Ashland High School in Ashland, OR offers alternative learning options right on their campus. The school's goal is to offer a personalized education for all its students, one that allows them to learn in their own way while still being a part of the larger AHS community. I recently interviewed AHS Principal, Michelle Zundel, to get her thoughts on some of our most prominent education issues and to see what AHS is doing to rise above. The following is a brief snapshot of our conversation regarding current options for students as well as insight into possibilities for the future.
K: What are your thoughts on alternative education? It sounds like here, at Ashland High, you are kind of bringing in pieces of alternative education?
Z: I would hope we would end up not needing that term anymore. I believe in personalized education. I believe that every student is unique; that they have interests. Our responsibility is to cultivate talent, and you can’t do that with regular and alternative education. You can do that for each individual if you have personalized education. So, thus, the personal education plan and the student lead conferences: the opportunity to approve learning, you know, outside of the four walls of school.
K: Do you find that there may be some barriers to achieving that?
Z: Mmn hmn. We have two alternative education programs that are part of us. We have never—some school districts create a separate alternative high school that the poor test scores (or what have you) are hidden and housed in the alternative program. Our remarkable scores include our alternative education students. We have a program for ninth and tenth graders that, next year, will be called the Thoreau School (they chose that name). They read To Kill a Mockingbird; they read Camus [laughs], but they are doing it in a different way. And in Catalyst it’s the same thing: the students are doing a project right now creating business plans and studying entrepreneurship. It’s a high level, project-based learning that is very personalized. The kids and their constellation of issues outside of school, be it poverty or drug use or homelessness or mental health issues, are well known and cared for. And, I think it shows in our graduation rates too. Our kids maintain a sense of belonging. Both of those are part-time programs so we are on a block schedule. On “red days” you’ll be in Catalyst and on “white days” you’ll have regular classes with everybody else. So there’s not a sectioning off of people.
K: What else does AHS have going on?
Z: We have an exchange program with Guanajuato and we’re buying plane tickets today [laughs]. Our football team goes to Japan every four years to play in a game, and the Japan team is coming here this summer. Our Mandarin program--any kid that finishes the second year gets to go to China for two weeks in the summer and they have to pay only for their plane ticket. We believe learning can take place beyond the school walls and so we have a proficiency based P.E. system, we have internships, we honor school-to-work, we have students taking classes at SOU, and we have independent study on any topic. We have online classes being offered. We believe that education at the high school level [pause] while we want to maintain community and we understand that the, you know, that the reality of the economy and life in the United States is that people have childcare needs for their five- to eighteen-year-olds. I’ll show you our course selections, but we maintain wood shop and metal shop and mechanics and foods and nutrition. We have a virtual enterprise—we have forty-two student clubs. It is—you know my father came to visit from New Orleans and said “you didn’t tell me that you ran a community college!” [laughs].
K: What aren’t you guys doing here?
Z: I don’t know. Tell me and we’ll do it [laughs]. We want a seamless entry into SOU. One where, if you enter into an AP class that’s articulated with SOU, you’re automatically enrolled in the SOU class so there’s no clunkiness in the system. We want SOU teachers to be able to teach here and our kids to be able to go there. You know what’s educational malpractice in my opinion? That there are 500,000 high tech jobs that are going unfilled in this country, and that there hasn’t been significant federal and state money poured into technology classes at the high school level. I put out in our course guide a programming class to see if there was student interest. Not knowing how I was going to fund it, not knowing who the teachers would be. Ninety students signed up for it. It’s going to be offered next year, and we’re figuring it out. But that’s without any extra money. And no one is doing it well. And high schools and colleges are not geared up. Look at the offerings in computer science.
K: I will. I never even took a computer science class in middle or high school [laughs], and that was a while ago. Technology changes. It has changed a great deal since then—and still, why aren't we moving with this?
Z: Shouldn’t that be a part of the core requirement, you know, a freshmen survey course in computers—applications as well as programming as well [pause] we all need to interface with them. Why aren’t we doing that? Well, the answer is that we’re required to provide all of these classes for graduation, and in order to replace—introduce programming without any new money we have to cut something else. So, we’re unwilling to cut the arts, we’re unwilling to cut our language offerings, we’re unwilling to cut some of those other things that I guess are optional. But seem really worthwhile. Why isn’t our country graduating people from high school and college who are bilingual? Who didn’t come in—first of all—not knowing English. Those are really the kids who graduate bilingual. Other countries—do you know, Madagascar (I’m pretty sure that’s where that was)—Madagascar offers English from Kindergarten.
K: It makes sense.
Z: So, we’re the richest economy in the world and we could afford it.
K: Mmn hmn. Yeah.
Z: But there’s not yet the institutional will. And we kind of like it that everybody has to speak English. It’s really ethnocentric of us. So, that’s a big deal. The other big deal that has not come up is about diversity and inclusion. There is a nationwide shortage of people of color who are teachers. And so one of the things that I’m talking to _________ is some way of creating a Southern Oregon pipeline where students of color are selected in high school, recruited, and then possibly go to SOU for undergrad and get a free MAT. Because teachers in the United States are 80%--no, I’m sorry—80% white, and that doesn’t serve our students. That’s not the complexion of the United States. And it’s a lack of imagination and institutional will that keeps it that way. At this national conference I found out that 17% of administrators in high schools are women and 20% of superintendents in the nation are women. And, so there’s work to do within education stop this goofy rhetoric about “the sky is falling” because really extraordinary things are happening all over the country and we’re educating more students to higher levels than we ever have been. Get people excited about becoming teachers, and go from there.
K: I can tell you’re really passionate about this.
