Complementary Education Reform Organizations

The Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) began in response to a study conducted from 1979 to 1984 that identified the problems of American secondary education as well as key imperatives for better schools. Based on the findings of this study, CES sought to move away from the "shopping mall high school" model of schooling, which, in intending to appeal to the individual interests of students, often fell short on academic rigor. It aimed to reform schools in order to hold all students to higher academic standards, to motivate students to become more actively involved in the learning process, and to move away from conventional tracking systems that placed students according to ability or interest.

The CES member schools are diverse and include suburban, urban, rural, public, independent, parochial, vocational, last resort, middle, and high schools. Although the schools that form the CES vary in size, location, and focus, they base their program on a set of shared, common guiding principles. These guiding principles do not prescribe a program but rather serve as a framework to guide restructuring efforts. Participating schools actively agree with the principles and work with them to change the traditional roles of students and staff, interpreting and prioritizing them as they see fit for their population. CES advocates restructuring schools from the bottom up because it believes that there is no recipe for reform--all schools are different, as are the populations with which they work; long-lasting reform is created through faculty- and school-driven efforts focused on the guiding principles. The change process, consequently, unfolds incrementally over a long period of time as schools redefine the conventional roles of every individual in the school, including those of the student, teacher, administrator, principal, and other staff. Schools working through the guiding principles, in the deepest way possible, undergo a whole-school restructuring process that can often be messy and tiresome, but reportedly very worthwhile in the long run, as evidenced by both student achievement and teacher empowerment.

CES hopes that its guiding principles will serve as the beginning of conversation for change within schools and help spawn comprehensive schoolwide programs. The guiding principles have been defined by CES as follows:

• The school should focus on helping adolescents to learn to use their minds well. Schools should not attempt to be "comprehensive" if such a claim is made at the expense of the school's central intellectual purpose.
• The school's goals should be simple: that each student master a limited number of essential skills and areas of knowledge. While these skills and areas will, to varying degrees, reflect the traditional academic disciplines, the program's design should be shaped by the intellectual and imaginative powers and competencies that students need, rather than necessarily by "subjects" as conventionally defined.
• The school's goals should apply to all students, while the means to these goals will vary as those students themselves vary. School practice should be tailor-made to meet the needs of every group or class of adolescents.
• Teaching and learning should be personalized to the maximum extent feasible. Efforts should be directed toward a goal that no teacher have direct responsibility for more than 80 students. To capitalize on this personalization, decisions about the details of the course of study, the use of students' and teachers' time, and the choice of teaching materials and specific pedagogies must be unreservedly placed in the hands of the principal and staff.
• The governing practical metaphor of the school should be student-as-worker rather than the more familiar metaphor of teacher-as-deliverer-of-instructional-services. Accordingly, a prominent pedagogy will be coaching, in order to provoke students to learn and, thus, to teach themselves.
• Students entering secondary school studies are those who can show competence in language and elementary mathematics. Students of traditional high school age but not yet at appropriate levels of competence to enter secondary school studies will be provided with intensive remedial work to assist them in meeting those standards. The diploma should be awarded upon a successful, final demonstration of mastery for graduation--an exhibition. This exhibition by the student of his or her grasp of the central skills and knowledge of the school's program may be jointly administered by the faculty and by higher authorities. As the diploma is awarded when earned, the school's program proceeds with no strict age grading and with no system of "credits earned" by "time spent" in class. The emphasis is on the students' demonstration that they can do important things.
• The tone of the school should explicitly and self-consciously stress values of unanxious expectation, trust, and decency. Incentives appropriate to the school's particular students and teachers should be emphasized, and parents should be treated as essential collaborators.
• The principal and teachers should perceive themselves as generalists first (teachers and scholars in general education) and specialists second (experts in only one particular discipline). Staff should expect multiple obligations (teacher-counselor-manager) and have a sense of commitment to the entire school.
• Ultimate administrative and budget targets should include, in addition to total student loads per teacher of eighty or fewer pupils, substantial time for collective planning by teachers, competitive salaries for staff, and an ultimate per pupil cost not to exceed that of traditional schools by more than 10%. To accomplish this, administrative plans may have to show the phased reduction or elimination of some services now provided in many traditional secondary schools.

