George – It has been my pleasure to know & work with you the past many years. Every time I chat with you, you always challenge me to expand my thinking. Sometimes it works & sometimes it doesn’t, but you always force me to think. I guess this is what teaching is all about!!!
Happy Birthday,
Jim Curtis

Here is my partial list of problems that our society wishes schools to solve:

People enter the workforce untrained for today’s jobs and require expensive on-the-job training to become productive. The lead time it takes to change schools and retrain teachers into a new function is now much greater than the time it takes changing technologies to modify jobs.

Chronic unemployment seems a permanent part of American life; there is a mission for the schools to keep kids out of the workforce for as long as possible

Our society has found that equality, lawfulness and decency don’t just happen, these social qualities need to be learned and to be enforced. Thus schools became the logical venue for desegregation. Schools are where we do drug education, where we try to prevent teenage pregnancies and suicides, where we try to enforce control of handguns. Even give children one sensible meal a day. Schools become the place where we try to become a nation with a single language. Now we even hope to make them more attractive to those past the age of mandatory attendance than running with street gangs.

We make our commitment to universal education at a time when the diversity of students entering the public schools has never been greater, and when the other institutions of society that in the past shared the responsibility for educating and socializing the next generation, families, churches and communities, are struggling. As these traditional institutions have faltered, schools have been called on to cope with the intractable problems of the larger society and to pay more and more attention to student’s nonacademic needs.

Headline, June ‘93: Seven 6th graders in Columbus, GA were arrested for allegedly plotting to kill their teacher because she made them behave in class.

I don’t think it can work to ask schools to take on the business of social services, law enforcement and provide a more rigorous content and trained workers without genuinely comprehensive changes in the institution itself.

Dear George,
Happy 75, I hear you look the same and haven’t aged, just had a few nuts, bolts, and screws removed from your body. Perhaps you feel a little looser now? I hope you are well, I miss you and wish you were still part of my life at CCS. I am due in 6 weeks with my second child and will be on maternity leave December through February. Perhaps during that time we could get together for lunch or just to talk. I’ll call you some time in the near future and maybe you will return the call??????
Love always, Ellen Huttenhower

We ask schools to satisfy many simpler needs too. The need for the local district to have above average test scores, the need to have winning athletic teams, the need to have a senior prom without obvious drunkenness. Above all there is a need not to offend significant segments of our society, there is a certain niceness demanded of schools. That schools be nice is dictated through state and local curriculum requirements as well as the local social customs. Textbook publishers have achieved great power because they can declare that a textbook satisfies all federal, state and local curriculum requirements and is not offensive to any group no matter how crazy the group may be. Thus it is that astrology, for example, is not presented as a dubious science at best.

One of the contradictions is that while we ask schools to solve complicated problems we simultaneously limit their ability to even discuss the problem in schools. For example, society wants fewer teenage pregnancies and yet limits the amounts and kind of sex education provided.

George,
I imagine that someone who often views life through the lens of a camera knows to pay attention to the nuances of each moment. May you continue to find and celebrate great moments! Happy Birthday!
˜Julia Marshall

Perhaps it’s the failure of schools to solve these social problems and perhaps it’s a fear about our global economic competitiveness and perhaps it’s just that we hate not being “best”. But newspapers make big headlines with “U.S. ranks 14th out of 15 nations in 8th grade math”, which is a true result of some study or other. And we mobilize as a result of such headlines. We say this is unacceptable, that schools are failing; and two presidents in a row have adopted the America 2000 goal number 4 “By the year 2000, U.S. students will be first in the world in science and mathematics achievement”. And how will we know whether or not that goal has been reached?

We have become a nation fascinated with single number evaluations of almost everything, including schools. “How’s the president doing?” 38% approval rating. “How’s your kid doing?” Getting a 3.0.  Standardized tests are multiple choice, machine-gradeable, nationally-normed abominations each of which has generated a “how to” book: “How to take the SAT, CEB, GED,” etc. and etc. 100 million standardized tests are given each year in this nation’s classrooms. While we debate the quality of our schools using averages of these scores we hardly blink at the news that the vast majority of U.S. school districts score “better than average”. Standardized test results correlate well with how well a student does in school for the next couple of years - as long as how well the child does in school is measured by standardized tests. Standardized tests seem really to measure simply how well a student does standardized tests. There is some evidence of a special aptitude at “psyching out” these tests without really knowing the material. That is you can question students who score well on the meaning of the answers and they don’t know the meaning, they know only that it had to be the right answer.

