A school must always be a set of undiscovered possibilities in the realm of the human spirit and a community devoted to their exploration and realization.
We’ve come to the end of the exercise here, perhaps fittingly as I watch the Rhode Island shoreline rush by en route to the National Association of Independent School Annual Conference, a gathering of the clans featuring enough blue blazers, camel’s hair, and tweed—along with inspiring presentations and contacts with old friends—to keep us sated for another year.
As I suppose most of us who work in schools do from time to time, I’ve been known to imagine what I might want to do out in what our private sector siblings and friends chide us about as being the “real world.” What sort of work would I be fitted for and would want to do? Some days collecting tolls on the Mass Turnpike seems as though it might be refreshing, or perhaps selling something really expensive, on commission.
And then I remember something really wonderful, perhaps the most wonderful thing of all, about working in an independent school, something that, whenever it happens, reminds me why this is what I need to be doing, at least for now.
The wonderful thing, and I every now and then I find a colleague who admits to sharing this belief, is being wrong. In particular, being wrong about a kid.
Little Joey can’t write his way out of a wet paper bag—until the day he turns in an essay that makes you gasp for the insights and the strong, sure voice it displays. Sullen Lulu is so self-absorbed that you grumble to yourself about the values with which she must have been raised—until on the bus ride back from the field trip she starts talking about the work she did at the animal shelter near her vacation home last summer and you realize it’s not about the vacation. The 15th player on your soccer team squibs in the winning goal; the pouty hulk with his hood up all the time is just big and clumsy and worries about his Down Syndrome younger brother; the basketball star mentions that he likes reading Hunter S. Thompson; the girl with even less fashion sense than you have (so you think) creates stunning costumes for the winter musical—in which a small, shy sophomore you’ve only vaguely noticed reveals a powerful baritone that fills the auditorium.
These experiences are reminders that making assumptions is a terrible thing; we rely too heavily on our experience and judgment and wisdom at our peril. But more importantly, being wrong is an object lesson in what good schools do best: allow what lies within each student to bubble up, to come to fruition, to stake a claim on some special space that is theirs (even for a moment) and theirs alone. Most often we have an inkling or more of what is coming, but there is almost nothing more delightful, more inspiring, than when we completely miss something, either because the child has carefully hidden it or, more often, because the child is as shocked and delighted as we are when the moment, what the house-and-garden shows call the “reveal,” arrives.
I’ve grumped here and there already about schools where there is a stated or strongly implied ideal, the perfect incarnation of what the school wants its students, who arrive apparently as imperfect versions, to become. I think that such schools, no matter how laudable their ideal, are missing the most exciting part of the great and wonderful experiment that they could be conducting—the opportunity to experience and take full and unadulterated pleasure in the truly unforeseen, to glory in those moments when a child becomes fully and in the best way possible himself or herself.
We are engaged in an endless experiment, to see whether our students, in our schools, can not just endure but also triumph over all the obstacles, important and petty, personal and societal, that childhood and adolescence throw in their way as they move, sometimes wriggling, sometimes streaking like lightning, toward adulthood and those lives of “usefulness and purpose”—and above all of meaning—that we want for them.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Thursday, February 17, 2011
A school is… (Verse 13)
A school is a laboratory for the human experience in the context of a distinct, intentional, and internally consistent mission and set of values.
I’ve probably worked over the concepts of mission, values, and intentionality to the point of saturation, but it has occurred to me—especially during these endless February weeks when spring teases us but when we and our students are perhaps closest to unraveling—that we are engaged in an endless process of human research and development.
I think I first heard from Steve Clem the factoid that teachers make something like 400 instructional decisions on the average day, and whether the number is too large or too small, these are probably the days when teachers feel the burden of these decisions most acutely. There is a missing element, I think, that explains the sheer exhaustion we feel and perhaps also why no school day is ever the same as any one that has come before: each of those decisions is freighted with an emotional component, the requirement to make judgments not just to get some point across but to respond to what the teacher believes are the immediate needs and and best interest of the student.
