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jenettVarious conversations in the last couple of weeks have left me wanting to do more direct conversation about education - and specificially, my experience working in the independent school world. (Also, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
leanne_opasker asked me about my thoughts on a book, which I'll talk about at the end of this series once I've had a chance to read it.)
You can divide up primary and secondary education in the United States in all sorts of different directions.
- Public schools are funded by tax dollars (usually some combination of local and state) and governance involves oversight by government or government appointed officials at some level.
- Independent schools own, govern, and finance themselves.
- Charter schools are usually a middle ground - they get public funding, but have been released from some of the rules, restrictions, etc. of the public schools.
- Parochial schools are another middle ground - they often group with the independents for various things (sports, professional organisations, etc.) but if they're run by the diocese or whatever other appropriate religious body, they're not quite independent.
- Exam schools are another middle ground - they're schools you get into by doing well on the entrance exams, but they're funded by public school resources. Boston Latin is a good example.
Independent schools may also qualify for some public funds for very specific purposes - I'll talk about this more eventually, but whenever you see me taking about Title funds, that's what I'm talking about. (Usually, these funds are meant to insure equitable access to specific resources between all schools in a geographic location.)
Power of names
Now, your next logical question is "Why are we calling this other set of schools 'Independent' rather than 'Private'?" This is a good question. It's a shift that's been taking place over the last 15 years or so, though the term was certainly in broad use before that. (The "Independent School" name was used for Independent Schools of the Central States starting in 1958, and I think the National Association of Independent Schools started using that name well before that.)
I actually sort of like the explanation my current division head gave earlier this year - that independent schools have that name because they really are independent in many ways. They have a tremendous amount of leeway in deciding what they're going to focus on, how they're going to teach, and to set the benchmarks for what they consider a successful education.
Now, obviously, this doesn't happen in a vacuum. Schools obviously pay attention to whether that education means their students succeed once they leave (college, work, etc.) and to their reputation among similar schools, within their geographic community, and to all sorts of less direct measures, like how they feel about the actual individual people who are graduating are educated. And schools also have people doing oversight - we have a board of trustees who do have an impact on the school, but who are not school employees.
There are, though, two parts of this 'independent' thing. First, that such schools tend to collect faculty and other staff who like the variety of options available to them. This has many good sides - we have immensely creative, talented, passionate teachers. It also has downsides - meetings can take forever and a day or end up emotionally fraught because people have strong feelings on every side, or simply a strong desire to argue every point.
The second is that we tend to collect highly independent students. This is mostly a Very Good Thing, because passionate students are a lot more fun to teach generally, but it does mean you end up balancing the good of the individual vs. the good of the teacher helping them vs. the other people in a class who are working at different levels in that subject.
You will notice I have not, in any of this, mentioned standardised testing. This is because independent schools get to duck most of the state-required testing. Me, I think this is a good thing. Our students take the PSATs, SAT I and II (SAT II tests are what many of you may remember as Achievment Tests - subject specific exams) and most take at least a couple of Advance Placement tests. Some take the ACTs (equivalent to the SAT I). But that's basically it - we don't take the state graduation tests, anything like that.
I'll also note that there are some public school restrictions we do have to meet. We have to have a certain number of fire drills, lockdown drills, and tornado drills each year. Our buildings obviously have to meet fire code and accessibility standards (as well as all the assorted employment laws). We have a school nurse here two mornings a week who is employed by Minneapolis, not by the school. Just that we don't have to meet district requirements about curriculum, or how we decide that.
One *big* difference that is worth bringing up here is that public schools generally are required to do fairly substantial internet filtering (this is related to getting funds via eRate.) Independent schools can opt into these funds (and if so, have to filter), but don't have to - we don't, because our head of IS strongly feels that teaching kids how to navigate sensibly and having consequences for abuse is much more important than blocking (which is often flawed anyway). I agree with her: it's one of the reasons I like working here.
