Arise Senior Mikal Smith – On Why Arise Matters: Speech before the Philadelphia School Reform Commission

My name is Mikal Smith, I am 17 years old and I reside in a SIL which stands for Supervised Independent Living.  I am also a senior at Arise Academy.  3 minutes is not enough time to discuss my thoughts about Arise, but here we go.

Arise is not a school, it is a family of people who generally care about one another. At Arise, the staff is aware of the struggles each individual student goes thru, this starts at the top with …Mr. Gabe the CEO.  This is different than my past experiences with school.  At Arise students are comfortable being who they are and being in the situations they are in.

In the past, I felt forgotten about by workers and teachers.  I was never understood.  I felt alone and it was as if people were only there for me between certain hours.  Nobody ever went above and beyond, this means cared. At Arise teachers do more than just teach academics, they are always available to talk.  At Arise, I have a family that provides structure and supports which has allowed me to grow and overcome obstacles.

My biggest obstacle, sometimes being me. I was never a team player and relied only on myself,  I had to do this because I was never able to rely on people who were supposed to be supporting me, my workers, teachers, father ect. (WTF)

In my opinion, other students should have the same opportunities that I have been presented with at Arise:  flexibility,  a job,  housing support,  clothes,  food, money and the power finding my voice.  This can’t happen without an Arise.  While we are not the only school that deals with kids in difficult situations, in my opinion and experience with the system,  Arise always seems to do what’s best and has my back. Thank you for listening to me.

The Words of Ms. Jordan – Arise Community Meeting

The following is the spoken poetry of Arise staff member Gloria Jordan:

Education vs No Education
Knowledge vs Ignorance
Quality of life vs Poverty
Freedom vs Imprisonment
Ability to Improve vs Limited expectations

When I hear these words, I think of my grandfather
Four generations back, being kicked, beaten, spat on and called nigger all
Because he wanted an education so I could be here.
It hurt me to my heart that I a colored woman has to fight another colored person
To unlock the bathroom door so they can go hide from their education
Do you know that the key to your future is an education? Without it someone else has
The key to control when that door is opened.
The primary reason for your being here at Arise is to pursue a quality education.

If you think this is a joke, remember every joke has a punchline.

Don’t let the last laugh be on you!!!
Can you hear what I’m saying to you. If you can, show me that you hear me!!!

- Ms. Gloria Jordan

A message of hope from Mount Karmel

Before I begin, I need to apologize to my readers for the long delay. It probably won’t shock any of you to learn that being the head of a young charter school, particularly one on its third leader in 2 years and in the middle of charter renewal, has been all consuming. Having said this, I am excited to be back finally, and excited to be sharing our work at Arise with all of you. Over the next several months I will be writing extensively about the school design work we are now undertaking but for today I have more immediate reflections.

It is an amazing world we live in.

I say this in part because I am sitting across from Autumn Graves, the head of Girard College, on Mount Karmel, in Israel. The two of us are visiting the Yemin Orde Youth Village.

I also point out that the world is an amazing place as a statement of philosophy and purpose. There is enormous power in optimism, in hope, and in appreciation (See Norton, Anik, Aknin, and Dunn, 2011). The Yemin Orde Model, what they call the Village Way, asserts the belief in something transcendent as one of their philosophical anchors. It is awareness of, connection to, and faith in values and principles greater than ourselves that allows us to achieve the extraordinary and to lead others to do the same. It is from the transcendent that inspiration comes.

Welcome Remarks to the Arise Family on the First Day of School: “There’s more than one way to count to ten”

Below is roughly my opening day talk to Arise students. This was long and the students were a little irritable about it, but they were almost silent for the whole end and I was reasonably convinced the messages I cared about got across.

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We will begin, as those of you who were here this summer have guessed, with a moment of silence. I ask for silence when we begin together for many different reasons. One reason is that I want there to be some difference between the time we spend together as a community and the rest of your time–our shared silence brings us together as a community. Some of you will be tempted to talk because silence is hard and being together is hard. That’s ok, we will learn to do this together. If you can’t be part of the community right now, we will ask you to leave and to come back when you have sat with your anger or your fear and are you ready to rejoin us.

