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The Relationship School

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: March 22, 2012

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Usually when you visit a school you walk down a quiet hallway and peer in the little windows in the classroom doors. You see one teacher talking to a bunch of students. Every 50 minutes or so a chime goes off and the students fill the hallway and march off to their next class, which is probably unrelated to the one they just left.

Josh Haner/The New York Times

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When you visit The New American Academy, an elementary school serving poor minority kids in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, you see big open rooms with 60 students and four teachers. The students are generally in three clumps in different areas working on different activities. The teachers, especially the master teacher who is floating between the clumps, are on the move, hovering over one student, then the next. It is less like a factory for learning and more like a postindustrial workshop, or even an extended family compound.

The teachers are not solitary. They are constantly interacting as an ensemble. Students can see them working together and learning from each other. The students are controlled less by uniform rules than by the constant informal nudges from the teachers all around.

The New American Academy is led by Shimon Waronker, who grew up speaking Spanish in South America, became a U.S. Army intelligence officer, became an increasingly observant Jew, studied at yeshiva, joined the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, became a public schoolteacher and then studied at the New York City Leadership Academy, which Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the former New York Schools chancellor, Joel Klein, founded to train promising school principal candidates.

Just another average résumé.

At first, he had trouble getting a principal’s job because people weren’t sure how a guy with a beard, kippa and a black suit would do in overwhelmingly minority schools. But he revitalized one of the most violent junior high schools in the South Bronx and with the strong backing of both Klein and Randi Weingarten, the president of the teachers’ union, he was able to found his brainchild, The New American Academy.

He has a grand theory to transform American education, which he developed with others at the Harvard School of Education. The American education model, he says, was actually copied from the 18th-century Prussian model designed to create docile subjects and factory workers. He wants schools to operate more like the networked collaborative world of today.

He talks fervently like a guerrilla leader up in the mountains with plans to take over the whole country. For the grandly titled New American Academy, he didn’t invent new approaches, as much as combine ones from a bunch of other schools.

Like the Waldorf schools, teachers move up with the same children year after year. Like Hogwarts, students are grouped into Houses. Like Phillips Exeter Academy, students are less likely to sit at individual desks than around big tables or areas for teacher-led discussions.

The students seem to do a lot more public speaking, with teachers working hard to get them to use full sentences and proper diction. The subjects in the early grades (the only ones that exist so far) are interdisciplinary, with a bias toward engineering: how flight, agriculture, transportation and communications systems work. The organizational structure of the school is flattened. Nearly everybody is pushed to the front lines, in the classroom, and salaries are higher (master teachers make $120,000 a year).

The New American Academy takes a different approach than the other exciting new education model, the “No Excuses” schools like Kipp Academy. New American is less structured. That was a problem at first, but Waronker says the academy has learned to get better control over students, and, on the day I visited, the school was well disciplined through the use of a bunch of subtle tricks.

For example, even though students move from one open area to the next, they line up single file, walk through an imaginary doorway, and greet the teacher before entering her domain.

The New American Academy has two big advantages as a reform model. First, instead of running against the education establishment, it grows out of it and is being embraced by the teachers’ unions and the education schools. If it works, it can spread faster.

Second, it does a tremendous job of nurturing relationships. Since people learn from people they love, education is fundamentally about the relationship between a teacher and student. By insisting on constant informal contact and by preserving that contact year after year, The New American Academy has the potential to create richer, mentorlike or even familylike relationships for students who are not rich in those things.

It’s too soon to say if it will work, especially if it’s tried without Waronker and the crème-de-la-crème teachers he has recruited, but The New American Academy is a great experiment, one of many now bubbling across the world of education.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on March 23, 2012, on page A29 of the New York edition with the headline: The Relationship School.

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1.

O Todd Pytel

o Chicago

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I'm a veteran teacher in a big, traditional urban high school, typical of schools targeted for improvement by policy makers. I have no objection to the model described here, though it bears little resemblance to my own classroom. I can see it being quite beneficial if implemented expertly and appropriately.