The other way that we're independent is in discipline. Public schools often have very limited ways to deal with discipline issues, and they generally need to work through each step. This can sometimes be very scary. I know teachers even in what are considered 'good' school districts who've been physically attacked, stalked, and all manner of other scary things - and who had to choose between leaving that job or seeing the kid every day in their classes.
Independent schools have a lot more leeway to deal with these issues, as long as they don't actually break any laws. (The school I'm at has a detailed family handbook, which is unapologetic about the fact that you can be asked to leave without any intermediary steps if the school decides it's necessary. Obviously, that's not the preferred option, and there usually are other things tried first.)
The final area is budget - all schools in this day and age are budget conscious, and very thoughtful about how they spend resources. (It's possible my library's going to get a budget cut in the next round of budgets, for example.) But.. we've *got* a budget. Minneapolis public schools have had only a *tiny* amount for new books and other items for most of my time here. Independent schools do have more leeway in figuring out how to move the budget around, and what to do with it, and they can work on things like making a compelling case around donation or building funds for specific projects (as [school] did for major renovation projects about a decade ago.)
(Incidentally, one of the reasons they're looking at places to save money is that they're trying to throw as much at financial aid as possible, to create a more diverse student population along every axis. I approve of this, which is why I'm not fighting the idea of a reasonable budget cut.)
A momentary cross-comparison
If we're going to do cross-comparisons to other parts of my life, the analogy runs like this:
- Public school = church in large, mainstream denomination - there's a bunch of variety, but all things under that umbrella do have a number of things in common with each other, and it's pretty easy to make lists of those things given time. You know, going from school to school, basically what you can expect to see, or ask about.
- Independent schools are more like religious witchcraft groups. There are times you get a larger tradition which passes down the way it does things to other schools in the tradition (Montessori, Waldorf, various other such things), but there are also lots of little one-off groups that grew out of specific desires or common interests, and that continue to quietly flourish doing what they're doing. The good thing is that there's lots of flexibility to make changes if something doesn't work. The bad thing is that if you're not careful, schools can do rather weird things, and the 'this doesn't work' doesn't become obvious for quite a while.
Schools that survive more than 10 years or so have generally solved this problem - plus there are organisations and accrediting bodies that help with this. (I'm going to talk about the accreditation process in a later part of this series.)
A brief digression into personal history
I spent most of my education in public schools - specifically in the Winchester public school system just outside of Boston. Winchester has a long reputation as an excellent district, and I was there from 1st grade to 11th.
I then went to boarding school for two years - entering in what was a 2nd 11th grade year. There are a bunch of reasons for this, but mostly that I was very young for my grade, I was (because I was interested in music education) looking at some *very* large public universities for college, and a bunch of other things (my father's death when I was in 10th grade) meant that an extra year doing challenging work but letting me rebalance in some ways was probably not a bad move.
As I've said before, the academics at Andover was fantastic, the music was amazing. The social life, not so much, because it was an enormously high-pressure setting, and teenagers can be very cruel to each other. Or just plain stupid. I still consider it a worthwhile experience, but it's not one I'd recommend to everyone, or for all reasons.
College is college, but for the last 10 years, I've been working at an independent day school in the Twin Cities. (I do not identify which one in my journal, though I've said enough over the years that it's pretty easy to figure out with minimal digging. I'm glad to confirm guesses privately in email, and definitely very glad to talk about other schools in the area as well.)
I attend occasional professional meetings with people from other independent schools in the area - the one where we do the most talking is the Independent School Media Association, which is librarians and related folks from a bunch of independent schools (including Catholic ones) around the state.
Types of independent schools
There are three major groupings of independent schools to my way of thinking: boarding schools, parochial or other religious schools, and day schools. I've got experience in two of the three.
First, schools come in all grade levels - though obviously, most boarding schools start much later in the game. The school I work at runs pre-kindergarden to 12th grade, some schools run K-8, or K-6, some run 6-12, some run 9-12. Generally, schools in a geographic area will sync with each other to some extent - for example, the school I work at gets a certain number of people feeding in from a progressive K-8 school.
