BY | JEANNIE OUELLETTE

Americans lost confidence last year in our nation’s public schools and the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), according to a national survey administered by the education reform journal Education Next. But if the decline didn’t catch your attention, it may be because America’s education “crisis” has stubbornly persisted since the Reagan era landmark report A Nation at Risk: The Imperative For Educational Reform. That report shocked the nation and catalyzed an unrelenting concern that American schools are failing. It also touched off a wave of local, state, and federal reform efforts.

Unfortunately, reform efforts haven’t led to resounding success or even lasting improvements, as measured not only by public perception but also by hard data, including an escalating drop-out rate, declining test scores, and a teacher retention problem so dire that more than 30 percent of teachers leave the profession within their first five years. Last year, on the 25th anniversary of the release of A Nation at Risk, the nonpartisan organization Strong American Schools released a report card of our nation’s progress since the initial report, commenting:

“Now is not the time for more educational research or reports or commissions. We have enough commonsense ideas, backed by decades of research, to significantly improve American schools. The missing ingredient isn’t even educational at all. It’s political. . . . Without vigorous national leadership to improve education, states and local school systems simply cannot overcome the obstacles to making the big changes necessary to significantly improve our nation’s schools.”

Whether the needed “vigorous national leadership” will emerge in the Obama administration remains to be seen. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said, “Our kids cannot wait. They get only one chance at a quality education. I want to move with a huge sense of urgency. We’re for anything that works.”

George Theoharis ’93 couldn’t agree more. “We are constantly reinventing the wheel, we’re ‘helped to death.’ We’ve got this alphabet soup list of programs that come and go, and meanwhile we try to do something new and at the same time we’re not doing anything well. Anything that lasts takes a long time, but nothing we do lasts.”

Theoharis is an assistant professor at Syracuse University in the Teaching and Leadership Department. His forthcoming book, The School Leaders Our Children Deserve: Seven Keys to Equity, Social Justice, and School Reform, makes the case for decisive action toward fast reform based on what educators already know works. “I really believe we know how to teach kids. It comes down to our will to do it—our will collectively, as teachers, as leadership, as a country.”

Theoharis calls for three major shifts. First and foremost, he says, schools must improve access to the “core learning context,” which he explains as the general education teaching and learning. This means shifting away from ability grouping, tracking, and special education pull-out programs, all of which Theoharis calls ineffective. Instead, he says, we need to “re-envision a new understanding of inclusion.”

Second, teachers and administrators need to undertake intensive and ongoing professional development to improve their understanding of everything from curriculum to key justice issues.

Third, schools must cultivate a culture of belonging. “Too often our schools are places no one wants to be—not students, not parents, not staff,” he says. “I think that leadership has fallen down over the last century. We have to change people’s minds and recognize that when change is too slow, we can’t actually accomplish it.”

Theoharis cites his years at Macalester as formative. “Mac shaped my interest in being engaged in the community. Ruthanne Kurth-Schai really made the connection for me between teaching and issues of equity and justice.”

Kurth-Schai, chair of Macalester’s Education Department, teaches a course called “Education and Social Change” that many Mac alumni call a turning point in their journey toward teaching. But she deflects credit from herself to the ideals of Macalester as an educational institution. “Mac has an incredible legacy of highly prepared teachers making a difference in diverse urban public schools. Many students have gone into education policy and research, and are tirelessly and creatively working to promote those ideals.”

Kurth-Schai believes that lasting improvement in public schools will come only when our society commits to training highly prepared and qualified teachers of diverse backgrounds who are academically well prepared in the disciplines they’ll teach. This, she says, is essentially an NCLB provision that has not been well implemented.

But Kurth-Schai can imagine it being achieved through a number of means, including through loan forgiveness and tuition support for aspiring teachers, and through high quality professional development and continuing education and mentorship as well as improved salaries for teachers.

