Cleveland

Unsustainability

 By Mark Anderson

A handful of Cleveland parents sparked the startup of the Old Brooklyn Montessori charter school in 1998, seeking to bring an affordable Montessori alternative to their city neighborhood for the first time.

Their experiment carried on through eight years of enthusiasm and frustration before ending this year, falling victim to a familiar litany of challenges: the pressure to boost students’ scores on standardized tests; a shortage of public school-certified Montessori teachers; and the absence of a public Montessori preschool system that brought children to kindergarten prepared for the Montessori method.

Old Brooklyn is still operating as a charter, with a more traditional school curriculum now. And it’s thriving, thanks to a core of talented staff and committed families, says principal Cherie Kaiser.

Ending the Montessori program was a disappointment to Kaiser, who had served as principal and teacher since the school’s first day. But it left her with a useful perspective on some of the issues that would-be Montessori charters must learn to negotiate.

Kaiser arrived at Old Brooklyn after teaching in public Montessori programs in Kansas City, MO.

She had come to Cleveland for family reasons, but like many educators, she was intrigued with the possibility that charters might make Montessori accessible to many more families by stretching the public school model.

“For me it’s always been a passion both to be teaching in public schools and to be a Montessori teacher,” Kaiser said.

But she acknowledges that the public and Montessori paths often diverge, and those differences are growing as standardized tests assume more importance in defining school success.

The first obstacle Kaiser encountered, however, had to do with backgrounds, not tests.

Few children came to Old Brooklyn kindergarten or transferred into its elementary grades with early Montessori experience, meaning they weren’t prepared for the Montessori day, the classroom and materials, or for the lessons that started during the elementary curriculum.

“We didn’t have a feeder program of preschools, and there wasn’t money for a Children’s House in our program,” Kaiser says. “And we weren’t allowed to screen out children who weren’t prepared.”

Kaiser credits two talented AMI-trained kindergarten teachers with helping many children make that transition successfully. “But it still wasn’t working for some of our children.”

Parents were also caught unprepared. Many chose Old Brooklyn’s Montessori program as a well-respected, free alternative to the Cleveland public schools, but they didn’t understand the curriculum and were confused, and sometimes frustrated, by its results.

A second challenge emerged in 2000 when Ohio implemented the first of its state standardized testing programs.

Each year after that the testing regimen expanded, as policy makers added exams for more subject areas and searched for more precise ways to measure school failures and successes.

And each year, the pressure grew at Old Brooklyn to “teach to the tests.”

That motivation is especially strong at charter schools, which, as a key element of the school reform movement, are under an educational and marketplace microscope, Kaiser says. “The test scores at charter schools are intensely scrutinized by everyone from the department of education, to the press and families.”

Kaiser and her staff tried to balance those test-centric models with the Montessori method. They took time each year to align Ohio’s evolving content standards with Montessori lessons. They devoted more time to pre-test content reviews, and they combed the results from completed tests.

Eventually, Old Brooklyn switched some classrooms from Montessori’s multi-age groupings to single-age rooms, to help students focus on the content for their age-level tests.

But the acceleration of those changes frustrated Kaiser and her Montessori-trained teachers, many of whom began to look for other jobs.

“There’s a very large difference between the Montessori approach and what the public requirements are now in schools,” she says. “Teachers who take the Montessori training do that because they want to teach the Montessori method. It’s hard to do that in public schools now.”

In that environment, recruiting new Montessori-trained, state-certified teachers became more difficult.

Montessori schools in Ohio have an advantage in being close to one of the nation’s busiest, most public school-minded Montessori training programs at Xavier University in Cincinnati. But it was still hard to attract teachers to the Cleveland charter, Kaiser says, adding that she frequently lost recruits to Cincinnati’s large and growing public Montessori magnet program.

Another factor that finally played a role in the move away from Montessori was business. Old Brooklyn is owned and operated by Constellation Community Schools, a Cleveland-based education company that owns and operates 11 K-8 schools in northern Ohio.

Constellation wanted to provide Montessori as a respected educational alternative, Kaiser says, and the company made the investments needed to open and maintain a Montessori school and staff.

But its commitment to Montessori didn’t override the need for its schools to rank high on standardized test measures, which Constellation regarded as a crucial contributor to a stable student enrollment.

Old Brooklyn had performed well on tests, ranking in the second of four categories that Ohio uses to rank school performance. Constellation, however, targeted top rankings for its schools.

“When we weren’t performing at the same level as its more traditional schools we needed to adopt more of their approaches,” Kaiser says. Old Brooklyn’s switch to single-age classrooms in 2005-06 was one of those borrowings. That year Old Brooklyn finally achieved a top Ohio ranking that year.

The accumulated changes had produced a different school model, however, and in spring 2006 Kaiser recommended that her board convert Old Brooklyn to a traditional curriculum that retained some compatible Montessori elements.

“At that point we really weren’t operating as a Montessori any more, and it felt hypocritical to call it that any longer.”

That transition was a deep disappointment for a number of families who had sought a Montessori program and had been volunteers and supported the program for years.

Most remained at the school after the transition, however, Kaiser says, and the school community has rallied around the changes. A fall survey of families indicated very strong support for Old Brooklyn school and its staff.

But Kaiser believes that dropping Montessori is a loss to Cleveland’s school environment.

“It’s very sad. There are many children who would do well in a Montessori program, and their families would embrace it. But it’s going to be out of reach to them if the only opportunities are in private schools.”