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college students, University faculty—those who have a burning desire to teach. having donated over 5, textbooks for elementary reading courses. At the request of the Indians on Fort Hall Reservation just outside Pocatello, we have.
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Common ends, diverse pathways. School reformers have embraced this vision, but we still face the question of how to achieve it. We know most of the structural conditions necessary to make such a vision a reality: site-based autonomy, family and faculty choice, performance-based accountability, data-driven decision making, and research-based practice. But these structural features only get us so far. They explain what these schools have in common, but they don't account for what makes them distinctive. One crucial but often overlooked source of the distinctiveness among high-performing schools is philosophy —the beliefs and values that create our sense of what makes life worth living, and therefore what is worth teaching and how we should teach it.

These value judgments reflect deeply held philosophical worldviews. Few of us went into education out of a burning desire to raise students' test scores. We went into it out of a deep sense of what's good for kids and society, what's worth knowing and thinking about, what it means to be a good citizen and person—indeed, what it means to lead a good life. Philosophy matters. In fact, education's fiercest and most intractable conflicts have stemmed from differences in philosophy. The evolution of these differences is not grounded in science, but in history, philosophy, and ideology.

So-called progressivism evolved over the 19th and 20th centuries out of a complex interaction of romanticism, socialism, pragmatism, and progressive politics. So-called traditionalism has Aristotelian origins refracted through Renaissance humanism and later through romanticism, as well as pre-libertarian forms of conservatism. The former could be described as populist, small- d democratic, and attuned to the flux of modern life; the latter could be characterized as aristocratic, small- r republican, and attentive to the continuities that underlie and influence modern change.

Notice that romanticism appears as a source for both philosophies. This is not the only point of overlap. Education progressives and traditionalists from the 19th century to the present have shared certain overarching perspectives. For example, all espouse liberal democratic values inherited from the Enlightenment, such as rights, liberty, and popular government.

All subscribe to a developmental theory of childhood and learning. All strive to produce young adults who are good citizens, caring people, critical thinkers, and productive contributors to the economy. All believe that learning should be relevant to students. They simply disagree about the exact meaning of these ideals and their curricular and pedagogical implications. Does a relevant education start with student interests and backgrounds, current needs of the job market, and current events? Or should we teach students to recognize the relevance of ancient Greek thought, the Copernican revolution, and Shakespeare's soliloquies?

College Textbooks

How can we devise a study to adjudicate these different views empirically? We can't. Normative questions are not easily settled by empirical means because our normative points of view color how we understand empirical evidence. Not that empirical research is meaningless. On the contrary, research has produced many insights that help us distinguish between good teaching and bad. We know, for example, that the mind constructs knowledge—that people learn by connecting new information to existing understandings and conceptual frameworks.

We know that teaching needs to attend to both basic and higher-order skills, and to both cognitive and noncognitive development. We know that students learn best in safe, challenging, personally supportive, and authoritative communities. These findings, however, must be interpreted and translated into practice. Which interpretation is correct? On this question and many others, even the most rigorous and credible research provides little guidance.

Within the bounds of shared values and research-based principles lie a range of legitimate practices, and between science and practice lie a number of judgments that are irreducibly values-based. But we need not view the influence of philosophical values as an embarrassment anymore.

From time to time we remind ourselves about the importance of values, beliefs, and culture to education. But we are not conditioned to take them seriously in our deliberations about what schools should be. We need help, because enabling educators, parents, and other constituents to be more articulate about their convictions and the philosophical judgments behind them is a crucial step in forming effective learning communities. This step involves answering key questions both individually and collectively.

The following questions can help educators and their constituencies organize into philosophically and pedagogically coherent learning communities. The process of reflecting on these questions is especially useful for groups of educators who are creating new, small high school learning communities, such as schools-within-schools, but it applies to any school community striving to transform practice around shared goals. What motivated me to go into teaching? We all know that teaching is a vocation. We don't do it for money or glory, but for some intrinsic reward.

Was it a passion for a particular subject? A social service mission? A desire to help young people realize individual talents?

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This gut check will tease out your deep motivation and basic orientation toward practice. What do I think students should know and be able to do? We need to answer this question as concretely as possible; otherwise everyone's answers will sound the same.


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We all believe in developing students' literacy, mathematical facility, critical thinking, citizenship, workforce competence, and commitment to lifelong learning. This level of collective affirmation is important; it reminds us that whatever our differences, we are ultimately on the same side. But these broad values need to be unpacked with more pointed questions. To become literate, what kinds of books should students read, and why? What should be the ratio of printed text to other media?

Who should choose the medium—student or teacher? Which comes first in teaching literacy—decoding skills or comprehension? What should take priority in teaching mathematics—numeric manipulations or mathematical reasoning? Regarding science, is it OK if students graduate from high school without knowing what gravity is as long as they have mastered the scientific method?

When it comes to citizenship, does living in a North Atlantic democracy like the United States mean that a student should leave school with a deep knowledge of the history and traditions that made North Atlantic democracies possible, or do immigration and globalization necessitate a more multicultural curriculum? Notice that many of the foregoing are questions of priority rather than forced choices.

But priorities imply choices and different ways to organize learning. Our broad affirmations of consensus values usually degenerate into unproductive bickering when the hard work of constructing an instructional program begins.

Pathways to Reform: Start With Values

Who are the influences on my education philosophy? Because our deep motivations and priorities tend to form without conscious reflection, they often remain inchoate. One good way to become articulate fast is to read. I would start with books that survey thought and debate about education in a schematized way.

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Such books will furnish your group members with a common vocabulary and framework for situating themselves in the landscape of modern education thought. Most participants will identify quickly with certain philosophies. They can then choose from a menu of books that represent and develop those points of view. Browse around for the book that gets you most excited, and pay close attention to its vision of the ideal school. Chances are that the kind of school the book describes or suggests is the kind of school in which you would feel most fulfilled. Which colleagues share my vision?

Once people have made their initial self-identifications, they might want to do their vision readings together with like-minded colleagues. Teachers in a school probably know some colleagues well and have already gravitated toward those who share certain core beliefs about their work. Forming reading groups on the basis of these affinities can extend and deepen those networks, help members develop a shared normative vocabulary, and form the basis of design groups for small schools or school-within-a-school learning communities. What do parents, students, and local citizens want, need, and believe?

Ideally, other constituents would engage in the same exploration that teachers and administrators do. If that proves unrealistic, the school should conduct some kind of outreach to ascertain the degree to which parents and students share the points of view that emerge among educators.

Belief Systems and Practice

Reaching out to the community early helps create broad ownership and ensures that there will be demand for the learning communities that are likely to grow out of this exercise. Initially these reflective and deliberative exercises will be self-initiated and self-guided—hence the heavy dose of reading. School change consultants, coaches, and workshop leaders are no more proficient at disentangling the empirical from the normative than the typical faculty.

In fact, like most of us, education consultants are so habituated to reading research through the lens of their own normative value systems that they are more likely to steer school communities in a preferred direction than to help them identify their own direction. After the nascent learning communities have organized themselves, they can choose consultants with more care and begin the usual planning efforts. The shift to a true system of distinct pathways for students will likely heighten anxiety over certain issues.

When we introduce candid talk about values and pluralism, the following questions are likely to arise almost immediately. Won't this lead to segregation? It certainly can. Suppose that after deliberation, educators and parents at a comprehensive high school agree to create the following four small learning communities: a women's leadership school, an International Baccalaureate IB school, a high-tech school, and a school of African American and Latin American Studies.