News From SWW

Lew Marks' 30th Anniversary Speech

We are gathered here to celebrate 30 years in the life of the School Without Walls… 30 years! That's a long time! Where did all that long hair go? Where are the bib overalls? Where are my corduroy knickers?

Let's flash back to the beginnings:

First, let me take you to early September of 1971. A loaf of bread costs 25 cents, a gallon of gas—44 cents; you can buy a new Chevy for $2100. Richard Nixon has been President for almost three years. In two more years he will resign. The Vietnam War drags on. In a week Attica Prison will explode. It will be another five years before the first Apple computer will be built in a garage in California. Bill Gates is 16 years old.

A band of educational adventurers is about to leap into the unknown: for the previous two years we—students, parents, and teachers—as equal partners—had struggled with critical questions about the nature of education. We asked: "What should a school be, what are the critical things to learn, what is the appropriate role for a teacher, and how should decisions be made?" We had come to believe that schools too often obstructed education. They were in the teaching—not the learning—business, insisting on teaching labels and chasing students to come up with correct answers. Sadly, too often, required classes interrupted what should have been the major portion of education: finding out how the world ticks, and where and how people best fit into it.

We presented our ideas to the City School District, all of us betting our futures that our conclusions were right. We wanted to encourage students to be different and to help them develop the strength and ability to use the tools we hoped they would acquire: excellence, integrity, civility, responsibility, initiative, self-discipline, humor, and—beyond all else—the ability to ask appropriate questions. At the same time we wanted them to learn and sharpen the more conventional academic and survival skills.

We were lucky; our impulse for change came at a time when the New York State Commissioner of Education, the central administration of the school district, and the Rochester School Board all were receptive to new ideas. They gave us the go-ahead.

So that first day in September of 1971 we all jumped together into the unknown and entered … chaos. Those of you who were there that first year know what I am talking about—for the others let me draw a picture. Approximately 175 people—students, staff, student teachers and miscellaneous onlookers from the central office, the newspapers, and the Visual Studies Workshop milling around the large meeting room downstairs at Elton Street. We had no rules, no classrooms, no course curricula, no procedures… I handed out to every student what I called the floor plan for our new school—a map of the city. Everything else we had to develop.

We had ideas about how we wanted to operate, but none about what we wanted to do. We started to talk that day—boy could we talk! We started a river of words—small group meetings (later extended classes), town meetings, staff meetings, chats, arguments, speechifying, declaiming, orating, berating … it could take years to come to a decision!

All those years flashed by in that torrent of words. It was terrific—and terrifying. But we hammered out ways and changed ways, developed courses and changed courses; first we developed a catalog of offerings, everything from witchcraft to Esperanto; then a student handbook that contained all of the procedures and rules, and we did it together—we built our own system and it worked. It wasn't easy—securing agreement from a bunch including anarchists, nihilists, revolutionaries, and a variety of other radicals, and even some who were just plain students. We frequently produced more heat than light, but we all learned to listen, to adapt, and to compromise.

We played the token game, which drove everybody crazy. Since there was only one classroom at Elton Street, places to hold classes had to be found. We were everywhere: staff and student homes, churches and businesses, and even the school district's Central Office. The tokens were supposed to be used to get to classes, but they were a monumental nuisance. Then came evaluations and evaluation weeks and the 3M copier, a "triumph of modern technology." And there were the calls from Al Valvano, Principal of East High, about our students demonstrating on East's front lawn. In the midst of all of this sat Helen—much of the time the only cool head in the place. She took care of the tokens, the records, and the ordering of materials and equipment. She was the only one who knew where everybody was and how to get in touch with them. She had the safety pins, the band-aids… and the aspirin. Her experience in child care most certainly helped, for sometimes we probably resembled most closely a nursery school. Without her we might not have made it past the first semester.

And then just about when we had it all together, just before Easter vacation, we got word that the Superintendent of Schools was going to recommend cutting us from the budget along with the World of Inquiry and Interim Junior High. We rallied our forces, worked all through the vacation, and made our survival a major community issue. We won and in the process learned how the American political system worked.

In the ensuing years we went through two other locations, 50 West Main Street and the Triangle Community Center, before finally getting our own place, here, in 1987. Each place required us to adapt to different sets of conditions and restrictions. At least they were warm in the winter—which Elton Street never was.

Now—Here we are—still afloat thirty years later—a full generation later. Those original explorers have moved on to new challenges, but the institution keeps going. It is, however, being threatened by the proponents of a political movement that masquerades as an educational one—one that ignores all other measures of performance and accomplishment, and substitutes, instead, a single test. Deceived by the illusion of the objectivity and accuracy of computer-scored standardized tests, they pursue the accountability they insist on. According to the New York Times, in 1999, in New York City alone, mistaken scoring of 300,000 reading tests compelled nearly 9,000 students to attend summer school unnecessarily.

You more than any other group can testify to the effectiveness of an education not bound to traditional curricula. In the name of accountability the State Education Department, the state legislature, and the White House want to go charging forth into the twenty-first century by returning to the 19^th century for its methods and curriculum. Their concept of evaluation disregards all that we have found effective at SWW where we spent at least a month each year in face-to-face evaluation, diagnosis, and prescription. They have forgotten that it is not students' answers that lead to learning; it's their questions—the thirst to know what makes things tick.…

The major learnings that you carried with you from School Without Walls probably had little to do with the subject matter that you studied here. I hope that your experience with us was one of opening up, exploring, taking things apart, and working hard at seeing how things can be put together in ways that tickle you. I hope that you learned how to ask yourself what you want to do and how you can find ways to accomplish tasks without having to depend on authority figures.

Beware of the people who have fixed answers to arguable questions—who try to push their answers on you. These criers after unity, the homogenizers, forget that diversity breeds strength…. These answer-bringers are the same people who were certain that the world was flat, that bleeding was the all-purpose cure for illness, and that the earth was the center of the universe. There are no simple solutions to complex problems—but they have yet to learn that there are no easy answers.

So here's to the next thirty years of talk, tough questions, and complex answers.

--Lew Marks
June 16, 2001

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