HOW TO TEACH OUR CHILDREN HOW TO WELL

By Steve Wulf

On a beautiful fall afternoon not long ago, all 120 eighth-grade students and four of their teachers at the Olson Middle School in Minneapolis, Minn., walked across a grassy playing field down to nearby Shingle Creek. For the past five weeks, they had been raising monarch butterflies--from caterpillar through chrysalis--and now 30 of them were ready for release.

Raising butterflies isn't all that easy, as the Olson eighth-graders discovered. Every other day, the students would gather milkweed pods for their charges to eat. They kept journals, which they took home to their parents for evaluation. They rushed in on Mondays to see how their monarchs were doing, but they also struggled with large issues when one of them died.

After the butterflies were relocated to long tubes of bridal-veil material, the kids gingerly placed them on sponges filled with honey and water, then took delight as the creatures learned to go to the nectar on their own. Two days before their release, the students ever so carefully attached tiny tags to their hind wings--tags that a University of Kansas professor would use to monitor their migration to Mexico.

Raising children isn't easy either, as we all know. The task becomes even more difficult when we don't give them the education they deserve. We send them off to school every day, hoping for the best but often settling for less. Teachers are usually overworked and underpaid. Public schools are often overcrowded and underfunded. We begrudge tax hikes for schooling, then bemoan low test scores.

Our concern for education, well intentioned though it may be, has lately manifested itself in an insistence on such standards as test scores or dress codes or class size. But like the tag on a wing of a butterfly, such mandates must be applied gently. Too much testing will cut into the work that teachers and students should be doing; uniforms should not stifle efforts to bring out the individuality in each student; a large class with an inspiring leader is far better than a small class with a mediocre teacher.

What makes a good school? There are no stock answers, like wardrobe or testing or size. But there are some universal truths. A good school is a community of parents, teachers and students. A good school, like a good class, is run by someone with vision, passion and compassion. A good school has teachers who still enjoy the challenge, no matter what their age or experience. A good school prepares its students not just for the SATs or ACTs but also for the world out there.

To better illustrate what makes a good school, TIME has chosen three as shining examples--two of them middle schools, the third a secondary school combining Grades 7 through 12. They were selected in part because middle schools are an especially tough test for educators who have to swim upstream against the changes of adolescence and the customary disappearance of parental involvement at that stage. These three have also succeeded despite a profile that seems to predict failure or mediocrity: a majority of minority students, limited resources and membership in a large school system. They, and thousands of other outstanding public schools we might have mentioned, are the good news in American education.

Of the 1,256 students who attend the Stanford Middle School in the Los Altos neighborhood of Long Beach, Calif., 34% are Hispanic, 22% Asian, 23% Caucasian, 17% African American, 3% Filipino and 2% either Pacific Islander or Native American. More than 75% qualify for the free or reduced-cost lunch program, thus enabling Stanford to receive federal funding under Title I. Because the district allows parents to choose their children's schools, only about one-third of the students reside in the neighborhood; the others arrive on 16 buses. When Stanford's rainbow coalition gets off those buses, it is a vision in white and black: white-collared shirts and black pants for the boys, white blouses and black skirts or pants for the girls.

Four years ago, the Long Beach Unified School District, the third largest in California, decided to change over to "standards-based" education and to initiate a mandatory school-uniform policy. At the same time, Stanford principal Judi Gutierrez embarked on a program to restructure and reform her school. She created schools within the school, one for each of the three grades, with a "learning director" heading a core group of teachers. She allowed the students to pick their own mottoes--in the sixth grade, it's "Begin the Journey...Stride into Excellence." Gutierrez also stressed staff development, sending teachers to seminars and workshops using Title I funds.

Little changes can mean a lot. Each classroom has a nameplate with the educational background of the teacher. Kids with a grade-point average of 2.0 or better get T shirts and patches that designate their achievements. A special grant pays for eight college students to monitor 50 kids considered "at risk."

The big change that means the most to critics of education is that Stanford's test scores are on the rise--particularly in mathematics, where the sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders were, respectively, in the state's 77th, 74th and 66th percentile rank. Another measure of the school's success is its desirability: four years ago, the school accepted every student who applied; this year 200 students had to be turned away.

While almost all the teachers share a common passion, one Stanford staff member fairly pants at the opportunity to help students. She is Apache Rose, a four-year-old German shorthaired pointer and a licensed therapy dog belonging to physical-education teacher Monica Havelka. Apache was brought to school for the seventh-grade programs in health, science and phys ed, but she has become so popular that she now has kids of diverse backgrounds talking about her. She even has her own program to train older kids to handle therapy dogs--Apache Rose and Friends, or simply and cutely, ARF.

The other day at Stanford, a tall Hispanic boy and a small, autistic Cambodian boy walked Apache Rose through the halls together. The students had nothing in common but a leash to this dog, yet a visitor could sense their mutual pride--the older child in befriending a member of the Stanford family he might never have known about, the younger child in facing his fear and discovering the joys of companionship. Apache Rose, not unlike middle school, is a bridge.

