Idaho School for the Deaf and Blind, Gooding, Idaho: October 27, 2008

Out of the doorway to my left tumbled a silent group of children, “speaking” to one another in an inward facing circle so they could see the words being signed. When they saw me a boy quickly signed to see if I understood. I did not, and they returned to their conversation. Like a traveler to a foreign land, I felt the gap created by the language barrier. I must have had similar feelings to those a deaf student has in a traditional school, and in most environments throughout his life.  At the Idaho School for the Deaf and the Blind (ISDB), the tables are turned, and students with vision and/or hearing loss form a community of peers. There I—the hearing person—was the outsider, the one for whom the conversation was inaccessible.

ISDB is in Gooding, a town of 3,300 people in south central Idaho. Just west of the town center there are acres upon acres of cows and the world’s largest factory making barrel cheese—the processed stuff that’s individually wrapped and marketed as “American cheese.” ISDB was founded in 1906 in the state capital of Boise, and moved to Gooding several years later thanks to a real estate donation from former Idaho Governor Frank Gooding.

ISBD has 76 students; some board at the school, but most are day students. In general they have more severe disabilities than the 800 visually or hearing impaired students in Idaho who choose to receive services in traditional schools. Because visual and hearing disabilities are uncommon, deaf and blind students tend to be isolated in their communities, particularly in a rural state. Creating materials and training staff to serve these students at individual schools is prohibitively expensive. Consequently, ISDB acts as a resource hub for all 800 students scattered across Idaho, school director Gretchen Spooner told me. ISDB produces and distributes materials throughout the state. I watched as two women transferred material from standard print textbooks into a computer, and then sent it to a huge machine that turned the material into brail texts.

Every student with disabilities, including deaf and blind students, is entitled under federal law, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), to a free and appropriate education. Parents of special-needs students sit down with school staff and often the student to hammer out the details of an appropriate education. The contract that they come up with is called an Individual Education Plan (IEP). All students at this school have an IEP.

Spooner explained that enrollment has declined at her school, in part due to a shifting interpretation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The law states that students with disabilities should be placed in the “least restrictive environment.” Starting in the 1990s many disability activists understood this clause to mean that traditional classrooms in traditional public schools were the least restrictive, and ISDB the most restrictive. Spooner said that understanding was too cut and dry. “For many kids an environment like ISDB is much better and less restrictive than the traditional public school environment,” she said.

The school was a good fit for Mrs. Spooner’s daughter, an ISDB graduate who is now a graduate student and teaching assistant in English in a traditional four year college where most students are not disabled. But she is exceptional for graduates from ISDB. While some graduates go on to college, the school’s guidance counselor told me, many go to work or return home and collect disability pay. In general, she says, deaf students like working with their hands; the guys enjoy mechanics, welding, landscaping, the girls beautician work

Many teachers at the school are deaf. One teacher, Mr. Sharma, originally from India and deaf since the age of eight, told me there were no deaf services in his country when he was young, which is why he came to America. Ken, a welding and shop teacher who was a student at ISDB decades ago, spoke to me through a school translator. The inflection in our translator’s voice seamlessly matched Ken’s mannerisms and facial expressions as he signed his responses. Ken loved to play basketball growing up, and in high school he played at the local public school. He now coaches it at ISDB. The largest change he’s seen at the school over the years is that “vanilla deaf” students like himself—those who are deaf but have no associated disabilities or exceptional characteristics—are increasingly being “mainstreamed,” or kept in regular public school.

Many deaf people don’t see deafness as a disability, but rather as one of many characteristics making them the persons they are. That concept implies that a deaf person uses a different language, a visual language, instead of an auditory one. It explains why schools for the deaf prefer American Sign Language (ASL) to oralism or lip-reading to teach their students.

Spooner said sometimes mainstreaming works, but sometimes it doesn’t, and ISDB receives many kids who have fallen far behind academically before their parents realize the current setup isn’t working.  And social concerns are often a bigger challenge and concern than academic ones.  Students with vision and hearing loss are often isolated and alone in a world with which they have trouble communicating. They often draw further into themselves. At the end of the day, Spooner said, raising and teaching a deaf child is an immense task. Some students, especially those who have a strong family or strong community or school support, have their needs met in the local public school. Others don’t, and for them ISDB is a great option.

