Transcription of Chartering Education, #112
Male Voice: You’re listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour & Podcast recorded in the studio of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street, Portland, Maine. Download past shows and become a Podcast subscriber of Dr. Lisa Belisle on iTunes. See the Dr. Lisa website or Facebook page for details. Here are some highlights from this week’s program
Dr. Lisa: The idea is let’s shake things up and let’s look at Playspace learning. Let’s look at very individualized learning and let’s see what happens when we kind of divorce ourselves from pinning all these expectations on standardized tests. You get all this excitement and you can sense that the kids are sort of … they’ve been liberated from all the downsides of standardized testing. Now if you test well that’s a walk in the park. You’re all set but, what happens to the kids who are extremely bright and don’t test well at all.
Glenn: How do you get real world challenges authentic kind of assessments and how do you build units around those things that would challenge students in an interesting way, but also add value to the communities.
John: Small schools are sustainable over time, but need very different economic models, different teaching models in order to make them sustainable.
Male Voice: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour & Podcast is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors. Maine Magazine, Marci Booth of BOOTH Maine, Apothecary by Design, Premier SportsHealth a division of Black Bear Medical, Sea Bags, Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of RE/MAX Heritage, Ted Carter Inspired Landscapes, and Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial.
Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour & Podcast Show #112, “Chartering Education” airing for the first time on Sunday, November 3, 2013. Today’s guests include Susan Conley, author of “Paris was the Place,” and contributor to Maine Magazine, Glenn Cummings, President and Executive Director of the Maine Academy of Natural Sciences at Good Will-Hinckley, and John D’Anieri, Head of School at the Harpswell Coastal Academy.
Today’s “Chartering Education” Show was inspired by the article written by Susan Conley for the November issue of Maine Magazine. We know that kids learn differently and that no matter how kids learn, education is of paramount importance when it comes to health and wellness. Maine is working to find ways to educate our kids in new ways to programs such as Charter Schools. We hope you enjoy our thought provoking conversations with Susan Conley, Glenn Cummings, and John D’Anieri. Thank you for joining us today.
I always enjoy being on the air with people who have spent time with me in earlier episodes of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour & Podcast because it reminds me of the journey that we’ve been on. Sometimes somewhat of a rough journey. It reminds me where we’ve come from and where we are now.
The en-visual who is across the microphone from me today is Susan Conley. She is one of the individuals who has been on the show before, when we were talking about her earlier book, “The Foremost Good Fortune.” Today she has written another book called, “Paris was the Place.” She is going to talk to us about that and she is also going to talk to us about her Charter School article for Maine Magazine, a magazine for which she is a writer. Thanks for coming in.
Susan: It’s a treat to be back.
Dr. Lisa: Susan, you have been very busy and you’re in a very different place then when we last saw you. “The Foremost Good Fortune” for people, who I know are going to go back and listen to the prior interview, but just to give them a little bit of a teaser is really more about your own personal experience with being in China, dealing with breast cancer, raising two small children, and it’s very much a memoir. This book is a novel. Two very different books for two different places in your life. Talk to me about that process.
Susan: Well I’ve been on a book tour these last few months talking about this territory I’m calling the middle place or the middle ground coming out of memoir moving into novel. Memoir is preordained. You know what happened in the story and then the challenge I think is to find the story hidden inside the story. We all know the outer casing of our lives, but what’s sort of the beating heart inside.
The novel for me was of infinite possibility, but if you look at the sort of facts of that novel, “Paris was the Place,” a lot of it does line up with my life. You know it’s set in Paris in 1989. I lived in Paris in 1988. The narrator teaches refugee kids. Well I’ve done that here in Portland. It’s not an autobiographical novel which was a great relief. I didn’t want to write an autobiographical novel, but what I do is I pull and I think we all do this in many different walks of our lives. We pull from different sort of parts to weave stories.
Dr. Lisa: So you didn’t when you were in Paris fall in love with a good looking French lawyer.
Susan: I wish, but I was in love in Paris so I knew what it was like to be in love in Paris. Again, that was real life being woven into fiction and I do that a lot. People have been asking me how did you recreate Paris in ’89. You know I’ve been back subsequently, but I haven’t lived there since then, and you know that it’s all there for me in my memory. I hold on. I’m just one of those people. I did a whole lot of research on getting the street names right. Let’s make sure we know every metro stop. Let’s take the readers to Paris in such a way that they feel they’re on the street, but the emotional truth of it was still in my mind.