As the principles are intended to guide teachers' thinking rather than present a recipe or model for the "ideal school," CES emphasizes that there is, in fact, no ideal CES school. CES schools are ever-evolving, incorporating each of the guiding principles to varying degrees as the needs of the students change. A strong CES network provides member schools with outside coaches who can assist in the implementation of the CES guiding principles. The CES schools network with one another through forums, e-mail, and "critical" friends.

While CES has defined itself as primarily focused on academic school reform--intending to boost the academic achievement of all students--its framework of principles and frequent program components fit comfortably with a broadly conceived school-to-work philosophy. The very principles of Student-as-Worker, Teacher-as-Coach, and Graduation by Exhibition of Mastery are upheld in the most successful and progressive vocational programs, including career academies, magnets, school-based enterprises,
co-op programs, and youth apprenticeship programs. Both the CES and the school-to-work advocates take a distinctly Deweyan approach to schooling by placing project-based and experiential learning connected to the "real world" at their core.

For further information on The Coalition of Essential Schools, please contact

The Coalition of Essential Schools
Box 1969, Brown University
Providence, RI 02912
(401) 863-3384

Center for Collaborative Education

The Center for Collaborative Education (CCE) is a partner to the Coalition of Essential Schools in representing the New York City Coalition schools. The two groups do differ slightly both in organizational practice and guiding principles. When schools join CCE, they agree to participate in organizational decisions--for example, each school takes part in accepting new members to the CCE and in determining future directions CCE will take. Thus, the member schools are the critical decisionmakers for the policies set. Additionally, in looking at CCE's twelve guiding principles, a tremendous overlap can be seen with the guiding principles of CES, but also a few differences. All CCE schools are committed to the following:

1. Schools that are small and personalized

2. A unified course of study for all students; a common high standard for all

3. A focus on helping young people to use their minds well and to be critical thinkers and doers

4. An in-depth, intradisciplinary curriculum respectful of our diverse heritages

5. Active learning: student-as-citizen and teacher-as-coach

6. Student evaluation and graduation based on performance-demonstrated mastery

7. A school tone of unanxious expectation, trust, and decency

8. Family involvement and mutual respect

9. Collaborative decisionmaking and governance

10. Choice: Everyone is a willing partner to the school community

11. Racial, ethnic, economic, and intellectual diversity

12. Budget allocations targeting time for collective planning

The member schools of CCE are small schools of choice and, thus, students, usually with their families, decide which school they would like to attend. The schools have been afforded a number of exemptions and flexibilities by the Board of Education (e.g., waivers from Regents--New York statewide, standardized exams). In a typical school day, students spend their time in seminars analyzing, problem solving, discussing, researching, and writing about a variety of topics. The classes typically last longer than one hour and students work in collaborative research teams demonstrating their knowledge through presentations, debates, dramas, videos, speeches, and portfolios. In addition, much learning takes place off-campus where students take courses, work at local community agencies, and intern with leaders from the private and public sectors.

In 1992, CCE established the Coalition Campus Schools Project in New York City. This project is a three-year initiative to start new, small junior high and high schools (7-12) by phasing out existing comprehensive high schools. In the first year of the project, a comprehensive high school in Manhattan was closed to create six smaller Coalition Campus Schools, each of which was founded on CCE's twelve guiding principles. Unlike other restructuring efforts that break down large comprehensive high schools into smaller educational units (e.g., houses, charters, academies, and so on), the Coalition Campus Schools Project has taken a student body at a large school and has placed them in several cohorts in separate new schools around the city. These smaller schools are home-grown and focus on meeting the needs of their student body. The Coalition Campus Schools adhere to the same practice and principles defined by CCE.

For further information about the Center for Collaborative Education, please contact

The Center for Collaborative Education
1573 Madison Avenue, Room 201
New York, NY 10029
(212) 348-7821

Service-Learning Programs

Similar to school-to-work transition, service learning is a movement that has field-based learning and connections to the community at its core in order to provide students with fulfilling and challenging academic learning experiences. Service-learning programs are used in a variety of schools ranging from vocational to CES schools to career academies. Service-learning programs grew out of the need to better prepare students as productive and active adult citizens in a variety of settings. Unlike the peripheral after-school community service programs that have been in operation for years, service learning redefines the ways in which teachers, students, and the community interact during the educational process. Service learning uses service as a Deweyan, experiential, pedagogical means to enhance students' academic learning. Through service learning, students apply the knowledge they gain in their courses to address real-life issues in the community. Those real-life community issues become the focal point around which the course curriculum is based. In addition, students provide a welcomed benefit to their local community, as they apply their course content to real situations that help them to better understand the importance and relevance of the course content they are learning.

