Can Public Montessorians Across the United States Help Each Other?

Would a national organization help your school or district deal with enduring issues such as:

• Development of teachers and administration
• Assessment/reporting
• Program integrity
• Surviving policy churn in districts?

If you’d like to join others in thinking about that, there are two things you can do:

1. E-mail us at montess...@jolapub.com with ORG as the subject line. We’ll send out information and link you to others.

2. Attend the AMS conference March 6- 9 in Washington where a workshop session has been scheduled to consider creation of a national, non-sectarian organization to support Montessori education in the public sector.

Editor’s Note

Public Montessorian: Looking Back, Forward

We begin our 20th year.

In our first issue I wrote:

For the sake of discussion, let’s say public school Montessori is a movement in search of a direction.

For the sake of justifying this publication, let’s say a quarterly newspaper can help establish that direction.

Also on the front page I wrote:

A simple impulse lies behind this publication. We want to develop:
• Ways each of us can learn from other programs.
• Ways we can identify commons visions, goals and needs and begin to work cooperatively on them.

To paraphrase former New York mayor Ed Koch, “How are we doin’?”

It has been a fascinating and unpredictable ride.

The number of public Montessori sites in the U.S. has grown from about 50 to about 250, and more than 100 charter schools have added.

We quickly began mailing to about 3,900 independent schools, too.

We became more of a newspaper for the Montessori community (note the legend on the front page) and less of one targeted narrowly to public school parents and teachers.

We’ve added Montessori directories and picked up on the good work of Carolyn Jones to publish the Montessori Materials Guide.

We published Cam Gordon’s useful Together with Montessori.

We have provided information and open debate that has, I hope, advanced the work of Montessorians.

In that first issue, we noted the teacher shortage and weak preparation of some public school teachers. Writers discussed the tight-rope walk of meeting public school demands.

Many trees later, those concerns have not much changed. But wonderful work continues and, probably, gets better.

More significant, I think, is the coarsening of educational purpose in the United States. It deepens my sense of the importance of this paper. Montessorians need to both engage other educators and stay true to their generous vision of children’s potential. Montessori educators know the cost of viewing students as little more that scores on standardized tests. We will continue to make the case that they—you— have a moral responsibility to say so.

Thanks to our advertisers—with a special call out to Montessori Services and Montessori Education Center of the Rockies (in 1988 Rocky Mountain Teacher Training Program) who have been with us for all 77 issues.

Thanks to our readers, our critics and the wonderful personal and professional friends who would not be part of my life but for this paper.

Enough nostalgia. You have some of our civilization’s most important work to do.

Dennis Schapiro