Transcription of Dr. Glenn Cummings for the show Chartering Education, #112
Dr. Lisa: Education is a topic that we have addressed often on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour & Podcast and the way that we offer education within the state of Maine is something that is of great interest. There are a lot of relationships between health and education and wellness and it’s something that we think is important, so today we have with us Dr. Glenn Cummings, who is the President and Executive Director of the Maine Academy of Natural Sciences. We also have John D’Anieri, Head of School at the Harpswell Coastal Academy. Thank you for coming in.
Susan Conley of Maine Magazine wrote an article about your schools and about Charter Schools here in Maine for Maine Magazine coming up in November. She had some interesting thoughts and some very interesting experiences with the students at your schools. You are offering a very unique way to educate our children. Why did you become first interested in education? I guess I’ll ask Glenn first and you’re Dr. Cummings because you have a PhD in education.
Glenn: I have a doctorate in education, but it’s really in higher education. I had started my career back when I was 22. I came back to Maine from graduate school and taught social studies at Gorham High School. I thought I would just do it a couple of years, maybe go to law school in my late 20’s or mid 20’s and it captured my imagination. It drained every piece of energy out of me in a good way. I think for me it began this Rubik’s cube of how do you get better. How do you move things in parts that actually make education better for more kids. I could see where the programs that we had, certainly in those days at Gorham High School were working, but I could also see where if we could just do it differently a little bit we could bring in that other 30% that’s really not engaged. They may be doing their work, but they’re not really fully engaged and not reaching their full potential. That challenge hooked me early.
Dr. Lisa: And what about you John?
John: Actually it’s kind of a different story. In high school myself, a large suburban high school; I was not feeling that it was relevant or very useful. I went to college, left college, worked off and on. It was 10 years before I actually finished my Bachelor’s degree and then worked some more. I ran a nonprofit arts collaborative at Kentucky for a while and at 30 went back and got a Master of Arts in teaching. I had done a whole bunch of jobs truck driving and pizza making and all kinds of things. I worked at Pat’s Pizza in Orono for a very short time.
For me it comes out of a sense that for many kids, especially those kids in poverty or rural kids, that a lot about what schools were doing just weren’t working for way too many kids, but have fierce commitment to the public school system so not feeling like the solution to that was to create a separate track of schools, but really to try to work in public schools to dramatically reinvent them.
Dr. Lisa: What is it about Maine that is so unique that has so many students needing to navigate things in a different way?
Glenn: I’m not sure Maine is that unique. I think when you look nationally the statistics are even more startling. Quite frankly dismal when it comes to high school graduations and so when you look at how many kids are voting with their feet in terms of leaving especially large urban high schools it’s significant. Some places in Chicago and Philadelphia are talking about 50 or 60% between their freshman and their senior year never actually complete.
Maine’s graduating rate is much higher. It’s gone from about 80% up to about 82.5% so we’re seeing a little bit of progress in the last couple of years. Legislators have gotten, I think over the last 10 years much more focused about how to monitor the success of avoiding dropout. When you really look at how we’re engaged nationally it’s of great concern, but in Maine specifically we definitely have large segments of rural poverty and that seems to be correlated to dropout. Then we have increasing just poverty in general even in areas that you might not expect it. Those things are definitely contributing.
It may not be related to poverty. Maybe it’s simply the way in which we go about high school. For example at high school there’s a lot of I guess we’d call it sort of sit and get. So you have to sit there for 5-1/2 hours and sort of digest information and kind of put it back out. The models that I think John and I are trying to play with is, how do you get real world challenges, authentic assessments, and how do you build units around those things that would challenge students in an interesting way, but also add value to the community. We’re trying to think about new ways to get students to feel differently about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.
John: I would just add one thing it’s not that makes Maine unique, but it is a particular challenge to do sustainable school reform in rural areas where the economics of a state with 1.2-1.3 million people and the geography that we have are very different. I’ve done some work in New York and Boston and urban areas where you really can create innovation within a large system. For instance the Small Schools Movement in New York has really produced some documentable, excellent results for kids, but the economics of Maine don’t lend themselves to easily reinventing what has increasingly become a larger school system towards small schools. So if relationships are what works for kids and the relationships flourish in smaller schools, my career has been a lot of projects that are trying to demonstrate that small schools are sustainable over time, but need very different economic models, different teaching models in order to make them sustainable.
Dr. Lisa: Each of you has looked at education sort of from an eagles view. I know that Glenn you’ve been involved in politics. You were the Speaker of the House. You worked for the Obama administration. John, you’re a member of the Kappa class of the Institute for Civic Leadership, so to each of you it’s much bigger than just what do we do within a school. It’s how do we make inroads or connections. How do we understand education from a community perspective? Talk to me a little about that.
