Corbett Schools Lowest in County!

Corbett Schools are often, but not always, highly ranked. Let's take per pupil spending, for example. In 2007-2008, Corbett ranked last in Multnomah County. On the average, students who lived in Multnomah County but outside Corbett enjoy a $10,000 per year education allocation. In Corbett that number was, according to the Open Books project, $8291.00. So we spent at about 83% of the County average. In general, per pupil spending drops as one moves eastward from downtown. Portland and Riverdale lead the way, David Douglas, Reynolds and Parkrose are the second eschelon (all at $9000+ per kid), leaving Centennial, Gresham-Barlow and Corbett (in that order) to bring up the rear. Gresham spent barely $150.00 per kid more than Corbett. Not a lot, but Corbett teachers would have put an extra $3750.00 per classroom to good use.

But that's just Multnomah County, and everyone knows that bigger schools and bigger districts are just more expensive to operate. O.K., everyone doesn't know that, but only because nobody pays attention!

But what about other small schools? What about schools that Corbett competes with in football, basket ball, soccer? Well, it's bad news for the sports fans! Warrenton, Colton, Nestucca Valley, Neah-Kah-Nie, Seaside, Gaston, Knappa: they all outspend Corbett. On the average, these schools spend well over $10,000 per pupil per year. Neah-Kah-Nie, Nestucca and Seaside lead the way, with the lowest of them spending $10,753.00 per pupil. Knappa and Gaston are next at $9000+, and Colton, Warrenton and Corbett, in that order, bring up the rear. Like Gresham, Warrenton spends only about $150 per kid more than Corbett. Just $4000 more per classroom, in the case of Warrenton.

But hey, that's just small, rural schools. Everybody knows that small, rural schools are more expensive to operate.. WAIT A MINUTE!

What just happened? Corbett gets less than its (mostly) larger, urban counterparts because it is small and rural, and it gets less than its small, rural counterparts because it is...small and rural?

It's nobody's fault, really. Oregon has an extremely complex funding formula that has been manipulated at various times to take care of one or another interest group. It is obvious that both the large urban districts and the small, more remote districts have had their day in the legislature. And some districts have passed operating levies and have local taxes that help their situation. Corbett is small, rural, and too close to other schools to qualify as remote. We are stuck in between categories and miss out on the benefits of either. We do get a small high school adjustment, which is extremely helpful. Still, Colton, which is Corbett's demographic twin by all accounts, winds up with$330.00 more per kid. That's over $8000 per classroom. And that's no knock on Colton, whose schools I admire and which deserve all of the support that they can get. I mention them only to illustrate the peculiarity of Corbett's circumstance.

It's nobody's fault, and my attempts to raise the issue with the state have to date fallen on deaf ears. But it's a dilemma, and it leaves Corbett's kids with less support than they deserve.

We're off to a good start this year. While we will likely continue to bring up the rear in financial support, we intend to show well in every measure of school success.

The Goal of Corbett School District

"The goal of Corbett School District is to foster intellectual development, social awareness and civic responsibility among the members of our school community."

This most ambitious of goal statements has guided Corbett Schools during the improvements of the last several years. And yet it doesn't look like the goals of other organizations. There is not a single number, a single statistic, a single measurable objective in sight! According to common wisdom, it's hardly a goal at all. And yet we have, under its banner, posted higher scores, better numbers, and more impressive, measurable results than we would have dared commit to explicitly before-the-fact. I have said before that I see specific academic objectives (like the 10th grade benchmarks as stifling more than inspiring achievement. I said that the State's academic goals need to be met on the way to doing something really interesting. By the same token, I believe that Corbett owes much of its success to an unflagging commitment to an open-ended vision of the future that allows for improvisation, vigilant serendipity, and, occasionally, educational opportunism. Like a running back cutting for daylight, we don't always have a clear path defined ahead-of-time. But we keep moving forward, keep our heads up, keep our feet moving, and when we see an opportunity for kids, we take it. We don't need a goal that says we will gain 3.4 yards per carry. We know where the end zone is. (Excuse the sports metaphor. Done now.) We are relentless in our pursuit of ever greater opportunities for more and more kids. And this is a project that is too complex, too multi-faceted to be captured in a set of goals, objectives and action plans.

Finally, someone might point out that the word 'students' never shows up in our goal statement. When we say 'school community', we mean all of us.

Corbett School District will never hide behind the claim that we 'met' mediocre performance targets. We are willing for someone else to do the counting, the measuring and the calculating in any manner that they see fit. We want to create extraordinary opportunities for our kids and to set the example for them as the adults. And we believe that there will always be great opportunities available to kids who are intellectually prepared, socially aware, and committed to active participation in their various communities.

Imaginative Education

This is the heart of Corbett Charter School. It is the unique understanding of teaching and learning that has convinced me that we still have room to dramatically improve education in Corbett.

