The Celebration Chronicles

by Andrew Ross, Ph. D.

  Privately labeled as the “keeper of the vision” by her colleagues, Donna Leinsing, the school’s poised director of curriculum, had a reminder from Einstein mounted on her office desk: “Not everything that counts can be counted, not everything that can be counted counts.” She also had Warhol’s silkscreened “The Art of Mickey Mouse” on her wall. One was a dignified rebuttal of the number-crunching mania that presides over public education and so much of public life. The other was a gently ironic tribute to her school’s chief sponsor. Until she was ousted in the summer, in what she termed “a hostile takeover,” Leinsing’s confidence in the mission of the school—“we changed the paradigm … it had to happen all at once”—was as steadfast as her underestimation of the power of parents to change it back. When I first queried her about the dissatisfied parents, she asserted that they were simply “unused to change” and that the hubbub around the school was nothing more than “small-town politics.”

  Leinsing’s ouster proved otherwise. The fact is, schools like Celebration are few and far between in upscale suburban communities. Andres Duany likes to point out that in urban planning, “one must never experiment with the poor; they are already under stress. Experiment with the rich because they can always move out.”9 This principle is exactly the opposite of what prevails in the planning of education. Savvy policymakers will tell you not to “experiment” too much with a Celebration-type population. Nontraditional education is more ordinarily tried out in depressed, central city areas where there is “nothing to lose” from the perspective of educators. One couple who had pulled their son from the school in the first year curtly described the Celebration curriculum to me as a program more appropriate for “keeping inner-city ghetto kids off drugs.” It was not uncommon around town to hear talk of the school’s “inner-city curriculum.”

  In the search for existing educational models for the Celebration School, handpicked county principals and administrators had undertaken a national tour, including stops at inner-city schools. According to Candy Parker, one of those county principals, they were hard put to find high schools that fit the bill. She recalled only one, Schomburg High School in the Bronx, a school for students who had been expelled at least twice from other schools, where the team found that integrity and commitment to “habits of mind” had shown outstanding results. They also looked at Central Park East, the East Harlem school most often cited as a reference point by Celebration’s teachers, which was pioneered in 1974 in one of New York’s poorest communities, with test scores, at that time, “that placed it last out of the thirty-two city districts.”10

  While concerned parents saw their children as part of an “experiment,” and repeatedly used this term, teachers insisted that Celebration was not an experimental school. Its methods (or “best practices,” in TCC’s corporate jargon) had all been tried out elsewhere, some of them in Central Park East two decades before and many more in the schools (over a thousand nationwide) affiliated with Theodore Sizer’s Coalition of Essential Schools, the progressive alternative to E. D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Foundation. While the methods may not have been experimental, at least three aspects of Celebration School were highly novel: its location, in a community of parents accustomed to getting what they had paid for (including high test scores); the nature of its corporate partner, from whom parents had expected much more than they thought they had gotten; and the rural profile of the school district, still grappling, as one school board member put it, with a crippling “inferiority complex.”

  KOWBOY COUNTY

  In Osceola County, the school’s methods might well have been branded as communistic not that many years ago. Would they have met with a similar reception if they had arrived in Kissimmee without a Disney copyright attached? How did the school figure on the county map? The politics of the school board more or less reflected a county that had transferred its seasoned Dixiecrat loyalties to the Republican Party over the last decade. This had produced some strange fruit.

  Deena “Dee” Stevens, the crankish board representative for the western end of the county, which included Celebration, had run in 1994 as a moderate Republican against a Democrat whom she openly described as a “redneck.” One of her tasks, as she presented it to me, had been to stave off the efforts of the Christian Coalition to control the party and the school board, although no one I consulted could offer any evidence to substantiate her claim. She prided herself on her New York degrees in education and her passing familiarity with the latest ideas, and lost few opportunities to put down her board colleagues and her numerous public detractors, as hopelessly provincial—“I’m too sophisticated for them down here.” After I had met with Stevens a few times, she called one evening to warn me “not to get too involved” in the affairs of the county. “Don’t ask too many questions. The Klan is active here.” I was curious to know what kinds of questions would bring the hooded ones to my door. “You don’t want to get involved,” she warmly counseled, “a lot of things happen in this county.”

  If I had been talking to any other elected public official, I might have been alarmed, but Dee Stevens was truly a world unto herself. As one county principal confided, “Dee comes from a long line of Osceola County crackpots, just this side of sanity.” Recently, she had been in the newspapers a lot, on account of her numerous lawsuits against fellow board members (one had cut her “maliciously” during a meeting by handing her a sheaf of papers), the board attorney (for checking up on the veracity of her educational background), and, most infamously, a citizen who had launched a drive to petition Florida’s governor, Lawton Chiles, to recall her from office. As Dee put it, “They always put me in the headlines because my name makes news. I can understand how Jackie Kennedy felt.” On occasion, she had been escorted from school board meetings by a deputy for too zealously pursuing her complaints. Celebration School had not escaped Dee’s litigious fervor. A lawsuit had been entered against two officials who, Stevens alleged, had conspired to keep her name off the ceremonial plaque in the school office lobby.

