The Celebration Chronicles

by Andrew Ross, Ph. D.

  A few days later, another mass meeting was convened at the school by Dot Davis to announce the curricular revisions in the upper school that resulted from the summer workshops. She thanked the staff “for being true to our beliefs” and described the changes as being “in the interests of efficiency.” Most of the reforms concurred with the concerns of the parents’ group: rigorous test preparations for SAT and HSCT would be introduced along with an Honors Track, textbooks would be bought and issued (though the curriculum would not be “text driven”), discipline would be seriously upgraded, and classes would be taught on a modified block schedule with a focus on basic core course work. Assessments would be aligned more with county procedures, although the school would still not issue letter grades, preferring a numbered system: 4, 3, 2, 1. In the course of the first two years, reform of the grading system had come a long way. Initially, it comprised very soft categories of “extending,” “proficient,” “developing,” and “not yet,” which had met with a visible reaction around town. Most parents saw this latest attempt to distinguish numbers from letter grades as a last desperate holdout on the road to normality, but were willing to accept the distinction as a way for the administration to save face.

  Hostilities lingered on in some circles, but the July meetings marked a truce of sorts and ensured peace in time for the school to open its doors for the 1998 fall semester. Pressure from the concerned parents’ group had been decisive, though the leaders were keen to downplay their impact. “At the very best,” Biehler dryly observed, “I hope my son gets an average education.” As for the threats of media exposure, Howard explained that the “sabre-rattling helped to make our point and to empower us. We would be the very last people to allow the press to take shots at us.” Above all, it was important to avoid the perception that parents had simply walked in and gotten what they wanted. “The changes were already under way,” Howard added. “We gave them the strength to implement their plans.” While there was considerable relief around town that parents’ desires had been heard loud and clear, no one in Celebration wanted to believe its institutions could bend too easily to pressure from residents. That would be a bad precedent, and besides, it was too close to the Disney training philosophy that “the customer is always right.”

  As the school readied to open for the new year, only one member of the original development team—mild-mannered media librarian Paul Kraft—remained. Hopp, Leinsing, Vogel, and the others had all gone. Terry Wick was being reassigned to Disney’s education programs in California, and Larry Rosen was moving out of town for good. In the course of one year, Celebration School had lost twenty-five of the fifty-three faculty on staff, and several more would leave in the first few weeks of classes. On my first return visit to the school, in early September, it was clear that the personality of the upper school, most affected by the reforms, had substantially altered. The sofas had been removed from the hearth areas in the senior neighborhood, and along with the changes in the furniture, there was a sense of detached formality in the movements and interactions of students and teachers. The introduction of fifty-minute class schedules had dispersed the fluid communal environment of the neighborhoods and made interdisciplinary teaching impossible. The schedule, and not the learner, was now driving the day. Faculty were edgy and visibly daunted in response to the official directive that “the slate had been wiped clean.” An air of mute discipline prevailed. Many of the students whom I knew had thrived under the old model appeared to be in shell-shocked mourning. Several were “borderline depressed” and having trouble sleeping.

  One group, who styled themselves “concerned students” after the parent lobby, had prepared some talking points for discussion with the administration. After all, they were “stakeholders” in the school, according to the mission statement, which assigned power to the “student voice.”

  We feel corralled around like livestock. All day it’s rush here, hurry there, all within three minutes. We would like personal time—to just BE a human. Where is the time for us to interact on a personal level? We want to feel a personal connection with our teachers. We are wondering why we aren’t spending time building personal relationships first.… We are wondering how the time will be found for all of us to sit down together and speak in depth. Even if we did find that time—we aren’t sure that our teachers really know us anymore anyway.… We thought that as we grew, the “nurturing neighborhood” concept would be a buffer zone so we could still feel known—really known. The really scary thing for many of us: We were not successful at our old schools. You could say we had fallen through the cracks. Many of us already feel those old thoughts and behaviors creeping back into our minds.… That’s scary. We liked the new “us” and we want to continue to grow in the direction we were headed.4

  The talking points got short shrift and the rebuffed students fell into line. By January 1999, on my last visit, their resignation had hardened into indifference. Senior Rachel Binns, a picture of enthusiasm the year before, summed up the new apathy: “We put up blinders, put on sunglasses, do what has to be done, and then go home.” Lamenting the loss of the neighborhood’s extended family spirit, she confessed that “those of us who saw what it could be like are miserable. We got to learn the how and the why, and now that we just sit and take notes, we’re not so interested.” As we sat and chatted, it was getting on for four o’clock, and Rachel pointed out that everyone was clearing out of the neighborhood. She reminded me how the year before, students and teachers used to stay and work until seven or eight, and often showed up on weekends. Any link with the past, even my own reappearance in the neighborhood in January, was an occasion for exuberant reminiscences on the part of students like Rachel.