In classrooms that utilize service learning, teachers use time flexibly and emphasize reflection. It is during this reflection time that students analyze the service they performed and assess how their school learning assisted in addressing a community issue. Thus, the role of the teacher changes from director to guide, much in the same way the CES sees the teacher's role as that of a "coach." No longer is the teacher solely responsible for students' learning--the responsibility is shared among the teacher, students, and the community. Likewise, the students' role changes to that of "student as worker." Students no longer just follow directions, listen passively, and receive knowledge; instead, they discover knowledge by actively directing themselves through learning activities.

Given the rich array of communities and schools that exist, the structure and nature of programs that engage their students in service learning vary from school to school. While some service-learning programs are school-based--the service opportunities in which students are engaged are coordinated by the school--others are coordinated by either a community-based agency or by the agency that offers the service (sponsor-based). Regardless of which institution serves as the coordinating agent, service is always integrated with one or more of the school's curricular courses.

Despite their programmatic idiosyncrasies, all successful service-learning programs are based on several common experiential education principles similar to those espoused by CES and CCE:

• Concrete Service Experiences
  Regardless of whether students serve at the school or in the community, effective service-learning programs engage students in concrete experiences in which the students are actively involved in real and meaningful situations. Students are not just learning about their surrounding world by passively reading or hearing about it; they are learning about their world by actively attempting to understand why things are the way they are.
• Reflection
  All effective serving-learning programs provide students with an opportunity to conduct reflective observations of their service work. Students reflect upon and analyze their service to help prompt memory of what happened and why.
• Synthesis
  Service-learning programs also help students formulate theories about why an experience happened as it did. Students attempt to explain why particular situations exist. They use their academic and personal knowledge to devise a viable plan for ameliorating undesirable situations in the world around them. It is this higher-level abstract concept-making synthesis that sets service-learning apart from community service, volunteer, and other service programs.
• Active Experimentation
  Students are given supervised opportunities to test out a theory by carrying into action their ideas for ameliorating situations in their communities. They implement their plan(s) and assess their impact on the intended situation.

For more information on service-learning programs, please contact any of the following:

Don Hill, Director
Service Learning 2000
50 Embarcadero Road
Palo Alto, CA 94301
(415) 322-7271
(Provides services only in California)

Service Learning Clearinghouse
University of Minnesota
1954 Buford Avenue, Room 290
St. Paul, MN 55108
(800) 808-7378
URL: http://www.nicsl.coled.umn.edu

Foxfire

Foxfire began with the ideas of Eliot Wigginton, who was challenged to engage his adolescent students in Rabun Gap, Georgia, in their schooling. Influenced by John Dewey, he believed that projects that involved students in learning academic skills through studying their culture and community would engage students. Through the establishment of a school magazine, titled Foxfire, which focused on the folklore of rural Appalachia, students gained a sense of their cultural identity while learning academic skills. Since its inception, Foxfire has grown into far more than a magazine; Foxfire has become a pedagogy for teachers regardless of the subject matter they teach. Foxfire classes now take the form of cultural journalism, science, math, and various interdisciplinary courses. In addition, Foxfire advocates that schools focus on the individual development of each student. Thus, teachers need to work with students to continually evaluate their experiences in order to understand how the lessons they have learned can be applied in a variety of arenas.

