Needed: Exportable Models of Significant Change in Education

Herman Ohme

Do you drool with envy and squirm with guilt when reading about those marvelous innovations in someone else's school? Then try reading this.

Educators are barraged today with highly recommended programs, ranging from modest changes in structure or curriculum to a total reordering of all components in a system. Change resources range from single outside consultants to the expenditure of large sums from foundations and government sources. The results are sometimes real, more often hoped for; they are rarely if ever competently evaluated; they are described glowingly in prestigious journals, written up in textbooks, and presented as models in educational hardbacks and softbacks. To read what is being done elsewhere is enough to make the average overworked, problem-sated educator drool with envy and squirm with guilt about his own inadequate contribution. "Why can't things like the John Adams High School or the Parkway Program happen here?" he asks.

I intend to answer that question. But first let me note that educators have been offered some silver-lined fantasies. There is an enormous gap between what is reported in writing and what goes on in the real setting. The rush to get into print often causes serious distortion of the facts. And there are a few educators who are willing to trade their integrity for the recognition and financial gains that come from the spotlight of national publicity.

That all of this tends to impede actual progress and damage the profession has apparently become unimportant. The information that educators truly need is hard to find, although there is no dearth of books filled with cleverly substantiated claims by the current breed of medicine men.

Some examples of present and recently past panaceas are worth mentioning.

Melbourne High School

In its heyday several years ago, the Melbourne (Florida) High School became the most prominent model of the nongraded secondary school in the U.S. Its architect was the principal, B. Frank Brown. Ten of 11 chapters in Brown's book, The Nongraded High School,¹ deal with the historical basis, the rationale, and the operational aspects of the conceptualized model. It is exciting to read, and it attracted countless numbers of the curious and the faithful to visit the school. In the eleventh and final chapter, Brown instructs the educator on how to sell a nongraded secondary program to his community. It is quite clear that he is not describing how he sold the program to his community (if indeed he did), but how others should do the job. This type of reporting not only lacks credibility, it comes off in the final analysis as pure educational opportunism.

The book is not only interesting for what it contains but even more for what it does not contain. Nowhere is the word "evaluation" to be found. Once must conclude that Brown regarded his program as so patently good that it was unnecessary to verify any of the results.

Nova High School

At about the same time Melbourne became a mecca for innovators, Nova High School in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, was attempting similar breakthroughs. It was publicized as another link in the then-current chain of panaceas. By 1970 the link had broken, at least as reported in the following account from Newsweek:

Many of the school's experiments simply didn't work. "We got into some real jams," says one Nova administrator. "People got to calling this place Disneyland and they were often right." ...

Today rules and regulations have replaced Nova's initial freedom and individuality. A yellow poster on the door of an art room asks "Dear God — how come you have only 10 rules but Nova has a million?" Last month half a dozen students were suspended for five days and their grades were lowered one point — because they parked their cars in the faculty parking lot; they said the student parking lot was filled with broken glass....³

John Adams High School

Recently John Adams High School in Portland, Oregon, has received more widespread favorable publicity than any innovative high school program undertaken in well over a decade. The above-mentioned Newsweek article also devoted considerable space to John Adams High School, calling it the "best around."⁴

In May, 1971, the Phi Delta Kappan devoted 17 pages to the development and apparent success of the John Adams High School experiment.⁵

Charles Siberman considered John Adams High School "the most important experiment in secondary education."⁶

Consequently it should come as a rude shock to learn that, as of this writing, the John Admas High School experiment has been ended after only two years. The principal, Robert Schwartz, who was also the chief architect of John Adams, has been reassigned in the district and a new, more "traditional" principal has been appointed. According to local newspapers, a more traditional program was implemented in the fall of 1971.

A Phi Delta Kappan editorial (October, 1971) discussed implications of the demise of the John Adams High School experiment, pointing out that "present evaluative criteria remain so nebulous and subjective that it is virtually impossible to obtain an accurate overall assessment of the learning that results from any particular program."⁷

The Parkway Program

Since its inception in 1969, Philadelphia's Parkway Program has captured the imagination of many educators. It is considered to be one of the foremost innovative models in the country. John Bremer, principal at the time of inception, was the original architect. Descriptions written by the current practitioners have that familiar gospel-like quality, implying a kind of revealed truth, so completely self-evident as to defy questioning or even interpretation.

The philosophic basis for the program is stated in a school district document as follows:

What Parkway is about is an attitude toward learning, an attitude that suggests that learning is an enjoyable, profitable experience — not something which one stoically endures. In order to serve this attitude, and to encourage it, the Parkway Program draws on the spectacular resources of the Philadelphia community. However, to say that without those resources better education is not possible is a denial of accepted educational principles. Even in a traditional class, within a school building with a traditional curriculum, it is possible to structure the educational experience so that the student feels he has a stake in it. But it must first be admitted that each student has a right to make decisions about his own education, and that unless the student is permitted to make those decisions, his education can never be as useful to him as it might be.⁸

This and other descriptions fail to suggest evaluation by persons other than the students themselves. Appraisal by the clients is certainly worthwhile, but does not constitute a competent evaluation of all that is being done. Certainly it is an inadequate basis for holding the program up to other educators as a model. In fact, all three experiments discussed illustrate the nonexportable model of educational innovation.

Copyright 2005-2008: Herman Ohme