It's a catchy phrase, which is both necessary (if you want to get the attention of the education community) and unfortunate. It is unfortunate in that it is tempting to substitute the everyday-and-widely-varying notions of 'imaginative' for the specific phenomena (yes, plural, but limited) that Kieran Egan had in mind when he coined the phrase.

Kieran Egan's writing and research in Imaginative Education spans several decades, and his Imaginative Education Research Group based at Simon Fraser University is the world-wide clearing house for research, publishing and training in his unique approach. One of his books, The Educated Mind, is the single most comprehensive treatment of his ideas. I highly recommend it to those who are curious to understand our excitement and the basis for our ambitious goals.

As an approach to education in general, Imaginative Education consists in a highly sophisticated philosophical/anthropological approach to an array of issues ranging from human development to the nature of culture, cognition, childhood, knowledge and the world itself. When it comes to the relationship between theory and practice, most educators are pleased that they are not required to master the entirety of the related literature in order to put certain key insights to work. This may sound startling until one stops to consider how few educators (or others) have read Aristotle, Plato, Rousseau, Skinner, Kant, Locke, Piaget, Dewey, Montessori, Adler, Greene, or any dozen or so other seminal thinkers upon whose work most educational practice is (at least loosely) based. Egan is not easy. He is worth the effort. And I feel very fortunate to work with a team that is intent on fully understanding his ideas.

As an approach to teaching, the core insight of Imaginative Education is this: Human beings have an affinity for knowing. We find learning fun and interesting. So the first question that a teacher should ask herself when preparing a lesson is this: What is it about this topic that captures my imagination, my emotional commitment? This might seem like common sense (after one reads it) but it is not how we are taught to teach in schools of education. Most of us have been taught numerous ways to construct and deliver lessons, and never does the conversation begin with 'What is it that is the most emotionally engaging about this topic?' Someone said (was it Bertrand Russell?) that there is nothing so uncommon as 'common sense'. Next, the question of what it is that a teacher finds emotionally engaging in a topic needs to be translated to the emotional landscape and previous knowledge of the students in the room, which is why our multiage classrooms are configured as they are. Our classrooms, as they are designed, correspond to what Egan identifies as the age ranges of Mythic (based in oral language), Romantic (based in literacy) and Philosophic (based on the ability to think systematically) understandings. So the same topic, which is emotionally engaging to the same teacher for the same reasons, may be presented very differently to a given class depending on the current levels of understanding and interests of the students in the room.

(At this point some education 'insiders' will be tempted to think that this is the same thing as other more familiar, developmental theories. So to those 'insiders', I can only urge you to read the book cited above. It is profoundly different that anything proposed by Piaget or Erikson and is not driven by a model of biological/cognitive development.)

There is much more to add, but that's a start...Imaginative Education. Check it out at www.ierg.net The page includes pictures and text from our last IE training in Corbett!

EMPA

Yesterday I was fortunate enough to find myself in the company of the East Multnomah Pioneer Association as they held their 94th annual meeting in Corbett. They packed the MPB with good will and a with a celebration of their community and their heritage. It was heartening to see the pride that they take in their schools, their concern for the future of Corbett and their understanding of what it takes to build strong foundations for young people. Who would have expected to find such a forward-looking group at a celebration of the past?

Many thanks to President George Knieriem and the members of the association for a memorable experience.

Circumventing?

I read it again today when an acquaintance shared with me a copy of an editorial from a Bend paper. The editorial was very sympathetic to Corbett and ended with what amounted to a prophecy of doom to the effect that Corbett Charter School is a small fish and that the Oregon Educational Complex won't tolerate it's continued existence.

But the phrase that most captivated me was the claim, which I have read in other publications, that Corbett is 'circumventing the inter-district transfer process'. One hardly knows where to begin...

My first challenge is to suppress the nonsensical feeling that this phrase had to have come from the movie Dr. Strangelove. It has an ominous, paranoid feel to it, as if the circumventing of THE INTER-DISTRICT TRANSFER PROCESS would herald the immanent demise of the Western world. The Inter-District Transfer Process, the U.S. Constitution, the Ten Commandments...are these not the cornerstones of civilization as we know it? And wouldn't we give up the other two rather than tolerate the weakening of the IDT?

But the serious point is a simple one. IT'S A CHARTER SCHOOL! Eliminating District boundaries as barriers to parent choice is the point. It's not an oversight, not a flaw. It's why the law is written as it is. It's been on the books for a decade now, and Charter Schools are operating in districts throughout East County. It was only when Corbett sponsored one that the law became a threat to the American way of life.