Foxfire is similar to service learning and school-to-work transition in that connecting students to their communities is at the core of its framework. However, unlike the aforementioned programs, which focus on whole school change, Foxfire has focused its efforts on effective classroom change. Through its 22 teacher networks around the country, Foxfire provides teachers with outreach and technical assistance in instituting classroom strategies for effective teaching. Like the Coalition of Essential Schools and the Center for Collaborative Education, Foxfire is based on a series of principles, or set of core teaching practices. In general, Foxfire teachers aim to help students take full responsibility for their learning, and to develop projects and curriculum around students' interests. These practices are similar to those utilized in service-learning programs where the focus is on the active engagement of students in meaningful, collaborative, real-world learning experiences with an emphasis on reflection. The following are Foxfire's core teaching practices:

• All the work the teachers and students do together must flow from student desire, student concerns. Curriculum must be infused from the beginning with student choice, design, revision, execution reflection, and evaluation. Students are challenged to answer their own questions and are led to a point where they embrace responsibility.
• The role of the teacher must be that of collaborator, team leader, and guide rather than boss. Teachers have the responsibility of monitoring the academic and social growth of each student. They are expected to model the types of attitudes that they hope to develop in their students.
• The academic integrity of the work must be absolutely clear. Each teacher must embrace state--or local--mandated skill content lists as "givens" to be engaged by the class, and accomplish them to the level of mastery in the course of executing the class's plans, but go far beyond their normally narrow confines to discover the value and potential inherent in the content area being taught and its connections to other disciplines.
• Work is characterized by student action, rather than by the student being the recipient of processed information. Rather than students doing what they already know how to do, all students must be led continually into new work and unfamiliar territory. Once skills are "won," they must be reapplied to new problems in new ways. Students must be made to realize that mistakes are not considered failures but, rather, they are considered platforms from which to learn more.
• Emphasize peer teaching, small group work, and teamwork. Students help one another and in doing so recognize a place for themselves in the classroom--the goal is that students come to see themselves as "needed" and discipline problems cease to be an issue.
• Connections between the classroom work, surrounding communities, and the real world outside the classroom are clear. The content of all courses is connected to the world in which the students live. The process should help students to learn more about and identify with their communities.
• There must be an audience beyond the teacher for student work. The audience can be another individual, a small group of people, the community, and so on. The only requirement is that it be an audience which the students hope to serve, engage, or impress.
• New activities should spiral gracefully out of old, incorporating lessons learned from past experiences, building on skills and understandings that can now be amplified. A finished product is never finished, per se, but rather regarded as a starting point for a new lesson.
• Acknowledge the worth of aesthetic experience--create situations that encourage students to use their imaginations.
• Reflection--some conscious, thoughtful time to stand apart from the work--reflection evokes insights and nurtures revisions.
• The work must include unstintingly honest, ongoing evaluation for skills and content, and changes in attitude. A variety of strategies should be employed, including pre- and posttesting, simple memory tests, and complex instruments involving student participation in the creation of demonstrations that answer the teacher challenge. Students should learn to monitor their own progress and devise their own remediation plans.

While Foxfire may look different within each classroom in which it is used, each Foxfire teacher places student ownership of learning at the forefront of the class, as well as in developing class content and assignments. For example, often a Foxfire teacher will present a set of "givens" to his or her students--knowledge or skills that they must develop by the end of the course or a segment of the course. As a class, the students define the ways in which they wish to achieve those givens, identify places in their community where they could learn more about those ideas, or create exciting assignments in which they take an active role.

Foxfire teachers attend intense training sessions that focus on the development of expertise in the Foxfire core teaching practices. The workshops use an active teaching approach whereby teachers are asked to role play as students. New teachers are especially encouraged to attend the workshops, learn to utilize the core teaching practices, and become Foxfire teachers.

As with vocational programs that focus on developing students' understanding of all aspects of an industry, the central idea of Foxfire is that students should experience all aspects of a project, whatever project that might be. For example, when Wigginton first began Foxfire as a cultural journalism class in Rabun Gap, he had students participate in all aspects of magazine production. Not only did they write the stories and take the photographs, they developed the film, designed the layout, controlled the budget, and gathered advertisements. Because the magazine was published quarterly by Random House, students had concrete deadlines to meet. In the beginning, these deadlines detracted from the academic rigor of the Foxfire program--the product drove the academic agenda. When it became apparent that the program focused too much on the affective side of learning and technical skills, Wigginton worked through the problem and redefined the aspects of the program with his staff.

