The Celebration Chronicles

by Andrew Ross, Ph. D.

  The school owed its diverse student body to a decision to draw 20 percent of its enrollment from outside of Celebration. Larry Rosen’s original blueprint for the school cited a Diversity Plan, which proposed that the company “through its marketing procedures and approaches will create incentives for individuals to move to Celebration Center who represent a range of ethnic, racial, and socio-economic diversity. This would require a wide range of financial options for prospective residents of Celebration.”4 Rosen recalls early enthusiasm among some TCC team members for low-cost, even public, housing, but these plans fell by the wayside. In this first full year of operations, the student body would be at its most diverse, since residents came nowhere near to filling their 80 percent quota. Nine hundred and four county students had entered a lottery for five hundred places. Hopp was not alone among the teachers in applauding the clear successes the school had registered with many of these students from nonprivileged backgrounds. Angie Morales and Edwin Jo Mrosek, Puerto Rican newcomers to the region and bright lights of the Drama Club, had been overwhelmed in their first weeks in Upper 4. By the end of the first quarter, they clearly had undergone a conversion. “It’s like a jack-in-the-box,” mused Angie. “Once you’re free, you don’t want to go back.” Aimee Ramos, who had come to Celebration via the Bronx, had worried about being “the loner, the poor girl,” and had been astonished at the “new doors that opened” for her among “open-minded peers.” She sat between students who lived in low-rent apartments and $300,000 houses, but had met none of the social cliquishness she expected.

  From lower-income families, many of these kids were consciously seizing an opportunity that their Celebration peers would take for granted. If anything, they were more responsive to, and supportive of, the progressive methods, and they worried at evidence that classes were reverting to traditional ways. Rachel Binns, one of the most socially confident and articulate of the senior class, had found a perfect fit for herself here: “I went home to St. Cloud smiling each day—a dream come true.” A self-starter, she deeply regretted signs that the school’s mission was slipping and was glad she had enrolled when things were still fresh and innovative. As for her peers who lived in town, Rachel had a surefooted analysis: “People use their residency for status but many can’t afford their monthly bills. It’s an instant utopia that they can’t afford, and it messes their kids’ minds.” For other county kids, things had not clicked so well, and they had opted to transfer to another school. All of those who left seemed to have learned something for themselves about their personal educational needs, recognizing that they were not sufficiently motivated to take advantage of Celebration or that they needed more traditional instruction in platoon schools. Here, perhaps, was confirmation that the school “was not for everyone.” Some Celebration parents had a different reaction to their departure: “If county kids are not being ‘challenged’ at the school, then my kids certainly won’t be.” Months after the lottery, I still came across the rumor that a large number of “problem kids” from district schools had been entered into the competition for places. It was assumed, in other words, that the county had used the lottery to offload its problems much the same way that Cuba had used the Mariel boatlift to export its undesirables.

  On the other hand, Upper 4 also boasted many students from within Celebration for whom the looseleaf curriculum had delivered clear benefits. Andy Parsons, the charismatic Phish fan who had held sway over our rap circle outside the cinema back in November, was a case in point. The countercultural foil for Marcel, the clean-cut, stock-buying school mayor, Andy was an alternative mayoral figurehead among the town’s teens. After his years as a Massachusetts dropout, he had gambled hard in coming to Celebration, and his arrival in town in August, dreadlocked and dressed for decay, had garnered immediate attention, not least from the police. A staple presence on the streets, he took on a nurturing role for some of the more troubled kids, ran soccer clinics, and kept the peace without forfeiting any of his native gusto. Against the odds, and surprising even himself, he became a valued moral adviser to his peers and reconciled famously with his long-suffering parents. A week before he graduated, he acknowledged that he had been wrong in his dire forecasts about the school. “They didn’t mess up my education, but I was a guinea pig.” Andy had been self-started by a curriculum that required students to take personal initiatives. But still, he was less sanguine about many of his peers. “Half of the kids don’t learn a thing because they lack motivation. They don’t belong here, where they don’t have worksheets thrust in their faces, or where chapter three follows chapter two.” For himself, he was looking forward to an adventurous pre-college year. Through a foundation in Boston, he hoped to be working at a dolphin center in Hawaii, a sheep farm in New Zealand, a greenhouse in Thailand, and in an East African community in the Great Rift Valley. By Christmas, however, Andy was back in town. The world tour had fallen through, but a familiar substitute had kept him busy—Phish’s national tour.