Dr. Lisa: It does make one want to travel. As I was reading it over the weekend I kept thinking to myself that I’ve never been to Paris. I’ve never been to France, and you describe the scene where Willie the main character is going with her French lawyer boyfriend Macon. That’s how you pronounce it right?
Susan: Yeah Macon.
Dr. Lisa: Named after the city in Georgia, interestingly enough. They’re going out to the beach and they’re sleeping on the beach under the stars. I was thinking to myself why am I not doing that. I need to book a plane ticket, so I think you do a really nice job evoking that sense of place and really enticing people to live this sort of adventure.
Susan: Oh well thank you. That’s exactly what I was trying to do. I have this longing, this need to place characters in far off locations, I guess including myself and then see what happens. What is it like to be the outsider looking in? I like to get people out of their comfort zones. I think the minute you get people on the road in transit, you know, I get Willie in a truck with her new lover going to the beach in France and every-thing’s up for grabs. What are they going to talk about? What are they going to learn? I can’t stop doing that I don’t think.
Dr. Lisa: Well it does seem as though in “The Foremost Good Fortune” you really were the outsider. You were living this life and you describe it in the memoir and not only where you living the outsider life as somebody who is in China as an American, but you were also living an outsider life with somebody who had breast cancer with people who didn’t have breast cancer as a young woman. Now you’re back in Portland and you’re living kind of an insider life. You’re living a life that’s really more one you’ve always lived, but you’re still writing about living the outsider life. Why is that so interesting to you?
Susan: Oh that’s a great question. Maybe I’m terrified of stasis. Maine is my home. It’s been my home my whole life, but I’ve lived away from it so often maybe almost more than I’ve lived here. For many people I think Maine has that. It’s like the compass, but you have to keep orbiting. You have to keep stretching. I’m lucky because I married a man who has the travel lust as much as I do, if not more, so he thinks nothing of hopping on planes to go to remote locations that would take two day bus rides and then maybe a camel and a horse. It’s great to put yourself in sort of dynamics where other people are also sort of forcing you to shake up your comfort zone.
Dr. Lisa: Even within the story in “Paris was the Place” Willie travels from Paris. Now Willie is an American. She’s in Paris, and then she travels to India. So you really do like to keep people moving around and keep pushing them outside of their comfort zone so there’s always one more level, one more layer.
Susan: Yeah the India section of the novel is an interesting one because for me it was a lesson in editing. I love travel so much and I also love locale and flavor so I could have made the India section much longer. In fact, it was much longer and then I had to ask, and I’m always asking this of narratives and I’ve asked this of my students. I teach it a great deal. The question is how much can a narrative hold.
So we go to Paris. We’re also in California a lot in my novel. Can we go to India? Can the novel hold in India? It turned out it could, but it had to be a very kind of stealth, very focused trip. For a while it was going to be this sprawling kind of adventure and then I made her have a very clear mission for why she was going. Willie was doing some research on this crazy obscure Indian poet. And then the surprise in writing is you land on characters you didn’t know you would meet, so she meets the granddaughter of the Indian poet and this granddaughter is wildly charismatic and sort of curmudgeonly and also wonderful and I kind of fell in love with her and I didn’t expect to. So then I had to keep India in because I got so attached to the character.
Dr. Lisa: And simultaneously while Willie is going on this external journey she is also dealing with things herself internally and dealing with things interpersonally. She is dealing with one of her students, Gita, who is being held in asylum in France. They’re waiting to see whether they can enable her to stay in France or whether she will be sent back to India. So we have Willie struggling with that. We have Willie struggling with her new love. We have struggling with her brother Luke who falls ill. It’s a lot. Is that also part of the question can the narrative hold … ?
Susan: Yeah and when the novel presented itself to me it was all laid out like that. I had an image of a women on a train in France. She was about 30 years old. She was Willie and I didn’t know her, but I really wanted to know her. I wanted to capture a woman who had yet to have the big love of her life and who would yet to have children who was really still searching and everything was still unfolding for her and how exciting is that.