Moment of silence

Thank you. How are you today? Welcome back to Arise. Welcome to a new year. Welcome to a time of renewal, of possibility, and of hope. I am Gabriel Kuriloff, some people call me mr. gabriel, and I am the CEO of Arise Academy. If you are waiting to hear about the new rules this year, I’m going to get to them, but it’s going to take a little while.

Publicity for schools: Understanding the centrality of youth identity

As I have been detailing, I am the newly appointed CEO of Arise Academy Charter High School. A follower if the “entry plan approach” (thank you Dr. Torch Lytle for teaching me this), I have been trying to focus on learning about the school, its design, and the needs and desires of its members.

Unfortunately, hard lessons come early and often. A Philadelphia Inquirer article by Annette John-Hall and soon to be released film made with our students highlight one of our great challenges–creating an appropriate public persona for the school.

At Arise, as I have already learned, our students don’t want to be sold as “needy kids”–they don’t want to be pitied or patronized and they don’t want to be treated like “puppies in the window.” Unfortunately for us and them, this is what we at the school and what members of the media have inadvertently been doing. John-Hall reports:

Arise gets its share of publicity for being the only charter school in the country created for students who have been in the foster-care system.

Which can be a blessing, but is mostly a curse, students say.

“I don’t need sympathy,” senior Zakia Boatwright says.

“They [the media] come here, they treat us like puppies in the window,” adds senior Kalea Baker. “At the end of the day, they make us feel bad.”

Arise Academy Charter School – Gabriel’s New Home

Dear friends,

On Wednesday of last week I was appointed the CEO  of Arise Academy Charter School in Philadelphia. Arise is the first charter school in the nation to specifically serve youth in foster care (see a newscast about our prom here). The school is young, only two years old, and small, with less than 200 students. It is a perfect home for the work of purposeful school design.

As I apply the design work we have done at the REAL Schools to our work at Arise, I will continue to use this space to discuss school design and all of the related issues we have been engaging in.

Thank you so much for your ongoing support and I look forward to sharing our design work as we continue to put our theory into practice and as we continue to turn our practices back into theory so that we can share them with all of you.

gabriel

Learning to care about people instead of caring about things–a call to action: My speech to the Friends Select School’s Cum Laude Society Dinner

The following is the text of the speech I gave at the Friends Select School (FSS, my middle and high school alma matter). I was honored to be invited and it was a pleasure to be back at the school again.

We live in an era of material wealth unprecedented in the history of the world. We are surrounded by products and goods and we most often measure success by counting things. We count the credits accrued by a child and we count their test scores. We count their attendance and their graduation rates. Unfortunately, there is no counting that can account for the competence and confidence of an individual human being.

So, tonight I would like to talk about people, about equity, about human need and about school design. If there is anything that walking in these halls again–the halls I called home during middle and high school–teaches me, it is that truly purposeful schooling is fundamental (and relatively uncommon).

When I say design, I am speaking of, using David Perkins (1986) definition: “structure adapted to purpose.” Schools, because they are human systems with complex moving parts, are particularly In need of clear purpose and the thoughtful articulation of those purpose across the various elements of schooling from learning design to student life.

Let me give an example of what I mean by purposes. Most urban high schools are designed to prevent students from spending time socially with each other. Hallways are straight and relatively narrow and students are strongly discouraged from lingering. The evident purpose of this is to control the students.

Contrast this model with the design of the building here at FSS. As I walked through with my wife I fondly noted the large, sequestered nook on the stairs going up, specifically designed to create private social space in which young people get to be young. I pointed to benches grouped in the entrance way, in corners and in side hallways. These are a reflection of important and clear purposes–the valuing of the child and the child’s needs above those of the adults.

I am the new CEO of Arise charter school–the first charter school in the nation to specifically serve youth in foster care. In Philadelphia, over 75% of foster students drop out of school (note 50% of the general public school population drops out which is terrible to begin with).

This is a primary challenge for public education and it suggests strongly that when it comes to public schooling, we may not have our purposes clear and more importantly, we do not have purposes that match the needs of our students.

Many people insist that college must be the goal for all. Many, if not all of you are headed to college. It will be wonderful and powerful for you and it will help you continue to become the incredible people you are.

While I deeply believe that all students should have the tools to go to college, we have 400,000 college educated waiters and waitresses in this country. Students who go to college and don’t get a marketable degree accrue large debt with little of value to sell on the job market (see my previous post on this subject).