Foxfire is now a program in which students learn skills considered to be both academic and job-related; students leave high school with a set of marketable abilities for both higher education and work. Foxfire classes introduce students to a variety of career options while focusing on an academic curriculum. Students from Wigginton's original cultural journalism class who did not go on to pursue careers in journalism reported that they acquired several other useful skills necessary to getting other types of jobs. For example, one young woman commented on the business skills she learned in producing the magazine in order to begin her own housekeeping business. In addition, Foxfire students, in general, learn a great deal about their own culture, a goal which Wigginton emphasizes in hopes of empowering students and helping them to feel as though the material which they studied in school was in fact their own--with personal meaning and value.

For more information about Foxfire, please contact

Foxfire
P.O. Box 541
Mountain City, GA 30562
(706) 746-5318

REAL Enterprises

School Incubated Enterprise Programs

Rural Entrepreneurship through Action Learning (REAL) programs are similar to many of the experiential programs already described. Based on the writings of Jonathan P. Sher, REAL was originally created to enhance rural development by providing high school or college graduates with a reason to remain or return to the areas in which they grew up. By helping students develop school-incubated enterprise programs, REAL hoped to highlight untapped economic opportunities in communities currently lacking enticing possibilities for employment. REAL has expanded its program beyond rural areas and now works with inner-cities--especially for those with an obvious disinvestment of resources and deterioration of vital services. The Rindge School of Technical Arts works with REAL and has developed some of its own school-incubated enterprises (see Rindge case study). REAL advocates the school-incubated enterprise approach as an effective means for learning higher-order thinking skills, preparing students to succeed in an increasingly entrepreneurial economy, improving rural/urban communities and economies, and preparing students for general success--whatever field of work they may enter. The model of school-based enterprises has been advocated in the School-to-Work Act as a means of providing students with a school-to-work transition program.

Like Foxfire, REAL programs are not based on whole school reform; rather, they are single classes within a larger school program. It is that class's connection to the outside world that defines its REAL identity. By working in real-life situations, students learn to better understand the world of work. While providing students with a sense of entrepreneurship and career opportunities, REAL programs help develop academic and professional skills within a "real world" context. Like service learning and Foxfire, the use of experiential learning to better educate youth is a central tenet. In REAL programs, entrepreneurship is used as a vehicle not only to help students learn how to run a business, but also to provide them with the opportunities to learn to use their minds well in making important decisions.

Similar to Foxfire and service-learning programs where schoolwork is characterized by student action, collaboration, and connections to the real world, students in REAL programs research, plan, set up, and operate their own enterprises in cooperation with their school. In this regard, REAL programs are similar to AAI programs in which students are exposed to the various sectors of an industry and learn about a variety of issues and tasks. Students participate in a classroom component--an entrepreneurship course--and an experiential component in which they run their own venture. The business/service that each student chooses to develop is based on their research of the community. Students explore the types of businesses or services their community does not have but would benefit from if made available. While all of the REAL sites are linked by a set of common goals (like CES, service learning, and Foxfire), each program has to tailor its class to meet the needs and utilize the unique resources of its community. The enterprise is student-defined, student-planned, and student-run. It is a program centered around experience-based, student-centered education directed toward developing creative thinking, communication, and business-related skills. While certain technical skills are learned in the process of setting up and running a business, the focus is on academic and entrepreneurial skills.

REAL Enterprise programs aim to develop the following skills:

• effective thinking--problem-solving, paradigm busting, logical thinking, abstract thinking, decisionmaking, independent thinking, applied math, and brainstorming
• getting along with others--cooperation, using resources (things and people), networking, social interaction, patience, tolerance, forbearance, empathy, leadership, adaptability (dealing with change), working together, negotiation, and conflict resolution
• communication--public speaking, effective writing, listening, using the telephone, and effective reading
• understanding the world--research and interpretation, trend analysis, economics (understanding the big picture), understanding politics, and community awareness
• operatingeffectively within organizations--effective management, effective organization, planning, and delegation
• personal empowerment and effectiveness--self-confidence, projecting a positive image, myth-building, time management, using good grammar and manners, self-assessment, career planning, work ethic, positive thinking, mechanical skills, goal setting, following instructions, job readiness, punctuality, dressing for success, having theories such as "learn that the world does not owe you anything," and persistence
• technology--using a computer and a fax machine
• business effectiveness--marketing, ethics, financial statement analysis, and legal knowledge