Some offer a post-graduate year (often taken for either sports reasons, or as a stepping stone to college - either improving grades in someone who struggled earlier, or someone who's very young for their year getting a chance to be away from home in a more closely supported setting than college.)
Boarding schools are in some ways the simplest to describe. The vast majority of the student population lives at school - which means that it includes classes, sports, music, other activities, etc. all in one place, and with (one hopes) careful and thorough supervision and deep relationships with faculty. I know this one as a student: my last two years in high school were at Phillips Andover, one of the older boarding schools in the country (as it was founded in 1778).
Many boarding schools also have some day students from the immediate area: in practice, most day students are on campus for very lengthy periods of time. (The day students I knew showed up for the day at breakfast, and often didn't leave until everyone else had to be in the dorms at 10pm)
Boarding schools tend to cluster on the east coast, though there are some throughout the rest of the country. (However, I'll note that Minnesota has a grand total of four, and they're all either specific-religion, or heavily focused on a particular subset of students like people doing high-end individual sports or arts.)
Religious schools are also pretty obvious - some are day, some are boarding, there are varying religions (Catholic is best known, but there are Episcopalian, Lutheran, and other options out there.) How much the religion is an impact depends on the school. Some keep the roots and core values, but make a big push toward diversity in the student body and faculty, others want faculty, in particular, to be active members of the religion in question. (For those who remember when I was looking at options, this is why I said there are some schools I'm unemployable at: it knocked out something like a quarter of the possible schools in my area in one way or another.)
In such cases, employees often have to include a statement of faith, a letter from the appropriate religious community leader, or agree to a statement of faith that includes not just on-campus activity, but off-campus, as well. This is as compared to schools with a strong religious anchor, but who just ask that employees not undermine the religion in question while in their professional roles. (My best example of the latter is what is now St. Catherine University, where I had no problems working even though they're Catholic, but the same thing applies at the secondary level.)
Day schools are what's left. Why they exist varies quite a lot.
There's actually a fair bit of evidence in [school] archives that one of the reasons for a push for day schools in the Midwest was a certain amount of suspicion about what went on at those east coast boarding schools. There's a lot of early advertising material that talks about being able to have your son home every night.
Discussions with people with more understanding of the history (like the history teacher who wrote the school's cenntenial history) suggest that what they were saying under the surface was pretty explicitly "Keep your son at home so that he will grow up to be a heterosexual manly man, unlike those effeminate academics who go east."
Regardless, we end up with day schools. Fortunately, the day schools have moved on since then. Most of them try to push the idea of challenging academics, with a mix of athletics and arts, sometimes with a particular focus or goal (arts-focused schools, schools that support high-intensity sports of various kinds, technology focus, etc.)
A quick moment about calendars
One of the things that independent schools duck is the "Must be in school 180 days" thing - they set their own calendars.
The school I work at has classes running from the Tuesday before Labor Day through the last week in May (with graduation the following week). We have 3 days off at Thanksgiving, two weeks at the end of December and two weeks at the end of March. Students have a bit more time off - assorted days for parent conferences, etc. Plus Labor Day, MLK Jr. Day, President's Day, and Memorial Day, which are federal holidays.
Andover runs on the trimester system, which I must admit I rather miss. Fall trimester runs from mid-September to early December, with a week and a day break for Thanksgiving. Winter trimester runs from the first week in January to the second week in March. Spring trimester runs from the end of March (2 weeks of break) to the very end of May. This makes for slightly uneven trimesters, but it's easy enough to work with.
Now, Andover does do Saturday classes about every other week in fall and spring terms (they used to do them in winter, too, but did away with that my second year there to find a *huge* drop in illness rates.) But these aren't actually extra classes: you have a free period during the week for the classes that meet on the Saturday, instead.
Ok, I stop here: feel free to ask questions. Things I intend to talk about in future parts are:
- Day and week in the life - schedules and commitments for both students and staff
- What the hiring process is like
- Why teach in an independent school
- Elitism and pluralism.