In addition to quality teachers, Kurth-Schai sees the need for universal childhood education on one end of the continuum, and on the other, a dramatically overhauled approach to preparing young people for the transition from high school into the adult world. Citing high school dropout rates as high as 50 percent, Kurth-Schai says that students who wish to leave school should fulfill certain requirements, such as establishing a clear plan for how they could attain high school equivalency.

Even for those who are graduation bound, she says, requirements should be expanded to include work and life readiness skills, as well as preparation for civic life. “We need to help young people learn how to get everything from health care to financial advice to legal counseling to parenting guidance. And we need to help them know how to make a contribution to society.”

It’s critical to remember, says Kurth-Schai, that NCLB is actually a reauthorization of the 1960s-era Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which was designed to provide educational equity. “So to turn away from it because it’s too expensive and too difficult is unthinkable.” Instead, she says, we need to significantly rethink the policy but continue with its core aspiration of leaving no young person behind.

Many Macalester alumni are already out there working in the scholastic trenches—as teachers toiling in this country’s classrooms. We have chosen just three of those educator alumni to highlight here: one who works at a private alternative school, one who works at a public high school, and one who co-founded and directs a charter school. Here are their stories.

Anne Crampton ’88
City of Lakes Waldorf School
Minneapolis

If Anne Crampton ’88 weren’t teaching sixth grade at City of Lakes Waldorf School in Minneapolis, she might be an artisan cheese maker, a midwife, or even a private investigator. Which isn’t as surprising at it sounds, considering that all Waldorf teachers are expected to maintain an active and diverse interest in the world at large. This interest is thought to benefit students, who see in their teacher an adult authority with a genuine intellectual curiosity about all things.

Waldorf schools, founded in Germany in 1919 by Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, are private schools offering what they describe as “a developmentally appropriate, balanced approach to education that integrates the arts and academics” and enables students to fully develop their unique capacities. Serving children from preschool through high school (City of Lakes goes only through 8th grade), Waldorf schools strive to encourage the development of “each child’s sense of truth, beauty, and goodness, and to provide an antidote to violence, alienation, and cynicism.” Ultimately, Waldorf teachers aim to inspire in each student a lifelong love of learning.

For Crampton, teaching fulfills her need for truly meaningful work. And she found many of her models of good teaching at Mac, she says, citing such former professors as Harley Henry, Robert Warde, Norm Rosenberg, Jan Serie, and Donald Betts.

Crampton taught high school for many years before coming to City of Lakes. “As I read about and studied the philosophy, I realized how similar it was to how my own ‘inner education’ had been; the Waldorf approach evoked the things I remembered from childhood, that early inner life, and I really liked that about it.”

One key element of Waldorf education is the use of oral storytelling instead of textbooks. “I always loved stories and got a lot out of reading, but now I see that I was biased toward reading over storytelling. It took me a long time to understand that as a teacher I have to be willing to be a storyteller every day to help my students care about the lesson.”

Beyond storytelling, all of the arts play a central role in the Waldorf curriculum, which Crampton sees as imperative to improving education. She also emphasizes the powerful impact of continuity of relationships. In the ideal Waldorf model, students remain with the same main classroom teacher from first through eighth grades. In our mobile society, however, teacher transition is not uncommon during the eight-year cycle. In Crampton’s case, she began with her class as fifth graders and will see them through their eighth grade graduation in 2011. “I’ve become very attached to them. I’m a part of their life, and they’re a part of mine. I think adults and a cohort group who know each other for a long time is very powerful,” she says.

Erik Brandt ’95
Harding High School
St. Paul

Erik Brandt ’95 has been teaching English at St. Paul’s Harding High School for 13 years. He also coordinates Harding’s International Baccalaureate program. And he’s straight to the point about what he thinks makes a great teacher. “I’ve been at it 13 years, I’m on my fourth major educational reform, and look, there’s an art to it, but it’s not rocket science,” he says. “You’ve got to know how to write a good lesson plan and how to teach kids to shut up. At the same time, you’ve got to like kids a lot, in most cases more than the subject you’re teaching.”

