School Was Murder PDF Download

Why are school districts intractable to change? Why do the most promising school reform efforts fail? Deborah Meier, founder of the small schools' movement, has said that small, innovative schools do not die a natural death but are "killed off." New Century High School was such a school in Lacey, Washington. It was murdered by the North Thurston School District that created it. This book is a compelling postmortem of how and why, New Century, the most innovative school in the District was murdered. New Century earned national recognition as a model of school reform and effectiveness. It had tremendous support from students, parents, staff and business leaders, and the highest test scores in the District, a Presidential Blue-Ribbon Award, with twelve grant awards for its innovative, exemplary programs. How could a school like this fail to survive in the District that created it? How that happened is the topic of the book I promised to someday write about New Century. This year when I searched the web for information about our school's history, I found only a sentence. That solitary sentence read, "New Century is a closed, experimental school that ran on an evening/nighttime schedule." I needed to set the record straight, document our school's history and pay tribute to our amazing New Century Community. To quote Vonnegut, "All persons, places and events are real...No names have been changed to protect the innocent." And I have added, "neither have names been changed to absolve those who conspired to murder our dream." The words of the students, faculty, parents, and administrators tell the stories of what sustained New Century's spirit of innovation despite the micropolitics and unrelenting threats to its existence. The history of what happened to this small school that "once flickered brightly" may be useful to researchers who are studying other small, innovative schools, that are struggling to serve their students. It may extend understandings about how the construction of interests, coalitions, competition and power, work in the micropolitics of education. To advance reform efforts and sustain innovation reformers must be willing to examine the soft underbelly of politics that we in education are often ready to deny exists in our hallowed halls. We need more school leaders who are unwilling to become complicit in the loss of innovative reform by remaining silent about the omnipresent challenges that reformers face in an educational bureaucracy. To ignore the clash of micropolitical forces would be foolhardy and may result in the conclusion that the reform effort itself is the culprit and just another superficial educational fad. A greater understanding of the interplay of school district and school politics revealed in the story of New Century may inform policy makers about micropolitics, which must be considered in the implementation of the change process in educational reform.