Glenn: I remember being in the Legislative Education Committee early in my career and the crossfire of politics is very complicated in Maine, particularly around high property value communities versus low property value communities. I represented Portland, which is neither one of those really, and so we were certainly often challenged politically to get our voice heard.
From my perspective first of all everybody believes deeply. Usually if you talk to people at a party of something about education their eyes sort of glaze over, but if you get them to talk about their education and their experience, people have very passionate views about it. The community, certainly from a personal perspective, are people that are often very clear about what they like and what they don’t necessarily like about education. They have very definitive views which certainly in our world of Charter Schools it’s always interesting to hear what people have to say. We have tended to have kind of a nice blessing in terms of how people look at our school Maine Academy of Natural Sciences because we try to go after kids who are really struggling not necessarily academically, but they may be struggling in a variety of ways with school socially and emotionally and feeling like they need a new experience and they want to engage in the curriculum in a different way. We tend to stay out of some of the politics, which has not been the case for all the Charter Schools in Maine. They have often run aground a little bit with that, but our perspective is let’s focus on what’s really good for the kids. If we can prove that there’s a challenge that the kids can’t get met at that local public school or even other private school then there’s a place for us to give it a try.
John: I think I would add that we’ve evolved to a system of public schooling where there are certain ways in which the community or the parent community is involved in schools and many ways in which they’re not. Often they’re not involved deeply in what I would call the actual work of students in schools. Our notion of community based or Playspaced education really has those students out studying the clam flats which are under threat in Harpswell and preparing informed reports to testify before town committees and to interact with the shellfish warden and those kinds of things.
Our kids will be going out on a lobster boat this weekend. Casco Bay does a lot of those things, too, but the idea that the work of the school is not just bringing parents in for boosters or for bake sales, but for letting the kids and the community members know that their work is shared work. If they’re very separate it’s going to be very difficult for that gulf between what the students feel is relevant and what the community expects to ever be bridged, but once we put those people together often very different people in terms of how they define their adult lives, but you put them in a learning situation with students and some of those gaps diminish quite quickly for the benefit of both the adult and the kid.
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Dr. Lisa: Harpswell Coastal Academy is doing its own form of fund-raising and I know that you’re going into even a workshop today as we’re talking trying to understand how best to work on the development of your financial support That is an interesting thing for teachers and administrators to have to think about in a really different way.
John: So in a traditional public school you’re buying buses, but you’re not starting a bus route from scratch and you have a building. Well we have a building that was a school that was built eventually expanded to serve maybe 110 – 120 elementary school kids. We’re designed to be a school of 240 to 280 students that is, I think, the smallest we can be and make the sustainable small school economics work over time which means we’re going to need a building.
So on the one hand we’re keeping a vital community building that was probably going to be underused or possibly not used at all. We’re keeping that in the community, we’re able to sort of reuse that building, but we are going to need obtain, from scratch, significant facilities over time. It does again motivate that community to figure out what we need to do. The other thing that I think is worth nothing is that Harpswell, which has had at least at one point the widest economic disparity in income in the state of Maine, and the difference between the poorest people in Harpswell and the wealthiest people was the largest on the average, but our school is 14 miles down a peninsula. If you’re in middle or high school and have been driving up the peninsula through Brunswick to Mt. Ararat High School for years, that makes it very difficult to draw families who can see themselves living in that community over time.
We’re able to eventually bring 2.4 – 2.5 maybe 3 million dollars of economic activity to a very small town and that’s something that has been leaving. When Lubec lost its school, they fought. They fought and fought and fought to keep that school because the economics of keeping that school were bigger than just the dollar per student economics of the actual educational endeavor. Tom Shepard, who’s been on the show, talks about how it’s not just efficiency but productivity. If you invest in productivity sometimes you want to make some calculations that aren’t just about short term efficiency.
Dr. Lisa: Each of you also has links to Casco Bay High School, which we have featured on this show. Before we had Derek Pierce who is the principal of Casco Bay High School. I believe that they are 10 years from now from doing the type of Expeditionary Learning that they’ve been promoting. John you have teaching experience there I believe?
John: No I worked for Expeditionary Learning.
Dr. Lisa: You worked for Expeditionary Learning and Glenn you have at least a child that …
Glenn: I have two actually. I have a senior and a junior so my sons, and my wife teaches English there.