Now, it may be true that some teachers believe that the needs of their students at any given instant are solely about the academic issue at hand, with no consideration of such warm and fuzzy notions as “values,” “character,” or (heaven forbid) Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Such teachers might believe, in the moment, that what their students need is not sleep, security, self-esteem, moral exploration but a solid and unshakable knowledge of the Krebs Cycle, how to spell “pharaoh,” the pluperfect subjunctive, or the themes of The Scarlet Letter.
It’s never that simple, of course, and even moderately good teachers know this all the time and act on it most of the time. Sleep, security, and self-esteem do matter to how kids learn (duh!), and moral exploration is kind of what teenagers, at least, do for a living and what we want younger students to grasp as an important thing to do with their growing brains. The Krebs Cycle, spelling lists, and Hester Prynne’s travails play out against dynamic emotional backdrops of almost unbelievable subtlety and complexity. No wonder teachers appreciate vacations.
I’ve long been an adherent of the old concept of the teacher as observer, and I believe that the most successful and probably the happiest schools are those in which this role is acknowledged and encouraged, even if implicitly. Plentiful and thoughtful teacher talk, open communication and the rich (and respectful to the students) exchange of ideas, observations, best practices, failures, and puzzlements creates the culture of a think tank. The school becomes a mini-Los Alamos with its great object is to discover and implement the best way of teaching Kid X and Kid Y right now, tomorrow, and next year.
If a school’s faculty embraces the role of “think tank” and is both a brain trust and a “heart trust,” the discoveries will be made and renewed, over and over, responding to each child’s needs in the moment (and sometimes those needs are indeed to sit down and pay attention) all the while serving their long term needs and fueling their growth not as lifelong learners but as lifelong thinkers, creators, empathizers, and participants in the life of the mind and of society at large. Along the way the most effective educators and schools are amassing a bank of authentically “best” academic practices that we all need to be able to tap into.
I can’t help thinking that the Los Alamos effort helped “win” World War II, no matter how dubious the means its scientists created. We’ve arguably got a crisis of similar magnitude on our hands, and it’s obvious, I think, that the path to surmounting the world’s problems must start in the laboratories of the human experience that we call schools.
I’ve probably worked over the concepts of mission, values, and intentionality to the point of saturation, but it has occurred to me—especially during these endless February weeks when spring teases us but when we and our students are perhaps closest to unraveling—that we are engaged in an endless process of human research and development.
I think I first heard from Steve Clem the factoid that teachers make something like 400 instructional decisions on the average day, and whether the number is too large or too small, these are probably the days when teachers feel the burden of these decisions most acutely. There is a missing element, I think, that explains the sheer exhaustion we feel and perhaps also why no school day is ever the same as any one that has come before: each of those decisions is freighted with an emotional component, the requirement to make judgments not just to get some point across but to respond to what the teacher believes are the immediate needs and and best interest of the student.
Now, it may be true that some teachers believe that the needs of their students at any given instant are solely about the academic issue at hand, with no consideration of such warm and fuzzy notions as “values,” “character,” or (heaven forbid) Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Such teachers might believe, in the moment, that what their students need is not sleep, security, self-esteem, moral exploration but a solid and unshakable knowledge of the Krebs Cycle, how to spell “pharaoh,” the pluperfect subjunctive, or the themes of The Scarlet Letter.
It’s never that simple, of course, and even moderately good teachers know this all the time and act on it most of the time. Sleep, security, and self-esteem do matter to how kids learn (duh!), and moral exploration is kind of what teenagers, at least, do for a living and what we want younger students to grasp as an important thing to do with their growing brains. The Krebs Cycle, spelling lists, and Hester Prynne’s travails play out against dynamic emotional backdrops of almost unbelievable subtlety and complexity. No wonder teachers appreciate vacations.