Z: [Laughs] I see so much possibility and I think that it is—we make choices about how we choose to live, and we either choose to live with—in the face of possibility or we resolve to being victims of state funding or any number of excuses.
*Image Credit: "Independent Study." Portland State University. 2015. Web. 12 June 2015.
Z: I would hope we would end up not needing that term anymore. I believe in personalized education. I believe that every student is unique; that they have interests. Our responsibility is to cultivate talent, and you can’t do that with regular and alternative education. You can do that for each individual if you have personalized education. So, thus, the personal education plan and the student lead conferences: the opportunity to approve learning, you know, outside of the four walls of school.
K: Do you find that there may be some barriers to achieving that?
Z: Mmn hmn. We have two alternative education programs that are part of us. We have never—some school districts create a separate alternative high school that the poor test scores (or what have you) are hidden and housed in the alternative program. Our remarkable scores include our alternative education students. We have a program for ninth and tenth graders that, next year, will be called the Thoreau School (they chose that name). They read To Kill a Mockingbird; they read Camus [laughs], but they are doing it in a different way. And in Catalyst it’s the same thing: the students are doing a project right now creating business plans and studying entrepreneurship. It’s a high level, project-based learning that is very personalized. The kids and their constellation of issues outside of school, be it poverty or drug use or homelessness or mental health issues, are well known and cared for. And, I think it shows in our graduation rates too. Our kids maintain a sense of belonging. Both of those are part-time programs so we are on a block schedule. On “red days” you’ll be in Catalyst and on “white days” you’ll have regular classes with everybody else. So there’s not a sectioning off of people.
K: What else does AHS have going on?
Z: We have an exchange program with Guanajuato and we’re buying plane tickets today [laughs]. Our football team goes to Japan every four years to play in a game, and the Japan team is coming here this summer. Our Mandarin program--any kid that finishes the second year gets to go to China for two weeks in the summer and they have to pay only for their plane ticket. We believe learning can take place beyond the school walls and so we have a proficiency based P.E. system, we have internships, we honor school-to-work, we have students taking classes at SOU, and we have independent study on any topic. We have online classes being offered. We believe that education at the high school level [pause] while we want to maintain community and we understand that the, you know, that the reality of the economy and life in the United States is that people have childcare needs for their five- to eighteen-year-olds. I’ll show you our course selections, but we maintain wood shop and metal shop and mechanics and foods and nutrition. We have a virtual enterprise—we have forty-two student clubs. It is—you know my father came to visit from New Orleans and said “you didn’t tell me that you ran a community college!” [laughs].
K: What aren’t you guys doing here?
Z: I don’t know. Tell me and we’ll do it [laughs]. We want a seamless entry into SOU. One where, if you enter into an AP class that’s articulated with SOU, you’re automatically enrolled in the SOU class so there’s no clunkiness in the system. We want SOU teachers to be able to teach here and our kids to be able to go there. You know what’s educational malpractice in my opinion? That there are 500,000 high tech jobs that are going unfilled in this country, and that there hasn’t been significant federal and state money poured into technology classes at the high school level. I put out in our course guide a programming class to see if there was student interest. Not knowing how I was going to fund it, not knowing who the teachers would be. Ninety students signed up for it. It’s going to be offered next year, and we’re figuring it out. But that’s without any extra money. And no one is doing it well. And high schools and colleges are not geared up. Look at the offerings in computer science.
K: I will. I never even took a computer science class in middle or high school [laughs], and that was a while ago. Technology changes. It has changed a great deal since then—and still, why aren't we moving with this?
Z: Shouldn’t that be a part of the core requirement, you know, a freshmen survey course in computers—applications as well as programming as well [pause] we all need to interface with them. Why aren’t we doing that? Well, the answer is that we’re required to provide all of these classes for graduation, and in order to replace—introduce programming without any new money we have to cut something else. So, we’re unwilling to cut the arts, we’re unwilling to cut our language offerings, we’re unwilling to cut some of those other things that I guess are optional. But seem really worthwhile. Why isn’t our country graduating people from high school and college who are bilingual? Who didn’t come in—first of all—not knowing English. Those are really the kids who graduate bilingual. Other countries—do you know, Madagascar (I’m pretty sure that’s where that was)—Madagascar offers English from Kindergarten.
K: It makes sense.
Z: So, we’re the richest economy in the world and we could afford it.
K: Mmn hmn. Yeah.
Z: But there’s not yet the institutional will. And we kind of like it that everybody has to speak English. It’s really ethnocentric of us. So, that’s a big deal. The other big deal that has not come up is about diversity and inclusion. There is a nationwide shortage of people of color who are teachers. And so one of the things that I’m talking to _________ is some way of creating a Southern Oregon pipeline where students of color are selected in high school, recruited, and then possibly go to SOU for undergrad and get a free MAT. Because teachers in the United States are 80%--no, I’m sorry—80% white, and that doesn’t serve our students. That’s not the complexion of the United States. And it’s a lack of imagination and institutional will that keeps it that way. At this national conference I found out that 17% of administrators in high schools are women and 20% of superintendents in the nation are women. And, so there’s work to do within education stop this goofy rhetoric about “the sky is falling” because really extraordinary things are happening all over the country and we’re educating more students to higher levels than we ever have been. Get people excited about becoming teachers, and go from there.
K: I can tell you’re really passionate about this.
Z: [Laughs] I see so much possibility and I think that it is—we make choices about how we choose to live, and we either choose to live with—in the face of possibility or we resolve to being victims of state funding or any number of excuses.
*Image Credit: "Independent Study." Portland State University. 2015. Web. 12 June 2015.