Recently, special-education vouchers have become another important option for families of students with disabilities. Florida first provided them in 1999 and programs have since been enacted by Ohio (2004), Utah (2005), Arizona (2006), and Georgia (2007). The programs vary but are similar in principle: the state calculates the cost of educating a student based on his disabilities and allow the money to follow the child to a private special-education school if the parents wish. This gives parents added options in finding the right fit for their child, and also gives them leverage in contracting with public schools for services.

With almost 20,000 students, the Florida program, called McKay Scholarships, is the largest voucher program in the country. A study of McKay showed students using vouchers were victimized less often, private schools provided more of the promised services, and parents were happier with their children’s new school. Jay P. Greene reports, “It is important to note that no disabled students lose the right to an appropriate education when special-education vouchers are introduced. Those students can always negotiate an IEP with their local public school and seek remedy in the courts if the schools fail to deliver. Vouchers simply give disabled students another, often more effective, mechanism for ensuring that they get the services they need.”

Classical, Christian Education

Logos School, Moscow, Idaho : 10/24/08 

It was 9 pm on Friday night in Moscow, Idaho. Gathered together in the living room of high school teacher Jim Nance were the 25 juniors from his Rhetoric class. They were there to watch Henry V, starring Kenneth Branagh. Every year after the students read Shakespeare’s play, Nance has them over to watch the movie. He wants them to pay particular attention to King Henry’s motivational speech on the eve of the great clash with the French on St. Crispin’s Day (below is the movie clip of the speech). In class, Nance is having his students prepare and give their own speeches about personal heroes. “All the great men of the past had heroes,” said Nance. It is important not only to teach them about abstract ideas, but about concrete examples they can model their lives after, he continued. Nance’s hero is Leonardo Pisano, a famous mathematician. Students' heroes ranged from Michael Jordan to J.R.R. Tolkein, Albert Einstein to Steve Jobs, pastors and family members.

Nance and his students are from Logos School, a classical, Christian school with grades K-12. The school opened its doors in 1981, with 18 kids in the rented basement of a church. Superintendent Tom Garfield, who has been with the school since the beginning, said the founders wanted a school for their children that was both classical and Christian, and distinct from government (public) schools. The school has grown to 250 students, and is a leader of the classical, Christian education movement. In 1991, Doug Wilson, a founding board member and teacher in the school, wrote a book entitled Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning, introducing Logos as a real-life example of the model. It sparked interest in parents and educators around the country, and in 1994, with Logos as a charter member, the Association of Classical, Christian Schools (ACCS), was formed. ACCS now lists over 200 member schools.

Logos was inspired by Wilson’s reading of a 1947 essay, "The Lost Tools of Learning," by the English novelist Dorothy Sayers. She argued that there was something seriously amiss in modern education; we have, she said, “lost the tools of learning--the axe and the wedge, the hammer and the saw, the chisel and the plane—that were so adaptable to all tasks.” Instead, students learn an assortment of “complicated jigs,” specific, isolated knowledge, which have turned out to be very poor substitutes. We are failing in the “sole true end” of education, which is simply to teach men how to learn for themselves.

What set Sayers apart was her solution. Schools, she urged, ought to adopt “the mediaeval scheme of education…what the men of the Middle Ages supposed to be the object and the right order of the educative process.” At the heart of classical education is the Trivium, whose three parts are Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric, in that order. Intended for the study of Latin, they actually instruct pupils in the process of learning. First, one learns the structure of language, grammar (hence, grammar school) “what it was, how it was put together, and how it worked.” Then dialectic, how to use language, make accurate statements, construct an argument and detect fallacies in argument. Finally, the pupil learns rhetoric, how to use language elegantly and persuasively. These steps—acquiring the building blocks of knowledge, analyzing how they are used, and constructing something beautiful and true from them—apply to all fields of study, not just language. 

The Trivium also gives structure to a K-12 school because its three stages correlate with “singular appropriateness” to what Sayers recognized as three states of child development, which she called the Poll-Parrot, the Pert, and the Poetic. “The Poll-Parrot stage is the one in which learning by heart is easy and, on the whole, pleasurable.” The student memorizes and recites easily, and “rejoices in the chanting of rhymes and the rumble and thunder of unintelligible polysyllables.” The Pert age, which follows, “is characterized by contradicting, answering back, liking to ‘catch people out’ (especially one's elders).” People often say the last stage, the Poetic age, is difficult. The student is self-centered, expressive, and “rather specializes in being misunderstood; it is restless and tries to achieve independence; and, with good luck and good guidance, it should show the beginnings of creativeness.”