- What's the goal of a school?
- Accreditation process
leanne_opasker asked me about my thoughts on a book, which I'll talk about at the end of this series once I've had a chance to read it.) You can divide up primary and secondary education in the United States in all sorts of different directions.
- Public schools are funded by tax dollars (usually some combination of local and state) and governance involves oversight by government or government appointed officials at some level.
- Independent schools own, govern, and finance themselves.
- Charter schools are usually a middle ground - they get public funding, but have been released from some of the rules, restrictions, etc. of the public schools.
- Parochial schools are another middle ground - they often group with the independents for various things (sports, professional organisations, etc.) but if they're run by the diocese or whatever other appropriate religious body, they're not quite independent.
- Exam schools are another middle ground - they're schools you get into by doing well on the entrance exams, but they're funded by public school resources. Boston Latin is a good example.
Independent schools may also qualify for some public funds for very specific purposes - I'll talk about this more eventually, but whenever you see me taking about Title funds, that's what I'm talking about. (Usually, these funds are meant to insure equitable access to specific resources between all schools in a geographic location.)
Power of names
Now, your next logical question is "Why are we calling this other set of schools 'Independent' rather than 'Private'?" This is a good question. It's a shift that's been taking place over the last 15 years or so, though the term was certainly in broad use before that. (The "Independent School" name was used for Independent Schools of the Central States starting in 1958, and I think the National Association of Independent Schools started using that name well before that.)
I actually sort of like the explanation my current division head gave earlier this year - that independent schools have that name because they really are independent in many ways. They have a tremendous amount of leeway in deciding what they're going to focus on, how they're going to teach, and to set the benchmarks for what they consider a successful education.
Now, obviously, this doesn't happen in a vacuum. Schools obviously pay attention to whether that education means their students succeed once they leave (college, work, etc.) and to their reputation among similar schools, within their geographic community, and to all sorts of less direct measures, like how they feel about the actual individual people who are graduating are educated. And schools also have people doing oversight - we have a board of trustees who do have an impact on the school, but who are not school employees.
There are, though, two parts of this 'independent' thing. First, that such schools tend to collect faculty and other staff who like the variety of options available to them. This has many good sides - we have immensely creative, talented, passionate teachers. It also has downsides - meetings can take forever and a day or end up emotionally fraught because people have strong feelings on every side, or simply a strong desire to argue every point.
The second is that we tend to collect highly independent students. This is mostly a Very Good Thing, because passionate students are a lot more fun to teach generally, but it does mean you end up balancing the good of the individual vs. the good of the teacher helping them vs. the other people in a class who are working at different levels in that subject.
You will notice I have not, in any of this, mentioned standardised testing. This is because independent schools get to duck most of the state-required testing. Me, I think this is a good thing. Our students take the PSATs, SAT I and II (SAT II tests are what many of you may remember as Achievment Tests - subject specific exams) and most take at least a couple of Advance Placement tests. Some take the ACTs (equivalent to the SAT I). But that's basically it - we don't take the state graduation tests, anything like that.
I'll also note that there are some public school restrictions we do have to meet. We have to have a certain number of fire drills, lockdown drills, and tornado drills each year. Our buildings obviously have to meet fire code and accessibility standards (as well as all the assorted employment laws). We have a school nurse here two mornings a week who is employed by Minneapolis, not by the school. Just that we don't have to meet district requirements about curriculum, or how we decide that.
One *big* difference that is worth bringing up here is that public schools generally are required to do fairly substantial internet filtering (this is related to getting funds via eRate.) Independent schools can opt into these funds (and if so, have to filter), but don't have to - we don't, because our head of IS strongly feels that teaching kids how to navigate sensibly and having consequences for abuse is much more important than blocking (which is often flawed anyway). I agree with her: it's one of the reasons I like working here.
The other way that we're independent is in discipline. Public schools often have very limited ways to deal with discipline issues, and they generally need to work through each step. This can sometimes be very scary. I know teachers even in what are considered 'good' school districts who've been physically attacked, stalked, and all manner of other scary things - and who had to choose between leaving that job or seeing the kid every day in their classes.