  Celebration School now had its own “lost community” for veterans like Rachel and myself to recall with nostalgia. There was some hopeful talk among teachers and positive parents about the pendulum swinging back. “Next year will be different.” But I suspect that this kind of togetherness is always lost in time, unsalvageable. Even principal Davis conceded, in an interview on my last day in Celebration, that the compromise she had approved—“to get students on track with their transcripts”—turned out to be “a more extreme swing than we wanted to do. We’ve lost some of the neighborhood feeling,” she acknowledged. “We’d like to reclaim it, and get that common time back.” Seated in her scrupulously neat office, filled with plaques and trophies, it was an uncharacteristically wistful comment from Davis. But she must have been a little raw, having survived the mother of all SAC meetings the evening before.

  In the previous few months, SAC’s monthly meetings had become the target for a renewed assault on the school’s methods from the ranks of concerned parents. After the upper school reforms were implemented, the summer group’s momentum had stagnated. Convinced that the changes were merely cosmetic, four of the ten committee members pulled their children, and the leadership fell apart. Parents around town began to “partially withdraw” their children, home-schooling them in academics, and sending them to the school for arts classes and wellness activities. In November a new round of public meetings, this time directed at reforming the lower school, took place, cosponsored by Palacios’s MENSA group. Organizers noted that several residents who were Disney employees showed up to speak strongly in support of the school. Accusations about a planned “cover-up” circulated. A new note of paranoia was creeping into the opposition camp. Anyone with ties to the company was now suspect. SAC was increasingly being pressured to open more and more of its agenda to public comment from the floor. Everyone was expecting fireworks at the January meeting, thus the video cameras and a full house were in attendance.

  As the meeting gets underway, Davis takes a full twenty minutes to read an autobiographical essay. She begins by recalling fondly her time as a principal of “the first, break-the-mold magnet school in Alabama,” where a very mixed community of affluent and welfare families “refused to allow disappointments and broken dreams to divide us.” It is a barel
y veiled parable about the quite different atmosphere in Celebration, where earlier that day, the Reverand Wrisley lamented to me that the school’s troubles “were destroying the fabric of the community.” Davis’s eulogy to her past is beginning to sound like a resignation speech, but to the relief of the teachers sitting around me, it segues into her State of the Union address, describing how far she thinks the school has come and how far it has to go. Professionally upbeat as always, Davis cannot resist one censorious reference to the recent loss of teachers “due to pressure from parents who make unreasonable demands.” It is her own foretaste of what is to come.

  At every subsequent agenda item, the concerned parents in the audience make their presence felt, with pointed questions and comments. They are clearly determined that this time, finally, the town’s education establishment will have to sit and listen. Mike Robinson, a UCF professor who spends part of his week in Celebration neighborhoods, is introduced to report on his survey of studies on multi-age education. He begins by reminding everyone that “there is a much longer history of multi-age education in this country than single-age education.” Of the four hundred studies he has consulted, most show there is no difference in academic achievement between multi-age and single-age, some show that multi-age is superior, and all show that multi-age is overwhelmingly superior in nonacademic areas, like student development of social skills and peer relationships. This is a tense moment. MENSA leader Palacios has long mobilized residents against the school on the grounds that there is no research to prove the successes of multi-age education. “I seriously question the validity of the research,” Palacios proclaims, rising from his seat, and launches into a sustained interrogation of the basis, span, and age of the studies that will go on, intermittently, for much of the evening, despite the valiant attempts of the chair to silence him. It is clear that he has lost face, however, and some of those parents who have been persuaded by his line on research concede as much when I question them after the meeting. (Others feel insulted that a Ph.D. like Robinson had been wheeled in to set them all straight.)

  All is not lost however. Stuart Devlin, the PTSA president, picks up a loose thread. “What I hear is that multi-age education works well for most children, but not for all. So what are we doing for the kids who don’t do well?” Danny Bumpus, the nonchalant chair of SAC, observes that there will always be children who “fall in between the cracks.” Devlin’s question and Bumpus’s response appear to sum up the problem for the aggrieved in the audience who are here to vent. The door to full frontal discourse is now wedged wide open. For the next ninety minutes we hear a long string of passionate testimonies from parents, fighting back tears, about how and why Celebration School is failing their children. One refrain is constant: “Disney promised us a world-class education.” Off to the side, where I am seated, the teachers boil and fume, pass each other unutterable comments on Post-it notes, and occasionally rise to express their sense of injury or defend a point of principle. SAC members sit impassively in a semicircle, rather like coconuts on sticks at a county fair sideshow, as parents take potshots from the floor.