When I arrived at Logos school, I immediately saw the philosophy in practice. Up on stage in the cafeteria/auditorium, elementary (or grammar) school students were concluding a “speech meet.” Public speaking, the Rhetoric stage, is an important part of Logos at all grade levels, starting in elementary school but capped by a thesis presentation in 12^th grade. Garfield attributes the success of Logos school’s mock trial team (10 state titles in the last 14 years) to the school’s classical training.

Everything at Logos (Greek for “the word”) is self-consciously built on the bedrock of Scripture (John 1:1, “In the beginning…”). At first the school unsuccessfully used a pre-packaged Christian curriculum that it tried to mold to Sayers’ model of classical education. Eventually, it decided to build its own curriculum based on original documents and “great books.”

This often times means old books. A C.S. Lewis essay that came to be known as “On the Reading of Old Books” says, “Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.” It’s a philosophy Rhetoric teacher Jim Nance believes in. “We use Aristotle, we use source documents a lot in classical education.” Then the old books and documents are studied and criticized from a Christian perspective.

Sayers’ view was that problems in modern education are not about education, but are by-products of confusion about culture and civilization. She believed modern civilization was burdening its teachers with the task of shoring up the “tottering weight of an educational structure that is built upon sand.”

Logos believes it has found a more solid foundation. I visited a 12^th grade civics class whose textbook was Russell Kirk’s The Roots of American Order.  Tenth graders in literature class had finished James Fenimore Cooper and were reading Herman Melville—Moby Dick. The class was discussing a Melville character, Captain Bildad, in relation to the Scriptures, for Bildad’s namesake was one of Job’s three friends. The Logos school song is Shakespeare’s, Non Nobis, Domine (listen here), whose lyrics hang on a banner in the gym. Superintendent Garfield said the basketball team sings it after every game.

Most parents of Logos students work for the University of Idaho or as farmers, the two largest sources of employment in Moscow. Annual tuition averages $3,700 for K-12. The school supplements it with donations, and a cottage industry has developed: Logos sells its curriculum and administrative materials to sister schools and homeschoolers around the country. The income now accounts for about 20% of the school’s budget. 

Oregon Connections Academy, Scio, Oregon: 10/22/08

The school was tough to find located behind a coffee shop in downtown Scio. But Oregon Connections Academy (ORCA) serves 2,600 kids in a town of only 700 residents, and it added as many new students last year, its fourth in operation, as the town has inhabitants. ORCA can do that because it isn’t a “brick and mortar” school; it’s a “virtual” school, serving its k-12 student body entirely online. The school is part of a larger network of schools governed by Connections Academy, a for-profit online education provider based in Maryland. There are currently Connections Academies in 14 states, with schools in development in eight more.

Scio is in Oregon’s beautiful Willamette valley in northwest Oregon, 23 miles southeast of Salem, the state capital. The drive down from Seattle took me through rolling hills and past miles and miles of vineyards. The region’s winters usually aren’t harsh enough to bring snow, and the climate is excellent for growing grapes. Covered bridges dot the landscape. Principal Jerry Wilks joked that he’s glad few people know how idyllic the area is, “or else they’d all move here.” Wilks is a big guy who once played professional football with the Pittsburgh Steelers. After retiring, he was a public high school principal for 36 years, working in Nebraska and Iowa. “Organizing schools has always been my forte,” he said, but the daily grind had him feeling “burned out.” When the ORCA position opened, he jumped on it and he’s now re-energized by the “innovative and exciting” approach of a virtual school.

Much of ORCA’s structure and curriculum is supplied by the Connections Academy national headquarters in Baltimore. “They [Connections Academy] provide us with so many tools,” said Wilks. Two computers, set up side-by-side in his office, enable Wilks to quickly monitor daily “attendance” records, student progress reports, and information about students and their families—more information than I could really comprehend all at once. “The technology takes some getting used to, but it's very helpful to have all of the information at your fingertips,” he said. Information updates automatically whenever students complete assignments and take tests or as parents submit attendance records.