  Her appetite for justice aside, Dee presented herself as a friend of the school—“I’m a true believer.” With something of an arty background (a degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology and a brief sideline as a fashion show radio host in Kissimmee), she liked to identify with the avant-garde spirit of Celebration School and with the “creativity” of Disney. But she had mastered enough of the art of local populist politics to deride, at the drop of a hat, the principles behind its curriculum: “The teacher and the learner are related to one another. It took them thirty years at Harvard, and that’s what they came up with. I mean, anyone can tell you that. You’re the teacher, they’re the students, they’re the learners and you’re the teacher, right? If that’s the most they can come up with, then I don’t know. I’m not an expert, but …” Dee could yuck it up with the good old boys when it came to putting down the fancy stuff out of Harvard. Oddball that she was, she knew a thing or two about lobbying for votes in a county unreceptive to anyone putting on airs and graces.

  These days, when people decide to move somewhere new, they scan statistical profiles of the district to find out if the schools are actually as good as the real estate brochures claim. They also want to know about the composition and agenda of the local school board. Captivated by the Disney promotional literature, it’s unlikely that many Celebration residents gave more than a passing thought to the makeup of the Osceola board. They had been led to expect that the new school would be “world class,” and Disney all the way. Charmed, perhaps, by all the CEO talk about corporate school reform, they had pictured a school that would have nothing in common with the county system’s low test scores and undistinguished educational record. Those who had a passing acquaintance with the workings of the Florida public school system might have had more foresight. But no one could have foreseen the impact on the town of several years of battle-hardened negotiations between TCC and the board, both before and after the school’s opening.

 
Much of the early friction revolved around the opposition of Martha Anderson, a fairly liberal Democrat and the sole board member to vote against linking the school to the district. Anderson believed the school would drain resources from other county schools. She was uncomfortable with the use of the school as “a marketing centerpiece for the town of Celebration,” a “Disney promotional opportunity for which other county schools would have to make a sacrifice.” In Anderson’s opinion, other schools did suffer once the Celebration contract was signed. A planned wing of a Kissimmee school was sacrificed, and already crowded classrooms overflowed when student stations were assigned to Celebration, a site at that time without any population. Some of the district’s leading professionals became fixated on the intellectual romance of the Celebration curriculum, anxious to make their mark on an institution in a way that would enhance their CVs. Other schools were treated like “neglected stepchildren.” The cost, Anderson acknowledged, was difficult to measure in dollar amounts, but the psychological legacy was clear enough to see in the countywide prejudice against Celebration.

  Anderson was defeated in her, by now, Republican district in 1994, but other members’ bipartisan concerns about equity in funding persisted long after the school opened in 1996, generating no end of friction between TCC and the county. In an emergency measure in the fall of 1997, the board finally allowed the school to use a major portion of its enhancement funds to meet its staffing problems. These funds had originally been designated to support the school’s innovative programs, and, in keeping with the school’s contract, were not supposed to be used to subsidize regular staff recruitment. Among Celebration stakeholders, the board’s approval was seen as a victory and a turning point. By February 1998, Jackson Mumey was able to declare in a SAC meeting that “relations with the District have seen a 480 percent turnaround from last year. A year ago we were more like an oddity to be punished—a group under siege from, rather than a part of, the district.”

  By that time, however, many pioneers saw that Celebration might be better served by having its own representation within the county government. At some point, it was assumed, townsfolk would be active in seeking public office. Much sooner than expected, Celebration would field a candidate in the very first election to be held since the town was established. At the end of March, after much consultation among the town’s elite, Mumey announced he would be running as an independent in the school board race in November 1998. Even before he threw in his hat, he admitted to me that he didn’t “hold any illusions that a white male businessman from Celebration with a law degree is the people’s choice in Osceola County.” But Mumey’s family had long been in the education business—his Vermont ancestor was Justin Morrill, who sponsored the seminal Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862, establishing over seventy land grant colleges in the Midwest and far West—and he had already made a favorable impression by serving on one of the district’s education commissions. A highly articulate liberal, Mumey’s candidacy would be an early test of how Celebration was going to play in county politics.

  Like most of the school’s friendly stakeholders, he was an advocate of the role played by private corporations in sponsoring public schools, but worried that the district’s stingy treatment of Celebration had not set an attractive precedent. “A lot of private companies right now are reluctant to partner with this school board because of Disney’s experience of being kicked in the teeth. Some of these companies have looked at Disney’s experience and said, ‘We’re not sure that this is an environment where we’d want to get involved, without a school board that’s going to be more supportive.’ ” Mumey dismissed any concerns that corporate funding might influence educational content: “No company really wants to be in the education business. If there was a company that was really interested in control, the epitome of that would be Disney. They are the most controlling, and if they’ve been willing to back off and say we’re not controlling the school, I certainly don’t see Quaker Oats saying we need to control the school to contribute to it.” On the other hand, he believed that any company that wants to earn community goodwill “needs to do more than have their plant manager become the chair of the chamber of commerce.” Mumey would advocate a school board putting strong pressure on developers and companies to build a school on any site with more “than a handful of homes.” In line with the Celebration model, Mumey believed that a percentage of the places in these schools (20 percent in the case of Celebration) would be open to all children in the district and would disperse their influence accordingly. The goal was to build schools without raising taxes.

