If you have time, take a look at this video from Portland's WCSH-6. The 3 minutes of video provide a fascinating text of things said, implied, and ignored in the effort jump on the King bandwagon - a bandwagon that I'm on by the way. Some points:
First, Expeditionary Learning is not "so-called,"as the reporter described it, nor is the term interchangeable with "experiential learning," a wonderful term but far more generic in the sense that Maine Public Radio used it. Expeditionary Learning Schools has, over 17 years, "grown from a small adventurous group of ten schools into a network the size of a substantial urban school district." It is what in school innovation circles is described as a "replication model:" a (usually) non-profit organization that works with existing public schools and/or starts new public schools - often charter schools and often as part of the Gates Foundation's high school reform work. Why is this significant?
Because, as I've written elsewhere, a HUGE part of any sustainable, high quality effort to re-invent schools is affiliation with network of like-minded schools that can develop and share best practices, professional development, and the complex challenges of re-inventing, starting, and/or sustaining superb schools. In Expeditionary Learning Schools, the people who do this are called "school designers," a capacity in which I helped create Casco Bay HS in Portland - not out of whole cloth, but based on a model.
Second, Secretary Duncan was quoted as saying his job is "to clone this man here," meaning King Middle School and personal hero of mine Mike McCarthy. Leaving aside the moral, ethical, and technological hurdles to 91,000 or so Mike McCarthys running around, change that depends on heroic levels of leadership of the kind Mike has shown - through half a dozen superintendents, numerous offers of more prestigious (and easier) jobs, and occasional status on Fox News as poster boy for everything that's wrong with America, etc. - is NOT a sustainable change strategy (as I've argued in the same elsewhere referred to earlier.)
Third, and most relevant for the tens of thousands of Maine students who do not, and will not, have the chance to attend King, is related to what was not said. Rep. Pingree and Maine's newly official (congratulations) Commissioner of Education, Angela Flaherty, point out, quite rightly, that not all the elements of the Obama administration's plans map on very well to a largely rural state like Maine. For example, Secretary Duncan, who I met when he was running Chicago's schools, understandably developed a fondness for "throw the bums out" approaches to failing schools and umm...recalcitrant...teachers. But shutting down the only school within 40 miles...or the only one that's not a boat ride away, as island-dwelling Rep. Pingree pointed out, may not work for Maine, just as summarily firing the only person you can get to teach AP Physics in Jackman may not work for Maine either.
But...and it is a big but...such "won't work in Maine" arguments only go so far in explaining the reluctance of Maine's educational and political leadership to embrace the genuine, sustainable innovation advocated by Secretary Duncan. We have had nearly 25 years and tens of millions of dollars of investment in the kind of "innovation" that asks our schools to become "like" King. We have rearranged the deck chairs on the Titanic through consolidation, eking out some short terms savings - at what future cost, if any, we don't know. Our dropout figures remain level...a reported 17 to 20 percent, with many more honest calculations nearing 30%. More importantly, we hear from this think tank and that business group that our young people are become less employable, less healthy and less wise...creating increased (and increasingly unmet) needs for more services later in life to pay for what we failed to do earlier.
That need not be. There are PLENTY of "will work in Maine," approaches, such as "innovative, autonomous small schools." But the legislative, regulatory, and funding mechanisms needed to grow these schools are given short shrift in favor of a hodge-podge of objections that end up preserving narrow, largely outdated approaches that treat students, parents, and Maine's current and future work force more like one of Jack Decoster's eggs than like the vital, renewable (but also brain drain-able) resource that they (we) are.
Expeditionary Learning Schools is a replication model that can start effective schools of 240 students or more, like Casco Bay HS...but they can't, if they're honest, produce the same rates of sustainable success when they try to do what Mike McCarthy did at King - take an existing, demoralized staff and a broad array of learning challenges and transform that into opportunity and, as we saw yesterday, results. (And, though Mike does not make a big deal of this, seventeen years later, he has a core of teachers who have been with him the whole way, and far more who came on at some point during the process - specifically because this was the only school in Maine operating this way...lending some credence to Secretary Duncan's correct insistence that we find a way to get the best folks where they are needed.)
My colleague and former boss, Scott Hartl, now CEO of Expeditionary Learning Schools, wrote that both the spirit and fact of the above paragraph are off: "EL's best data is often from schools like King that were in existence long before their engagement with EL. We are about to release a study of our Rochester schools that will be the best data and most rigorous study done on EL to date that supports this point. I take up this point with you vigorously because a central tenet of our value proposition is that we are not a CMO (Charter Management Organization), but rather an organization that can work with schools across a wide range of settings including new to existing. I would also want to always hit the note about EL that we are focused on the 2.5 million current teachers and represent an organization committed to high quality professional development that helps current teachers grow and improve, rather than a solution that focuses only on new recruitment and existing strategies. I also think that if you look at the collection of our best schools the data would not support your reference to "240 students or more", but would rather suggest a sweet spot range of something like 150 to 600." Excellent points -with which I agree and disagree - more here.
Maine Enterprise Schools, though still a year away from our first students, is a replicable model designed specifically for Maine: our schools go against conventional wisdom in that we are deliberately small (no more that 100 students); that we integrate our academics with sustainable enterprise and workforce development; that we give out students, families and teachers a year-round option; etc. We also are designed to be small enough that the kinds of accountability that Secretary Duncan seeks to force on teachers will unavoidable - in fact, we see great potential for collective bargaining agreements in which teachers VOLUNTARILY hold themselves, their peers, and their students to real standards.
But we cannot do this if we...as voters, educators, parents, politicians, parties, etc....keep saying the equivalent of: we have to spend all the money the same way we are now. If, as we insist, this can be done without additional money, that means that the money to do it needs to come from the place where it is currently being spent. And that means not just hoping for innovation from quarters where round and round of attempts to spur innovation have created a handful of partial successes. It means accepting the pain and loss that goes with saying "we tried our best, but could not" and re-rigging the system to make it so that mere mortals can actually produce the kind of results that King has.
And who knows...maybe we don't even need to a big pot of federal money to do it...
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