Parents (and sometimes grandparents) play a very important role, explained Laura, a teacher at the school. They serve as “Learning Coaches” and are responsible for their children's day-to-day activities. The school highly recommends that a parent or other designated Learning Coach be at home with a student, but this is not required for enrollment; the Oregon Department of Education determined in 2006 that requiring the presence of a parent was not in compliance with state charter laws and threatened to withhold funding until this requirement was removed.

The other virtual school I visited—Bluesky Charter in Minnesota—was a high school that mainly served troubled students struggling to graduate. Bluesky offered an alternative path for kids who would have a difficult time in a traditional high school. ORCA serves these students too, but it also enrolls one-third of its students from another important demographic: Families who previously homeschooled their kids. “We get students who were homeschooled, or whose siblings were homeschooled, whose parents are looking for more support, more help,” said Wilks. Many families have one student enrolled in Connections, while the rest are in more traditional public or private schools.

At ORCA, parents, teachers and students are all connected through the Learning Management System (view a LMS demo here), a Web-based application through which students view their daily lessons, interact with teachers and other students, and participate in online activities. Laura explained that from 8:30 to 4:00 teachers must be online and available to communicate with students, parents and with each other. “It's really around the clock,” she continued, “but that's just the nature of being a teacher.”

Students' schedules are a bit more flexible. At the beginning of the year ORCA ships every student a complete hardcopy curricula—textbooks, workbooks, reading material and, for most students, a laptop computer. Since assignments and lessons are available online 24 hours a day, students can complete them on their own schedule. “They don't have to do 8:30 to 4:00 and they don't have to do 45 minutes of math and then 45 minutes of science...they can do math one day and then science the next,” Laura explained. Just so long as they complete the work and “attend” school for the specified number of days.

Keeping up with each student's individualized program is one of the challenges of teaching in a program like ORCA. Teachers have a lot of information at their fingertips through the LMS, and they have the opportunity to meet with many of their students face-to-face through school-sponsored activities and events. But without seeing kids every day, teachers lose the physical cues to gauge student needs and progress that they would have at a brick and mortar school. A good rapport with parents really helps, but “parents sometimes have a hard time seeing weaknesses in their children,” said Laura with a laugh, so it requires a very active virtual presence. “The first year's certainly an adjustment,” she said, “but we get good training and a lot of support from the CA staff.”

As a public school principal for many years, Wilkes witnessed the limitations of that environment. “I saw students walk out of my office and I had nothing else to give them,” he said. He knows that Connections Academy certainly isn’t for everyone either. It's too rigid for some homeschooling families who are used to more freedom in the curriculum and schedule, while it demands too much involvement from other families.

Nor should it or could it replace “brick and mortar” schools. Face-to-face peer and teacher interaction, school activities from sports to theater, and the overall sense of community created in many schools is hard to simulate in an online environment. Laura's three children attend a local public school, and Wilks spoke highly of public schools in the Scio district. But Connections Academy provides a “real viable alternative,” he said, and he points to the rapidly growing enrollment—more than 3,000 students next year—as evidence of that. ORCA’s resources and opportunities do not replace but complement those provided by traditional schools. “I don't think it ever will, and I don't want it to replace the brick and mortar school. Nothing will replace that,” Laura agreed.

Oregon’s state government has been mostly supportive, said Wilks. But he looks forward to a day when state regulations allow better coordination between brick and mortar schools and alternatives like ORCA. Wilks worries about a state law passed in 2005 that required 50 percent of students attending a school to be from the local school district. This was a law intended to kill future online schools. Connections Academy was exempt because it predated the law, but “if the law applied to us, we would only have a handful of students,” Wilks said. Connections is also exempt from a requirement that districts must sign off whenever a student leaves a local school, something school districts are often unhappy to do because the loss of students means a loss funding. Connections Academy receives 80 percent of what the local district receives per pupil for K-8 students, and 95 percent for high school students. The money comes from the state School Fund.

As technology advances, virtual schools are bound to expand, and traditional schools will likely offer more online classes and opportunities for students. Oregon Connections Academy—a public school run by a private company—demonstrates that public-private partnerships can be effective in providing public education, partnerships we also may see more of in the future.  

Reynolds Arthur Academy, Oregon, 10/21/08

View from the summit (7,300 ft) of Mt. St. Helens aka "Mt. Doom," near Reynolds

What follows is an example of the unusual teaching method used at the seven Arthur Academy public charter schools. It’s called “Direct Instruction.

