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21st Century
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Some Facts About Saturn School
Saturn School is a nongraded, middle magnet school currently serving 280 students
in grades 4 - 8. The magnet process allows parents to choose Saturn as one
of over thirty magnet programs. Students are randomly selected from a waiting
list by ethnic category. Since St. Paul schools have 45% children of color,
so must be the student body at Saturn. No other criteria are used for selection.
Parents are told that attendance at Saturn requires a greater involvement
on their part. They must participate in the several Personal Growth Planning
conferences held during the year. Virtually one hundred percent of parents
participate. Students are very representative of the district's demographics
except that about sixty percent are boys. We think this is due to the school's
rich technology resources and many parents' belief that technology is for
boys. In addition, we get many students who are "counseled" into
Saturn, "Why don't you consider Saturn; they have a Personal Growth Plan
and some alternative program there. Maybe they can help you better."
Many of these students, of course, are boys. Saturn is located downtown to
draw on the many resources there. Students attend classes offsite at the Science
Museum of Minnesota, at the Minnesota Museum of Art and use the downtown library.
We are setting up mentorship and apprentice experiences to help establish
the relevance of schooling to the world of work.
To simplify the planning, we opened with grades 4 through 6 and added grades
seven and eight in subsequent years. Primary grades in a downtown setting
was a concern for our Board. But, since then the district has opened a downtown
kindergarten. We find it difficult to attract fourth graders from other elementary
schools to come to Saturn. The Board recently indicated we may be allowed
to add the primary grades. Not only does this provide the school with a cohort,
but it also lets more students start fresh with a new approach to learning,
rather than re-learn new ways to learn.
Saturn Facts
Saturn is a unique school. Here's what makes Saturn alike and different from
other schools. First you need a mission statement. While we've changed it
some in recent years, this was our first guiding statement: "To bring
together the best of what is known about effective learning research and powerful
learning employs a Personal Growth Plan for each student, a curriculum for
today and tomorrow and the assumption of learning success for each child."
Here are some of the differences:
We changed whatever we thought would lead to more effective learning. After
three years of operation and a comprehensive evaluation process, we are beginning
to find some of the answers.
Sharing What We Are Learning: What Works And What Still Needs Work
Over 3000 visitors have come to Saturn to see this unique program. Among them
have been the former President George Bush who recognized Saturn as a site
where "teachers are reinventing school" during his announcement
of his America 2000 plan. Students conduct the tours and explain the intricacies
of the program. Most of our visitors are impressed by what they see and hear.
Those positive comments balance some of the more local negative publicity.
More will be said on the media's influential spin later.
The Superintendent and Board have remained supportive of the school in face
of considerable political opposition and budgetary constraints Saturn was
expensive to renovate and equip and the Board committed major dollars to fund
it. One in seven dollars for the first two years of the project was raised
from outside sources. While this outside help was considerable, the balance
funded was still a major investment for a local board to make in educational
research and development. More state and federal dollars are needed for seminal
change efforts such as Saturn. So far such funding has been limited to private
efforts such as NASDC, which appears to be seriously underfunded. If public
education does not continue to explore effective innovations, it will be left
to the private sector efforts of projects such as Whittle's Edison Project.
This raises some serious concerns for public school change.
Lessons From Saturn
After four years we have learned a lot at Saturn. There are things that are
working and things we are still working on. We've been involved in several
major evaluation efforts and have been open to scrutiny by interested evaluators
and visitors. We learn from their many observations as well as our own. There
are some things we have learned by trying, changing, listening, guessing,
and sharing.
Planning
Planning is essential to the success of any project. There is rarely enough
time for it. But it must be a high and continuing priority. We lengthened
our school year so we could have more planning time. Staff need to review
the mission and goals, build schedules, learn about new technologies, how
to work effectively together in new roles. If you don't take time to plan,
events will take on a life of their own. We involved parents, students and
the community in our planning, as well.
Teambuilding
Whenever you start something a new and exciting project, you are likely to
attract very different personality types to work on it. These "joiners"
tend to be very bright, highly energetic and strongly convinced their course
of action is the right one. Staff who come on at a later time may have great
difficulty getting into this inner circle. Creators are very different from
maintainers. Issues of working well together must be raised and time spent
on keeping the communication and trust channels open. We spent considerable
time with several capable Organizational Development consultants and these
issues remain problematic. Much of the difficulty, in hindsight, may be due
to the fact the new roles at Saturn were never sharply defined. We didn't
know with great certainty all of the roles that these new positions had to
assume. Staff differentiation resulted in higher salaried, year-round teachers
working closely with other teachers, including interns, paid at lower rates.