Conventional wisdom on standards and assessment is shifting rapidly towards statements like:  the standards need to include higher-order thinking skills and problem solving, currently standardized tests evaluate only lower- level skills, and since teachers teach to the test, teachers teach mostly lower-level skills. There is indeed a movement towards Authentic testing which is supposed to get at higher level; critical thinking skills. Nobody seems to know how to do this in a standardized way that could compare schools in New Jersey with schools in Georgia or schools in Germany.

Best wishes on your birthday, George! With every day that I spend time working with these amazing schools you founded, you earn my great appreciation and admiration. With highest regards, Audrey Bauhan

Another predicament; we like, even demand, simplistic single dimensioned evaluations; we know the ones we are using have little validity, we want to do better and don’t know how.

With or without testing involved there is now a large national effort going on about “standards”. Various disciplines have formed committees to establish the “what needs to be learned” for each discipline. The lingo for this discussion is “outcome based education” or OBE. The NCTM was the first and has produced an entirely credible work on the content of a modern math curriculum along with specific ideas on the kinds of activities that could be used by a learner. The math standards are a useful piece of work, are being adopted by many states and actually used in very few classrooms. The following disciplines have jumped on the standards bandwagon. Arts, Civics, Economics, English, Foreign Languages, Geography, History, Math, Physical Education, Science, Social Studies. Each standard, if implemented, would probably take about 45% of the school time. The “standards” people are preoccupied with content and with excellence. We can predict some conflict here because 11 45% just don’t fit in a school year.

There is another movement afoot which is worried that standards, and the outcome based educational approach, are inherently unfair. Just setting standards predictably will do nothing for the many schools that struggle with crime, guns, drugs etc. as much as they struggle with academics. This movement argues instead for standards on the “input” side rather than the “output” side. They want standards that guarantee every child “an equal opportunity to learn”. The lingo for this discussion is “Equity”, equal opportunity, equal inputs.

There is much to be said for both sides of this equity - excellence argument. It will bring up the difficult issue of a fundamental dissonance between equity and excellence. In America we like to guarantee minimums, put a floor under things. Everyone will have at least so much of hourly pay or of civil rights. Our problem has always been that establishing a floor seems to also establish the ceiling at not too far above the floor. There is no reason in principle why we could not guarantee an equal opportunity to learn for everyone and still allow for unlimited excellence, but it will be difficult, I think, because the fundamental goals are different. We’ll see how it comes out.

Happy Birthday George!
You’re 75 and look what you’ve done
Science & learning, you’ve made them be fun! You’ve stretched people’s souls, their brains,    and their hearts,
You’ve turned helping others into an art!
Thanks, Annie Runyan-Worley

We are apparently already in that widely touted information age, the post-industrial society, the service society. The gadgetry is remarkable; computers at home, in the schools, faxes and cellular telephones.

I date the beginning of the information age at 1973, the year of the oil embargo. By most reckoning the average scores on the various tests have remained substantially the same over the twenty year period since then. What has changed rather strikingly is median income of young workers. The number has declined, in constant dollars, every year since 1973. The numbers for children of divorced parents, children below poverty level, teenage suicides and so on are all up. 50% of children watch TV 3 to 5 hours a day. The average family has the TV on for 7 hours a day; these numbers are both up. We gave a prize this year to children who would commit to reading 15 minutes a day for a month. The prize was a slice of pizza at the Pizza Hut.

Dear George,

It’s wonderful to take a few moments to not only honor your 75th birthday, but to reflect on all that you have done to make this world a better place. A day never goes by at CCS without acknowledging how fortunate we are to have such a wonderful school. You made it happen and we are all so thankful.
My Warmest Regards, Leslie

The TV hours have made a real difference in what today’s kids are compared to pre-TV kids. They have a tremendous amount of information about the world at large, its people and particularly the nutty things they do to each other. My own kid, Ben, was 5 during the Gulf War; he gave me extensive talks about the doings of Saddam Hussein; generally quite accurate and his judgment of Saddam’s behavior was quite balanced and mature. And we don’t have TV.  He gave me quite a detailed and negative analysis of President Bush’s environmental record and encouraged me to use this information in making up my on mind on who to vote for last fall.

