Community member Jayson Seaman has sent the following letter to the Board, and given us his permission to post it here:
October 27, 2013
Dear ORCSD school board members:
As you face the difficult decision about balancing
elementary enrollments, there are a few items I hope you will consider that I
don’t believe have been reflected much in the discussion, in person or online. I’ll
apologize in advance – this letter became more of an essay. Sorry!
I am pulled in both directions about the models. I have
personal feelings about what will be my family’s experience under either model,
but for me, the board’s thinking should be driven not merely by a desire to
reconcile the many preferences of community members, but also by answering the
following questions: What do we mean by
‘education?’ What should we expect from it as a community? I’ll start by
offering a broad perspective on the first question, then with this established,
address the other through the lenses of quality of life, quality of schooling,
and equity. I think reasons for adopting
a model should be based on these considerations.
As I understand it, public education contains two aspects
that are in always tension with each other: (a) As something that contributes
to individual success, and (b) as an institution we all hold in common, a
necessary condition for a rich public life. “To become educated” is both a
private good, in that it offers enriched opportunities for material success
along with new ways of seeing oneself and the world, and it is a public good,
in that ‘educated’ people are typically expected to contribute their unique
talents and knowledge in some fashion to the general welfare – through our social,
political and economic institutions. Any good philosophy of education should
have, at its core, some way of reconciling these two aspects so they reinforce
one another instead of conflicting. In other words, education, at its best,
contributes both to things we hold in common and to maximizing individual
potential – or better yet, it configures the things we hold in common so
individuals can maximize their potential while fostering a commitment to the
commons so others can do the same.
There is a delicate balance here. Too much of a focus on the
commons and you risk getting what a friend called “a content-free propagation
of values.” This can squelch creativity, deny the importance of academic
content, or worse, result in indoctrination. All of these hamper individual flourishing.
Too much of a focus on the individual and you risk treating education like a
consumer commodity: something that accrues to individuals in order to secure
maximum private advantage. This can create serious imbalances of opportunity
and outcomes (what has been well documented, for example, in the work of
Jonathan Kozol), bend the institution around the interests of people in power, and
destroy any commitment whatsoever to the commons. Voucher plans are an example
of the latter.
One can detect both of these positions in the current debate
about elementary rebalancing. If I’m being honest, I bought a house in ORCSD
primarily for the individual benefits of an Oyster River education; sure, I
want my kids to experience a socially and emotionally supportive community, but
above all else I think an Oyster River education will give them advantages they
wouldn’t get elsewhere, whether this is academic training or a better chance to
discover and know how to assert themselves wherever they go next. One way to
think of this is that an Oyster River education offers better ‘cultural capital’
than other local alternatives. Knowledge of this is how many residents, I
believe, justify our relatively high property taxes, even if this is a kind of
public secret; we exchange our economic capital for our children’s cultural
capital because of the lifelong advantages this provides them. (If you doubt my
point, notice how quickly the Facebook discussion turned to real estate
trends.)
One can detect concern for ‘the commons’ aspect when people
draw attention to the unpleasant perception that Moharimet is superior to Mast
Way, and to the damage this does to the notion of Oyster River as a cohesive community,
not to mention to the psyches of the children and families who are subject to
it. Sensitivity to the idea that education is something we hold in common – not
just a ‘good’ that accrues to individuals – seems to be one of the main
rationales for the K-2/3-4 model. This model, the logic goes, will render any
comparison moot. All children will go through both Mast Way and Moharimet with everyone their age in
the district. Furthermore, it would be foolish to say one is superior to the
other since not only would you be comparing apples to oranges, you’d be arguing
against your own children’s interests.
My point here is to illustrate how these two fundamental aspects
of public education are always in tension with one another and how this tension
is visible in the current discussion. In my view, resolving this tension in the
best way possible lies at the heart of the board’s decision. I don’t envy you,
but I do urge you to avoid seeing this decision as a way to balance the many parochial
interests that unavoidably accompany the view that education is mainly something
that accrues to individuals. So, what other factors might you weigh?
One that strongly influences my own opinion is quality of life, particularly the
relationship between school and family. I’ve just argued against giving undue
weight to parochial interests, but here is mine: my kids are two years apart,
and under the K-2/3-4 model, and without full-day kindergarten, it will be
middle school before they are in the same building together. For us, this means
a loss of shared experience that spills over into family life, like dinnertime
conversations. Therefore, for this reason, I’d like to see the current
structure remain. To me, family is a more organic and meaningful unit than
‘grade’ which is bureaucratic and arbitrary. More transitions = fewer ways for
families to maintain coherence over a school career. If the school can
contribute to coherence and shared experiences within families, it should. (By
the way, this is the only reluctance I have about transitions – I think we
don’t give kids enough credit for their adaptability.) You can also put long
bus rides under this heading too.