Independent schools have a lot more leeway to deal with these issues, as long as they don't actually break any laws. (The school I'm at has a detailed family handbook, which is unapologetic about the fact that you can be asked to leave without any intermediary steps if the school decides it's necessary. Obviously, that's not the preferred option, and there usually are other things tried first.)
The final area is budget - all schools in this day and age are budget conscious, and very thoughtful about how they spend resources. (It's possible my library's going to get a budget cut in the next round of budgets, for example.) But.. we've *got* a budget. Minneapolis public schools have had only a *tiny* amount for new books and other items for most of my time here. Independent schools do have more leeway in figuring out how to move the budget around, and what to do with it, and they can work on things like making a compelling case around donation or building funds for specific projects (as [school] did for major renovation projects about a decade ago.)
(Incidentally, one of the reasons they're looking at places to save money is that they're trying to throw as much at financial aid as possible, to create a more diverse student population along every axis. I approve of this, which is why I'm not fighting the idea of a reasonable budget cut.)
A momentary cross-comparison
If we're going to do cross-comparisons to other parts of my life, the analogy runs like this:
- Public school = church in large, mainstream denomination - there's a bunch of variety, but all things under that umbrella do have a number of things in common with each other, and it's pretty easy to make lists of those things given time. You know, going from school to school, basically what you can expect to see, or ask about.
- Independent schools are more like religious witchcraft groups. There are times you get a larger tradition which passes down the way it does things to other schools in the tradition (Montessori, Waldorf, various other such things), but there are also lots of little one-off groups that grew out of specific desires or common interests, and that continue to quietly flourish doing what they're doing. The good thing is that there's lots of flexibility to make changes if something doesn't work. The bad thing is that if you're not careful, schools can do rather weird things, and the 'this doesn't work' doesn't become obvious for quite a while.
Schools that survive more than 10 years or so have generally solved this problem - plus there are organisations and accrediting bodies that help with this. (I'm going to talk about the accreditation process in a later part of this series.)
A brief digression into personal history
I spent most of my education in public schools - specifically in the Winchester public school system just outside of Boston. Winchester has a long reputation as an excellent district, and I was there from 1st grade to 11th.
I then went to boarding school for two years - entering in what was a 2nd 11th grade year. There are a bunch of reasons for this, but mostly that I was very young for my grade, I was (because I was interested in music education) looking at some *very* large public universities for college, and a bunch of other things (my father's death when I was in 10th grade) meant that an extra year doing challenging work but letting me rebalance in some ways was probably not a bad move.
As I've said before, the academics at Andover was fantastic, the music was amazing. The social life, not so much, because it was an enormously high-pressure setting, and teenagers can be very cruel to each other. Or just plain stupid. I still consider it a worthwhile experience, but it's not one I'd recommend to everyone, or for all reasons.
College is college, but for the last 10 years, I've been working at an independent day school in the Twin Cities. (I do not identify which one in my journal, though I've said enough over the years that it's pretty easy to figure out with minimal digging. I'm glad to confirm guesses privately in email, and definitely very glad to talk about other schools in the area as well.)
I attend occasional professional meetings with people from other independent schools in the area - the one where we do the most talking is the Independent School Media Association, which is librarians and related folks from a bunch of independent schools (including Catholic ones) around the state.
Types of independent schools
There are three major groupings of independent schools to my way of thinking: boarding schools, parochial or other religious schools, and day schools. I've got experience in two of the three.
First, schools come in all grade levels - though obviously, most boarding schools start much later in the game. The school I work at runs pre-kindergarden to 12th grade, some schools run K-8, or K-6, some run 6-12, some run 9-12. Generally, schools in a geographic area will sync with each other to some extent - for example, the school I work at gets a certain number of people feeding in from a progressive K-8 school.
