Free The Schools

April Bennet talks about Friends School

Posted on: 05-27-2002 22:41

April Bennet is the daughter of Polly Smock. She grew up in Virginia Beach and went to the Quaker-run Friends School there. I've already published Smock's views on education (look below or in the archives to read the posts about her). April has just recently finished getting her Masters degree in therapy. I asked her for her views on her own experiences going to a private school. She replied:

Going to Friends School was one of the defining experiences of my life. It helped me feel like a
good, worthwhile person because there were teachers who cared about me and who taught me according to what I needed, not just what the curriculum demanded. In 3rd grade, I tested at a 12th grade reading level, and my teacher sent me to the library during language arts time --to do whatever I wanted. She knew I would read, becuase that's what I loved to do, and thus I learned to value and pursue my abilities with words. I also learned that what I was good at was important to her because she valued the person I was becoming, and wanted to see who that would be.

In contrast, I was told during my 2nd grade year in public school that I worked too slowly, and was not allowed out at recess because of that. This was the "advanced" section of second grade. I was put in a reading group that was far below my capacities, and when I told the teacher that I had already finished, in my previous year at Friends School, the language arts book the class was working on, my teacher ignored me. Flat out pretended I hadn't spoken.

My mother sent me back to Friends School the next year, even though she had to take on a second job as the school's maintenance person to do it. She paid in monthly installments for my elementary education, finishing the payments sometime in my first year of college. When I went back to public school again in the seventh grade, I went immediately to the library, expecting it to be the warm, welcoming place that it was at Friends School. I was surprised to be either unacknowledged or treated suspiciously, and did not spend much further time there.

Such is life! I don't know what I think about school vouchers. I do believe that our public schools should be wonderful places, with creative and expansive and exciting educational programs, with teachers who have vision and create kids who are excited to learn. I don't know how to do that, but I do know that we haven't really tried.

Making testing a priority doesn't create a good educational system becuase it's not a theory of education, it's a theory of achievement. Achievement comes after education, and is based on the motivating talents in a person. Tests, then, don't even get at everyone's achievements, while they wrongly assume that everyone has had the kind of education that will reveal their particular ability to achieve.

Maybe I'm saying that we would be a better country if our schools were creative, expansive, amazing, and well-funded places, and that it's somewhat of a cop-out to give up on the schools by sending kids away from them. It's a cop-out for the government, not the parents. I understand the parents' motivation completely.

So maybe we should have vouchers and the government should be so embarrassed about that that they work hard to make our public schools really great. Until then, though, I have to say I don't think I will let the public schools fail my children the way they failed me.

So, no easy answers. But this is really the first time I've thought about it. I'd be interested in what you think, as you've probably done bunches of good research.

More from Polly Smock

Posted on: 05-27-2002 22:38

Polly Smock wrote me again to follow up on her earlier email:

P.S. Re: funding:
1) Don't tie funding to test scores. That's a lose-lose scenario.

2) Maybe increase funding to educational departments of museums, arts organizations, environmental organizations, libraries, etc. that can impact a lot of schools and learning communities. (I say "learning communities" in the spirit of rethinking what a school is -- I'm thinking there are as yet ways of educating our children that we have not yet envisioned, but may be the answer to the overinstitutionalization that is taking the learning out of education.) Maybe make these programs available to families, which is the context in which so much learning and reinforcing of learning happens.

I don't know a whole lot about it, but I'm interested in the idea of vouchers -- parents having a choice, and that choice having some money behind it. Kind of like voting with your wallet. Maybe some new kinds of "learning communities" would emerge out of that. Before I get behind it, I'd like to look at voucher programs that already exist, and see what problems may have been encountered, and what benefits...

I guess what I was getting at in my earlier ramblings was that I'm not sure I can get fully behind funding of schools as they are today. I can see additional funding helping some things in some schools(like, it's obvious that money makes a difference in the schools described in Kozol's book), but it seems that some school systems are as much or more about power and status quo as they are about education. Would money change that? Or would it, I hope, gradually attract more enlightened people and ideas? Anyway, that's why I want, ideally - a major rethinking to precede money decisions.

Vouchers Build Communities?

Posted on: 05-27-2002 20:53

Cheryl Wetzstein, writing in the Washington Times, reports a new study indicating the wealth building effects which vouchers might have.

Private-school voucher programs are likely to make low-income neighborhoods more racially integrated and boost property values, says an economics professor who is studying the effects of education policy changes on communities and school quality. In the current education system, families are assigned to a public school according to their address, Thomas J. Nechyba told a forum at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) on Friday. Taxpayer-funded voucher programs, which allow families to choose a school, encourage mobility because they "sever the link" between residency and schools, said Mr. Nechyba, who is an associate professor of economics and public policy studies at Duke University in Durham, N.C.

Success is a risky business

Posted on: 05-27-2002 20:32

In the course of my research I came upon this article by Joanne Jacobs. The gist of the article deserves repeating:

Traditionally, nothing succeeds like failure. Failure is rewarded with more money for more programs, more specialists, and, of course, more failure. Success, on the other hand, is a risky business. It destroys excuses. It raises expectations. It’s even worse when a profit-seeking business succeeds with high-risk students. If customer-serving, bottom-line-adding businesses can run schools, that opens the door to a host of market evils: Independently run charter schools staffed by non-unionized teachers. Voucher-empowered parents shopping for their schools of choice.