  Finally, the response from some teachers on SAC begins to turn rancorous. Kathy Gross, a teacher who left the school two years before and is now home-schooling her own children, darts across the floor and pounds her fist on the SAC table: “You are not hearing us at all.” Things could get physical in a flash. Instead there is a collective recoil in the entire room, perhaps from the prospect of open aggression. Some teachers get up and leave, others present an ultimatum: “There is a negative current running through this community, and that has to stop this evening.” An official from the district points out that since the original visionaries of the school mission have left, it might be appropriate to bring in a fresh set of Ph.D.s to address some of the parents’ concerns. Dot Davis agrees to chair a committee, including outside experts, teachers, parents, and students, to consider the grievances. Two and a half years after the first blowup at the school, Celebration’s concerned parents finally get their public forum and a response from the top that offers the inkling of a way beyond the stalemate. As the meeting breaks up after a draining four hours, one teacher, an old hand, confesses to me that she had expected it would be a lot more bloody. Outside, a confrontation between a parent and teacher almost does turn violent. The next day, combatants can read a blow-by-blow of the meeting’s verbal scuffles in the Orlando Sentinel, which begins: “It was not a good day in the neighborhood that Disney built.”5

  Nor was it a good week, five months later, in June, when TCC and the school district suddenly announced some new plans. A brand-new 2,000-student high school would be built on fifty acres of Celebration swampland, and the existing K–12 would turn into a much expanded K–8. With 50 percent of the students coming from the surrounding county, these schools would go a long way toward meeting the district’s overcrowding problems, but would not sit well with any of the factions among the townsfolk. Celebrationites had not been consulted at all, and in spite of all the tribulations they had been through with the school, the hornet’s nest stirred up by these plans looked as if it might be the last straw for many of the pioneers. Ironically, the Hatfields and McCoys of the town’s warring camps were temporarily unified in their common opposition to the plans, and so the siege of the existing Celebration school was relaxed for the first time in almost three years.

  8

  OIL AND WATER

  “JAMES BOND”

  Once upon a time there lived James Bond. He had to go to the mzeum but he dint have a car, so had to call a taez. The taez didined come, so he wockt 2 days to get there. But the museum wasn’t there. It was burnt, so he called the police. And the robbers ran away and never came back.… The next day he saw the museum built and James Bond got very happy, with his mother, he went to the museum. James was very happy now. —Poem on a wall, Upper 3 neighborhood

  In the year I spent attending Celebration School, I must have thought more about education than I had done in fifteen years of college teaching. Until then, the one sure thing I thought I had grasped was not to expect to see immediate results from my teaching. The most valuable lessons are absorbed and utilized five or ten years down the road when students find themselves in circumstances where the insights make sense. Very little of this can be evaluated in the short term, and least of all by testing. I pointed this out one day in conversation with Marvin Ashmen, one of the town’s ex-military residents. Skeptical of the school’s alternative methods of assessment, he nonetheless agreed with me. He had been an instructor in the army, he said, and acknowledged that teaching, by contrast with instruction, probably should be aimed at lifelong learning. “But,” he added, “we do have to live in the real world.” Most educators don’t agree. We contend that education serves best when it shapes the world anew rather than tailors itself to the status quo of the “real world.” There has been too much tailoring of late, especially now that schools are cutting their curricular cloth to fit the high numbers game and to meet the cost-benefit analyses of would-be privatizers. Few teachers will deny that the quality and breadth of education suffer when it is approached as a private investment in a competitive market, or when the classroom is treated as a marketing arena in return for corporate-sponsored teaching materials. As for the obsession with testing, colleges are mostly to blame for perpetuating the SAT and GPA system in the interests of boosting their own prestige. Every year, my own employer—the largest private university in the world—touts an increase in SAT scores among applicants. In some other college there is an equal and opposite reaction. Scores have to be decreasing elsewhere. Statistics are a grifter’s game: you might win some, but mostly everyone will lose in the long run.

  The reforms in the upper school at Celebration felt like a loss, in a short time, and it was disheartening for me to watch the novel energy between teachers and students dissolve and get realigned in more orthodox ways. The iron law of the GPA stifles other forms of learning. Parents moving into town of
ten asked me, as an educator, what I thought of the school. “It will make your child a much better person,” I used to say, “though it won’t necessarily get him or her into Harvard.” The upper school now seemed to be headed in a direction where it would not do either of these things; it would be neither fish nor fowl. For a small number of students, these two goals are not mutually exclusive, but for most they are, and the majority lose out when the pressure to compete kicks in and drives out the rest.

  From what I could see, Celebration was a public school besieged by parents’ consumer-driven demands for a private school education. “Fix my child” was a prevalent demand. The school’s association with Disney did not help. As a result, many parents expected brisk consumer satisfaction. It was also easy to see how Dot Davis could believe that she was “one of the few residents who did not have these expectations.” From the vantage point of her principal’s office, she had heard the discourse of entitlement loud and clear: “I constantly hear, ‘What is Disney going to do for me? What is the school going to do for me? What is the Health Center going to do for me?’ That is not my paradigm. My paradigm from birth has been about helping others. What can I do for others?” Davis was presiding over a school where the public—the realm of rights—was regularly confused with the private—the realm of privileges. This was not a dilemma unique to Celebration, though there were local details, like the Disney factor, that exacerbated it. It is a condition that is more and more common in a society where market dictates are all-pervasive.