The leadership model created did not invite broad participation or a team-based
approach. More time should have been spent on teambuilding or selecting staff
who are more willing work well with others.
Building A Site-Based School Community
The St. Paul school district serves nearly 40,000 students in over 60 schools
and programs. It is still highly centralized, although efforts have been underway
to create site-based schools. As in many schools across America today there
are not nearly enough resources to address the broad roster of services schools
attempt to provide. Change is not a process most of us are comfortable with.
Most seasoned educators have gone through their share of unsuccessful innovations
and remain unconvinced. Their negativism is heightened by the shrinking resources
in public schools. With supply budgets cut every year, teachers buy their
own classroom supplies. When a new program or idea gets funded, the equity
issue gets loudly raised by staff who have been waiting forever for their
equipment or supplies.
The Issue Of Up-Front Costs
Schools that look different and work differently don't usually fit into existing
school sites (without a lot of renovation). Technologies cost a fair amount
of money, too. Cost is among the first criticism of your critics. The Saturn
community found a languishing YWCA building, replete with gym, auditorium
and pool. No outside playground and little parking, but it was located right
in the middle of the community we proposed to use. Lease purchase and renovation
costs ran to $9.0M but that was a fraction of the cost of building a new building
downtown. The district is in a student growth phase so this move didn't invite
great criticism. More students are living in housing that rings the downtown
area, anyway. The budget for technology in this new school was major, however.
Nearly a million dollars was earmarked for computers and other media. Even
the furniture, though comparably priced, was high-tech and futuristic looking.
Midway through the first year of operation, and when a good part of the technology
was in place, we held a grand opening and invited the community to take a
look. Only the technology and furniture caught the critics eyes. That this
new school was an early R&D effort fell on deaf ears. Many could not accept
the major expenditure of dollars on untried assumptions with resources so
scarce. Before the first year was over, the nay-sayers were lobbying administration
and board members. The local paper, which gave some encouraging coverage before
the school opened, began to focus exclusively on program shortcomings. Before
the first year of a the valuation period, Saturn was being held to the terminal
outcomes and standards described in its five year plan.
The Non-Professional Reactions Of Other Professionals
New organizational models mean new roles for staff. New year round teacher
positions were negotiated with the bargaining agent and the board and compensated
beyond the teacher contract. Originally we plan ned to recreate the role of
principal teacher: a half-time administrator and half-time teacher who would
serve in a supervisory and leadership position. Once the principals caught
wind of the proposal, protests were carried to the Superintendent
Becoming Proactive With The P.R.
If you are not proactive with news about what you are doing, most of what
you do will be to react to news written or said about you. At Saturn we assigned
those responsibilities to a very capable educational assistant. She has worked
diligently to inform people about the uniqueness of the school, to host the
many visitors, to provided tours to prospective students and parents. She
has been quite successful in helping us keep a positive image within the national
community. Our local press has been another matter, however. Good news doesn't
sell local newspapers.
Putting On Your Own Spin...
Try to be held to standards of your own choosing. Without a clear mission
statement, a sensible set of objectives and some agreed upon milestones, you
will spend you energy where critics turn you....and if goals are unrealistic
or unclear, milestones will become millstones. It's imperative to have a clear,
proactive program of information.
Choosing Your Noose And Your Ribbons
It makes no sense to be inspected for proper hot air ballooning standards
if your chosen mode of travel is the space shuttle. For us, standardized tests,
the district's benchmark for all schools, held us to standards our students
weren't yet learning. From the beginning we focused on student performance
as measured by portfolios and their personal growth plans. While national
norms may be helpful in relative ways, norm-based measures have a long way
to go when it comes to performances and outcomes. So, if you've got a very
new, nonstandard developing program, watch out for the standardized pitfalls.
It would be better if truly experimental programs were exempted from standardized
issues for their beginning years.
The Curriculum Commandments
Much of what we do in K-12 education gets dictated by higher education. They
set the admission standards and write most of the textbooks. The textbooks
determine the curriculum and what gets taught. Changes are needed in the way
higher education trains its teachers too. If exit interviews were conducted
with teacher training grads or a year or two later, the colleges would find
that their curriculum had missed the point. In fact it misses many points.
