Teaching: Island of Change

Most U.S. school systems are so busy corseting the population bulge that much of the reform in U.S. pedagogy is passing them by. Among the happiest exceptions is Newton, Mass., a Boston suburb with a population of 95,600 (up 13,600 since 1950) and a tradition of academic excellence that goes back to 1848, when Horace Mann moved the nation’s first normal school there. Newton is probably the most creative school system in the U.S. today—an “island of change,” as educators call it, that is rivaled only by the much smaller Winnetka, Ill. (pop. 13,400). “Newton never seems to be afraid of a new idea,” says Harvard Education Professor Herold Hunt. “There ought to be a lot more Newtons all over the United States.”

Give or take a characteristic, Newton resembles many another well-to-do suburb. It has a small factory district, an average family income of $14,946, a population roughly divided among Jews, Catholics and Protestants, with about 100 Negro families. Newton’s schoolchildren are usually two years ahead of national norms in reading; around 60% go on to four-year colleges. With enrollment (18,000) up 60% since 1950, the town has spent $19 million to expand a school plant that now includes one junior college, two high schools, five junior highs and 25 grade schools. Annual spending per pupil is a relatively modest $504.30.

Stop Dropouts. What makes Newton different is its refusal to mistake physical growth for educational progress. The town is proud that it planned its schools so well that it has never had a single day of double sessions, prouder that as a pioneer in spotting potential failures it has cut its dropout rate almost to zero. This concern wins rewards: since 1962, Newton has received more than $500,000 in foundation grants for refining new ways of teaching everything from nursing to geography to business history. When the Harvard Graduate School of Education tries out a new idea, from team teaching to teacher training, Newton is the school system it turns to first.

Newton pays its school superintendent $22,000 a year, compared with the mayor’s $15,000, and in Harvard-honed Charles E. Brown, 39, it has one of U.S. education’s genuine whiz kids—a reformer who believes that schools them selves must launch curriculum ideas rather than wait for university brain-stormers. Newton is no passive receiver of new courses through the mail. It creates its own, the work of teachers who plunge into ceaseless meetings and study groups as soon as the kids go home in the afternoon.

Stand Back. “You don’t work in Newton unless you’re a glutton for punishment,” says one former teacher, who wishes he had never left. To find such gluttons (top pay: $11,600), Superintendent Brown raids not only schools across the U.S. but also universities. He takes only the best: “The people who hire teachers have to have the courage to turn down those who are not fit.” As a result, Newton is brimful of truly concerned teachers. “My most important task,” says Brown, “is to find good people, make sure they know their responsibilities, and then get out of their way.”

At Hamilton elementary school, for example, Principal Ruth Chadwick and her teachers got fed up a few years ago with the convention of passing or failing small children by grades. “Children’s learning is so erratic in the first three years that we shouldn’t make a student stay back if he can’t read well but does other things well,” she says. With Brown’s support, Hamilton designed its own version of nongraded classes in the first three primary years. Able tots now start primary work after as little as one term of kindergarten.

For math and reading, Hamilton puts specialist teachers to work on small groups of four and five, using everything from Cuisenaire rods to “independent” study periods. To untutored eyes, the result is confusion—kids moving from group to group without a single neatly defined class. In fact, the system allows a child to race ahead in reading if he can, while crawling in math if he has to, with no stigma attached to his uneven pace. It may baffle parents, but Principal Chadwick says, “You can’t measure what this does for teacher enthusiasm.”

Contract Students. The same goes for “continuous learning” at Meadowbrook Junior High School, where in 1961 teachers rebelled against the “lockstep” track system then dividing pupils into homogeneous groups. Determined to “reach the individual,” Meadowbrook’s teachers partly copied the Newton high schools “house plan,” which divides those big schools into heterogeneous groups of 400 to 500 pupils, each with its own housemaster, faculty, office staff and intramural teams—in effect, creating small schools with “a sense of belonging.”

Meadowbrook puts a “house adviser” over every dozen or so students. Students get no letter grades, can partly determine their hours in school, but are each closely guided by the house adviser and five subject advisers. As each term begins, the student signs a “contract” agreeing to “complete the task outlined on the progress form to as high a degree of mastery as I am capable of attaining.” Deemed a rousing success so far, the plan has particularly inspired students whose ability is notably high or low, and has led to a revision of the whole curriculum with emphasis on college-style independent study.

Adolescent Anthropologists. Newton’s claim to the nation’s first complete overhaul of high school social studies is in the hands of Wayne Altree, the imaginative Harvard-trained head of the department at Newton High and a collaborator with “university types” across the country. Drawing on scholars from Harvard, M.I.T. and Amherst, Altree has begun a yeasty approach to Western history built around the concepts of “tradition, continuity, innovation and revolution.”

One purpose is to get students thinking anthropologically, to discover the dynamics of human culture, or patterns of adaptation, throughout the world. The three-year course begins, for example, with the problem of how a boy becomes a man—moving from the fiction of such writers as James Baldwin and Arthur Miller to a study of Eskimos and Winnebago Indians. It proceeds to urban cultures in the ancient Near East, to the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, to the life of St. Paul, and thence to Luther, seen partly as a son in conflict with his father. Using art to probe the Age of Discovery’s new vision of society, the second year starts with perspectivist painting, moves up to the American Revolution. Newton’s seniors will focus on the modern U.S. from the viewpoint “what happens when simple tradition falls over the stress of sudden innovation.”

Such is the cutting edge of U.S. school reform—the work of teachers who care and are free to care. “We must show teachers that we value their intellectual growth,” says Superintendent Brown. “This country has to support the kind of programs necessary to produce first-rate teachers.” That Newton has done, setting a pace for schools everywhere—if only they care to follow.