A、teachers are discovering for themselves what children and parents need B、there is someone telling teachers how to teach and wh

W: You come from a long line of public educators, yet you have been a founding partner of the Edison Project and are now director of education for the Baltimore New Compact Schools, a new kind of alternative for public schools. Why is it important to have alternatives outside and within public schools?
M: Competition stimulates public entities to do better. It’s like Federal Express stimulating the Post Office to do customer service better. For example, a Catholic school in our neighborhood used to drain our schools of some of our brightest students. It’s a very small school, charges low tuition, and does a lot of fund-raising. We’re fighting back now. No, we’re not fighting back. What we’re really doing is talking to them about what they’re doing so’ well.
W: How do the Baltimore New Compact Schools differ from typical public schools?
M: The New Compact Schools model offers an excellent opportunity for urban systems in these days of limited resources. The model permits schools to cluster their resources, personnel, and funds. For example, in Sandtown-Winchester, all three elementary schools use the E.D. Hirsch Core Knowledge Curriculum. That greatly reduces the amount of learning time lost to students from the high mobility of their families. The nonprofit Enterprise Foundation offers leadership, management, and technical support to the schools, including fund-raising and evaluation. Because of all the attention we pay to accountability for school achievement, professional development, and management of facilities, philanthropic organizations and businesses have been willing to grant the schools additional funding.
W: You’ve recently finished up your summer program? which offered an alternative to traditional remedial summer work. What kind of instructional model did you use?
M: Our summer program was an example of a model that attracted quite a few students from parochial and other public schools. The parents found the situation extremely beneficial. Every day our attendance rate was 100 percent. We served 200 children -- more than we were supposed to. They were rushing home and telling their parents how well they liked it.
   The model we used this summer was very small class size, teachers from diverse backgrounds, and many things to draw in the parents. We put on a Shakespeare festival -- Julius Caesar and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The parents built the sets, and the children in grades 2-5 were the actors. And we performed the games of the Olympics.
   We had an academy for parents, an academy for teachers, and an academy for children. And the major goal was to sustain the learning that children had acquired over the year. We also wanted to create the opportunity for lifelong learning for the adults and to connect children to parents in powerful ways.
   Now we will measure those children against our baseline to see whether the program had any effect on their achievement.
W: You were a founding partner of the Edison Project. What would you say are the key differences between that project and the New Compact project?
M: The key difference is that instead of someone telling us how to teach and what to learn, we are discovering for ourselves what our children and parents need. It’s a very grassroots effort. And that grassroots effort extends to relationships with universities, the federal department of education, and the Empowerment Zone.
W: What role do parents play in your schools, and what have you learned about involving parents from your program?
M: From my 37 years of experience as a public school educator, I’ve learned the more you involve parents, the stronger your program will be. That’s simply a fact. Good schools are schools where parents have some say. Just because communities have poor resources does not mean that parents don’t want their children to have good instruction.
    Parents know when their children are being taught well. So our parents participate in several ways. We have school improvement teams with parent representation. We have parent academies, where parents learn to work as instructional volunteers in the schools. And last year when we wrote our Core Knowledge Curriculum, eight or nine parents worked with us throughout that process. It was interesting when someone from the state office of education visited us. She said to me, "You have parents doing this work?" And I replied, "Can you tell me which ones in this room are the parents?" Of course, she couldn’t.
W: The New Compact Schools use the Core Knowledge Curriculum partly because that’s what the parents requested?
M: Yes. Educators must understand that most parents are relatively conservative. They want their children to be learning things that they can understand. The core curriculum is very specific. It teaches world civilization, American civilization, language development, literature, the mechanics of grammar. It appeals to parents’ experiences in school. And our parents like it very much.
W: What is the role of the professional educator working with the parents? You said that you don’t necessarily think that the Core Knowledge Curriculum is the best curriculum.
M: No, it’s not. There is no best curriculum. Curriculums should continually evolve. Parents and teachers and community people must work together to smooth out imperfections That’s in fact what we did this summer. Teachers reviewed the scope and sequence to bring our instructional activities more into alignment with what we want.
W: What kind of teacher training institution would improve urban education?
M: Teacher training institutions should be community-based and reside in the place where the work needs to be done. Teacher educators need to look at the child as a whole and the child’s environment. The cultural patterns in many communities are so different from the cultural patterns of those who are expected to teach children there.
   We need to have a very strong professional development teacher training orientation and go beyond methodology and toward helping teachers develop themselves to be continual learners, The present system of developing teachers is very terminal We tell people if you take a course, you will be a teacher. And some of the courses are absolutely ludicrous. The people who are teaching them have not been inside a classroom in years. They have no sense of what is really going on in these life spaces called schools.
   One of the things I would do is to require every young person who wants to become a teacher to go sit in an urban elementary school classroom and tell another person what they are seeing. The gravest thing is that we’re sending people into classrooms who absolutely are not able to observe situations accurately. Their observations are clouded by their own notions of things -- and some of the notions have sexist and racist overtones.