Second is quality of
schooling. What I mean here is, how
does each model facilitate things such as focused professional development,
vertical and horizontal integration of curriculum, teaming, looping, optimum
facility use, community involvement, arts integration, teacher reflection and
evaluation, and so on? The current arrangement evidently makes many of these
things challenging, and this might fuel the perception of differences in
quality between schools. And, while children’s relationships with teachers is
important, as per their letter, I would like to see the academic program given
higher profile in consideration of the models. For example, how does mentoring
of first graders by fourth graders support subject matter learning, not just
emotional growth, and how often are these opportunities maximized? This is the
kind of question I think should be asked of either model.
Last is the matter of equity. I’ll approach this in terms of the
district’s motto: Working together to
engage every learner. Like all good slogans, this one is broad enough to
sustain multiple interpretations. For instance, it could mean: (1) schools
working with parents to engage their children
as unique individuals, (2) school personnel working together to engage all
children as individuals in the activity of learning, and (3) all of us –
community members and school personnel – working together to make sure all
children have the best opportunities to realize their potential as learners.
All of these undoubtedly get wrapped up in the motto’s practical realization, yet
they all differ in subtle but important ways.
Let’s assume for a second that (a) education is conceived
mainly as the maximization of private advantage (as in ‘I bought a house in
this neighborhood so my kids had better get a good education,’) and (b) the
motto is interpreted to mean schools
working with parents to engage their children
as unique individuals. That this combination might prevail in an educated
and affluent district like ours strikes me as reasonable and plausible. But I
see a downside to this particular combination, especially when not checked by
other meanings. Let me explain. One of the ways teachers come to understand
what children need is through parental involvement – in parent-teacher meetings,
on committees, through volunteering, and so on. These venues provide parents an
important means of orienting teachers to the distinctive characteristics of
their child. Moreover, parents who are skilled at using official-sounding
language to communicate with teachers (for example, using developmental
terminology or the vernacular of psychological testing) are especially
effective at getting schools to recognize their children as having unique needs
that should be satisfied and interests that should be cultivated.
This kind of involvement is to be expected from any caring
parent; we should want everyone to do it. The problem is, not all parents can
participate in their child’s education to the same extent, and not all parents
are practiced at communicating effectively with bureaucratic organizations like
schools. This confers advantages on some kids in two ways: By starting them off
on the ‘right foot’ through early home activity (like literacy, discipline
through reasoning, and quiz games – “what’s
this?”), and through extensive
involvement and highly effective advocacy by their parents throughout their
school career. To paraphrase Orwell’s famous aphorism – this creates a
situation where all learners are individuals, but some are more individual than
others. The social consequences of this arrangement are well documented in the
educational literature – you can predict even before a school career starts who
is most likely to go to college and who isn’t. Data would reveal how effective Oyster
River is at altering this pattern.
Moving to #2 above, school
personnel working together to engage all children as individuals in the
activity of learning, this really just refers to the need for high-quality
and innovative learning opportunities at all levels, regardless of children’s
learning background or school configuration. “Differentiation” fits under this heading.
Most of my points on this topic were made in the quality of schooling paragraph
above, but one more is worth making: what we know from effective models of
urban schooling is that a strong academic program with high expectations, for
many kids, is the ticket out of recurrent cycles of poverty.
The interpretation I hope we can all get behind is this one:
all of us working together to make sure
all children have the best opportunities to realize their potential as
learners. In other words, we view education as something we all hold in common
and create structures for all children to thrive as learners, no matter which
elementary school they’re in or how the schools are configured. Certainly the
district has adequate resources to make this the prevailing interpretation of
the motto; communities elsewhere are doing it at lower cost, so I suspect we
can too. Ultimately, this is what I think should drive the decision about
elementary rebalancing – what are the implications of either model on all kids’ chances to succeed, especially
those who don’t possess the built-in advantages and ongoing kinds of support my
kids have? And what are the consequences of either model on our conception of
education as something we all have a stake in? For instance, if the K-4 model
is retained, how will we all participate in ending this invidious comparison
between the elementary schools?
These would be educational
reasons for pursuing one model or another. I realize there are bureaucratic reasons too, like
minimizing the need to shift district boundaries every few years. The way I see
it though, things like getting rid of modulars, equalizing class sizes, ensuring
facility adequacy, and offering similar social events and extracurricular resources
are not reasons in and of themselves to rebalance enrollments, but instead
necessary conditions for the realization of educational and community aims that
we all value, and should want to realize for all kids, not just our own.
This is where I come down: You, the board, will have my
support either way, but the rationale for one model or the other needs to be educational above all else. I encourage
you to think of this in terms of quality of life, quality of schooling, and
equity. There might not be sufficient national data on, say, which model will
produce better outcomes, but this is where the professional judgment of your
administrators should enter in. Moreover, here is a chance to get behind
something as a community – not the feel-good version, but the kind where we all
make sacrifices in order to realize ideals we hold in common, and under which
we all benefit. Me, I have a personal preference, but I also have no doubt that
my kids will thrive under either model – I am the kind of person who is most likely
to ensure it.
Respectfully,
Jayson Seaman
Durham
