Edutopia - September 2007 - (Page 30) C o o l Sc h o ol s One student who has capitalized on that flexibility is Chenega Bay’s Ian Angaiak (grandson of tribal president Pete Kompkoff ). He participated in YAW and Alaskan Scientists of the Future, another program that pairs students with scientists for inquiry-based learning, through which he traveled to Hawaii and learned methods to measure sun radiation and water salinity. Despite those continuity breaks, the sixteenyear-old will graduate a year early if he keeps his pace. (Principal Douglas Penn notes, however, that most early graduates stay with the district for advanced or college courses.) Because he’s ahead of most other Chenega Bay students, but only the students themselves can decide how hard to work, what quality of work to produce, and how fast to progress. Administrators don’t pretend that the Chugach model is perfect, or that it would be ideal in every setting. “People think we’ve got the golden egg,” says Superintendent Robert Crumley. “There is none. There is no magic recipe.” Still, the approach has proven itself, and district educators at all levels say it could work well or better in a larger school district. With more teachers, each one could specialize in certain content areas and levels, rather than trying to cover everything. The reform could be made with little or no change in state policies, Crumley says—the only accommodation his district needed from the state government was a waiver from tracking Carnegie units, the measure of how much time a student spends studying each subject. Although Chugach supplements its $5,380 per-pupil allocation with about $1 million per year in grants, the standardsbased model does not hinge on finances, says Penn. It represents a change in thinking, he adds, “and it costs nothing to change your thinking.” Crumley has a caveat: “It cannot be done piecemeal.” And, yes, it will be hard and frustrating to “Our students make such a big change, but educafrustrating graduate when tion is hard andnot? “Insteadanyway, he says, so why of perthey’re ready. petuating a system where we try to force kids to fit, it’s much more We’re not pumping them rewarding to do the hard work when you can see you’re making a out the door difference systematically, rather with Ds on their than just trying to put your finger in the dam,” says Crumley. diplomas.” Sampson calls this kind of reform an imperative. “We have to quit pumping kids through our system because they put the time in,” he says. “We have to stop allowing teachers to use whatever criteria they want to give a kid a grade. We can’t have your third graders all do page fourteen, because they’re all over the map—in any school.” The Chugach model demands a lot of its teachers and, consequently, the district gives them a lot of support. They get thirty days of professional development a year and have a say in what they want to learn. A set of detailed standards—similar to those used for students—spell out what is expected of teachers and how they will be assessed. Every year, all Chugach teachers receive an identical performance bonus ($11,000 each this year) based on the average of their evaluations—a perk Penn says is designed to foster teamwork. The result is a tight-knit, congenial staff (and not just the ones who are married to each other) focusing their daily efforts on individual needs. The Chugach schools are as different from their conventional, grade-based counterparts as tiny Chenega Bay is from downtown Anchorage—and not simply because of size. Penn sums it up with an anecdote from one of his visits to Whittier: He watched a teacher give an assignment. A new kid in town refused to do it, announcing, “I’m just going to take the zero.” The boy’s classmate leaned over to him and whispered, “Dude, it doesn’t work that way here.”e Brain Storm: Principal Douglas Penn offers Jordan Geffe suggestions for his persuasive essay on village life. Angaiak does a lot of independent work, much of it from books, which he says gets boring. But, he adds, it’s better than enduring what the other kids are learning, and better than his five years in Anchorage, where he remembers having more than thirty students in some classes. Here, he says, “you don’t have to sit in a classroom with twenty students and just have the teacher talk to you.” Angaiak adds that at his current school, students actually have to learn something to get by. Scaling Up The Chugach model presents challenges for participants. In 2002, the district introduced an electronic tracking system to help teachers monitor students’ progress without drowning in paperwork. Ian Angaiak complains that there are an overwhelming number of standards and that some of the levels take too long to complete. (A revision of the standards will try to correct those obstacles.) The demands on teacher expertise also are heavy: Jed Palmer points out that he is responsible for teaching ten subjects at four levels each, or the equivalent of forty classes. He has learned to feel more comfortable saying “I don’t know” and recruiting students into the hunt for unknown information. His wife and fellow teacher, Nichole Palmer, says the system also requires a lot of self-motivation from kids—a benefit for some, a struggle for others. She consistently pushes them, she says, 30 EDUTOPIA SEPTEMBER 2007 GRACE RUBENSTEIN
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