Good morning. My name is Mr. Brand. Today you are going to learn about the Reynolds Arthur
Academy. The first topic we are going to discuss is: location of the school.

My turn. The first topic is: location of the school.

When I signal I want you to say, “location of the school.” When I signal by writing “signal” in italics I want you to say, “location of the school.” The topic is: location of the school.

Your turn. What's the topic? Get ready. Signal.

That's right: location of the school. The location of the school tells where the school is. Where is the school?

My turn. Where is the school? The location of the school is: Troutdale, Oregon.

Your turn. When I signal you say, “Troutdale, Oregon.”

Where's the school? Get ready. Signal.

That's right, the school's location is Troutdale, Oregon.

The second topic we are going to discuss is...

This method of teaching would seem to be a very drawn out way to say that the Reynolds Arthur Academy is located in Troutdale, Oregon. However, the classroom instruction I observed of the 164 students at the K-5 charter school was designed to be repetitious, but it wasn’t nearly as drawn out. The pace was quick.  As I watched Chris Arnold, the school manager and one of the kindergarten teachers, go through a phonics lesson for 5-year-olds seated around her on the floor, I realized he method was grounded in rhythm. The dialogue moved regularly between her and the students: instruction, a question, a signal, a group response and brief congratulations for a correct answer or immediate correction of a false one. Chris worked deliberately through a stack of flashcards with letters and letter combinations, making sure the students knew the sound each made.

Charles “Chuck” Arthur, the current director of the schools, his wife, and Chris Arnold started the first Arthur Academy in 2002 “for curricular reasons.” He felt the public schools lacked a coherent and effective curriculum, and it was preventing kids from achieving their potential. When Oregon's charter school law was passed in 1999, Arthur saw an opportunity to start a school where he could implement a curriculum of his choice.

At the Arthur Academies, curriculum is drawn from two sources: the Core Knowledge Sequence for history, science and geography, and Direct Instruction for reading, language arts and mathematics. They are combined into one integrated curriculum and are taught using the instructional method prescribed by Direct Instruction. Arthur said he likes to think of the method as “incremental mastery.” Students proceed along sequenced paths of instruction in small steps towards a larger goal. Their progress is regularly checked, and they don't move on until mastery of the component parts is achieved. “It's the best one,” said Arthur, comparing Direct Instruction to other curriculums and methods. Students are engaged, there aren't any gaps in their understanding, and students' confidence rises as they see themselves learning and doing well on mandated state tests.

The method of Direct Instruction (DI) was developed in the 1960s by Siegfried Engelmann and Wesley C. Becker, under the name DISTAR (Direct Instruction System for Teaching Arithmetic and Reading). According to Arthur, it has demonstrated improved student academic achievement. Arthur referred me to “Project Follow Through,” a massive study begun in 1967 as part of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, whose findings placed Direct Instruction at or near the top of the 22 methods for improving achievement test scores. A more recent analysis by the American Institutes for Research gave DI the highest rating for boosting student achievement. Mr. Arthur proudly showed me his own schools' achievement test results.

Finding and implementing an effective curriculum wasn't Arthur’s only challenge. “A school needs to look like a school, not a warehouse,” he said, pointing out the new field and playground at the Reynolds Academy. He had to find the buildings and obtain permits. Recruiting experienced teachers wasn't easy either.  But with seven Arthur Academies on either side of the Columbia River in Oregon and Washington state, Arthur can shuffle his faculty between schools, keeping a good balance of experienced and new teachers at each school. Mrs. Burks, a 3^rd grade teacher at Reynolds, said the hassle of getting public school certification in Oregon prompted her to look to Arthur Academies. She had a teaching certificate in Texas but had to retake tests and “jump through the hoops,” she said, to teach in Oregon.

Chuck Arthur, who worked taught in Oregon the public school system for 30 years, is very supportive of Oregon public schools. But he was disappointed that the public education establishment and the general public were unwilling to appreciate the benefits of Direct Instruction: “We’re old school, and get frowned upon sometimes for it.” People think DI is too narrow, but “there's more to it than just a traditional approach to the three R's.” Even though Arthur believes DI can work in almost any school environment, he admits that teachers must want to teach that way for the technique to work.  Most teachers simply will not buy into the curriculum, which means the program cannot be implemented. The culprit is an “all-or-nothing system, as far as curriculum is concerned.”