I think I was nostalgic for that time as well in my own life. She very much had a brother who she was so close to. This is where real life mirrors the fiction again because I had lost someone very dear to me to AIDS in the early ’90’s. He was really kind of part of our family. I needed to write about him. I needed to honor him and celebrate him in the book. There’s a character that’s very much based on him. It’s not him. I mean it moves so far away from him and yet there’s something at the core that is my friend and that was really wonderfully satisfying to get to do.
Dr. Lisa: It is very interesting for me because I’ve now read enough books written by people that I either know well or know somewhat. It’s very interesting to read novels written by people that I’m acquainted with because when I’m sitting here thinking this feels like something that actually happened in this person’s life or this is something that really rings true. I felt that a lot as I was reading this book. I absolutely had the sense that much of this was stuff that you had some connection to personally.
Susan: That’s great. That’s just what I wanted. I wanted that emotional tether. I wanted that emotional urgency, if you will. I mean in some ways I wanted it to read like a memoir which was interesting because I had just written a memoir. You have to be careful with that. Novel is not memoir.
My dear friend Keith who died of AIDS did not live in Paris. It’s again how we borrow, but as a writer I carry these searing emotional scenes that I know I have to try to render and that was on them. Particularly there is a scene near the end of the book that I really needed to render. So how much can narrative hold? I call it weaving or like pulling threads. How many threads can you pull? I think I tested the limits.
Dr. Lisa: Well I enjoyed it. I think it was definitely something that kept me reading and it wasn’t just because I knew I was going to be talking to you. So I think you were very successful of that.
Susan: Thank you so much.
Dr. Lisa: I also know that it caused me to really think about the work that you do as a teacher. I know that you are co-founder of The Telling Room here in Portland. There’s a lot of work being done with The Telling Room and people from other countries that have children with stories to tell. This really was not only in your book, but also kind of was a theme that was picked up in the “Chartered School” article that you have written for Maine Magazine. Talk to me about education and why education has become so important to you?
Susan: Well I think it’s distilled back to story. It’s storytelling for and for me it was having incredible English teachers, who were really writing teachers for me, who turned the light on. I have been doing readings in the state and my sixth grade English teacher has showed up, my seventh grade English teacher showed up, and it’s so amazing. These people are the one’s that handed me “The Bridge to Terabithia,” which was a book that changed my life and here they are. Now I can say I’ve written stories because I was inspired by you. I think not to sentimentalize it I really needed to say this relationship between the teacher and the student can be life changing. It’s really important.
So often we hear that a child was saved. Like they were on the edge and they were saved because one teacher reached out and did a little bit more. And that’s where I put Willie. I put her in a refugee center. She doesn’t have any idea what she’s really doing in Paris at this center. A friend has talked her into it. How much will she help and to tie it back to sort of the landscape here in Maine. I was asked to go do a little tour of Charter Schools for Maine Magazine. That was an incredible opportunity to sort of take a peek and say okay what are you trying to do here on a teacher level. I talked to a ton of kids at three of our Charter Schools and the refrain was all the same and it’s really simple. They want teachers to listen to them. They want to be heard. They would love a little less testing. They’d like to go outside more. It was very poignant.
That’s the most poignant piece of all and this goes for all our students across Maine. I need to say that we’re looking closer at Charters because they’re the newest to the table, but boy there’s amazing teaching going on in all of our public schools and teachers that are so passionate and innovative. All of these kids talked about this very essential need to fit in. That really was very moving to me. John D’Anieri who is the Head of School at the Harpswell Coastal Academy, a brand new Charter School that I looked at hard for the piece. He used the word comfortable. Students have to be comfortable before they’ll start to actually learn. You can call it what you want, fitting in, feeling nurtured, feeling comfortable. I think that’s something that the Charter Schools are looking hard at.
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Dr. Lisa: Susan, where did you go to school?
Susan: I went to rural school in Woolwich, Maine from kindergarten to 8th grade. We were all in a one sort of building school and then we went to the big city of Bath across the river. That was very exciting. I went there for two years and then my parents and I looked around and realized that I was stagnating and that I had this huge appetite particularly for stories. Then I did go out of the state. I went to boarding school for two years at Andover which wasn’t so far away and that was the perfect time for me. It was a perfect mix. I knew where I’d come from and then I sort of saw this huge landscape of learning that was out there and then I kind of never looked back in terms of my appetite for learning.