Schools apply to REAL's state office and, if accepted, a lead teacher, or a team, attends a training program before implementing the program into the school. Students apply in the tenth or eleventh grade, provide their reasons for applying, and are selected based on their applications and interviews. Students are not expected to be academically gifted in any way, nor are they all at risk. They are required to have at least an eighth-grade level of literacy and must illustrate why they are motivated to participate in the program and must exhibit an understanding of the challenges and hard work with which they will be faced. They are asked to show evidence as to where they have taken initiative (leadership) in organizing and carrying out an activity, completed a significant independent project above and beyond that ordinarily expected, and demonstrated unusual plans and actions.

REAL provides its teachers with curriculum packets, or frameworks, that can be adapted to individual classrooms. The packets include a series of ideas for student-initiated projects in a variety of communities. In addition, REAL has established a teacher network, similar to that of Foxfire's, which provides teachers the opportunities to communicate and collaborate. Because REAL programs are found in single classrooms among schools, the network becomes an important vehicle for REAL teachers at one site to exchange ideas and information with other REAL teachers. Opportunities for teacher collaboration are also provided through regional, state, and national workshops on the principles and pedagogies of REAL. The workshops also help train new teachers in the REAL process.

For more information about REAL Enterprises, please contact

REAL Enterprises
1160 S. Milledge Avenue, Suite 130
Athens, GA 30605
(706) 546-9061

City/Community-As-School

Like REAL, Foxfire, and service learning, the primary objective of City/ Community-as-School (CAS) is to provide opportunities for students to learn through and within their communities. CAS began in 1972 as an accredited public alternative school in New York City with a focus on external learning--or learning outside of the school building. In 1985, the school received a National Diffusion Network award and began setting up similar programs in other communities and cities, establishing itself as the CAS program.

Originally, CAS began as an alternative program for gifted students. The program has moved its focus to meet the needs of a variety of students, including those not engaged in or disenfranchised with school. The focus of the specific CAS program is dependent upon the school population; like the Coalition and REAL, each individual school defines its own program. Some schools place their priority on student learning within internships throughout the community, allowing students to fill a majority of their credits in field-based learning settings, while other sites limit the number of internships students can take. Furthermore, the various sites structure the internships somewhat differently--some attach a specific in-house class to the internship, while others have students working independently on related assignments. However, all of the experiences emphasize structure and reflection to achieve cognitive as well as affective development. The underpinning philosophy of all CAS programs is to establish means for student learning, other than the traditional lecture class method, and to tap into community resources as much as possible. The program holds as its central premise the idea that every child is a student of the community--every child must learn from the community, and the community has a responsibility to take part in educating every child.

As with Foxfire, REAL, service-learning programs, and work-based learning programs, CAS places education within a real-world context because it is one of the best motivators for engaging students in their schooling. Their efforts to place students in service- and work-based learning situations predates the current state and federal initiatives. The main elements of the program involve the following:

• placement of students in the real world to serve as interns
• compensation for their labor and learning in the form of high school credit towards a diploma (no monetary compensation is awarded)
• supervision of each placement by a teacher who creates a curriculum for the site (called a LEAP, for Learning Activity Experience Package) and monitors student progress
• once-a-week meeting in school for each student with an advisor

• increasing student self-esteem and motivation.
• establishing better relationship between students, parents, and school staff.
• enhancing student understanding of the active roles they can play in shaping their education and future.
• increasing students' sense of belonging to the larger community and consequently school attendance and graduation rates.
• developing better organization and work habits through internships.
• helping students to earn credits through work experiences.
• increasing enrollment in college and other kinds of training after high school.
• widening of students' career and schooling horizons.
• turning on disenfranchised students to the importance of academics and other classroom-type training so that they can fulfill larger and more creative roles within their fields of interest.
• providing potential job placement after school or postgraduation.
• mentoring of individual students by adults who are in a unique position to help them.
• increasing participation by the community in the education process.
• creating new and exciting roles for teachers through staff development.

For more information on CAS, please contact

Joan McLachlan
City-As-School
16 Clarkson Street
New York, NY 10014
(212) 645-6121 or (212) 691-7801