Some offer a post-graduate year (often taken for either sports reasons, or as a stepping stone to college - either improving grades in someone who struggled earlier, or someone who's very young for their year getting a chance to be away from home in a more closely supported setting than college.)
Boarding schools are in some ways the simplest to describe. The vast majority of the student population lives at school - which means that it includes classes, sports, music, other activities, etc. all in one place, and with (one hopes) careful and thorough supervision and deep relationships with faculty. I know this one as a student: my last two years in high school were at Phillips Andover, one of the older boarding schools in the country (as it was founded in 1778).
Many boarding schools also have some day students from the immediate area: in practice, most day students are on campus for very lengthy periods of time. (The day students I knew showed up for the day at breakfast, and often didn't leave until everyone else had to be in the dorms at 10pm)
Boarding schools tend to cluster on the east coast, though there are some throughout the rest of the country. (However, I'll note that Minnesota has a grand total of four, and they're all either specific-religion, or heavily focused on a particular subset of students like people doing high-end individual sports or arts.)
Religious schools are also pretty obvious - some are day, some are boarding, there are varying religions (Catholic is best known, but there are Episcopalian, Lutheran, and other options out there.) How much the religion is an impact depends on the school. Some keep the roots and core values, but make a big push toward diversity in the student body and faculty, others want faculty, in particular, to be active members of the religion in question. (For those who remember when I was looking at options, this is why I said there are some schools I'm unemployable at: it knocked out something like a quarter of the possible schools in my area in one way or another.)
In such cases, employees often have to include a statement of faith, a letter from the appropriate religious community leader, or agree to a statement of faith that includes not just on-campus activity, but off-campus, as well. This is as compared to schools with a strong religious anchor, but who just ask that employees not undermine the religion in question while in their professional roles. (My best example of the latter is what is now St. Catherine University, where I had no problems working even though they're Catholic, but the same thing applies at the secondary level.)
Day schools are what's left. Why they exist varies quite a lot.
There's actually a fair bit of evidence in [school] archives that one of the reasons for a push for day schools in the Midwest was a certain amount of suspicion about what went on at those east coast boarding schools. There's a lot of early advertising material that talks about being able to have your son home every night.
Discussions with people with more understanding of the history (like the history teacher who wrote the school's cenntenial history) suggest that what they were saying under the surface was pretty explicitly "Keep your son at home so that he will grow up to be a heterosexual manly man, unlike those effeminate academics who go east."
Regardless, we end up with day schools. Fortunately, the day schools have moved on since then. Most of them try to push the idea of challenging academics, with a mix of athletics and arts, sometimes with a particular focus or goal (arts-focused schools, schools that support high-intensity sports of various kinds, technology focus, etc.)
A quick moment about calendars
One of the things that independent schools duck is the "Must be in school 180 days" thing - they set their own calendars.
The school I work at has classes running from the Tuesday before Labor Day through the last week in May (with graduation the following week). We have 3 days off at Thanksgiving, two weeks at the end of December and two weeks at the end of March. Students have a bit more time off - assorted days for parent conferences, etc. Plus Labor Day, MLK Jr. Day, President's Day, and Memorial Day, which are federal holidays.
Andover runs on the trimester system, which I must admit I rather miss. Fall trimester runs from mid-September to early December, with a week and a day break for Thanksgiving. Winter trimester runs from the first week in January to the second week in March. Spring trimester runs from the end of March (2 weeks of break) to the very end of May. This makes for slightly uneven trimesters, but it's easy enough to work with.
Now, Andover does do Saturday classes about every other week in fall and spring terms (they used to do them in winter, too, but did away with that my second year there to find a *huge* drop in illness rates.) But these aren't actually extra classes: you have a free period during the week for the classes that meet on the Saturday, instead.
Ok, I stop here: feel free to ask questions. Things I intend to talk about in future parts are:
- Day and week in the life - schedules and commitments for both students and staff
- What the hiring process is like
- Why teach in an independent school
- Elitism and pluralism.
- What's the goal of a school?
- Accreditation process