Dr. Lisa: Did you at any time ever feel this outsider thing that you describe in your novel, in your memoir, and even in this Charter School piece that you’ve written?
Susan: Have I felt like the outsider in my life? Well I think going through education absolutely. I mean that’s what’s so poignant about the kids I talked to is I remember feeling like the biggest outsider in the world when I drove across the Kennebec River to go the Bath Junior High. I was from Woolwich and so how would I ever fit in because the social parameters are so delicate and nuanced in 9th grade and we forget that as adults and I was seeing that so clearly in these conversations I was having with girls in the Charter Schools and frankly a lot of them were trying Charter because the social piece wasn’t working in the other schools so they were taking a risk in my opinion. They were really trying something new and they didn’t know how it was going to go.
Dr. Lisa: Well I think going through your education.
Susan: Absolutely. I mean that’s what’s so poignant about the kids I talked to. I remember feeling like the biggest outsider in the world when I drove across the Kennebec River to go to the Bath Junior High because I was from Woolwich and so how would I ever fit in. Because the social parameters are so delicate and nuanced in 9th grade and we forget that as adults. I was seeing that so clearly in these conversations I was having with girls in the Charter Schools. Frankly a lot of them were trying Charter because the social piece wasn’t working in the other schools so they were taking a risk in my opinion. They were really trying something new and they didn’t know how it was going to go.
Dr. Lisa: As I’m reading this article on the Charter Schools I like the fact that we’re looking at different areas of interest for kids. You talked to individuals from the Maine Academy of Natural Sciences. I love the fact that we’re here in Maine and there’s a school that’s actually called the Maine Academy of Natural Sciences because there is so much of this that we live in, but we don’t always have a chance to actually observe it.
Susan: We forget what a rural state we are and how much agriculture is the backbone of our state. What they’re doing up in Fairfield at the Maine Academy is saying, here’s how you grow a sustainable garden. Here’s how you fix a tractor. Here’s how you build vegetable beds in the greenhouse that they just built. I think the missions of these Charter Schools that I looked at were very distilled. They’re trying to cut a very narrow path. They’re very honest about it at the Maine Academy. Not everyone there as their wonderful principal. Emanuel Pariser said, “Not everyone here wants to grow carrots,” so they have to figure that out and they do. I think they’re very, very nimble up there and they’re very clear. They’re working with disengaged kids. How do they win them back? I think one of the most moving lines in the whole piece for me was when Emanuel Pariser says, “It’s up to us to spark their imagination again and help them grow their confidence. How do we do that?” because he doesn’t want to lose any kids.
Dr. Lisa: You also spoke with individuals at the Harpswell Coastal Academy. How is their focus different?
Susan: It’s an entirely different world there down the Harpswell neck. Very rural, small, an old elementary school that was sitting vacated in the community said, okay you want to put a Charter School here. We’d love something in this building. The mission of that school is intrinsically tied to Harpswell at the town. It sounds like a wonderful premise. Let’s have a school that looks at the watershed and the marine industry that lives in Harpswell. Let’s look at the working waterfront. Let’s have the students mapping coves for data on seaweed and snails. Again, the goals are really exciting. I caught them all in day six so a lot of things had yet to shake out. Every time I left these schools I thought hats off to the teachers because there’s a lot of work to be done.
Dr. Lisa: At the same time you have in past articles written profiles for Maine Magazine. There was one you did on a painter, who one would say is at the other end of her life. She’s in her 90’s I believe. She’s very well known internationally and yet early on her family and she had to make a decision to not swim with the rest of the fishes, but go in a different direction and it did give her great success. Is it interesting for you to be able to say okay kids if we can spark your interest in a way that’s different than what you’re already getting? We really could be setting you up for some interesting success that we can’t even define at this point.
Susan: Yeah absolutely, I spoke with Adam Burke at the Baxter Academy. The idea is let’s shake things up and let’s look at Playspace learning. Let’s look at very individualized learning and let’s see what happens when we divorce ourselves from pinning all these expectations on standardized tests. Let’s free the children up. It means they’re wonderfully articulate about their skepticism about standardized tests. They’re not working for a lot of our kids and yet a lot of our kids are incredibly capable. That’s the beauty of what’s happening, you get all this excitement. You can sense that the kids have liberated from all the downsides of standardized testing. Now if you test well that’s a walk in the park you’ll all set, but what happens to the kids who are extremely bright and don’t test well at all.