Every Friday at Olson Middle School, the adults--not the children--are in uniform. Principal Shannon Griffin, her staff and faculty all wear crimson T shirts that read, OLSON MIDDLE SCHOOL--DREAM MAKERS. "Educators crush dreams all the time," explains Griffin. "Here we want to make them."

Six years ago, Griffin was brushing her teeth one night when... "Bam! It all came together." Of course, she had 30 years of experience teaching in public schools, but in that instant, she saw the way a school should work: teams of teachers helping students learn by themselves, a thematic curriculum, extended days, classes without bells, a three-year relationship between the students and their advisers. At the time, Griffin was working for a school that spurned her ideas. But in April 1995 she was hired to take over Olson, a 30-year-old building on Minneapolis' north side that was being converted from an elementary school into a middle school. Because it was a start-up, Griffin was able to hire without regard to seniority. "If you want high expectations for students," she now says, "you have to have high expectations for your teachers."

Olson has 720 students who reflect the changing face of Minneapolis: a third of them are "European American," a third of them are African American and almost a third are Asian American--mostly Hmong from Southeast Asia. With 78% of the students eligible for free or reduced-cost lunch, Olson is one of the city's poorer middle schools, but in last year's state reading tests, Olson came in third among the seven middle schools.

When the eighth-graders settled into their classrooms on the first week of school this year, they found plastic boxes with mesh tops and one or two caterpillars in them. English teacher Kay Pfaffendorf and social studies teacher Cindy Farmer had taken a course on raising monarchs at the University of Minnesota in order to present a project involving not only their subjects but also math, science and art.

As the kids found out, the project wasn't just about raising butterflies. It was about emerging from a summer cocoon, sharing their excitement with their parents and bonding with one another in their last year before high school.

Central Park East Secondary School is an experiment that has withstood the test of time. A few years ago, it was one of the most celebrated alternative schools in the country. Deborah Meier, its founder in 1985, was the first public school teacher ever awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and she wrote a book about her experience, The Power of Their Ideas.

Her own idea had been to create a secondary school in New York City's East Harlem in which less was more. Smaller and fewer classes meant increased individual attention and a deeper understanding of subjects. She built the school a grade at a time, starting with the seventh in '85, until the school had a Division I for seventh- and eighth-graders, a Division II for ninth- and 10th-graders and a Senior Institute for 11th- and 12th-graders--546 students in all this year, with 41 full-time staff members.

Each of the divisions has a two-year curriculum devoted to the two core subjects, humanities and math-science, keeping the students with the same pair of teachers two years in a row. In the Senior Institute, students assemble portfolios demonstrating mastery in 14 subjects (seven majors and seven minors). Those portfolios are judged by a graduation committee on the basis of how well they satisfy the five "habits of mind" that form the basis for the curriculum: evidence, perspective, connections, supposition and relevance. It sounds New Agey, but students understand. As Lohattis Hayden, a 12th-grader interested in sociology, says, "The way we learn is totally different. We read a lot of articles and literature, but we don't have to take a load of textbooks home. This school is more than just studying--it's looking inside yourself."

Meier, who has since moved on to start a school in Boston, has had her mainstream critics. But she put up numbers that were astonishing, given the secondary school's impoverished surroundings: 90% of the graduates went on to college, some of them to Ivy League schools.

As befits its daring mission, Central Park East Secondary School is situated in the Jackie Robinson Educational Complex at the corner of Madison Avenue and 106th Street in East Harlem. The building is stark on the outside, but inside it turns friendly, with colorful student-made ceramic tiles leading people to class.

Indeed, the whole school seems a wonderful mosaic of activities and classes and inquiries. In the library, the Tech Scouts, a group of computer-savvy students, show off their Website and online magazine. Up in the Girls Inc. room, students replay a "feminized" skit, based on Snow White and Cinderella, that they performed at a conference. In Brent Duckor's "Democracy, State and Society" class, Senior Institute students openly and persuasively challenge his assertion that they are being cynical. ("You win," he says. "You're not at all cynical.")

Teachers say the school has actually got better in some ways since Deborah Meier left. "Pioneering is exhilarating," said one, "but it is also exhausting." David Smith, a former humanities teacher, now director of the school, brings a sense of calm to the hallways. (The kids, as they do with all of their teachers, call him by his first name.) "Every so often," says Smith, "a student will tell me, 'I don't know how to do that.' And my reply is, 'You don't know how to do that--yet.' That's an empowering word: yet. Our purpose, you see, is not to provide them with the answers but with the tools they'll need to find the answers for themselves."

The teachers at Central Park East Secondary School have something in common with the eighth-graders at Olson Middle School. When the butterflies were finally released on that warm fall afternoon, the kids openly wondered which ones would reach Mexico, and how long it would take. One thing they were certain of: they knew they had done all they could for the butterflies.

--Reported by Deborah Edler Brown/Long Beach, Emily Mitchell/Minneapolis and Megan Rutherford and Rebecca Winters/New York City

With reporting by DEBORAH EDLER BROWN/LONG BEACH, EMILY MITCHELL/MINNEAPOLIS AND MEGAN RUTHERFORD AND REBECCA WINTERS/NEW YORK CITY