Case Study 8C

The “A”-School: Democracy and Learning

Howard Rodstein

A 2009 graduate of the Scarsdale Alternative School (SAS), a Just Community school founded in 1972 and dedicated to promoting moral growth since 1977 when the staff began working with Lawrence Kohlberg, wrote, reflecting on his three years at the A-School, “It is much more productive to be motivated by a community of supportive classmates and caring teachers than by the destructive do-or-die atmosphere of needless competitiveness and obsessive materialism. I have learned that the skills and experiences we acquire from a nurturing community enrich our lives more than money ever could, and I hope to share that value with my peers at Lehigh.”

Several years earlier, a senior, writing in the Scarsdale High School PTA magazine commented,

I don’t think it is possible to spend a day at the Alternative School and not hear the word “community.” We are not bound together simply because of our enrollment in the A-School, but also by our support for each other. It didn’t take very long for me to realize what effect the A-School community would have on my own personal growth. In my sophomore year, the community elected me as head and organizer of the annual Alternative School Fair. I had never been in charge of people older than I, and the idea of telling a teacher what to do was daunting. However, teachers and students alike willingly encouraged me to develop my skills as a leader. The A-School community encouraged me as I learned how to guide a group of eighty people towards a fun and successful fair.

How does the Scarsdale Alternative School create such a community in which students “own” their own education and practice democracy, leading to a broadening of perspective taking and the fostering of leadership skills in all its students?

First, size matters: SAS consists of eighty-two students (sophomores, juniors, and seniors), five full-time staff, and a full-time secretary. The program seeks a balance of boys and girls representing a broad range of academic success and experience. It is not a program that caters to a category of student: disaffected, gifted, average, or learning disabled. Rather, it welcomes all of these so that perspective taking is maximized.

Second, students choose to enter the program. For each of the past three years, roughly one hundred students have participated in the lottery that determines who will take the twenty-six spaces available to incoming sophomores. Students elect to enter the program because they know it personalizes school, because it offers them a narrative report card that gives them authentic feedback about their strengths and deficits as learners, because it gives them practice in the application of skills and knowledge, and because it engages them in questions of moral consequence in their daily lives.

Third, democracy is not just a buzzword in the A-School. Substantive decisions are made by the school community utilizing the principle of one person, one vote, and enforcement as well as the enactment of rules are collective obligations.

The school’s success is built on the premise that only through foundational structures can all the various kinds of teenagers who enter its doors acquire this unique kind of preparation for life. Throughout the A-School academic year, student-led community meetings are held one afternoon a week for one and a half hours. The agenda is the outgrowth of the deliberations of an agenda committee that has clarified the issues at hand and has ranked them in the order of importance to the school community. At the community meeting, the discussions result in the establishment of new rules, expectations, and procedures. However, although the community meeting is the legislative branch of government at the A-School, some of the most important dialogue is not legislative in its intent. Rather, there is often open sharing of concerns, disagreements, and sources of conflict, which leads to the kind of cognitive dissonance based on authentic moral dilemmas that is essential for moral growth in all people.

Once a week, each student also participates in a smaller meeting called core group, with sixteen fellow students and a teacher/advisor who also holds an individual meeting at least once every three weeks with each of his or her advisees, which significantly personalizes and improves the monitoring of a student’s life in school. In addition to forging close relationships among students and teachers, the core group also serves important administrative functions, including helping students plan for their January internship, the fourth A-School structure. Begun in 1973 as one of the oldest high school internship programs in the United States, the A-School internship program requires that all students in grades 10 through 12 access the perspectives available in “the world of work” and benefit from the kind of hands-on education not often available within the four walls of the school.

Agendas, core groups, internships, and community meetings are closely linked structures designed to push students to enhance their perspective-taking skills, helping them to prepare for life in a democratic society. In a community in which students are encouraged to make public their expectations of others, to debate proper behavioral norms, and to formalize these expectations and norms through democratically determined rules, another structure is necessary to determine fair consequences for those who do not abide by the rules and norms. The fairness committee, initiated in 1979 as part of Lawrence Kohlberg’s Just Community concept of schooling, consists of a representative group of students including one trained student facilitator who leads the case. A teacher also sits on the case as a voting member of the committee. The task of the fairness committee is to hear and decide cases of alleged rule violations and to determine appropriate action as well as to try to settle any type of grievance brought before it. Recent fairness cases have involved cheating, bullying, lateness, use of drugs, violations of deadlines, and disrespect of fellow community members. Every community member regards it as her or his duty to serve on the fairness committee when called to do so.