Dr. Lisa: Well I agree with you on the one hand and on the other hand I’ve had lots of standardized tests in my life as a doctor. I’m actually studying for another standardized test even now. Every 10 years we have to get Board Certified again and just because we can take tests well I think sometimes we still feel like the education doesn’t quite fit us. I think that’s the other piece of it is are there kids also out there who might test well, but still don’t really quite feel like the educational system fits them in some way.
Susan: Absolutely and I agree with you completely. In fact, what I heard was that some of the kids who test well just surf.
Dr. Lisa: I think that’s very common actually.
Susan: Right and they’re equally disengaged. You know at The Telling Room I’ve always said that we are only as good as our latest teacher. I felt that over and over doing this Charter School piece for Maine Magazine which was who do we have in the classroom today. How are you interacting with these kids? The kids want to be heard. They want dialog. Every single kid I talked to used the word one-on-one. One-on-one conversation with teacher, you know, want more please.
Dr. Lisa: Nowhere in this article did I hear public schools are less than ideal. We don’t like public schools. Public schools are doing the wrong thing. I never heard that. What I heard was really what the Charter School Champions have been saying consistently which is, here’s another option and maybe in exploring this other option we can make education better for everyone, public schools, kids are disenchanted with public schools, with teachers. So I think it’s an interesting line to walk. My mother is a public school teacher, has been for many years, and I know she has thoughts about Charter Schools, but maybe if we can look at it as okay this could make it better for all involved and how can we build on that.
Susan: It’s interesting you say that because I also did a profile for Alan Lishness from the Gulf of Maine Research Institute for this same education issue for Maine Magazine and I put it to him. He said in the piece, I thought rather compellingly, “the jury is out,” he said. But what’s the risk of sitting back and watching and seeing what happens when we do more individualized lines of learning. We don’t have anything to lose by seeing if that works because then we could all benefit from that data. Let’s wait and see, but at the same time we can’t be naive about this. There’s a really small piece of education money out there and that’s the controversy. That’s what I call the Maine hot potato in the piece and we’re not done talking about that.
Dr. Lisa: Well that will be very interesting to see how all that all plays out. Maybe we’ll have you back again over a few years more into The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and we can talk about that and probably your next book, but we’ve been really honored to have you in here talking to us today about “Paris was the Place,” your new novel, and also about the articles that you’ve written for Maine Magazine. Thanks for coming in Susan Conley.
Susan: Thanks it was a great pleasure.
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Dr. Lisa: Education is a topic that we have addressed often on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour & Podcast and the way that we offer education within the state of Maine is something that is of great interest. There are a lot of relationships between health and education and wellness and it’s something that we think is important, so today we have with us Dr. Glenn Cummings, who is the President and Executive Director of the Maine Academy of Natural Sciences. We also have John D’Anieri, Head of School at the Harpswell Coastal Academy. Thank you for coming in.
Susan Conley of Maine Magazine wrote an article about your schools and about Charter Schools here in Maine for Maine Magazine coming up in November. She had some interesting thoughts and some very interesting experiences with the students at your schools. You are offering a very unique way to educate our children. Why did you become first interested in education? I guess I’ll ask Glenn first and you’re Dr. Cummings because you have a PhD in education.
Glenn: I have a doctorate in education, but it’s really in higher education. I had started my career back when I was 22. I came back to Maine from graduate school and taught social studies at Gorham High School. I thought I would just do it a couple of years, maybe go to law school in my late 20’s or mid 20’s and it captured my imagination. It drained every piece of energy out of me in a good way. I think for me it began this Rubik’s cube of how do you get better. How do you move things in parts that actually make education better for more kids. I could see where the programs that we had, certainly in those days at Gorham High School were working, but I could also see where if we could just do it differently a little bit we could bring in that other 30% that’s really not engaged. They may be doing their work, but they’re not really fully engaged and not reaching their full potential. That challenge hooked me early.
