We held this year’s Gala at the barn by the Carlsbad Flower fields, in the barn, and everything glowed under the light of the biggest moon of the year.  It was Cinco de Mayo, too.  The event was a perfect reflection of what a great organization can do because it drew upon diverse groups and individuals and swirled them all onto the same team, smiling all the way—when you see that happening, that’s collaborative leadership, one of our core values, and it was going through the barn roof on Saturday night.  I appreciated, on that night, the chance to tell some stories about the state of the School, and I’m incredibly grateful for how well received those stories were.  This was immediately followed by an astonishing outpouring of philanthropic giving …read on to see the outcome of this…

Ernest Hemingway wrote:  “In springtime there were no problems except where to be happiest.”  This is the time of the 3 Gs at our school:  Grauerpalooza, Gala and Graduation, three of our biggest celebrations of the year – they appear to focus on music, celebration, and life passages, but ultimately they focus on three things even more enduring:  gratitude, gratitude and gratitude.  The paddle raise at the gala this year offered up the chance to launch something permanent and unforgettable in an act of gratitude.   Gift-pledging paddles everywhere across the barn were raised as, in less than 10 minutes, we raised the money needed to fund design development of our new campus.   And yet, what we experienced was clearly more than the launch of an architectural program:  Our parents, students, alumni, patrons, board members are united behind our School’s inexorable arc from local prominence to national and global leadership.

Albert Einstein, who said at least 5 out of my top 10 favorite life quotes, said:  “Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in class.”   Our kids are spending the most dynamic part of their lives on our campus, in our great hall and on the green, in this amazing space of powerful, authentic lessons and values for living in our changing world—way more than “just” class.  As our children pass through, our next and final phase of architecture will secure for them a permanent space, a constant that will remain standing in their lives and memories, like a childhood home, an indelible part of their consciousness and spirit.  Thank you to all of you who turned out not only to high-step and swirl, clap and sing along, celebrate, and join the conversational buzz, but to begin the process of securing a permanent, secure home for real teachers doing real teaching—no doubt, these are getting harder to find around the country these days.  Music teacher Isaac and Counselor Tricia, two stars of the Gala festivities, both comment often:  there is no way they could do what they do in pretty much any other school.  How can we explain this?  Well, I try to every week in this column.

Our gala was a resounding success in every way, a tour de force of all that is extraordinary about our school as we embark upon our second generation.  And if you think this year’s extraordinary gala was a great celebration, wait till you see Phase III:  our finished campus!  The message is clear:  let’s get this school built!

We will start talking to our architects today.

Gala Thanks

For our beautiful, Western themed, successful Gala this year, we thank:

Carol Higgins, incredibly able gala veteran and chair of the auction

Sheila Wirick for doing the program and much of the auction acquisitions along with  , and for leadership in hundreds of ways

Brenda Stevens, Gala co-chair

Jackie Campbell, Auction co-chair,

Liz Ecke, Location chair who spent 1000 to make the flower fields space available and great.

Erin Adams- Decorations chair

Robin Perreault- Class project coordinator

Tam Ashworth – Floral arrangements

Jennifer Hagstrom, Kelly Johnson, Cheryl Pia, who produced the wine gathering event, always one of our most fun evenings.

Diane Jacobs-Baizer,  Wine coordinator

And thank you to all of the chairs and moms for helping setting up and taking down:

Laverne Guetz, Helen Siggurdson, Vanessa Smith , Margie Kuntz, Tara Schroeder, Annie Hutchins, Nancy Rein and Angela Velez

Many more people were involved in the success of this year’s gala, thanked and unthanked, known and behind the scenes.  We can never be certain about our ability to track all the thousands of good works that were done in creating a success this big, and yet we can be completely certain that all of your good works will pay off as we continue to refine our programming and attract and develop the top educators in the region.

Click here for the 2012-2013 Calendar.

Can you believe that our Spring Expeditions are just two weeks away?  While Costa Rica’s participants have already addressed the details of an international trip in a parent meeting, information regarding the other trips will be disseminated via trip packets including itineraries, trip packing lists, and departure/arrival information.  The packets for the Middle School Big-Survivor trip, the Santa Barbara Energy trip, and the local S.D. Nature and the Arts expedition are attached to this newsletter.  Information regarding the Pacific Northwest Trip and the LA Film Intensive will be sent home via email this week.  Please be sure to contact your child’s expedition leader directly if you have ANY trip questions.