What I do have a problem with is reading a columnist of your influence floating yet another structural silver bullet for schools that distracts from the essential business of education - thoughtful, expert instruction that engages students with the core ideas of the subject matter. The structure at both the classroom and district levels that delivers that classroom experience matters. But it will never outweigh the fact that far too many of our schools spend much of their energy dancing to the tune of endless standardized testing, ever-changing district policies and political whims, and well-connected consultants peddling the latest strategies. Articles like this merely add to the noise and make our job even harder.

Give me a faculty of elite professionals that share a singular focus on setting meaningful goals and creating the best possible learning experiences to achieve them and we can build a school according to nearly any structure you desire. Whatever its shape, it would blow away what we have now in academic performance. Our problem isn't how schools are organized. Our problem is that our educational system no longer concerns itself with actual teaching.

o March 23, 2012 at 1:27 p.m.

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2.

O Darwin

o New York, NY

NYT Pick

While this progressive, open ended, project based model of instruction has many, many positive attributes, it requires highly skilled teachers (which are in limited supply) and a management team capable of handling the noise (behavioral and otherwise) created by it. Moreover, assuming NYCDOE stays the course with its teacher assessment and testing system (now known to be unstable and unreliable - I won't even mention that most teachers and education professors question their validity), it would be very surprising that students educated under this system could be good at taking the standardized (industrial model) tests used now.

Of course this model of education isn't emphasizing the skills or knowledge measured in the standardized tests. It has different educational goals and aspirations - which is the more important point - learning to work in teams, dealing with interdisciplinary and open ended problems and questions, communicating publicly - these are complex skills, attitudes and concepts that are completely ignored in the NYS standardized tests and in the entire accountability structures of teachers and schools.

Kudos to Shimon and his team for having the courage to take the risks to go against the received model of education. May the numbers and accountability nonsense not destroy your different path, as it will takes years, if not decades, for your model to be experimented and tested enough to know its value.

o March 23, 2012 at 1:28 p.m.

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O Ms. G.

o San Francisco, CA

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I think the most important piece of this "new model" is actually nothing new at all: the nurturing of the relationship between teachers and students. I'm thrilled to see a school that places this relationship as the highest priority. In too many public schools these days, teachers are spending more of their energy finding resources or adhering to overly strict curricula than they are developing the relationship with their own students. What American education needs isn't a new model, but instead a look back at the most fundamental human elements that create a successful learning environment.

o March 23, 2012 at 1:28 p.m.

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O Mark Twain

o On the Mississippi

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The students are stuck with the same teacher for years? I don't think that is going to work out as my experience from the 60s and 70s is that their are lousy teachers, slightly lousy teachers, competent teachers, almost outstanding but not quite teachers and then there are the select few outstanding, great, most superlative, superior excellent teachers. If I had children, I would not want them to be stuck with someone in the less than competent teacher mold and I have no doubt that would indeed occur. Indeed some students would get the highest echelon teachers but none of the students other than those would get such exposure. Let's not feed our children just one vegetable, they need them all and perhaps something with protein as well. Having the same thing on you education r dinner plate for years is going to cost too many children a complete educational experience.

o March 23, 2012 at 1:28 p.m.

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5.

O Sara

o Cincinnati

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As an experienced teacher of over 25 years, I would think that this method of teaching, especially in junior high and high school would be a recipe for chaos. From this article, I can already see that no matter how innovative and feel good this method is it must still rely on structure and orderliness. As David writes, students must now pretend that they are entering a "teacher's domain" and enter in single file and in silence. I would love to see this at an inner city junior high with 60 horrormone raging kids. I do like the concept of collaboration among the teachers. Why not have smaller classrooms with 15 students per class in which they collaborate closely with each other and with the teacher. You would have much less distraction and many more opportunities for quiet study and reflection. Many students would find that this open environment with four teachers circulating and 60 other kids doing various activities overstimulating. Besides, group work and "discovery" learning are highly overrated. Guided instruction and independent practice and study coupled with a stable home environment work best. A school or teacher can never replace a home. Of course, respectful student and teacher interaction is a must and collaboration among teachers would certainly improve the delivery and implementation of curriculum. We already spend more on each student than most every other country on earth, and this method seems very costly given the low student teacher ratio.

o March 23, 2012 at 1:31 p.m.

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