Dr. Lisa: And what about you John?
John: Actually it’s kind of a different story. In high school myself, a large suburban high school; I was not feeling that it was relevant or very useful. I went to college, left college, worked off and on. It was 10 years before I actually finished my Bachelor’s degree and then worked some more. I ran a nonprofit arts collaborative at Kentucky for a while and at 30 went back and got a Master of Arts in teaching. I had done a whole bunch of jobs truck driving and pizza making and all kinds of things. I worked at Pat’s Pizza in Orono for a very short time.
For me it comes out of a sense that for many kids, especially those kids in poverty or rural kids, that a lot about what schools were doing just weren’t working for way too many kids, but have fierce commitment to the public school system so not feeling like the solution to that was to create a separate track of schools, but really to try to work in public schools to dramatically reinvent them.
Dr. Lisa: What is it about Maine that is so unique that has so many students needing to navigate things in a different way?
Glenn: I’m not sure Maine is that unique. I think when you look nationally the statistics are even more startling. Quite frankly dismal when it comes to high school graduations and so when you look at how many kids are voting with their feet in terms of leaving especially large urban high schools it’s significant. Some places in Chicago and Philadelphia are talking about 50 or 60% between their freshman and their senior year never actually complete.
Maine’s graduating rate is much higher. It’s gone from about 80% up to about 82.5% so we’re seeing a little bit of progress in the last couple of years. Legislators have gotten, I think over the last 10 years much more focused about how to monitor the success of avoiding dropout. When you really look at how we’re engaged nationally it’s of great concern, but in Maine specifically we definitely have large segments of rural poverty and that seems to be correlated to dropout. Then we have increasing just poverty in general even in areas that you might not expect it. Those things are definitely contributing.
It may not be related to poverty. Maybe it’s simply the way in which we go about high school. For example at high school there’s a lot of I guess we’d call it sort of sit and get. So you have to sit there for 5-1/2 hours and sort of digest information and kind of put it back out. The models that I think John and I are trying to play with is, how do you get real world challenges, authentic assessments, and how do you build units around those things that would challenge students in an interesting way, but also add value to the community. We’re trying to think about new ways to get students to feel differently about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.
John: I would just add one thing it’s not that makes Maine unique, but it is a particular challenge to do sustainable school reform in rural areas where the economics of a state with 1.2-1.3 million people and the geography that we have are very different. I’ve done some work in New York and Boston and urban areas where you really can create innovation within a large system. For instance the Small Schools Movement in New York has really produced some documentable, excellent results for kids, but the economics of Maine don’t lend themselves to easily reinventing what has increasingly become a larger school system towards small schools. So if relationships are what works for kids and the relationships flourish in smaller schools, my career has been a lot of projects that are trying to demonstrate that small schools are sustainable over time, but need very different economic models, different teaching models in order to make them sustainable.
Dr. Lisa: Each of you has looked at education sort of from an eagles view. I know that Glenn you’ve been involved in politics. You were the Speaker of the House. You worked for the Obama administration. John, you’re a member of the Kappa class of the Institute for Civic Leadership, so to each of you it’s much bigger than just what do we do within a school. It’s how do we make inroads or connections. How do we understand education from a community perspective? Talk to me a little about that.
Glenn: I remember being in the Legislative Education Committee early in my career and the crossfire of politics is very complicated in Maine, particularly around high property value communities versus low property value communities. I represented Portland, which is neither one of those really, and so we were certainly often challenged politically to get our voice heard.
From my perspective first of all everybody believes deeply. Usually if you talk to people at a party of something about education their eyes sort of glaze over, but if you get them to talk about their education and their experience, people have very passionate views about it. The community, certainly from a personal perspective, are people that are often very clear about what they like and what they don’t necessarily like about education. They have very definitive views which certainly in our world of Charter Schools it’s always interesting to hear what people have to say. We have tended to have kind of a nice blessing in terms of how people look at our school Maine Academy of Natural Sciences because we try to go after kids who are really struggling not necessarily academically, but they may be struggling in a variety of ways with school socially and emotionally and feeling like they need a new experience and they want to engage in the curriculum in a different way. We tend to stay out of some of the politics, which has not been the case for all the Charter Schools in Maine. They have often run aground a little bit with that, but our perspective is let’s focus on what’s really good for the kids. If we can prove that there’s a challenge that the kids can’t get met at that local public school or even other private school then there’s a place for us to give it a try.
