New school counters MCAS-based mentality
By Anand Vaishnav, Globe Staff, 8/26/2002
But watching the standards-and-testing movement creep to the center of her
children's classrooms, this public school parent chose a different educational
path: home schooling. Next month, Tilson will send her children several days a
week to the Mystic River Learning Center in Medford, where there will be no
desks, no rules tacked to the wall, and certainly no tests. It's a new outlet
for home-schoolers whose parents need help, as well as a refuge for those who
say MCAS and grade-by-grade standards have squeezed the innovation and
creativity out of public schools.
''All of a sudden, there's this whole thing about having to pass [the MCAS
exam] to get out of high school. And I began to see they were revving up for it
even in first grade,'' said Tilson, mother of a 10-year-old daughter and a
12-year-old son, who initially welcomed MCAS as a reasonable educational
yardstick. ''Everything was changing to accommodate and prepare for the MCAS.''
In some ways, the opening of the Mystic River Learning Center next month is
the ultimate MCAS protest, a movement that has taken more conventional forms
such as rallies, petitions, and boycotts of the Massachusetts Comprehensive
Assessment System exam. The center's founder is Lynette Culverhouse, an
Arlington mother and former teacher in England who is well-known in anti-MCAS
circles.
''I can't look at kids as numbers,'' said Culverhouse, who will open her
school with about 15 home-schoolers, ages 6 to 14, in rented rooms in a Medford
church. ''Learning, in order to happen in a meaningful way, has to be in the
context of meaningful relationships. And when the context is testing, it's
harder for teachers to form meaningful relationships with their students. Kids
have such talents and gifts. Why try to homogenize them and make them learn all
the same things at the same time?''
Her ideas - teachers as facilitators rather than lecturers, students who
learn best by reading and studying what they want, exploration instead of
regurgitation - are not new. The Mystic River Learning Center is another piece
of what some call the ''unschooling'' movement: putting young minds in charge of
what they learn, at their own clip. A similar center for home-schoolers exists
in Hadley, and some private schools such as the Sudbury Valley School in
Framingham have neither grades nor curricula.
Ted Sizer, chairman of the Coalition of Essential Schools, said Culverhouse's
actions are part of the backlash against the standards movement in the Bay
State, which opponents say has been hijacked by MCAS. In many ways, Sizer and
other education specialists said, it adds more fuel to the debate about what a
solid education should look like. ''It's one of a growing number of symptoms of
an essential withdrawal of support for this public policy,'' said Sizer, former
dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. ''It'll be dismissed as woolly
headed by the current state Board of Eduation and dismissed by others as
privatization on the left rather than privatization on the right. Both of those
are unfair.''
By and large, though, unschooling hasn't caught on. MCAS scores - the next
round of which will be released this week - have risen as the graduation
requirement has kicked in. Switching to home schooling or private schools
because of MCAS remains relatively rare, even in the affluent communities where
opposition to the test has been loudest.
State Board of Education Chairman James A. Peyser, a steadfast MCAS
supporter, applauded the broadening of choices in education in ventures like
Culverhouse's. And he acknowledged that some schools may have ''overreacted'' to
tailoring their lessons to the tough MCAS test. But he wondered if efforts like
Culverhouse's are an overreaction of a different sort, and questioned whom they
really help. Most of her students, after all, will come to her more advanced
than the peers they left in public schools.
''By far the greater focus of the whole discussion is those schools and
districts where students are not even becoming competent in basic academic
skills,'' Peyser said. ''And this notion that we need to provide them with a
more creative and flexible environment in order to improve performance is belied
by every observation and every bit of research that I've ever seen. We have to
raise expectations for those students, not remove them entirely.''
To some, Culverhouse said, her school might look like ''organized chaos.''
Rooms will echo with the clatter of dice as she uses counting games to teach
place value. A second-grader enthralled with ancient Egypt might read a picture
book on the country; his more advanced peer might curl up with a novel. One day
could feature two hours on math; the next day, 10 minutes. As for lunch, the
students will decide what they want to eat for the week, shop for it, and cook
it - unconsciously blending math, reading, and social skills while they're at
it.
Annual tuition ranges from $2,250 for one day a week to $9,600 for five days
a week. Because Culverhouse is working with home-schoolers, her center is not a
school legally, and the only requirement other than liability insurance is for
her families to include Culverhouse's activities in annual reports they file
with their local school committees.
Some families, like Tilson, pulled their children out of public schools at
the end of June. Others, like Caryn Johnson, have had their children skip public
schools entirely. Johnson, mother of 6-year-old Daniel Johnson-Carter of
Bedford, said the drive toward MCAS and standards is pigeonholing both teachers
and students.
''The attempt to improve the education system is a fine thing. The choice of
methods is not ideal,'' Johnson said. ''They are trying to come up with a
one-size-fits-all curriculum, a one-size-fits-all approach to the material, and
I have children for whom that really does not fit.''
This story ran on page B1 of the Boston Globe on 8/26/2002.
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2002 Globe Newspaper Company.