Contacts:

Big Sur-vivor – jillianbourdon@grauerschool.com, sophieoller@grauerschool.com

Santa Barbara Energy – morganbrown@grauerschool.com, seanhauze@grauerschool.com

LA Film Intensive – seanpreci@grauerschool.com, johnrubio@grauerschool.com

Pacific Northwest – isaaclangen@grauerschool.com

Costa Rica – dana@grauerschool.com

Local S.D. Nature & the Arts – patriciayoung@grauerschool.com

More Information:

Big Survivor Parent Handout

Santa Barbara Info Packet

San Diego Local Expedition

In over twenty years of writing my column for The Grauer School Newsletter, I’ve almost never been political, but events last week pushed me over the edge.  I’m going to tell the truth this week, and I imagine I could offend some readers, but I will say nothing that does not need saying.

What follows is an instruction manual you could use if you decided to take one of the world’s top public education systems and efficiently make it mediocre in a generation or two:

1.  Abandon any ethics for federal and state budgeting so that you cannot legitimately fund public education (e.g., Bankrupt the national and state treasuries through nonsensical taxation strategies, short sighted pension plan arrangements, terrible banking regulation, foreign wars, etc.)

2.  Declare the local schools poorly managed and politicized, and impose state and federal funding requirements based upon “standards,” which weaken or replace regional distinctions, traditions, innovation, and personalization.

3.  Declare the schools are both failing and fiscally irresponsible; therefore, hire huge corporations such as Pearson to impose testing as well as the curriculum teachers are required to teach in order to prepare students for that testing.  In many cases, contract with corporations to actually take over the governance and/or administration of large school systems.

4.  Instead of core values, aim for the standardized test scores set by national systems such as Korea, China, and Japan (which, ironically, have spent the past two generations attempting to shed that model while aiming for the outgoing educational model of the United States).  In organizing curriculum, prioritize not what can be best taught to our youths, but what can be most efficiently tested—if it is not easy to test, regard it as low in value.

What actually happened last week to drive me over the edge was that Pearson Corporation began implementation of a computerized essay reader; Pearson computers will determine if the rising generation of American students are writing acceptably on nation-wide standardized tests.  This effort to reduce the writing process to a formulaic, non-human, meaningless process is our worst nightmare of technology finally coming true.  The lack of any fanfare as this went down was something I personally find eerie and dark, as though I were an alien witness to some kind of cosmic hypnosis.  Luckily, the general public will become stupider and stupider as all our educational programming degenerates, so less and less people will be bothered.

Public school sizes as well as class sizes have increased relentlessly since the 1970s in our specious search for an economy of scale in education—during that time the number of textbook choices has diminished as conglomerates have taken over the industry.  The idea that there are real and local public schools anymore is a myth:  most large public school systems are now under contract with large corporations in key areas.  Major corporations determine what students study, how they are tested, what they eat, and now they determine the definition of good writing in their drive to produce standardized kids.  American kids:  a monocrop.  As The New York Times describes:  “An American child could go to a public school run by Pearson, studying from books produced by Pearson, while his or her progress is evaluated by Pearson standardized tests. The only public participant in the show would be the taxpayer” (Collins, April 27, 2012).  Add to this Pearson, The College Board, Princeton Review, and other corporations that function as interest groups, funding university schools of education, conference junkets, and grants for items on the research agenda.  In furthering the privatization of American public schools, Apple, Microsoft, and others will surly sink their meat hooks into depleted budgets quickly and deeply–this is imminent.  A spate of on-line charter schools popping up across the country are little more than private taps into to government funding, producing one-dimensional educational programming for a compliance-driven profession easily enthralled by the techno-wow of anything that can be thrown up on a website.  Both of our national political parties are completely complicit in permitting and promoting all of the above forces as they help turn our state and federal taxes into corporate profit centers.