John: I think I would add that we’ve evolved to a system of public schooling where there are certain ways in which the community or the parent community is involved in schools and many ways in which they’re not. Often they’re not involved deeply in what I would call the actual work of students in schools. Our notion of community based or Playspaced education really has those students out studying the clam flats which are under threat in Harpswell and preparing informed reports to testify before town committees and to interact with the shellfish warden and those kinds of things.
Our kids will be going out on a lobster boat this weekend. Casco Bay does a lot of those things, too, but the idea that the work of the school is not just bringing parents in for boosters or for bake sales, but for letting the kids and the community members know that their work is shared work. If they’re very separate it’s going to be very difficult for that gulf between what the students feel is relevant and what the community expects to ever be bridged, but once we put those people together often very different people in terms of how they define their adult lives, but you put them in a learning situation with students and some of those gaps diminish quite quickly for the benefit of both the adult and the kid.
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Dr. Lisa: Harpswell Coastal Academy is doing its own form of fund-raising and I know that you’re going into even a workshop today as we’re talking trying to understand how best to work on the development of your financial support That is an interesting thing for teachers and administrators to have to think about in a really different way.
John: So in a traditional public school you’re buying buses, but you’re not starting a bus route from scratch and you have a building. Well we have a building that was a school that was built eventually expanded to serve maybe 110 – 120 elementary school kids. We’re designed to be a school of 240 to 280 students that is, I think, the smallest we can be and make the sustainable small school economics work over time which means we’re going to need a building.
So on the one hand we’re keeping a vital community building that was probably going to be underused or possibly not used at all. We’re keeping that in the community, we’re able to sort of reuse that building, but we are going to need obtain, from scratch, significant facilities over time. It does again motivate that community to figure out what we need to do. The other thing that I think is worth nothing is that Harpswell, which has had at least at one point the widest economic disparity in income in the state of Maine, and the difference between the poorest people in Harpswell and the wealthiest people was the largest on the average, but our school is 14 miles down a peninsula. If you’re in middle or high school and have been driving up the peninsula through Brunswick to Mt. Ararat High School for years, that makes it very difficult to draw families who can see themselves living in that community over time.
We’re able to eventually bring 2.4 – 2.5 maybe 3 million dollars of economic activity to a very small town and that’s something that has been leaving. When Lubec lost its school, they fought. They fought and fought and fought to keep that school because the economics of keeping that school were bigger than just the dollar per student economics of the actual educational endeavor. Tom Shepard, who’s been on the show, talks about how it’s not just efficiency but productivity. If you invest in productivity sometimes you want to make some calculations that aren’t just about short term efficiency.
Dr. Lisa: Each of you also has links to Casco Bay High School, which we have featured on this show. Before we had Derek Pierce who is the principal of Casco Bay High School. I believe that they are 10 years from now from doing the type of Expeditionary Learning that they’ve been promoting. John you have teaching experience there I believe?
John: No I worked for Expeditionary Learning.
Dr. Lisa: You worked for Expeditionary Learning and Glenn you have at least a child that …
Glenn: I have two actually. I have a senior and a junior so my sons, and my wife teaches English there.
Dr. Lisa: I mean you are already interested in Expeditionary Learning. Each of you had a slightly different, but still important link to this process. Why was this something that was so necessary to each of you as individuals?
John: Well I’ll start by saying that I came out of an organization called The Coalition of Essential Schools which was founded by this guy Ted Sizer, who came out of the original Annenberg Institute for School Reform, which was a 25 now or maybe even 30 years ago attempt to sort of reinvent American schools.
Expeditionary Learning is a large national nonprofit that has roles in over 200 schools around the country so they are sort of a small E, small L, Expeditionary Learning. It is also very much a model of working with schools over time. They hired me to work for them to help get this school started and to work with other schools around Maine. What I would say of the approach is that I’m very versed in that come through a couple movements are small schools, personalized schools, project based learning and Expeditionary Learning is one of the many places that that can land. What they have is an extraordinarily strong and well-defined set of models so that when they can go in to work with a school they can really say this is what we’re going to do. The it is pretty well defined.