A communist economy

Posted on: 05-27-2002 20:28

Theodore Forstmann offers this perspective on the schools:

We live in a society that thrives on democratic capitalism. This is a statement of fact that no one-from Jesse Helms on one end of the political spectrum to Hillary Rodham Clinton on the other-will dispute. Yet we operate our education system by principles diametrically opposed to democratic capitalism. Democratic means many things, but it means at least this: that people have a say. We trust people to choose their party affiliation, their Congressmen, their Senators, their President-and through these representatives, their laws and government. We trust people not only to select politicians, but to do other, arguably even more dangerous, things. Like driving, for example. We let people have control over multi-ton vehicles-to choose their roads, pass cars, and drive at high speeds vehicles that are potential killers. We let people choose where to live, what to read, how to pray, whether to drink-in short, and within relatively moderate limits, how to live their lives. But we do not let people choose the education they would like for their children. That’s one contradiction. The second is that America is not only a democratic country but a capitalist one as well. Suppliers compete for the choice, the business, of the individual. In all areas except one: education. As the late Al Shanker, former head of the American Federation of Teachers, observed: It’s time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system in which everybody’s role is spelled out in advance and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It’s no surprise that our school system doesn’t improve: it more resembles the Communist economy than our own market economy. Why don’t we apply democratic capitalism to education? There must be a very good reason for such a gross inconsistency.

Home schooling is growing

Posted on: 05-27-2002 20:21

In the course of my research I came upon this article about homeschooling. Originally published in the Detroit Free Press and written by Peggy Walsh-Sarnecki. The article goes a long way towards deflating some out-of-date stereotypes about homeschooling, in particular the idea that it has to happen at home.

"Very rarely are we at home," said Jennifer Makas, mother of four. "It's more on the road. We've met people from all over the metro area. "It's more home-directed school." Once, homeschooling evoked visions of children sitting around the dining room table amid stacks of books while Mom dispensed wisdom about Shakespeare, geometry -- and probably the Bible. Other parents and educators criticized homeschooling, saying that children weren't learning social skills. But in the past decade, homeschooling has evolved into something that's often anywhere but at home, and students are rarely alone. They're seeking other home- schoolers to share resources and classes, taking field trips, traveling abroad and joining curriculum organizations and schools offering support to parents teaching at home.

Clearly, things have changed. This kind of schooling doesn't even deserve to be called "homeschooling." It would be more accurate to simply describe it as "parent directed schooling."

The article went on to offer some statistics about how much homeschooling has grown:

Homeschooling has been growing steadily. Today, there are 700,000 to 1.25 million homeschooled children. The U.S. Census Bureau estimated up to 400,000 homeschooled students as recently as 1994 and calculated that the movement is growing as much as 15 to 20 percent annually. Nationally, there are more children involved in homeschool programs than the 579,880 students in charter schools or the 15,125 in school voucher programs.

The article finished up by telling the story of the Makase family, worth repeating here:

The Makases bought a home in Dearborn because they wanted to send their children to the public schools. But a decade ago, a couple of failed millage elections led to their school district eliminating some programs. By 1992, the Makases felt their son was misbehaving in school because he was bored after programs for gifted students were eliminated. Private schools were too expensive. Then, Jennifer Makas heard of the Clonlara School in Ann Arbor, a private school that offers curriculums for homeschoolers along with teacher support and accredited high school diplomas. The cost was $500 per student. In the beginning, Chris Makas, 17, said he wondered whether he would miss meeting classmates.But that changed when his family hooked up with others. "Now I don't feel like I'm missing anything," he said. "We're allowed to move at our own pace, which we weren't allowed to do in the public school."

Private school - one parents choice

Polly Smock is a woman who lives in Virginia Beach, Virginia. She was 25 when she had her daughter, April Bennet. Polly raised April on her own, and sent her to private school, the Friend's School in Virginia Beach. April is now fully grown and out of school. Recently I asked Polly why she sent April to private school. She quotes my questions and writes me this reply:

1.) Why did you send April to private school?
I did not like what I saw of the public schools in our area: 1)The unimaginative and limited curriculum (no foreign language until high school, limited arts education, very little in the way of advanced placement programs at that time). 2)The unbelievably ignorant policy at that time of corporal punishment -- this was only 20 years ago! Even though I doubted that she would ever be subjected to such institutionalized barbarism because she was such a shy, well-behaved kid, I did not want her to be a powerless person in a system whose role models saw that as a way to solve problems. Unbelievable. 3) What seemed to me to be an atmosphere of pressure and drivenness, in an apparent attempt to get students to achieve and excel, which misses the point, really. I had grown up in both public and private schools in a progressive university town, where lots of students excelled and many went on to the highest-rated colleges, all without making it driven and overbearing. We were inspired to enjoy learning, and excelling was just a by-product of that. So I was looking for something like that for my daughter, but also something more nurturing than I had had, because April was very sensitive.

So it wasn't that I chose private over public. I was looking for a place that reflected my values for her and would fit her particular nature as well. Friends School seemed like the best choice, given those criteria.

2.) Did you face economic hardships because you were sending your daughter to private school?
I was facing such economic hardships anyway as a single parent that I qualified for some generous financial assistance. Even so, It was more money than I had in my budget and I was constantly juggling.

3.) Do you have an opinion about how our schools should be financed?
That question brings up some complex issues, but the short answer would be that I think the playing field should be evened out in some way, so that local taxes don't determine who gets the good education with all the fancy programs, and who on the other hand gets the toxic buildings and oversized classes. Jonathan Kozol discusses this persuasively in his book, Savage Inequalities. But the bureaucratic cookie-cutter approach of federally funded programs with their least-common-denominator results is disappointing, to put mildly.

Wonderful things can be created at the grass-roots level. I also want to know more about for-profit schools. I think it's worth truly rethinking the whole idea of education: What do we want? Who decides what communities should have? How do different kids learn and what do they need to learn and what do different ways of achieving that learning cost, and where can the money come from? I'd love to sit at my kitchen table with Jonathan Kozol and a few others and discuss that over dinner for several weeks running, and see what we come up with. I really would.