Arthur argues that if individual schools were free to select curriculum programs, many would discover and choose programs like Direct Instruction. He notes that a written survey of all Arthur Academy parents showed that 96% said they were “highly satisfied” with the school.

Arthur welcomes the charter school concept as a way to give public schools more independence, which creates diversity. “We can coexist, and not fight as much,” he said. He pointed out that special ed. programs are granted more independence, which enables them to experiment in implementing different curricula. “Charter schools open up conversation,” he said. In Oregon the local school districts sponsor charter schools. That brings more politics, but also more dialogue. “We have to deal with them, and they have to deal with us,” said Arthur. At least it opens up dialogue, and gives parents options.

Eton School, Bellevue, WA: 10/16/08

“Education is a natural process spontaneously carried out by the human individual, and is acquired not by listening to words but by experiences upon the environment.” Maria Montessori

The kids were everywhere doing something different—some stacking blocks or studying map-puzzles, others pouring water or counting beads—and all were using smartly designed and colorful educational materials. The Eton School’s structure of individualized learning, from its decentralized workstations to the assortment of  “learning tools,” gave it the characteristic atmosphere of the Montessori school. 

Montessori schools are inspired by the teaching method and philosophy of the woman they follow, Maria Montessori. “An amazing woman, Maria,” as everyone at the school informed me, Montessori was a devout Italian Catholic, a physician and an educator. She worked with mentally retarded and poor children in the early 20^th century in Rome, where she achieved impressive results. Some called them a “miracle,” and schools following her model spread over Italy. After fascist Benito Mussolini came to power in Italy in 1922, he confined and then exiled Montessori for refusing to change her schools to meet his demand for warriors and mothers of warriors. Montessori went on to live and work in Spain, the Netherlands and India before her death in 1952.

The central pillar of the Montessori philosophy is that young children teach themselves, through a process Montessori called “spontaneous self-development.” While guidance and the right environment are necessary, Montessori believed children have an innate appetite and aptitude for learning. Adult instruction of the type that ordinarily occurs in traditional school classrooms she considered more hindrance than help. Teachers should be observers and guides, not lecturers. Learning can be effortless and joyful, said Montessori, if the material is right and the timing is natural. (Here is a somewhat dated but essentially accurate promotional video explaining Montessori schools.)

In Washington State there are 91 Montessori schools, including dozens in the Seattle metro area. I visited two in Bellevue, an upscale suburban area full of comfortable homes and office parks, on the verdant, rainy Eastside of Lake Washington.

Eton School was opened 30 years ago as an independent school with a Montessori philosophy. Patricia Felton, the school’s founder and current director, told me she deliberately left “Montessori” out of the school’s name because she wanted Eton to be contemporary while including the best of Montessori. The school currently has two components, Eton Montessori School, which serves students ages 3-9, and Eton Belvedaire Academy, for students ages 10-14.  Eton School’s mission is “to provide the child with daily experiences through an ordered environment of responsible freedom. With assistance each child becomes a participant in independent learning.”

One unique characteristic of Montessori schools is that students aren’t grouped by year and grade. Instead, students are organized in age groups that span three years: 3-6, 6-9 and 9-12. Almost all Montessori schools are elementary schools, and Eton’s Montessori school has groups of students ages 3-6 and 6-9. At 10 years of age, students enter Eton’s upper school, which is non-Montessori. While still prizing independent learning, its classes are more teacher-directed.

Felton explained the Montessori view that it is critically important for the youngest children to use concrete “hands-on” materials; learning is connected with doing, the brain with the hand. Instead of relying on a teacher to give them correct answers, children can learn to correct their own mistakes using specially designed Montessori materials. I observed students work independently on activities in one the five work areas prescribed for all Montessori schools: Practical Life (tweezing, buttoning, pouring and working on other small motor skills), Sensorial, Math, Reading and Cultural (botany, zoology and geography).   

Observes Tufts University professor David Elkind: “The natural world is the infant’s and young child’s first curriculum, and it can only be learned by direct interaction with things. Learning about the world of things, and their various properties, is a time-consuming and intense process that cannot be hurried. This view of early-childhood education has been echoed by all the giants of early-childhood development—Froebel, Maria Montessori, Rudolf Steiner, Jean Piaget, and Lev Vygotsky. It is supported by developmental theory.”