I think King Middle School is an extraordinary example in Portland, and that’s been a 15 year journey, but what they’re able to do with a 600, you know, Casco Bay as proud I am of that I helped get that running and it is a wonderful story, but starting from scratch is easier to build those kinds of results then starting with a school in the middle. One of the reasons why I do start-ups is that I think you can get where you’re going. You’re more likely to get where you’re going.
Taking an existing public school and transforming it around these kinds of notions, which is what’s happened at King Middle School over time, is an extraordinary story and a very rare one. Glenn having worked in the administration knows that the turnaround process, which for instance the Gates Foundation invested a bunch of money in turning around schools turns out to be extraordinarily difficult. The very few successes are exceptions to a very long. I’m committed to those things because I think they work for kids. I think that if you look at a group of students whose needs are not being met the kinds of educational practices that cause relationships to be necessary as opposed to be optional which is what small schools can do that’s the way to go.
Dr. Lisa: What I like about the fact that I’m able to sit with both of you right now is that you each are representing Charter Schools, but you’re each representing a very unique school. A school that is linked to the community in which it’s actually located. The Harpswell Coastal Academy has a slightly different way of approaching education based on where it is. The Maine Academy of Natural Sciences has its own unique approach. How are some of the attributes of the community working their way into your curricula?
Glenn: I mean from our point of view obviously agriculture is a key component of what we do. We have 2,300 acres that we’re surrounded by. We have a community college that just came to our campus. They’re going the main campus of KVCC, Kennebec Valley Community College to us. They have the first, they’re beginning the first Ag Tech Program in the state so we have a natural sequence in which our students can evolve to, but we’ve had a long history. Reverend Hinckley was started in the 1880’s believed that the farm had it’s own redemptive values and that you could learn about nature, about human nature, about biology, about botany and horticulture and, of course, agriculture and about livestock. That in itself was rich in learning and meaning for kids, but also in terms of learning how to be disciplined, take care of things, to be a steward of nature and all those things seem to fit in with a recent generation of interest, which is looking at local organic sustainable food systems and trying to find ways in which they can get that market up and going. We feel like we stepped into the middle of something that seems to be certainly a regional trend, if not a national trend, to look at our food systems and to think about how we feed ourselves. What is it that we actually are putting in our mouths. That trend seems to be something that we could build on from an academic point of view.
Dr. Lisa: People who are interested in learning more about the Maine Academy of Natural Sciences which is located at the Good Will-Hinckley campus and also the Harpswell Coastal Academy they can read Susan Conley’s article on Charter Schools in Maine Magazine. How else can they find out about your schools?
Glenn: They can certainly go on our website. If they go under Maine Academy of Natural Sciences we have a website there. Also I encourage them if they’re looking at visiting the school to call Lisa Sandy that’s 238-4000 and just set up a time to come visit.
John: For us that would be Carrie Branson is our Assistant Head of School and Director of Operations, 833-3229. We really do want people to come and see us and a matter of fact if you not only want to learn about the school, but have something you would want to share with our students call us up and we can give you an audience pretty easily. Our school is set up to facilitate having people come in or having our kids get out.
Dr. Lisa: John do you also have a website for the Harpswell Coastal Academy?
John: Yeah and it is the very long harpswellcoastalacademy.org
Dr. Lisa: It’s been a privilege to sit with the two of you today. We’ve been speaking with Dr. Glenn Cummings, the President and Executive Director of the Maine Academy of Natural Sciences and also with John D’Anieri, the Head of School at the Harpswell Coastal Academy. The fact that I was so fortunate to have you both in the same room at the same time and have the same conversation is wonderful. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here today.
Glenn: Thank you.
John: Thanks Lisa.
Dr. Lisa: You’ve been listening to The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour & Podcast, Show #112 “Chartering Education.” Our guests have included Susan Conley, John D’Anieri, and Glenn Cummings. For more information on our guests and extended interviews visit doctorlisa.org
The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour & Podcast is down-loadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each weeks show sign up for our eNewsletter and like our Dr. Lisa Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter and Pinterest and read my take on health and well-being on the Bountiful Blog. Love to hear from you so please let us know what you think of The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged as they enable us to bring The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our “Chartering Education” show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.
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