I’ve long been an adherent of the old concept of the teacher as observer, and I believe that the most successful and probably the happiest schools are those in which this role is acknowledged and encouraged, even if implicitly. Plentiful and thoughtful teacher talk, open communication and the rich (and respectful to the students) exchange of ideas, observations, best practices, failures, and puzzlements creates the culture of a think tank. The school becomes a mini-Los Alamos with its great object is to discover and implement the best way of teaching Kid X and Kid Y right now, tomorrow, and next year.
If a school’s faculty embraces the role of “think tank” and is both a brain trust and a “heart trust,” the discoveries will be made and renewed, over and over, responding to each child’s needs in the moment (and sometimes those needs are indeed to sit down and pay attention) all the while serving their long term needs and fueling their growth not as lifelong learners but as lifelong thinkers, creators, empathizers, and participants in the life of the mind and of society at large. Along the way the most effective educators and schools are amassing a bank of authentically “best” academic practices that we all need to be able to tap into.
I can’t help thinking that the Los Alamos effort helped “win” World War II, no matter how dubious the means its scientists created. We’ve arguably got a crisis of similar magnitude on our hands, and it’s obvious, I think, that the path to surmounting the world’s problems must start in the laboratories of the human experience that we call schools.
Monday, February 14, 2011
A school is… (Verse 12)
A school is a place whose environments must practically and aesthetically serve students and staff.
When I was a kid I wanted to be an architect, but the profession fortunately dodged that bullet. It’s more than just as well, because every year the whole idea of designing spaces for a school becomes more complicated. Adding to the complication is the growing reality that more and more, those spaces are becoming virtual or even imaginary. It’s about environments nowadays.
For reasons that were once historical, for a couple of centuries and more school architecture tended to reflect the churchly beginnings of European education, and schools and colleges today are still happy to exploit the drool factor of a richly Gothic or otherwise faux-medieval campus; a dining hall or library that excites the comment “This looks like Hogwarts!” from starry-eyed parents on campus tours must assuredly house a better sort of student and educator and be just a bit more selective and perhaps a bit more, hmm, costly. (Those same parents are not at that moment thinking of the solicitations they might receive for funds to keep the belfries free of bat dung and the hammer beams varnished, but oh, well). In New England the plain, durable and fireproof brick used by Harvard’s founders generated another, “Georgian” look, understated elegance with simple white trim and dark wooden shutters.
Although James Garfield once quipped that “The ideal college is [Williams College president] Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other,” his predecessor Thomas Jefferson had opted for the democratic, understated elegance of brick at “his” University of Virginia, and at some point in the mid nineteenth century the American campus arms race began, with its emphasis on picturesque exteriors and inspiring public and community spaces and with paradoxically banal sleeping spaces and rectangular classrooms whose sameness is striking in every schoolroom photographed from the daguerreotype era right into the 1980s: desks in rows, blackboards, pull-down maps, a few meager bookshelves, perhaps a flag, and the inevitable portraits of Washington and, later and north of the Mason-Dixon Line, Lincoln.
What gives the spark of life to such photographs is usually the presence of students and, if one takes the time to look hard, evidence that whatever teacher claimed the place was indeed human and not so different from ourselves. The odd stuffed bird becomes an idiosyncratic icon of an interest in nature, the personallysupplied framed prints or mottos—and nothing has ever been cheap on a teacher’s salary-- demonstrate a love of history and ideas. We can’t see the titles of the books usually, but there they are. Whether our predecessors were the sanctimonious martinets we tend to imagine them as or vibrant, curious, funny people (like ourselves!), enjoying their work and the company of children, we can imagine that most worked to make their poorly lighted and chalk-dust filled cells into interesting, perhaps even fun, places to learn. They filled these otherwise dreary boxes of desks with things that represented their own passions, situated to draw their young charges into the joy of learning and thinking.
We ought to be careful when judging teachers by the spaces they are forced to keep. Our Sudanese former foster child learned English in an open-air classroom in which dozens of refugee boys learned from a single textbook. It would be churlish indeed to fault his teachers or harp on their rote style of teaching—they did extremely well with what they had, which above all was a passion to help their students build lives beyond the endless waiting that filled their lives, and their students appreciated their efforts. It wasn’t “21st-century learning,” but it was collaborative in the extreme and fitted to students’ most fundamental needs and interests.