Kids talk about these things amongst themselves, and usually when they don’t think we adults can hear. They have a lot of raw information, and they have quite a bit of it tied together into a semi-consistent, if spotty and incomplete model of the world and what goes on in it.  They talk about black holes, Dr. Kevorkian, ozone, plutonium, rain forests, whales, dinosaurs, and AK 47s.

Happy Birthday George!    We wish you the best on your 75th, and will never forget all you’ve done to support and guide CCS along its way! Thank you so much, Ted Frisbie

My son Ben walked by as I was reading Science Magazine: He glanced at the cover illustration and said “those are atoms aren’t they?” He was right; and we have never talked about atoms and I know his teachers haven’t either because they don’t know about atoms.

Dear George – With every school year that passes, every child happy to come to school in Woody Creek or Carbondale, and the daily work of very inspired teachers, your gift to COMPASS, to this community and to education shows. COMPASS is growing, getting better, and is something I hope you feel very proud of! Thank you, and a very HAPPY 75th Birthday to you!
Best wishes, Chelsea Brundige

Our curriculum, the scope and sequence, the stuff our teachers are prepared to bring to the classroom is not nearly so rich or inclusive of information. We think it’s great fun to break out the dinosaur book for the 2nd graders, but they and the kindergartners have been to see the film Jurassic Park, they are miles ahead of our little book. We talk to 3rd graders about the heart and lungs and the role of oxygen, they know about Magic Johnson and AIDS.

Kids have a huge amount of information from TV, the malls, the arcades and from talking amongst themselves. School is no longer the primary place for children to get information. Schools need to adapt to this situation too. Surely it is important for children to read and write, but look for a minute at their motivation to do so. They have their information from elsewhere. How about just reading a good story then? The titles on the school bookshelf are Nora’s Roses, the Glow in the Dark Night Sky Book. The titles that come home from the video rental store are Terminator one and two, and Wayne’s World.

Happy 75th George!
“Time…our youth…it never really goes, does it? It is all held in our minds.”
Helen Hooven Santmyer
American writer

Love,
Jill

The situation in our society has changed dramatically; the situation in the world has changed. Schools have not changed much, they are not structured to change very much. This used to be considered a virtue; for as society went from one swing of the pendulum to the next schools could provide a certain stability; they were still there, still pretty much the same each time the pendulum swung back around. But today’s changes are not pendulum swings, they are, I believe irreversible.

There is a savagery to the times reflected in teenage drug use, suicides and pregnancy rates. We are less sure if there will be jobs, let alone knowing what will be the nature of jobs in the future. Much of society is unstable and under organized. Governments find themselves simultaneously feeling responsible and helpless. And they feel that schools must be part of the fix. To say that schools should just stick to education is not realistic. Schools can - and should - change; they are structured, from their bureaucracy all the way to teacher training practices to change slowly. If they are expected to change quickly there will have to be some restructuring. And schools need a clear message from society on just what change to make, what is the mission.

Dear George,
Without your vision and your creativity both the community schools in our valley would not exist. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for creating options. Your spirit inspires me. Happy Birthday, “Oh George, oh Georgie,” I love You! Annie

Mission and change must recognize that children today are strikingly different. They are no longer the products of stable extended families with aunts, uncles and grandparents. They are the products of television, malls, arcades. They know a lot; they know a lot of what their future looks like and they find school pretty irrelevant to that future.

Schools have such limited vocabulary for change that they talk about testing their way into effectiveness. I think this is foolish. Given what schools are, what society is, what we ask of schools may simply be mission impossible. But we will go ahead, sincere efforts will be made, mistakes will be made; I don’t know how the story comes out. I have one wish as we move on. I believe that our strongest human tool for facing uncertainty is our curiosity; because curiosity is the engine of learning, and I take it that curiosity is also a survival skill and therefore hardwired into we humans by the evolutionary process. It is also important to recognize that true curiosity is necessarily anti-authoritarian, all knowledge, beliefs and institutions may be questioned.

As schools thrash through the current and coming challenges, let them please nurture the children’s curiosity, leave it intact.

Dear George, You are an inspiration to us all! Love, Randi

This is a physics center sponsored lecture: I’ll close with a quote from Einstein:

“It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreck and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.”

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