Although my time at New Roads began in 1995 and ended in 2013, and unfolded in some sort of order that approximated chronological, my experience of New Roads and of being and becoming a head of school did not. My understandings and approaches to this or that piece of the education-puzzle has been fluid. When I had to figure out how to deal with a threatening student, I could not help but relive the struggles of that 6th grader I met in 1995, or that time in 1961 when I hit my classmate in the 4th grade too hard and for all the wrong reasons. Ultimately, I opted to tell the story of New Roads as it lives in my experience.

Chapters are organized around different aspects of running a school - Admissions, Teachers, Parents, etc. To make one or another point, I circle back in time to events that happened that seem to me to illuminate the territory.

All this is to say that if you are looking for ‘a history’ of New Roads School - first this happened, then that, then - you will not find it here.

A Word About Everything Else - Visible and Invisible

Stories always get told by a storyteller. In this case, that’s me. As so much of my time in the more recent years were spent at the high school campus, so much of what went on at the elementary and middle schools is simply not here. There is no intention to leave things out nor to suggest that this focus is the most important. You won’t find much about the extraordinary work of Pat McCabe and Bruce Gram, Kathy Jarel-Girgis, Shelly Fredman, Vernon Johnson and others at our elementary school. Nor will you hear about our effort to create a middle school on La Cienega Boulevard and the fine and herculean efforts of Charletta Johnson and the fine teachers - Kamal Hassan, Viviana Trujillo, Mr. Ali-Il, Jon Pearson, and others whose New Roads - La Cienega experience gave birth to the Community Harvest Charter School. I...