The ongoing challenge of how to teach kids of wildly different ability levels still raises questions for him. “At Harding, most of our students are living in poverty. These are kids who, if they weren’t getting breakfast and lunch at school, might not eat those meals. And these students are tracked by choice—they pretty much choose what level of classes they want to be in. In my IB English classes I’ve got the top performing kids in the building, and even within that group the range of ability is striking. You’ve got some that think the verb ‘hurted’ is just fine, along with kids who are brilliant, fluent writers who can dash off something flawless. That’s the dilemma in every classroom, those varying ability levels in one room.”

Brandt spent the 2007–’08 school year teaching in Budapest, Hungary, through the Fulbright Teacher Exchange program. “It was a very different model, one that many schools around the world follow. Kids are put in an advisory homeroom of about 30 kids. From grades 9 through 12, they take all their classes with that group, like a family.” While Brandt saw some benefits to that continuity, he also saw drawbacks. “The kids who were picked on were picked on all day long, so there’s huge pressure to conform to the group norm. If it’s a positive group norm, those kids learn a lot and it’s successful. But if it’s not, then the kids are sentenced to this negative downward spiral.”

And some kids seemed underchallenged in this model, Brandt says. “There were students who were great at English, ready to go to a much higher level, but the other kids weren’t there yet, whether through lack of effort or exposure.” Motivated kids should be able to choose to work at a higher level and take more challenging classes, Brandt believes. “At Harding there are only two levels, IB classes and regular classes. In IB, I spend about 1 percent of my time on discipline. In the regular classes, it’s more like 40 percent.”

In Harding’s regular-level classes, the two things that seem to work best are having a consistent teacher throughout the year and keeping class sizes smaller. “When kids change teachers it causes turmoil. Teachers are not consistent; we have our own little kingdoms, our own rules and things we like to do, and it takes kids a while to figure out our systems and what we expect from them.”

Jessica Wodatch ’93
Two Rivers Public
Charter School
Washington, D.C.

Jessica Wodatch ’93 spent two years teaching third grade in the Bronx through the Teach for America program. Following that experience, she returned home to Washington, D.C., and spent several years doing research at Policy Research Associates, a Washington-based consulting firm. “I traveled around the country, observing this incredible range of schools and programs, interviewing school leaders, observing master teachers, and helping to train teachers,” says Wodatch. “It was during those years that I gained a clear sense of what does and doesn’t work in education.”

Today Wodatch is using that expertise as the executive director of Two Rivers Public Charter School on Capitol Hill, a thriving institution she cofounded in 2004. Two Rivers uses Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound, an educational model that emphasizes interactive, hands-on, project-based learning, says Wodatch. “The school focuses on the whole child, recognizing the importance of character education and the social-emotional needs of children while helping them achieve excellence.”

Two Rivers’ founders and staff share a strong belief that all children can be high achievers. The school is based on four values: that learning should be hands-on, fun, interactive and relevant to students’ lives; that developing character and community should be as important as academics; that arts, movement, and Spanish should be focuses; and that diversity should be honored by valuing all learners and grouping classes heterogeneously, with students of varying academic levels together. “Of course, it’s a challenge to instruct multiple ability levels in the same classroom,” says Wodatch, “but it’s essential to our learning philosophy.”

The student population at Two Rivers does reflect the school’s commitment to diversity: only a third of the student body is white and nearly a third qualify for free or reduced-cost lunch.

Wodatch and her staff pride themselves on the atmosphere at Two Rivers, a place where visitors often comment on how happy the kids seem. Two Rivers currently serves nearly 400 students in preschool through seventh grade, expects to add an eighth grade next year, and plans to reach full capacity by 2012. Meanwhile, the waiting list for Two Rivers is more than 800 names long.

Second to the school’s educational philosophy, Wodatch credits the school’s teachers for its success. “A school is only as good as the people who work in it,” she says. “I spend an inordinate amount of time on hiring,” she adds, a process that includes long interviews, model lessons, and a writing component. “We really want to make sure that the candidate is right for our school, and that the school is right for them.”

JEANNIE OUELLETTE is a Minneapolis writer and teacher.

Photos: tracey brown