Today we can take our classes to meet peers from across the world in Second Life simulations (or perhaps, scaled digital representations), and school libraries have to decide whether they are coffee bars, study spaces, media centers, or laboratories of applied information science. I very much doubt that the British-style open dormitories with curtained sleeping spaces that were found until the 1970s at one school where I taught are still as they were; privacy and other concerns must have changed their configuration by now. And faculty lounges, once foully smoky bastions of gossip and posturing characterized by pecking orders every bit as powerful as those among students, have mostly given way to offices and workspaces designed to “foster collaboration and interdisciplinary thinking;” the smoke at least has gone, although I dare say all the gossip has not. The cafeteria system has largely replaced table service in even the most Hogwarts-like dining rooms, and portraits of founders, benefactors, and former heads now stare benevolently or bleakly out onto soft-serve ice cream machines and steam tables arrayed with broccoli sauté and vegan hot dogs.
And of course there is always the fun of imagining the ideal teaching and learning space—flexible, high-tech, LEED Platinum, with infinite connectivity and furniture out of the Jetsons. Architects and designers of 2011 have both lucrative opportunities to design such spaces anew and probably even more lucrative mandates to retrofit the School Georgian and Neo-Gothic buildings of yore to meet modern needs—the best of both worlds. It’s a good thing I never got into this work.
What the future will bring, who knows? Will “blended learning” environments change the whole meaning of “classroom space,” and will schools even begin to revert to the kinds of community centers of which alternative school people dreamed in the ’60s, with their social functions taking precedence over “teaching” as students do their academic learning on line and depend on schools mainly for activities, sports, and companionship?
I think independent schools are likely to be safe from on-line replacement for a while, as their strong values bases and reputation for developing powerful student–faculty relationships will keep families who can find ways to pay sending their children for the rich personal experiences as well as those Hogwartsesque dining halls. But new ways of teaching as well as the brute force of technology are changing the meaning of space, and schools will need to be thoughtful and nimble as they negotiate the next decades.
It makes me almost wonder whether one day the pendulum will swing back, and parents will be seeking bleak Neo-Dickensian environments to give their children a dose of cold-water reality (perhaps with a bit of birching, for good measure) that would go places like Gordonstoun and the rugged term-away places in North America more than one better. I’ll be gone by then, I hope.
When I was a kid I wanted to be an architect, but the profession fortunately dodged that bullet. It’s more than just as well, because every year the whole idea of designing spaces for a school becomes more complicated. Adding to the complication is the growing reality that more and more, those spaces are becoming virtual or even imaginary. It’s about environments nowadays.
For reasons that were once historical, for a couple of centuries and more school architecture tended to reflect the churchly beginnings of European education, and schools and colleges today are still happy to exploit the drool factor of a richly Gothic or otherwise faux-medieval campus; a dining hall or library that excites the comment “This looks like Hogwarts!” from starry-eyed parents on campus tours must assuredly house a better sort of student and educator and be just a bit more selective and perhaps a bit more, hmm, costly. (Those same parents are not at that moment thinking of the solicitations they might receive for funds to keep the belfries free of bat dung and the hammer beams varnished, but oh, well). In New England the plain, durable and fireproof brick used by Harvard’s founders generated another, “Georgian” look, understated elegance with simple white trim and dark wooden shutters.
Although James Garfield once quipped that “The ideal college is [Williams College president] Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other,” his predecessor Thomas Jefferson had opted for the democratic, understated elegance of brick at “his” University of Virginia, and at some point in the mid nineteenth century the American campus arms race began, with its emphasis on picturesque exteriors and inspiring public and community spaces and with paradoxically banal sleeping spaces and rectangular classrooms whose sameness is striking in every schoolroom photographed from the daguerreotype era right into the 1980s: desks in rows, blackboards, pull-down maps, a few meager bookshelves, perhaps a flag, and the inevitable portraits of Washington and, later and north of the Mason-Dixon Line, Lincoln.