  BAGELS AND GRAPES

  Against the civil rights backdrop of Upper 4’s classrooms, it was a little surreal to hear Celebration parents talk about their own “rights” with respect to the school. When I mentioned the Ocean Hill-Brownsville battles over parents’ rights in New York in the late 1960s (where mostly white teachers in the New York City public school system were pit against mostly minority parents) to Hopp, she responded that these had been struggles over the power of the school board and not a direct challenge to what teachers were doing in their classrooms. Celebration’s teachers had felt the full brunt of parental disrespect in their own workplace in a way she had never imagined possible. “Whose rights,” she asked, “are being reduced here?” With a weak union, teachers’ grievances had little in the way of an organized outlet and often took a curt and embittered form. A typically resentful comment came from one teacher in the lower school, weary of close scrutiny by the barrage of parent observers and visiting educators’ groups: “I feel like a monkey in a cage—‘Look, they chew their food.’ Leave us alone, and don’t make us live here with all the freaks, just pay us more. I’m not here to ruin your child’s life.” Even the support from “positive parents” got a lukewarm reception from some teachers: “Our spouses are leaving us, our families are falling apart, we can’t pay our bills, and all we get is bagels and grapes”—a reference to the appreciation picnics thrown in support of the teachers by the friendly parents.

  Resentment of this sort thrived among teachers who felt that their credentials were being slighted by parents who believed that they knew better. This was surely a sign of the times. All across the country, affluent, suburban parents of high-achieving children have strenuously resisted school reforms like detracking, noncompetitive learning, and alternative assessment. From their perspective, reform is unnecessary. The SAT testing system, after all, has evolved into a highly efficient delivery mechanism for propelling their children into elite colleges while relegating the less fortunate to less distinguished points of the compass. Why would such parents support changes in a system that successfully awards their children labels of distinction at the expense of others? If their kids are doing well under this system, they do not support reform. When their children flounder under a reformed program, then that program is likely to be sabotaged by the influence of parents’ money, opinion training, and political clout.5 Something like this was clearly happening in Celebration.

  Another part of the story lay in the need for new parents to have some kind of outlet for their opinions that was otherwise denied in town. After all, boomer parents are accustomed to having their say. They had learned the liberating value of voicing their opinions in the course of their own college years, and much of that training arose from questioning the relevance of education itself as a result of the student movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It’s no surprise that this generational experience has carried over into strong parental opinions about their own children’s education, and that these opinions are viewed as an exercise of ri
ghts.

  I didn’t have to look far in Celebration for a generational profile of the outspoken, credential-conscious parent. Joseph Palacios, one of the school’s chief antagonists, was a prime example. A Venezuelan in his early forties who moved to the United States for “security reasons,” he had transferred from Boston University to Stanford because he had not felt “intellectually challenged.” In the course of our first conversation, Palacios lost little time in presenting his credentials, which included consulting for the Venezuelan Ministry of Education. He was confident about his opinions: “I always give ideas, most of them unsolicited.” Neat, energetic, and a self-described “white Hispanic,” he early ran foul of Bobbi Vogel, the first principal, and several of the Celebration teachers when he enrolled his daughter at Highlands, their previous school. Somewhere along the way, Palacios’s offer to the principal to volunteer his expertise (in Internet technology) had been rebuffed, and a personal enmity had developed between the two: “Vogel was like my high school friends who never advanced beyond what they needed to live locally. She was a local bumpkin, on top of a mountain, who didn’t know diddley.” He took some personal “credit for getting rid of Vogel,” alleging to me, among other things, that she had fixed the ballot for the first SAC elections (for which he had run unsuccessfully). Above all, Palacios believed that Celebration’s concerned parents were “better educated” than the parochial Osceola educators who had designed the curriculum, and, once they were out of the way, the parents would have their day.

  Although he had given credence, initially, to the school’s progressive methods, his skepticism had hardened in the same measure as his dissent had been ignored. Over time, he became an embittered foe of the school and its more prominent defenders, none more so than the education maven Jackson Mumey, who lived directly across from him on Teal Avenue. From the perspective of Palacios, who felt marginalized for his outspoken views, Mumey was the consummate insider—commercially tied to the school, intimate with the powers that be, and, to Joseph’s mind, rhetorically endowed with miraculous, but mendacious, spin-doctor skills. Palacios’s discontent extended to other features of the town, but he was always careful to distinguish between TCC and the Disney experience. He still went to Main Street, in the Magic Kingdom, to have his hair cut, “for the magic.”

  The rest of Celebration swung uneasily between the poles of Mumey and Palacios. Closer to Palacios but more open to dialogue was SAC member Jim Whelan, in semi-retirement from a New Jersey career in psychological counseling, who took a very active, scientific role in examining claims about the school. He was especially interested in the behavioral impact of high levels of ambient noise in his son’s neighborhood, Upper 3, and cited to me scholarly papers contending that noisy classrooms raise children’s blood pressure so that they tend to give up more easily. Whelan even had a pop psychologist’s explanation for the defense of the school’s methods by the town’s establishment: “Just as Finland, when it perceived the Soviets as a threat, began to identify with them, and just as Patty Hearst began to identify with her captors, so too we increasingly identify with what is perceived as a threat here. We begin to question whether the linear approach is the right one, whether rote memorization of anything, even periodic tables, is any good.” What exactly is the threat you are describing, I asked? “The unpredictable outcome of this progressive education.” Whelan had shrewdly summed up the anxieties of many parents, unwilling to reject the methods that had “done them no harm” in their own schooling.