At the next level, ages 6-9, a few textbooks are introduced and there is structured time for lessons. Independent learning, however, remains the focus. “Do you want to do math now, or English?” the teacher asks. Students keep a portfolio of all the work they need to do for the week, and decide when they will do it. Kids are encouraged to be curious, creative and self-directed. In the upper grades, classes were more traditional, but
attitudes continued to focus on choice and experience. Students used rice kernels in solving 5^th grade math problems. A 7^th grade Latin class was conducted as students sat on cushions on the floor.

While some parents might find Eton’s methods too loose, Felton said the school tries to strike a balance between structure and flexibility. Students do exercise some control over when and for how long they pursue an activity, but their tasks and tools have defined purposes that are intended to teach kids. Eton guides its students to use learning exercises and tools in that way. The method embodies the Montessori philosophy of “responsible freedom in a controlled environment.”

Eton serves a pretty special demographic. The school is located across from the headquarters of Microsoft, and many of the students’ parents work for the computer giant.  Microsoft scours the world to find the most talented employees, and the school’s diversity is reflected in the large number of Asian and Indian engineers and computer scientists who enroll their children in Eton.  These parents are super-involved, and “when parents have a concern,” Felton said, “it is, ‘can the kids go faster? Can the school be more challenging?’” Lakeside, where Bill Gates went to high school, is a sought-after destination for students graduating from Eton.

If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It

Bellevue Montessori School, Bellevue, WA: 10/17/08

Montessori schools have operated much the same way since the first school opened in 1907. Their motto; if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. That doesn’t mean Montessori has always been popular. While the approach had some early prominent supporters in America, including Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison and Helen Keller, the approach fell out of favor. Montessori isn’t a franchise; anyone can start one. “People used to think Montessori was weird,” said Christine Hoffman, director of Bellevue Montessori School. It wasn’t until the early 1960s that the school model again became popular, helped by the promotional activities of Nancy Rambusch, founder of the American Montessori Society. There are even public schools based on the Montessori model.

Bellevue Montessori serves 230 kids, and, like Eton School, most of its students come from families where both parents are working professionals. The school is classic Montessori, accredited by MSAC, the accrediting arm of the American Montessori Society (AMS). Hoffman, who has been at the school for 22 years as teacher, administrator and director, said Bellevue must meet high standards and go through a rigorous review to earn those stripes. Teachers at the school must undergo an extra year of training to learn how to set up and teach in Montessori’s “designed environment.” The high standards are a good thing, she continued, because without them the program could “dissolve into chaos.”

As we toured her school, Hoffman explained that an effective Montessori school maintains an environment that rewards initiative and concentrated effort. Students have the flexibility to decide when and for how long they will pursue an activity. “If we see concentrated effort,” she said, “we’ll let it go as long as possible.” To “let it go” builds the child’s attention span. This fits Montessori’s belief that children learn most often and best during periods of intense concentration. In a 2004 segment on the 10 most interesting people of the year, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin—both Montessori educated—attributed part of their success to the fact that they were encouraged in school to be self-starters.

Tuition at Montessori schools in the Seattle area averages $10,000-$13,000 per pupil, about the same as the per-pupil costs in area public schools. Teachers receive salaries comparable to Seattle public school teachers.

By many measures, both Eton and Bellevue are successful schools. The students do well and their parents are happy and involved. Teachers and staff feel connected to the mission and culture of the schools. As Felton said, “We all look at kids the same way.” This doesn’t mean Montessori schools can be successful everywhere: There are plenty of parents and teachers who don’t want a Montessori environment. Nor does it mean that other school methods aren’t successful. Hoffman acknowledged that her own children weren’t Montessori-educated, but they’re doing just fine.

Felton—a product of the Catholic school system and a former public school teacher—recognized that Montessori wasn’t the only way to give schools a common culture and mission. “I imagine parochial schools are similar in this way,” she said. Moreover, most public schools serve families, and employ teachers, whose beliefs about education are more varied.

For Felton, the key to improve public education is to empower teachers by somehow deregulating the system. “You have to feel for them, their hands are tied. They are part of a bureaucracy.”