But the tragedy of all this loss of freedom and all this loss of community is trivial compared to the real loss.  When we put technology in charge of determining our progress we are removing the biological basis for experience.  According to The Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, the mind of a human is literally millions of times more complex than that of today’s most advanced computer; electronic grading machines are far from able to deal in things like empathy, passion and consciousness, mankind’s greatest advantages.  Surrendering those in order to come up something more measurable is to lock our own imaginations into the tight circle of rule-bound thought, as though we had set out intentionally to create an autistic mind-set. Measuring student writing and thought in terms of artificial intelligence is the same as trading in mountain trails for treadmills, love for prostitution, joy and grace for greed and efficiency.

Postscript:

In learning about the move made by Pearson last week, I had mixed feelings. I didn’t merely feel trapped and frustrated; in fact, I simultaneously felt happy or proud to be in real, private education—a pure expression of democracy which has become more public than public schools, as our clients all are exerting freedom in choosing us, and we make our decisions based upon student needs rather than corporate profit strategies.  I take this freedom less and less for granted, which increases my gratitude and commitment to it.

This past weekend, Marcus, Lily, Natalie, Eric, Max, Summer, Matt, Nini, Chis Ahrens, and I went South of the Border to the community of El Florida to build a house for a lovely family, Jorge and Esperanza and their five kids.  Their old house, for the seven of them, was a one-room shed made of leftover plywood and corrugated aluminum.  Jorge was badly wounded for recent months from a bite from a black widow spider, so they were quite happy to have us lend them a hand.  We lent 20 hands.  Once again, the Grauer crew was magical: everyone worked hard and smiled the whole way and finished off all the painting and concrete work for the new three bedroom house.  Thanks to Mimi Robinson for setting this up and to Build a Miracle (BAM!).  Our students are the nicest kids I have ever met in the whole world, and I am not exaggerating.  (Check out the photos at the end of the newsletter and also check out our pictures on Facebook!)

Interestingly, a great new article was just published in an education journal on Grauer kids and our School’s service work.  The Community Works Journal is a wonderful publication dedicated to service in schools.  I was this month’s “Feature Writer.”  You will definitely get a big bang out of reading this article called “Digging a Hole.”
Click Here, Take 5 and enjoy:            http://communityworksjournal.org/articles

-Dr. Stuart Grauer

Friday, April 6 (the last day before Spring Break). I did the unthinkable: I forgot my computer.

I could have gone home and gotten it, but people started showing up and here’s what happened next: I noticed them. We talked—people had the most beautiful visions for Spring Break.

I noticed a tree outside the art room was hung with sonnets written by the sevenths graders, and I read them. Audrey’s Hebert’s ended:

Thou doth come in many flavorings
Frothy green bejeweled with rich dark chips
Cinnamon swirls and fresh fruit fit for savoring
But by one kind are all others eclipsed
The cacao bean’s tasteful blossom
Brings the flavor level to truly awesome.

Yes! The poems were fun and fresh and happy. I was really tasting the cinnamon and cacao now.

A physiology class (11th grade) was going to the Neurosciences Institute which was conducting translational research on octopuses and, in general, on primary consciousness. Primary consciousness? I took that to mean a day with no technology, and with a biological basis for experience: a far far more tangled an existence than I can get online—sorry tekkies, but that is profoundly true. There we learned that neuroscientists are attempting to build computer networks and within a year may approach the number of neuronal connections of a common octopus, but still orders of magnitude from the complexity of the human mind.

By 10 AM my photoreceptors were in full gear and, returning to the school, I started worrying about going cold turkey. So when I got back I went straight to the seventh grade. It was break time. Those kids have the purest smiles of any people I’ve ever known, and I was living life by 11 when I got a call from the repairman who was at my house, trying to get in. I went home to let them in and grabbed my computer, returning to school with it. Now I am typing.

Just for a while there that morning, it was Spring Break! Welcome back.

It was Sunday morning and I was reading the NY Times when I remembered:  the point is to savor it, to be steeped in the reading, not just race to the end of each article.  What was to keep the weekend from shutting its steel trap gates, leaving us in the middle of the next marching week, and that ending?

I took the dogs down to the green and tried to embrace the big wind, somehow to be more present and to slow down time.  Not so easy in my business.  In my business, the whole point is kids growing up, leaving home, new ones coming in and growing out, the endless marching.

