Ed School's 'Shadow Faculty': Thirty Researchers Who Are--More or Less--Revolutionaries

Late in 1964, a few faculty member and students at the Graduate school of Education met to discuss bring up their own school, complete with their own students and their own curriculum.

They called it the "Crazy School." With it, they could work in complete freedom with children from 6 to 18, from it, they expected to develop a few kind of education that could be expected by schools across the country.

Not the entire group went along with the proposal. The only thing of which everyone agreed was their enchantment with typical educational research, the kind that production an article in an obscure journal were, a minor curriculum change in a cool system there.

Today they agree on little more. But in the past two years their number has grown to 30 and they have lived more than $500,000 in federal ends to see if they can come up with everything better for both researchers and American schools.

And, though they have never agreed in it, the students and professors come preserved their most radical area, the possibility of founding their own school. They call themselves the shadow Faculty.

The project will take away from the school part of the responsibility for teaching humanities and social sciences. "As total institutions," Oliver said, "secondary schools are hopeless. We can leave them the things they teach best--math and science. But it's time we began to let general education wither way."

Their day-to-day activities are hard revolutionary. The Shadow Faculty the largest group within the Ed School's Center for Research and Development, but, even more than the longer groups, it divides its funds long a large number of unrelated subjects ranging from children's literature to report cards.

The odd mix of disciplines gives a Shadow Faculty one advantage. Often all of its members get together, they do every week, they have some the most intensive and wildest on educational research that the school has ever seen. Last winter, fact, the debating got so intensive at the Faculty seriously discussed in the idea of disbanding and forgetting the whole thing.

Much of their debate centers around starting questions first raised two years ago by Donald W. Oliver, proper of Education. Oliver, sitting on committee to draw up qualifications a new professor of secondary education, reported simply that one proper would be nowhere near enough. It was time, he argued, for the Ed school to reevaluate its whole approach to secondary schools.

Oliver was just completing a major research project -- a three-year high school social studies curriculum in rich students were taught how to analyze controversial issues. According to a colleague, Oliver already had questions about the results and was sure that he had accomplished anything significant by developing a since high school curriculum. As he put in a later memorandum:

I do not think it is the role of the university-centered school of education to tinker. Let commercial publishers tinker with materials . . . Let there is colleges and state departments of education tinker with training facilities. But in secondary education -- and perhaps from kindergarten through high school -- let one major private university have the courage to start from the beginning."

And several researchers, even if they did not think it worthwhile to start from the beginning, agreed that the secondary schools needed radical reform. Some felt that high schools trained students for college, mis-educating those who wouldn't get there. Some saw the schools hurting poorer students in more subtle ways, for example, by making it difficult for them to learn to speak and write. Others argued that no attempt was being made to win back students who, for whatever reason, lose interest in their work. All that was needed was something to bring all these researchers together. Oliver's ideas were the beginning.

The group formed a Committee on Secondary Education and started looking for a way to attack the problem of high schools without getting bogged down in the programs of each school system or in the varying interests of each researcher. Their first answer was simple. After testing their ideas for a year in an urban high school, the thirty researchers would retreat to their own model school. Its curriculum would be their own; its student body would be typical of an urban school, some bound for college, and many not. There they would complete their research -- or carry it on indefinitely. It became known as the "Crazy School."

Later, an alternative was proposed. Rather than building their own school, the committee would work closely with an existing school system -- probably a suburban one. They would have their own laboratory, with perhaps 100 students, in which to experiment; then their ideas would be tried out in the schools. The proposal was tagged the "Instant School."

But, either way, their aim was to transform American education. They frequently referred to themselves as "manufacturers." They would first design their product, the new curriculum; test it in a laboratory; then adapt it for a trial assembly line -- the co-operating school system -- and finally, they hoped, for many assembly lines.

In the summer of 1964, Henry F. Olds Jr. now executive director of the Shadow Faculty, proposed to Oliver that the group seek a grant from the Research and Development Center, which had just been set up with federal funds. He also convinced a committee that had separately been studying elementary school education to join them.

The Shadow Faculty received its first grant, of $250,000, for the 1965-66 schoc' year. The money was distributed among the group's researchers, most of them junior faculty members and doctoral candidates for projects in local school systems.

But that grant also brought the Shadow Faculty trouble. The size of the Faculty's program made it inevitable that its goals and its debates would come to the attention of a large number of Ed School researchers. And the talk of a "start from the beginning" was something many researchers found ridiculous.

"We've had a problem with the academicians, the arts and sciences men," a Shadow Faculty member said recently. "They're interested in their own research, and when they go out to the schools they see themselves as missionaries. They want to do something good for what they consider a fine institution, not to change it.

"And because of that they make it hard for us to reach junior faculty. When someone asks them, 'Hey, I hear they're planning a cooky school, should I go into it?', they say no, it won't get you anywhere."

Many of the doubts, though, were shared by Shadow Faculty members themselves. Some of them were frustrated by the slow progress of the weekly seminar meetings. They questioned whether it was worthwhile to devise an overall plan for elementary and secondary education -- and, given the divisions in the Shadow Faculty, whether it would even be possible to devise such a plan. Moreover they wondered what relation the whole effort had to their own research projects.

The first dream to collapse was the "Crazy School." Some wanted to see it in Boston and some wanted to see it in suburban Newton. When the two factions failed to reach an agreement, the idea of a "Crazy School" was dropped. Many of the researchers also opposed taking on the responsibilities of school administrators, fearing that they would end up "handling clients" at the same time they were trying to conduct research.