What gives the spark of life to such photographs is usually the presence of students and, if one takes the time to look hard, evidence that whatever teacher claimed the place was indeed human and not so different from ourselves. The odd stuffed bird becomes an idiosyncratic icon of an interest in nature, the personallysupplied framed prints or mottos—and nothing has ever been cheap on a teacher’s salary-- demonstrate a love of history and ideas. We can’t see the titles of the books usually, but there they are. Whether our predecessors were the sanctimonious martinets we tend to imagine them as or vibrant, curious, funny people (like ourselves!), enjoying their work and the company of children, we can imagine that most worked to make their poorly lighted and chalk-dust filled cells into interesting, perhaps even fun, places to learn. They filled these otherwise dreary boxes of desks with things that represented their own passions, situated to draw their young charges into the joy of learning and thinking.
We ought to be careful when judging teachers by the spaces they are forced to keep. Our Sudanese former foster child learned English in an open-air classroom in which dozens of refugee boys learned from a single textbook. It would be churlish indeed to fault his teachers or harp on their rote style of teaching—they did extremely well with what they had, which above all was a passion to help their students build lives beyond the endless waiting that filled their lives, and their students appreciated their efforts. It wasn’t “21st-century learning,” but it was collaborative in the extreme and fitted to students’ most fundamental needs and interests.
Today we can take our classes to meet peers from across the world in Second Life simulations (or perhaps, scaled digital representations), and school libraries have to decide whether they are coffee bars, study spaces, media centers, or laboratories of applied information science. I very much doubt that the British-style open dormitories with curtained sleeping spaces that were found until the 1970s at one school where I taught are still as they were; privacy and other concerns must have changed their configuration by now. And faculty lounges, once foully smoky bastions of gossip and posturing characterized by pecking orders every bit as powerful as those among students, have mostly given way to offices and workspaces designed to “foster collaboration and interdisciplinary thinking;” the smoke at least has gone, although I dare say all the gossip has not. The cafeteria system has largely replaced table service in even the most Hogwarts-like dining rooms, and portraits of founders, benefactors, and former heads now stare benevolently or bleakly out onto soft-serve ice cream machines and steam tables arrayed with broccoli sauté and vegan hot dogs.
And of course there is always the fun of imagining the ideal teaching and learning space—flexible, high-tech, LEED Platinum, with infinite connectivity and furniture out of the Jetsons. Architects and designers of 2011 have both lucrative opportunities to design such spaces anew and probably even more lucrative mandates to retrofit the School Georgian and Neo-Gothic buildings of yore to meet modern needs—the best of both worlds. It’s a good thing I never got into this work.
What the future will bring, who knows? Will “blended learning” environments change the whole meaning of “classroom space,” and will schools even begin to revert to the kinds of community centers of which alternative school people dreamed in the ’60s, with their social functions taking precedence over “teaching” as students do their academic learning on line and depend on schools mainly for activities, sports, and companionship?
I think independent schools are likely to be safe from on-line replacement for a while, as their strong values bases and reputation for developing powerful student–faculty relationships will keep families who can find ways to pay sending their children for the rich personal experiences as well as those Hogwartsesque dining halls. But new ways of teaching as well as the brute force of technology are changing the meaning of space, and schools will need to be thoughtful and nimble as they negotiate the next decades.
It makes me almost wonder whether one day the pendulum will swing back, and parents will be seeking bleak Neo-Dickensian environments to give their children a dose of cold-water reality (perhaps with a bit of birching, for good measure) that would go places like Gordonstoun and the rugged term-away places in North America more than one better. I’ll be gone by then, I hope.
Saturday, February 5, 2011
A School is… (Verse 11)
A school is a legal and corporate entity whose structure, operations, and management must conform to legal and ethical standards of multiple jurisdictions.
More nuts and bolts, but strangely the requirements that these jurisdictions place upon schools will necessarily have more than a small effect upon their culture and programs.