  The Mumey family and their Cottage home on Teal Avenue. (Photo: Jonathan Hayt)

  Acknowledging that Mumey may be an “enlightened candidate,” Anderson judged his views as “politically naive.” “He doesn’t have a prayer,” she added. An orchid grower, she was a businesswoman herself (“I believe in the capitalistic system”), but had learned a lesson, from her experience with Disney, that a “line had to be drawn between private commerce and public education.” Indeed, at an early meeting between the board and TCC officials, she had warned the company, “You really don’t want to deal with us. It’s like mixing oil and water. We’re more trouble than it’s worth.” Anderson, an ex-teacher, was referring to the potential conflicts between private and public interests. Disney, after all, had had very little experience with the public domain. Never once, she maintains, did she worry about the company’s interference in the school curriculum. Other companies in the county would be a different story: “As for some of these developers, I wouldn’t want a penny from them.… They’re not enlightened enough to trust with preserving the freedom of educators.”

  All the current board members (who, in Florida, enjoy a salary greater than that of an entry-level teacher) and many of the district’s school principals shared Mumey’s view that corporate partnerships were relatively benign. “If they want a better product,” said board member Judy Robertson, who raises emus in her family business, “it’s in the company’s interests to contribute.” Was she worried about the potential for using the classroom to promote company products? “People are bombarded by commercialism,” she replied. “Why should schools be any different?” Pete Edwards, chair of the board, as well as of the St. Cloud/Greater Osceola County chamber of commerce, recalled a failed, and admittedly shameless, attempt to interest companies in advertising in county schools: “We would have had final review of the ads, and they would have been tasteful.” A Republican, Edwards was generally keen on corporate partnerships, but, in light of the Celebration experience—“the enhancement funds caused more trouble than it’s worth”—he thought that public authorities would need to come up with much stricter rules about the use of additional private funding to ensure fairness.

  This last point was a relatively minor fiscal matter, but it had become a politically charged issue, resonating throughout the county system. Several school principals whom I interviewed confirmed the intensity of feelings about the subject. Mike Smith, head of Ventura Elementary, verified the countywide perception that all of the rules, from funding to busing, were being bent to accommodate the new school. “Local folks had started out thinking, ‘We’re building a private school for Disney, and that’s not right,’ ” (the district took hundreds of calls to that effect) and pointed out that public relations had not improved much now that the school was built. Along with others on the board, Smith predicted that, in time, it would become a charter or private school.

  As a member of the county’s design team for Celebration School, Candy Parker, principal of Pleasant Hill Elementary, agreed that the concerns about equity had hindered progress, and regretted that some of the initial vision and planning—especially plans for personalized learning and vocational training—had also fallen by the wayside. As for the involvement of the private sector, Parker was of no two minds that “education has shot itself in the foot by shying away from corporations.” Resistance to privatization had been “massively detrimenta
l” and “it’s all coming back to haunt us now, with the charter school movement.”

  Gary Mogensen, head of Hickory Tree Elementary and ex-principal of St. Cloud High, was plainly sympathetic to the aims of Celebration School. He himself had been forced to abandon authentic assessment because of parental opposition among his school’s poor rural residents. Nonetheless, he acknowledged that the promotion of Celebration had come off as high-handed: “It was like the Ugly American in the 1950s, landing in Costa Rica and saying to the locals, ‘Look, we have all these wonderful things we’re going to sell to you.’ ” In particular, the school’s promises about access to advanced technology had ruffled many feathers. Thanks to its corporate donors, Celebration had up to six highspeed T1 Internet connections by now (plus a host of Sun Unix servers and Java stations), while most county schools barely had access to one. But Mogensen reserved his real frustration for the policies of Florida state legislators, devoted to a senseless regime of testing and standards, and for an economic system that had taught children to accept educational failure, poverty, and minimal expectations about their future. If anything, Celebration had the chance of being “a haven of intelligence in the hostile world” created by these legislators. Fond of drawing analogies to fascism, Mogensen felt more and more trapped in the “Nuremberg problem”: “Your leaders are mad and bad, and the more you comply and follow orders, the more you are personally responsible.”

  None of these administrators was opposed, in principle, to corporate sponsors. Even Mogensen had twenty-eight small business partners who contributed, in what he felt were benign ways, to his school. Smith, who personally dislikes advertising, confessed: “If I have to put a Pepsi sign at the entrance to my school, I have no problem with it … as long as there’s no strings attached.” Among the county principals who worked on the Celebration project, only John Beall, the principal of Kissimmee Middle School, drew the line at private sponsorship. He had turned down an offer of Pepsi ads in his school: “I don’t feel comfortable going cap in hand to Home Depot.”