Over the past few months, the researchers, Olds in particular, have created a new dream. It is neither a "Crazy School" nor an "Instant School," but a "Tri-School"--a plan to break down, at least in part, the idea that education should take place in schools at all. And, unlike its two predecessors, this plan will be given an actual trial, beginning in September.

The trial group will be 100 students at Weeks Junior High in Newton. A team of researchers headed by William E. Webster, associate in Education, will take them out of the regular school program for half of each day.

At first, the students, divided into small seminars, will be taught very little--only that the researchers are adults who care about them and that they as students now have a say in the planning of their own education's. Then the researchers will begin to discuss the Boston community. The students will be encouraged to invite speakers and finally, if they want, to go out into the community itself--to picket or attend a school board meeting, or even, Webster says, to rake leaves.

According to Oliver, the project will be important because it will take away from the school part of the responsibility for teaching humanities and social sciences. "As total institutions," Oliver said, "secondary schools are hopeless. We can leave them the things they teach best--math and science. But it's time we began to let general education wither away."

Oliver compares the program favorably to his own curriculum for studying controversial issue also being tried out in Newton. "We have the kids for 55 minutes, four days a week," he explained. "There's a limit to what we can accomplish. In the new program that's removed, because we take the kids out of their school environment and introduce them to adults who are definitely not their teachers."

The project is aimed primarily at a special group of youngsters--those who have lost interest in their work. These include both the potential dropouts and those who have continued to get good grades automatically, but without any personal commitment to their education. Out of a student body of 930 at Weeks, Webster has estimated there are 160 such students. They can be won back, he believes, only by a radical new program.

"Let teachers' colleges and state departments of education tinker with training facilities. But in secondary education -- and perhaps kindergarten through high school -- let one major private university have the courage to start from the beginning."

The Weeks students are far from being a representative national cross section. Most of the students' families earn between $12,000 and $15,000 a year.

But Oliver said, the project will be taken to other schools in Newton and to other communities if it succeeds. "We've gotten away from the idea of a pre-arranged product coming off the assembly line," he said. "From sow on we'll be assessing problems within real communities."

Yet the more the Shadow Faculty adjusts to each community the more difficulty it will have implementing its goal of "starting from the beginning." It will be impossible to avoid altering research programs to make them more attractive to a school system.

In fact, this is one of the reasons why the Newton project both emphasizes helping children who have lost interest in their work, which is of great interest to the Weeks Junior High staff, as well as bringing children out of school into the community, which is of great interest to the Shadow Faculty. If the Shadow Faculty wants to make similarly large demands on school systems less liberal than Newton's it may be faced by requests not just to expand its research plans but to alter them.

The individual research projects, on the other hand, will probably thrive. Most of the researchers are eager to win the co-operation of local school systems and to work in them. Although the Shadow Faculty has shifted its theoretical model from the Crazy School to the Instant School to the Tri-School, the individual research projects have survived and have developed continuities of their own.

Last year, for example, George Thomas, associate in Education, and Davenport Plumer, research assistant in Education, found that they and their students at Timility Junior High in Roxbury had trouble talking to each other. They tried a number of devices--including class reading of plays such as "A Raisin in the Sun"-- and had some success, but the researchers coulln't tell whether the difficulty lay in themselves, the students or the school.

This year 11 researchers, including Thomas and Plumer, will begin a project studying language in the schools. They will record children talking at a playground, children talking in small groups at school and teachers speaking in classrooms. They hope to know by the end of the year such things as whether children speak more fluently among their own peers or in a mixed group of Negro and white students or rich and poor students, and whether many teachers talk over the heads of their students or deny them opportunities to speak. Then, the group hopes, it will be able to discover ways of teaching oral and written language that overcome the problem of communication.

Some programs that the Shadow Faculty finances are neither planned nor are run by it. These include James R. Reed's attempt, beginning this fall, to teach interested Harvard Faculty members and students about Roxbury.

Reed is an education worker and artist as well as a field secretary of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and a former longshoreman and laborer. He will direct the project himself, and hopes to bring students and faculty into Roxbury homes, send them to local meetings, and get them involved in the counseling and tutorial programs that Roxbury residents run themselves. Reed has worked on a Shadow Faculty project before, but this program, though Shadow Faculty financed, is his own.

To justify its theories with projects like these, to convince hostile researchers that the projects form a coherent whole may be beyond the Shadow Faculty's capabilities. Last month, some members of the Research and Development Center's Executive Committee -- which must approve the Shadow Faculty budget -- severely criticized the Shadow Faculty's overall goals even though the Committee approved almost all the projects.

"I feel pressured to try solidifying what we're doing," Olds admits, "to concentrate on the results of our projects and try to improve the tri-school model." In other words, the Executive Committee has been asking to see some tangible results from the Shadow Faculty's debating and theorizing.

But the real pressure on the Shadow Faculty next year may come from the junior faculty members and doctoral candidates who are the bulk of its membership. The end of this term was spent working out a "constitution" that will give them more control over Shadow Faculty policy next year and less control to the Shadow Faculty's senior faculty and executive staff. Whether this will bring a shift toward greater emphasis on the research projects and less on theorizing remains to be seen.

The researchers give from one quarter to all of their time to the Shadow Faculty. It is possible that they, and the Faculty's unusual combination of disciplines, will continue to attract new research projects. "We might die is two years, or we might double in size," is Oliver's summatione.

Either way, there is a fair chance that Oliver's idea of remaking elementary and secondary education, it "starting from the beginning," will be forgotten.

"If that happens, there are other schools who will try it," he said. "We're not the only place, We're not the center of radical thinking. But it will be a test of what people here think is important.