What is the political assumption behind the Inter-district Transfer Process? It seems to be that all parents residing within the boundaries of a school district owe a tribute to that agency regardless of their level of satisfaction with the schooling that is provided therein. I've never understood this, and it never occurred to me to tolerate it. I put my daughter in her neighborhood school for exactly one year. I believe in public education and neighborhood schools, and I was happy to enroll her near our home. I was astounded to find that in spite of her having a wonderful teacher, the culture of the school was such that she was not going to be allowed to progress at her natural rate. So I applied for (and was granted) an Inter-district Transfer. Lara received permission to attend Corbett every year for the next nine years, including when we moved to a new district. I didn't think anything of the annual ritual, as it was always approved without comment, and so was every request for students wanting to transfer out of Corbett. It was an open door. It lasted for a decade, more or less. We superintendents talked a lot about choice, about giving parents options, about cooperation. We talked about students and parents preferring smaller or larger schools and how good it was to allow them their choices.

Whether it was new leadership (Corbett's neighboring districts have gone through several superintendents each during my tenure in Corbett) or just economic stress, Corbett was put on notice that the age of cooperation was past. Fair enough. I understand that folks need to do what they think is best. But of course I thought that I would be afforded the same courtesy. Seems I was mistaken. Corbett sponsored a new Charter School and the recriminations have echoed in the press non-stop.

During the last legislative session, the Oregon Education Association, the Confederation of Oregon School Administrators and other interest groups supported legislation aimed at reinforcing the rights of districts to hold their residents captive (really, they call it 'capturing' students). This would leave school choice in tact for the wealthy, of course, but would eliminate it for the vast majority of people. The legislative attack failed, but these things have a way of coming back in subsequent sessions.

This recurrence is the future that the Bend editorial was predicting. And while I don't doubt that Corbett Charter School will be the target of a renewed legislative attack in the next session, I am not so pessimistic as our high-desert commentator. I believe that Oregon is ready to get serious about having better schools and is losing patience with the constant promise that just one more School Improvement Plan will lead us to the promised land.

So thank you, in Bend, for your good wishes. We'll see how it goes.

40% Named AP Scholars!

Eighteen of Corbett's forty-three graduates making up the Class of 2009 were named Advanced Placement Scholars by The College Board. This is an astounding achievement, and it could add to the claim (complaint?) that Corbett is just packed with students who are by nature exceptional. And there is some truth to this, as 16% of the class was identified as Talented and Gifted. That accounts for seven of the eighteen AP Scholars. And the TAG students did well. They passed an average of eight AP exams each during their careers. (eight passing scores will nearly always convert to a full year of credit at a pubic university, and many of our students begin their college careers as sophomores.) The TAG-identified seniors all passed AP Calculus, AP English Comp, AP English Lit, AP Statistics and various exams scattered across nine other subjects.

What about the other eleven AP Scholars? The ones who weren't identified as TAG? They made up a quarter of the class, they weren't identified as part of any special program, and they passed an average of more than four AP exams each. They had no common passing subjects, but they put up passing scores on thirteen different exams.

These non-TAG performers are, in a way, the epitome of Corbett's unique approach to education. Most districts in Oregon would not provide these students access to Advanced Placement classes simply because AP is not part of the curriculum. In most schools that do offer Advanced Placement classes, participation is limited to somewhere between five and fifteen percent of the student body. Many of our students would have been excluded for fear of hurting other schools' passing rates. In Corbett, students who would not be allowed to participate in Advanced Placement programs are not only expected to engage, they are required to, and they earn over half of the passing scores in the school!

Corbett is unique among Oregon schools in this regard. Virtually all students, barring a significant impairment, participate in Advanced Placement work. This year, all ninth graders are taking AP Human Geography, all 10th grader are taking AP World History, all 11th and 12th graders are taking AP Language and Literature. Seventy-five students (one quarter of the 9-12 student body) are taking Advanced Placement Calculus (ab) or (bc). Sixty students (many of these overlap with calculus) are taking AP Statistics. We will administer over 425 exams in these six areas, enough to make Corbett the leader among Oregon schools again this year. But Corbett offers eleven other Advanced Placement classes and anticipates administering several hundred exams in addition to the 425 outlined above. And we don't know ahead-of-time who will pass, and we make no attempts to screen students out in order to protect passing rates. The only students who don't take Advanced Placement classes in Corbett are those for whom we believe participation in the course is inappropriate to their academic needs.

We are OK with identifying students as Talented and Gifted. It's the law, so we will continue to do so. But we don't give out special privileges or special classes. They are treated exactly like everyone else in that they are expected to engage the curriculum each year at a level that constitutes their own next steps. They are required to prove themselves again and again, just like every Corbett student. And they have responded splendidly, but when they look around at the award ceremony they find that they are not alone. The stage is crowded with high achievers, including some who nobody else would have expected to be there!

Other schools have made the claim that their 'curriculum' is just like that of Corbett. I suppose if by 'curriculum' one means a document on a shelf somewhere, that might be true. But if by 'curriculum' one means the planned educational experience that is delivered to every student each year, I think that the above constitutes evidence that Corbett is utterly unique. Yes, Corbett students study the Civil War and the potato famine, just like students in every other school in Oregon. But somehow when we are done presenting the 'same' curriculum the experience of Corbett students is significantly different.