Not nearly enough time observing good teachers, practice teaching, using new
learning technologies, working in multicultural environments, becoming skilled
with project based learning and cooperative learning strategies, knowing how
to be a facilitator or conductor of learning and not a purveyor or font of
all knowledge. Until higher education is itself restructured it is unlikely
that these needs will be well understood and passed on to their graduates.
Beyond Architecture
Just because a school may look different and it cost a lot to make it look
different, doesn't means that it is. Space and equipment changes alone don't
mean restructured schooling. You can add Wide Area Networks and Local Area
Networks and labs and modems and even Computer-Assisted Design and Drafting.
But if students and teachers continue to interact with learning in the same
old ways, nothing has really changed. People need to change their behaviors,
too. We need to re-wire our own neurons and change our own protocols. While
schools remain committed for these changes with their students; teachers need
to learn new things too.
The Limelight
Being in the limelight shows your mistakes as well as your successes. Very
different schools attract attention. Your local press, if it's anything like
ours, is in the business of selling newspapers. and they are afflicted by
a great case of the grass is always greener (see the earlier reference to
the Gallup poll). Even if the articles they write aren't all bad, whoever
writes the headlines for major local newspapers is afflicted with a bad case
of cynicism and pessimism. This is not the case for publications outside your
home town. You don't have to be a prophet to get the prophet's lack of honor
treatment. You will be anathema to your former colleagues, too. If you get
the attention, good or bad, and if you get more money, whether it's a lot
or a little, your associates and colleagues will soon be former. your judgment
and motives called into question. In short many will be hoping that your restructured
efforts go the way of the last innovation that came to town. (it was teaching
machines, wasn't it?).;It will be hard to keep whatever support you once had.
It is here that your early efforts to build a broad base of support will pay
off. If you involved the community in the planning, included the teachers'
groups, the principals, the parents, even the students in the input process,
your efforts will be all the more formidable. Wolves have a hard time with
sturdy brick schoolhouses, no matter how windy they are.
Our local paper has been our most negative detractor. Rarely is positive
news covered. But anything which seems to suggest that all is not well with
this new school gets front page coverage. A local columnist took one of our
students to task for misspelling a word when he was entering information into
the computer at President Bush's request during his visit to the school. We
had all we could do to keep the students from writing a letter to the editor
when that same columnist misspelled a word in one of his stories a few weeks
later. The lesson is: Never fight with folks who buy their ink by the barrel.
Also, our standardized test scores have not been exemplary since staff and
students concentrate more on skills these tests really don't measure very
well. Even though students have built exhibits at the Science Museum, painted
a colorful mural in the city, won the city-wide mathematics league, the paper
choose to focus on the standardized test scores. Coverage in other papers
and journals has been kinder, understanding the tremendous tasks this restructured
school faces.
Grandmother's Rules For Innovators
When if first started in school administration some 20 years ago, a wizened
colleague gave me a copy of some tips on rules to follow. Half of them were
"grandmother's rules." They were a lot more meaningful than grandfather's
rules and have stayed in my mind all these years. They still serve as good
rules when it comes to innovation, too: Here's my top five and a rejoinder:
The Ultimate Test Of Success
Sustaining Change: The Important Thing Is To Last
Sam Snead said it best: "The more I practice, the luckier I get."
Add to that Vince Lombardi's, "Perfect practice makes perfect."
and you've got a formula that, over time, will produce success. Change has
got to be given a chance. There is evidence to support that minor changes
take three to five years to work. Major change needs five to ten years. Too
often, those who approve new projects want instant results. Sometimes understandably
so. School boards, for example, get lots of political pressure from the have-nots
and the squeaky wheels. If you just got funded, you're a prime target for
next year's cutbacks. Have a broad base of support, a written plan with milestones
and agreed-upon evidence. Keep the decision-makes informed. If anything keep
them over-informed. It's better that any bad news come from you rather than
a rumor or a newspaper headline. Try to find ways to bring some kudos to those
who have made your innovations possible. Have a grand opening, give out some
award certificates or plaque
Reinventing Schools; Reinventing Ourselves
* Originally posted at the Penn State College
of Education's former special website section on the Saturn School of Tomorrow
at http://www.ed.psu.edu/insys/ESD/saturn/index.htm.