  Among his other volunteer activities around school, Whelan was a highly vocal advocate of E. D. Hirsch’s “core knowledge” textbooks, and had stumped at PTSA meetings for parents to use them as home tutors. Indeed, in many of the homes I visited, I saw copies of Hirsch’s What Your 2nd [or 3rd/4th/5th] Grader Needs to Know. This was a highly conservative approach to learning, viewing pupils as empty receptacles into which digestible bits of knowledge can be poured. Hirsch’s methods are aimed at the passive absorption of discrete facts, selected as the crucial information for all citizens to absorb. They ran directly counter to the methods espoused by the school, and must have confused children faced with pressure to respond to both. Whelan’s was not the only effort at alternative education. At least one resident, Lauren Adams, was preparing a different course of home tutoring. The “spiritual aspect” of her children’s education had been lost when she moved them from the First Baptist Church school in Orlando, and so she was busy co-authoring a guide for parents to teach biblical doctrine entitled Discipling Your Children. “Once children have accepted God, what do you do with them then?” she queried, adding that her book would fill a market need. When I asked Adams if she believed Celebration School was too liberal, she thoughtfully made a distinction between “progressive methods” and “liberal content,” implying that she was, in principle, comfortable with the former.

  There was no doubt that many parents believed the school was too far “to the left of what was natural” and that it was clearly a by-product of liberal thinking that had driven the reform movement in education. Ironically, ever since the milestone year of 1983—when the Reagan administration’s infamous Nation at Risk report was published—most of the educational reform movement has been far from progressive. The appearance of that speciously alarmist report (“if an unfriendly foreign power had imposed our schools upon us we would have regarded it as an act of war”) tethered the nation’s economic crisis to the state of the public school system. The anxieties of the day about corporate competitiveness were answered by a nationwide crusade for school improvement by introducing more rigorous competency testing and implementing state and national standards. Most of the time, it was an invitation to cheat and doctor statistics and to squander the potential for learning knowledge that was not forgotten the day after the tests.

  In the meantime, the call for reform was also taken up by “education entrepreneurs,” who believed that the discipline of the marketplace would force public schools to brave the same kind of restructuring undergone by industry in recent decades. With corporate management rhetoric already entrenched in many education sectors—the public as customer, education as marketable product, learning as efficiency tool—it did not take much to draw public schools into the orbit of the movement for deregulation and privatization.6 Corporate advocates of reform insisted that if schools were liberated from being monopolies of the state, they would innovate more productively and efficiently in partnership with the private sector. Shortly before becoming secretary of education, Lamar Alexander declared that Burger King and Federal Express should set up schools to set an example of how the private sector would run things.7 School-business partnerships opened the door not just to Total Quality Management but also to every corporate huckster looking for ways to promote and build brand loyalty in “the K–12 marketplace.” Tax-supported school vouchers and union-free charter schools were introduced and were seen, respectively, as the fast and the slow track toward privatization. Every CEO worth his or her salt intoned that corporate reform would bring schools more in line with the needs of industry, and thereby provide solutions to the nation’s economic problems.

  Fortunately, most educators, and enough policymakers, cannot afford to declare that schools exist solely to meet the industrial needs of corporations. They know that the concept of public education is historically tied to the training of a democratic citizenry. Yet the encouragement of independent, critical thinking among youth—the mark of an active citizenry—does not lead to the compliant workforce desired by corporations. The questioning of rules, traditions, and authorities is deemed undesirable except among “responsible” elite students being prepared for entry into the professional-managerial class. So how do progressive educators justify their reforms? One of the easiest ways is to appeal to the “new” industrial skills of cooperative problem solving. Progressive schooling, then, is often presented as a response to corporate managers who say they want employees who can work together in groups rather than comp
ete against each other as goal-achieving individuals. Dot Davis repeated this standard defense to me, implying that, these days, no one had any use for fact-ingesting robots: “That’s not what business and industry wants. It’s a lot easier to sell what we do because of the demand of business and industry for people to work together as a team, who can write grant proposals, who can construct things. We used not to teach children to do these things, we taught children to fill in the blanks.”8

  While they may pay lip service to “the demand of business and industry,” principals like Davis know that this does not serve the cause of public education, at least not for the mass of students for whom there simply are no problem-solving jobs out there in the service sector. The ideals of nontraditional education make much more sense if you relate them to a democratic rather than to an industrial training. From this perspective, competition in the classroom is socially damaging. It stigmatizes those who fall short and habituates the majority of children to thinking of themselves as failures, rather than as active participants in society. The healthier and more democratic alternative is for students to learn from, and work alongside, their peers in pursuit of some common goal. As the story of Celebration School shows, this alternative is on a collision course with what “academic excellence” usually means for parents—rewards for the best and brightest, as determined by the numbers game of high-stakes testing.