Thinking back over the past week, one image in particular gave me a sense of how the time can slow down and we can all exist free of the race:  our gathering Friday night.  100 of us all gathered in the Great Hall, board members, new parents, future parents, teachers, just to stop for a minute and reflect on how good we all have it.  For my part, I found that just listening to the stories of parents provided an experience of timelessness, like looking at fine art.

The next time our school is having an event, try this.  Try coming out and hearing people speak of their families and, especially, of their kids and what they are going through.  It’s enduring and deepening, and it stops the clock for a while.  Being in a caring community is what enables us to give meaning to our days.

-Stuart

The New York Times website is visited by about 30 million people per month. I
don’t know how many of them read David Brooks’s column, but “a lot” puts it mildly.
He is definitely a news maker.
So when he covered, in a very recent column, a school in Brooklyn that is focusing
first on teachers who form authentic relationships with students, it gave me pause.
Whoa! Shouldn’t a school where students and teachers interact be just business as usual?
What’s become of our culture when teachers relating to students is front page?

What makes this news? Brooks described this aberrant new school: “It is less like
a factory for learning and more like a postindustrial workshop, or even an extended
family compound. The teachers are not solitary.” That’s it?
“R is a at our school. When we surveyed our faculty last year, “relationships-
based education” was the number one ideal feature cited about our school. Teachers who
form a sort of ensemble with their students is fairly standard operating procedure at The
Grauer School, surely not news. Relationship Driven Education is part of our heritage as
well as a part of our 2011-2015 Strategic Plan.
The quality of our relationships determines the quality of our lives. Our small
school atmosphere promotes meaningful interaction and great conversation, enabling
students to relate closely with peers, teachers and their world. We also have removed
hard-edged department lines found in typical schools, so that teachers can collaborate
effortlessly across departmental lines.
If you’ve noticed how this works, would you be willing to write about it, below?
We’d love to hear your observations.

Did You Leave a Legacy at Your High School?

Our Seniors surely will.  Senior Portfolio Defenses have been going great.  I’m not sure if you know what those are, but we really want you to learn.

Graduating seniors must create and publically defend a portfolio which shows how their time at The Grauer School has exemplified the school’s core values. Our seniors have been presenting beautifully on those values and many have provided examples of legacies they leave to the school, not something I can brag about having done for my high school.  Leaving a legacy is one of the ultimate acts of leadership:  if you do not develop followers how can you be a leader?

Alex Guy (class of 2012) is a good example.  Alex, petitioning in the area of technology for his senior defense, did not mention his 4.83 GPA, perhaps the highest in the school’s history; but he did detail his original proposal on robotics.  Alex took the lead on a proposal to start up the original robotics team at Grauer three years ago, and he even designed the logo—this club has since turned into a full, for-credit class, gone on to world level competitions, grown to a team of about 7 students, and spawned a middle school robotics class.  Alex leaves this as a part of his wonderful legacy, and the fact that he did all of the above in collaboration with (and gratitude for) wonderful classmates and teachers is just part of that legacy.

Mia Sewell (Class of ’12) petitioned to graduate with distinction in leadership and her legacies in this area go far.  Her six years of service as a Grauer Ambassador have resulted in various, visiting families signing on to Grauer.  When her Improv Drama class was foundering, rather than quit, Mia took it over(!), serving as one of the school’s first student teachers.  She was one of the school’s first expedition chaperones, an action that is becoming a Grauer School tradition.  And for her next action, she plans to start up an alumni network to keep alumni connected.  Surely Mia’s legacy will live on.

There have been a series of such portfolio defenses, filled with exciting achievements and legacies.  The Senior Portfolio Defense is a great pride of the school because, after 6 or 7 years at your school, what could be better than being able to stand up before teachers, peers and family and state clearly what you have to show for those years.

If you have not been to a Senior Defense, I invite you to sit in on one with me–give me a call.  The experience of a Senior Defense is guaranteed to deepen your understanding of what great education can do.  You will likely be astonished at how sophisticated, articulate, accomplished, and gracious our seniors have become.

Our seniors have learned values it took many of us far longer to learn, core values like perseverance and rigorous work.  As Sean Bharadwaj, class of 2012, said,  “I’m not going to give up just because it’s hard.”  Believe it.