Education Revolution

I just wrote this article in response to a report on the results with students when they have good and bad teachers (http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-teachers-20100817,0,6793836.story?track=rss)

Jerry Mintz

I used to think that our little democratic school was unusually blessed with good teachers. But as I thought back about it I realized that many of those teachers were not particularly good when they came to us. In fact, some were not good at all. So what happened?

Well, one significant aspect of our school is that we had two long staff meetings every week to go over everything that was happening in the school, and what was happening with each child. We wound up all being on the same page and catching little problems before they became big ones. Also, students who chose to could come to staff meetings. We found them particularly helpful, as they knew about things that were going on that the staff didn’t.

But in retrospect, that was not the most important training method that helped our staff to become great teachers. I think the most important factor was that no student had to come to any teacher’s class unless they wanted to! All attendance was noncompulsory. This meant that the classes were great and teachers could really teach because everyone was there because they wanted to be there. It also meant that if a teacher was not teaching something very interesting the students gave instant feedback with their feet. They either left or didn’t come back the next time. With this kind of feedback and evaluation, new teachers quickly learned how to organize interesting classes and activities. In some cases, if they couldn’t adjust, they just left the school. Pay was certainly not enough to keep them there. But in most cases they developed very quickly, sometimes in a matter of days, and figured out what the students really wanted to learn.

How sad it is that 99% of teachers in non-democratic schools never get this kind of feedback in their entire careers. They have a captive audience. In most cases this prevents them from becoming good teachers.

We never cared about testing for student’s grades. We didn’t give grades. But we did use standardized testing to test how the school was doing by traditional measures. In spite of the fact, or because of the fact that students didn’t have to go to any class they didn’t want to, the average student improved on national standardized tests at two and a half times the national rate. In some areas, such as vocabulary, it was useless to test them after a few years because they were always five or six grade levels above their age. This was undoubtedly because they all were very motivated to understand everything that was being said in the democratic meetings.

Sometimes people would visit, talk to the students (they often thought the older students were young looking staff members) and say to us afterward “Well of course it works with these kids. They are middle class!” But we had no minimum tuition and most of our students were low income and many were on welfare. Very few were actually middle class. But they sounded like they were after a few years in the school.

I’m not sure what the traditional system could learn from our experience with helping develop great teachers, but one step might be to leave the door open, so students could come in or go out!