Because the issues that bubble up in the cauldron of teenagers’ lives each year are different and because the conversation around those issues is the opposite of scripted or canned, how the structures come together is different every year. This is character education of the most raw, authentic type.

An example from the fall of 2010 is illustrative of the process: the A-School math teacher, new to the program, was meeting in the hallway outside her room with an advisee. Inside the classroom, five seniors were studying for a test that was going to be given in the next hour. Two of the seniors saw the test itself on the teacher’s desk and began to read it. Another senior, realizing what was going on, confronted her peers and told them to stop, pointing out that it violated a cheating rule that had been drawn up by a committee of students and teachers and adopted by democratic vote at a community meeting the previous year. Not only did the two students ignore the “confronter,” but they then solicited the assistance of the fourth senior, who helped the other two “get the right answers.” Then the bell rang, which alerted the offending students to hide their indiscretion before the test was given. After cheating occurred on the test, the confronter brought it to the attention of the teacher, and the two of them brought the other three seniors to the fairness committee. Consequences included a zero on the test, a public written apology to the class, and an obligation to lead a community meeting focused on clarifying how cheating is destructive to a community of learners. This conversation in turn led to smaller, less formal conversations in core groups.

The central role of the fairness process in making ownership function and serve as the engine for the moral growth of students cannot be underestimated. A 1999 graduate of the Alternative School explained the very personal context in which that growth occurs. Similar to participants in the 2010 incident, she described “sitting on a Fairness Committee” deliberating over a case in which “a young woman had cheated. And I remember the teacher felt so horrible for bringing her [the student] to Fairness because she [the teacher] really wanted to deal with it on her own. But you know, we have to do it here within the structure. And for me, hearing what prompted the cheating, and obviously it’s not justified, got me thinking about the pressure within this district.” Fairness, in simple terms, becomes a vehicle for the adoption of multiple perspectives. The oversimplification of moral dilemmas becomes impossible. The value of turning the abstract other into a fellow human being becomes a core tool in the skill set of the newly conscious student now attuned to issues of justice, empathy, and care.

To sum up, the structures push adolescents of all backgrounds and levels of academic proficiency to listen more, reflect more, think more, value others’ feelings and perspectives more, and practice skills associated with active citizenship. Often, visitors ask A-School teachers why the school is so committed to its identity as a school rooted in Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral development and his vision of the Just Community school. One useful answer is that Kohlberg’s fundamental notion of morality is that it is rooted in the interrelationship of the individual and the society. Kohlberg argued that this interrelationship gives justice its central role in both the development of moral thinking and the development of democratic schools (Kohlberg, 1984; Kohlberg & Mayer, 1981).

For students in democratic schools, and more specifically in Just Community schools, justice and caring are not abstractions or homilies. They are lived values that are part of the fabric of their education. They are as important as history, algebra, and chemistry. Neither conventional academics nor preparation for democratic citizenship are given short shrift at the Scarsdale Alternative School as its record of 100 percent college acceptance over the past ten years suggests. Just as significantly, studies of A-School students and alumni regarding their growth in prosocial behavior (Markman, 2002); empathy (Barr, 2005); and moral development expressed as committed community and global participation as alumni (Horan, Higgins-D’Alessandro, Vozzola, & Rosen, 2009) confirm the power of the Just Community approach in its impact on the character and moral education of the people who have benefited from participation in this notable kind of democratic schooling.

References

Barr, J. J. (2005). Development of empathy in adolescents attending a Just Community alternative high school (Dissertation, Fordham University). Dissertation Abstracts International: Section B: The Sciences & Engineering.

Horan, J., Higgins-D’Alessandro, A., Vozzola, E., & Rosen, J. (2009, July 3–7). A qualitative analysis of student alumni reflective adult perceptions of the impact of a Just Community school (1972–2008). Paper presented at the annual conference of the Association for Moral Education, Utrecht, Netherlands.

Kohlberg, L. (1984). Stage and sequence: The cognitive-developmental approach to socialization. In L. Kohlberg, Essays on moral development: Vol. 2. The psychology of moral development (pp. 7–169). San Francisco: Harper & Row.

Kohlberg, L., & Mayer, R. (1981). Development as the aim of education: The Dewey view. In L. Kohlberg, Essays on moral development: Vol. 1. The philosophy of moral development (pp. 49–96). San Francisco: Harper & Row.

Markman, L. B. (2002). The impact of school culture on adolescents’ prosocial motivation (Dissertation, Fordham University). Dissertation Abstracts International: Section B: The Sciences & Engineering, 62, 6024.