Sometimes the effects can seem vexatious and trivial. I happen to work in a place, for example, where our local authorities have a deep-seated aversion to food waste. This meant that for many years can and bottle recycling was off the table, lest the sticky innards of empty soda cans attract unwanted critters whose presence, it was felt, would far outweigh the social benefits of recycling the darn things. Somehow in recent years there has been a change of heart, but decades of student environmental initiatives came to naught, creating a frustrating hidden curriculum in which next-level efforts—“We’ll get the students to make a proposal to the town!”—failed, as well.
As the snow piles up across the nation, one of my favorite new reads is a U.S. Department of Education document entitled State Regulation of Private Schools, 337 pages of detailed, state-by-state information on the rules and laws under which independent schools must operate. Sadly, in most states it would take a mathematical lawyer or bureaucrat to answer the “How many snow days are we allowed before we have to start making them up?” question, but the booklet—which I dearly wish I owned in dead-tree form, because I know just where I would like to keep it as a casual pick-up-and-read—is full of entertaining surprises.
For example, in New Hampshire the trustees of any private school must supply the school with a “United States flag, not less than five feet in length, with a flagstaff and appliances for display outdoors.” In the U.S. Virgin Islands, “The commissioner of education is responsible for disseminating materials to private and parochial school[s] for the celebration of John P. Scott Day, Melvin H. Evans Day, Rothschild Francis Day, and Cyril Emmanuel King Day.” (This last is April 7; King was a governor of the U.S.V.I.—you can look it up!) And, confuting thirty-some years of my own assumptions, in Massachusetts “There is no mandate regarding what courses private schools shall teach”—including the suddenly mythical “mandatory” year of American history (which most colleges do “require” for admission, whether our Commonwealth tells us to teach it or not). On the other hand, many states require that students in high school and/or middle school study and pass tests on both the United States and their state constitutions, an idea which stirs an atavistic smile within my late, inner history teacher. (And before you smugly dismiss this old school fancy, please tell me how many of your students clearly understand the legislative, executive, and judicial operations of your state?)
Mostly, it’s just interesting to see where regulation burrows itself into the skin of independent school operations, and it is interesting to speculate on what systemic, practical, crisis-related, or purely notional motivations lie behind the odder regulations. In many places these rules make the tax code seem straightforward by comparison.
But then there is the more serious and often more visible and visceral sides of the issue—for example, the school’s stance as both a citizen and a "jurisdiction" in its own right. Where do the boundaries lie when a school wishes to enforce its own “good neighbor policy,” its rules relative to student behavior away from the campus, or in the virtual world where legal requirements—embodied in anti-(cyber)bullying statutes or anti-hazing laws—bind the school to some potentially very harsh realities. Such laws, multiplying as they are, are forcing schools to make difficult and often painful calls on matters where once they might have been safe in turning a blind eye or simply maintaining a firm distinction between things that happen in school or at “official school functions” and things that happen off campus?
And then there is case law, where independent schools have to consider issues ranging from “special education” to simple liability to athletic eligibility to food safety. Lawsuits spurious and serious shape our operations as well as our basic assumptions around “due diligence” and the fading—I am told—doctrine of in loco parentis. Criminal background checks—repeated at regular and specified intervals—are now absolute necessities, as is the practice of making clear to teachers the nature of their legal role as “mandated reporters.” There are and can be no shortcuts and no secrets—no "I promise not to tell"—where children’s welfare is concerned.
Regulation, where it does hit us, is really a very big deal, an elephant in every room we occupy. By and large we push ourselves—and are sometimes pushed—to do the right, or at least the legally prudent, thing, and by and large we make it work. Some among us may long for good old days (Were they, really, though? I think not so much, on the whole) before anti-bullying laws and the like, and we may grumble at the sometimes picayune level of effort that conforming entails, but schools must conform, in the end, not just because the laws and rules require it, but because we recognize and embrace the need to make school better—safer, happier, healthier—for kids.
More nuts and bolts, but strangely the requirements that these jurisdictions place upon schools will necessarily have more than a small effect upon their culture and programs.