Going to college does not equal having access to power. So I ask again, what should the purposes of schooling be? The bottom line is, we need many kinds of schools for many kinds of purposes.

Some of my students are care takers with serious daily responsibilities. Some live in shelters. When we tell them to sit still for a study of a classic novel, they are right to be skeptical–in many cases schools have not done the work of translating the reading of that novel into cultural capital–we have not helped them turn their learning into power.

Schools have been in the business, in fact, of taking away power. Rather than honest purposes that are centered on the needs of the child, we have perpetrated the college myth. We have been guilty of valuing things–tests and scores, credits and requirements, standards and accountability–more than we value people.

This is a profound failing on the part of educators. We must do better. We must build human systems that value the individual, unique and human in each child.

This is a call to action. You who have had wonderful, purposeful education must demand from our nation, its leaders, policy makers and educators, the same excellent and purposeful education for all our nation’s students.

Lessons from the shores of the Nile: In response to the slaying of Osama bin Laden

I am certainly no biblical scholar, but I find myself reminded of a biblical fable Jewish families across the world retell at Passover:

The lord parted the Red Sea for Moses and the Israelites crossed safely. When the Egyptians attempted to pursue the Israelites across the dry path, the river resumed its course and the Egyptian army was largely drowned.

The fable tells that as the Egyptians were vanquished, the angles in heaven rejoiced, but the lord silenced their celebrations saying, “my people are dying and you rejoice!?”

Human life is sacred. I have seen video of Americans celebrating the death of bin Laden and to me this is a sign of a dangerous degradation of our values. It is not healthy or moral to revel in death–even in the death of a hated enemy. What makes our nation great and worthy of our loyalty is our collective refusal to change our morals even in the face of terrifying enemies. When we give in to our fear, we lose ourselves; we become less human, less divine, and more animal. 

60 seconds on what’s important in education

I won’t step on the toes of the great folks who filmed me giving a 60 second lecture today by giving away their work, but I was asked to talk about why education is important and as a teaser, I’m including the text below.

It’s amazing how hard it is to say anything that matters in a short time. I thought the experience was valuable. Like it or not, there is clear utility in being able to essentialize ideas and make them palatable to mass audiences. At the same time, reductionist thinking tends not to be that useful and often obscures rather than illuminates the truth.

I do not believe that education is important, as some argue, because all people should be able to recall the same set of basic facts? Cultural capital matters and is one tool for accessing power, but all students will never know and be able to do the same things—that’s not the way our species is built.

Great schools are places where rather than learning our founding facts, students learn our founding values—places where students learn these values by experiencing them. For example:

-          Students learn to work and live together when they collaborate together in work that is purposeful and meaningful to their lived experience

-          They learn to be responsible to community when they are cared for by community members and when they practices caring for each other

-          They learn to participate, to be engaged and interested, when they are empowered and supported both to make decisions about their own selves and futures and when they are empowered to take part in determining the structures that effect their learning and living

Students learn to challenge, inquire, and question—they learn to learn, when they are given even the slightest opportunity to do so. The educator’s job is to give students a chance to do some worthwhile learning.

Learning Community Design 2.0: The library as a communal center of learning

My friend and urban planner, Jen Hurley (Twitter: @JenHurPlanner), forwarded me this piece (April 1, 2011), by Rick Cole, on libraries as learning communities. In response to the declining importance of book lending, Cole points to an Australian library design that dramatically recasts the place of libraries in the community.

Citing Ross Duncan, the manager for Learning Communities for Sunshine Coast Council, a large Australian metropolitan region, Cole explains the new vision for libraries in the Sunshine Coast:

Duncan’s philosophy is to infuse the 10 branches of the Sunshine Coast library system with a focus on “changing the world.” He’s shaped what is essentially an informal family university offering more than 4,500 activities, workshops and events that foster a “learning community.”

Duncan’s vision is of a dynamic learning space that allows individuals of every age to learn, study, interact, and take action together. The model is especially compelling because it seems so much more functional and flexible than the traditional schooling design for learning with its set classes and limited outcome goals. Duncan’s library design is powerfully open-ended–allowing transformative learning to incubate in a variety of safe spaces: