Newsweek ranked Corbett #8 in the nation last year. We have improved since then. A lot.
On a per pupil basis, Corbett passed 25% more exams than the next most prolific Oregon school. 40% of Corbett's graduating Class of 2009 earned AP Scholar status. Outrageous. Over one third of Corbett's 2009 AP Scholars were in 10th or 11th grade and are back in Corbett again this year!
Now, if these facts reflected achievement on the football field, no-one would think twice about our 'crowing' a little...after all, to win is good. But because they are ACADEMIC achievements, it is considered bad form for a school to 'brag'. Why is that, I wonder? And why is it that we ignore the prohibition?
Corbett is a small fish, but we don't live in a big pond. Rather, we are swimming up a large, swift river. The current against us is substantial, consisting as it does in the orthodoxy of both the various education agencies and the corporations that make their living by reducing the complexities of education to a 'simple, guaranteed' consumable.
Believing and behaving in ways that disregard Corbett's approach to education is literally a multi-million (and probably billion) dollar industry. Education consultants charge thousands of dollars per day to speak at conferences. Districts pay thousands of dollars per day to train teachers not to teach, but to study and interpret data. Federal programs literally prohibit the use of what we believe to be best practice regarding at-risk students. It is impossible to exaggerate the degree of contradiction between what we do and what a lucrative education industry insists must be the done. Why are they so insistent? Why don't they give credence what we do? Because if the majority of educators immulate us, there is little left to sell, little left to buy, little profit to be made.
This is not to say that we are utterly without fellow-travelers. We owe tremendous intellectual debts to remarkable thinkers. We enjoy the counsel of the best minds in the field. No exceptions. Who are these 'best minds'? Kieran Egan, Mem Fox, Frank Smith, Howard Gardner, Parker Palmer, David Solway, Deborah Meier, Nancy Atwell and countless others who have written about education from the 'inside' as well as from 'the outside'. (Others include Michael Polanyi, Northrop Frye, George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Neil Postman).
Those who have read these writers will quickly realize that they are not all of one mind. They don't represent a 'school' of thought or a program. One of the things they have in common is perhaps best represented by Nancy Atwell's comment, in The Reading Zone, that she has discovered that she no longer has a 'program' to market!!! All of these 'friends of Corbett' are authors, and some are teachers as well. They all sell books. Many of them speak in public. But none of them sells a program that lends itself to traditional 'staff development' in which teachers are told where to stand, what to say, how to test, or how to interpret data. None of them has anything to say about preparing for the Oregon Assessments. They all have something to say about becoming educated, about preparing for an uncertain future.
This is all well and good, but still, is bragging appropriate? CORBETT'S RECORD OF ACHIEVEMENT IS ITS 'HALL PASS', ITS PERMISSION SLIP FOR ITS UNORTHODOX PRACTICE. WE PRODUCE BETTER THAN ANYONE ELSE. IT BUYS US BREATHING ROOM.
It gives us an answer when we are asked, again and again, why we don't do things the way that other schools do.
And what do we brag about, really? What is it right and proper to brag about? Just this: Corbett might be the most fully democratic school in Oregon. Corbett offers to every student what is the exlusive domain of the 'elite' in other schools.
Unless an interdisciplinary team determines otherwise, every 9th grader in Corbett takes Advanced Placement Human Geography. Every 10th grader takes AP World History. By age 16, Corbett students have more experience with AP courses, and therefore with college-level expectations, than do 80 percent of Oregon graduates. After 10th grade comes the real fire. Two years of Advanced Placement English. Advanced Placement Government. Many students add one, two or even three AP Math classes. Many of the students pass multiple exams prior to graduation. In fact, Oregon's 2009 AP State Scholar (the student who passed more AP exams than any other 2009 graduate in the state) graduated from Corbett last year. But that's almost beside the point. We know that students who score a 2 (with 3 considered a 'passing' score)have a significant advantage in college over those who have not attempted an exam. Even that is beside the point.
The point is that we don't sort. We don't select or 'deselect'. We don't decide ahead-of-time who is 'good enough'. We offer opportunities to every student. More than that, we make beneficial demands of every student. We schedule them, support them with extra study halls specifically designed for promoting their success, and we pay for the exams. Students benefit differently, based mostly on how much they are willing to work. (That's another thing we do...we admit that some students work much, much harder than others).
So we brag. We are proud. Proud of our students and proud of the opportunities that we offer. It's what makes us different. It's what makes our work worth doing. It's what creates space for us to be outside the box but still inside the system.