Dr. Lisa: I mean you are already interested in Expeditionary Learning. Each of you had a slightly different, but still important link to this process. Why was this something that was so necessary to each of you as individuals?
John: Well I’ll start by saying that I came out of an organization called The Coalition of Essential Schools which was founded by this guy Ted Sizer, who came out of the original Annenberg Institute for School Reform, which was a 25 now or maybe even 30 years ago attempt to sort of reinvent American schools.
Expeditionary Learning is a large national nonprofit that has roles in over 200 schools around the country so they are sort of a small E, small L, Expeditionary Learning. It is also very much a model of working with schools over time. They hired me to work for them to help get this school started and to work with other schools around Maine. What I would say of the approach is that I’m very versed in that come through a couple movements are small schools, personalized schools, project based learning and Expeditionary Learning is one of the many places that that can land. What they have is an extraordinarily strong and well-defined set of models so that when they can go in to work with a school they can really say this is what we’re going to do. The it is pretty well defined.
I think King Middle School is an extraordinary example in Portland, and that’s been a 15 year journey, but what they’re able to do with a 600, you know, Casco Bay as proud I am of that I helped get that running and it is a wonderful story, but starting from scratch is easier to build those kinds of results then starting with a school in the middle. One of the reasons why I do start-ups is that I think you can get where you’re going. You’re more likely to get where you’re going.
Taking an existing public school and transforming it around these kinds of notions, which is what’s happened at King Middle School over time, is an extraordinary story and a very rare one. Glenn having worked in the administration knows that the turnaround process, which for instance the Gates Foundation invested a bunch of money in turning around schools turns out to be extraordinarily difficult. The very few successes are exceptions to a very long. I’m committed to those things because I think they work for kids. I think that if you look at a group of students whose needs are not being met the kinds of educational practices that cause relationships to be necessary as opposed to be optional which is what small schools can do that’s the way to go.
Dr. Lisa: What I like about the fact that I’m able to sit with both of you right now is that you each are representing Charter Schools, but you’re each representing a very unique school. A school that is linked to the community in which it’s actually located. The Harpswell Coastal Academy has a slightly different way of approaching education based on where it is. The Maine Academy of Natural Sciences has its own unique approach. How are some of the attributes of the community working their way into your curricula?
Glenn: I mean from our point of view obviously agriculture is a key component of what we do. We have 2,300 acres that we’re surrounded by. We have a community college that just came to our campus. They’re going the main campus of KVCC, Kennebec Valley Community College to us. They have the first, they’re beginning the first Ag Tech Program in the state so we have a natural sequence in which our students can evolve to, but we’ve had a long history. Reverend Hinckley was started in the 1880’s believed that the farm had it’s own redemptive values and that you could learn about nature, about human nature, about biology, about botany and horticulture and, of course, agriculture and about livestock. That in itself was rich in learning and meaning for kids, but also in terms of learning how to be disciplined, take care of things, to be a steward of nature and all those things seem to fit in with a recent generation of interest, which is looking at local organic sustainable food systems and trying to find ways in which they can get that market up and going. We feel like we stepped into the middle of something that seems to be certainly a regional trend, if not a national trend, to look at our food systems and to think about how we feed ourselves. What is it that we actually are putting in our mouths. That trend seems to be something that we could build on from an academic point of view.
Dr. Lisa: People who are interested in learning more about the Maine Academy of Natural Sciences which is located at the Good Will-Hinckley campus and also the Harpswell Coastal Academy they can read Susan Conley’s article on Charter Schools in Maine Magazine. How else can they find out about your schools?
Glenn: They can certainly go on our website. If they go under Maine Academy of Natural Sciences we have a website there. Also I encourage them if they’re looking at visiting the school to call Lisa Sandy that’s 238-4000 and just set up a time to come visit.
John: For us that would be Carrie Branson is our Assistant Head of School and Director of Operations, 833-3229. We really do want people to come and see us and a matter of fact if you not only want to learn about the school, but have something you would want to share with our students call us up and we can give you an audience pretty easily. Our school is set up to facilitate having people come in or having our kids get out.
Dr. Lisa: John do you also have a website for the Harpswell Coastal Academy?
John: Yeah and it is the very long harpswellcoastalacademy.org
Dr. Lisa: It’s been a privilege to sit with the two of you today. We’ve been speaking with Dr. Glenn Cummings, the President and Executive Director of the Maine Academy of Natural Sciences and also with John D’Anieri, the Head of School at the Harpswell Coastal Academy. The fact that I was so fortunate to have you both in the same room at the same time and have the same conversation is wonderful. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here today.
Glenn: Thank you.
John: Thanks Lisa.