Sometimes the effects can seem vexatious and trivial. I happen to work in a place, for example, where our local authorities have a deep-seated aversion to food waste. This meant that for many years can and bottle recycling was off the table, lest the sticky innards of empty soda cans attract unwanted critters whose presence, it was felt, would far outweigh the social benefits of recycling the darn things. Somehow in recent years there has been a change of heart, but decades of student environmental initiatives came to naught, creating a frustrating hidden curriculum in which next-level efforts—“We’ll get the students to make a proposal to the town!”—failed, as well.
As the snow piles up across the nation, one of my favorite new reads is a U.S. Department of Education document entitled State Regulation of Private Schools, 337 pages of detailed, state-by-state information on the rules and laws under which independent schools must operate. Sadly, in most states it would take a mathematical lawyer or bureaucrat to answer the “How many snow days are we allowed before we have to start making them up?” question, but the booklet—which I dearly wish I owned in dead-tree form, because I know just where I would like to keep it as a casual pick-up-and-read—is full of entertaining surprises.
For example, in New Hampshire the trustees of any private school must supply the school with a “United States flag, not less than five feet in length, with a flagstaff and appliances for display outdoors.” In the U.S. Virgin Islands, “The commissioner of education is responsible for disseminating materials to private and parochial school[s] for the celebration of John P. Scott Day, Melvin H. Evans Day, Rothschild Francis Day, and Cyril Emmanuel King Day.” (This last is April 7; King was a governor of the U.S.V.I.—you can look it up!) And, confuting thirty-some years of my own assumptions, in Massachusetts “There is no mandate regarding what courses private schools shall teach”—including the suddenly mythical “mandatory” year of American history (which most colleges do “require” for admission, whether our Commonwealth tells us to teach it or not). On the other hand, many states require that students in high school and/or middle school study and pass tests on both the United States and their state constitutions, an idea which stirs an atavistic smile within my late, inner history teacher. (And before you smugly dismiss this old school fancy, please tell me how many of your students clearly understand the legislative, executive, and judicial operations of your state?)
Mostly, it’s just interesting to see where regulation burrows itself into the skin of independent school operations, and it is interesting to speculate on what systemic, practical, crisis-related, or purely notional motivations lie behind the odder regulations. In many places these rules make the tax code seem straightforward by comparison.
But then there is the more serious and often more visible and visceral sides of the issue—for example, the school’s stance as both a citizen and a "jurisdiction" in its own right. Where do the boundaries lie when a school wishes to enforce its own “good neighbor policy,” its rules relative to student behavior away from the campus, or in the virtual world where legal requirements—embodied in anti-(cyber)bullying statutes or anti-hazing laws—bind the school to some potentially very harsh realities. Such laws, multiplying as they are, are forcing schools to make difficult and often painful calls on matters where once they might have been safe in turning a blind eye or simply maintaining a firm distinction between things that happen in school or at “official school functions” and things that happen off campus?
And then there is case law, where independent schools have to consider issues ranging from “special education” to simple liability to athletic eligibility to food safety. Lawsuits spurious and serious shape our operations as well as our basic assumptions around “due diligence” and the fading—I am told—doctrine of in loco parentis. Criminal background checks—repeated at regular and specified intervals—are now absolute necessities, as is the practice of making clear to teachers the nature of their legal role as “mandated reporters.” There are and can be no shortcuts and no secrets—no "I promise not to tell"—where children’s welfare is concerned.
Regulation, where it does hit us, is really a very big deal, an elephant in every room we occupy. By and large we push ourselves—and are sometimes pushed—to do the right, or at least the legally prudent, thing, and by and large we make it work. Some among us may long for good old days (Were they, really, though? I think not so much, on the whole) before anti-bullying laws and the like, and we may grumble at the sometimes picayune level of effort that conforming entails, but schools must conform, in the end, not just because the laws and rules require it, but because we recognize and embrace the need to make school better—safer, happier, healthier—for kids.
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