The schools that Katrina built
飓风建起来的学校
“Hey, guy, tuck your shirt in, yeah?” The boy scurrying across the cafeteria of Samuel J Green Charter School mumbles an apology, and tidies away the trailing flap of his white shirt. Jay Altman gives a satisfied nod, bends to pick up a stray piece of litter on the floor, and then continues on his way.
“嘿，伙计，把衣服束起来好吗？”在塞缪尔格林特许学校，一个小男生匆匆穿过餐厅，一边嘴上嘟哝着道了个歉，一边整理好白衬衫松出来的衣角。Jay Altman满意地点了点头，弯下腰捡起了地下的一片垃圾，然后继续往前走。
Samuel J Green feels like the kind of place you’d want to send your own children to. The pupils – ranging from the five-year-olds in kindergarten to 14-year-olds about to head off to high school – are bright, enthusiastic, neatly turned out in their dark green uniforms. The school’s red-brick facade is gleamingly clean.
塞缪尔格林让人感觉就是那种你想把自己孩子送去的地方。那里穿着墨绿色校服的学生——无论是那些才5岁的幼儿园学生，还是那些已经14岁快要上高中的学生——都显得那么聪明、整洁，而且充满活力。学校的那些红砖建筑外表都干净得发亮。
In the cafeteria, there are plastic compost buckets on every table, which will shortly be taken out to the “living playground” – the large garden that takes up much of the space behind the school, where the pupils learn to grow herbs and plants, or take lessons about nutrition in the shade of a vine-strewn canopy under the Louisiana sun.
餐厅里，每个餐桌旁都放着塑料有机堆肥桶，它们很快会被搬到“生活乐园”上去清空。“生活乐园”是一个占去学校后面大部分面积的大花园，学生在那儿学习种植各种香草和植物，在路易斯安那的阳光下藤曼遮蔽的树荫里了解植物营养学。
But there are several startling things about this school, one of five that Altman’s chain, FirstLine Schools, oversees. For one thing, there this used to be one of the worst schools, in one of the worst neighbourhoods, in one of the worst cities, in one of the worst states, in America. For another, 10 years ago Samuel J Green was underwater not just metaphorically but literally: on the cafeteria wall is a shoulder-high line, painted on to show where the waters reached their height in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. And its remarkable recovery – and that of the New Orleans school system as a whole – took place not despite that disaster, but largely because of it.
这所学校是Altman名为“前线学校”的学校联盟所监督的五所学校之一，在这里发生了一些令人惊讶的事。例如，它位于全美最糟糕的州里最糟糕的城市，曾经是全市最糟糕地段里最糟糕的学校之一。 另外，十年前这所学校还遭受了灭顶之灾，这不是一个比喻，而是一个事实——在学校餐厅的墙上，画了一条齐肩高的线，标示着在卡特里娜飓风肆虐后洪水达到的高度。而它令人瞩目的复兴——和整个新奥尔良校网的复兴——不仅是因为克服了巨大的困难，而且很大程度上是得益于这次灾难。
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The story starts back in 1992, when Altman and his friend Tony Recasner, along with a group of other teachers, parents and activists, founded the James Lewis Extension school – a charter school (the equivalent of the UK’s free schools and academies) before such a thing even existed. It wasn’t meant to be the start of a movement: they just wanted to prove you could run a decent school without cherry-picking the pupils, and increase the life chances of some of the poorest families in New Orleans in the process. The key, Altman says, was to focus on the “middle school” years between 11 and 14, “because that’s where the big dip comes”, as rich students start to pull away from poor ones.
事情要回溯到1992年，那时Altman和朋友Tony Recasner联合了一班教师、家长和社会活动家，创立了詹姆斯刘易斯附属学校。这是一所特许学校（相当于英国的自由学校或自由学院），只是当时还没有这种说法。他们并没想开启一场运动，只是想证明，就算不对学生精挑细选，也一样可以办一所像样的学校，同时也可以为新奥尔良穷困家庭的孩子增加改变命运的机会。Altman说，其中的关键在于狠抓11岁到14岁这一段初中时期，“因为这是开始沉沦的年纪”，家庭富裕的学生开始甩下贫困的同学。
James Lewis was an enormous success: six years later, it became the first official charter school in New Orleans. In 2005, their group – then called Middle School Advocates, but now known as FirstLine Schools – was asked by the state to take over Samuel J Green. “It was out of control, it was chaotic,” recalls Altman. He actually advised Recasner to say no: “Don’t take over that school, that school will kill you.” But Recasner, who’d grown up in the neighbourhood, wanted to give something back.
詹姆斯刘易斯学校取得了巨大的成功，六年之后，它成为了新奥尔良第一所正式的特许学校。2005年，州政府邀请他们当时名为“剑指初中”的学校联盟（如今已更名为“前线学校”）， 接手萨缪尔格林。Altman回忆道，“那时候这学校失去了控制，简直乱作一团。”他实际上还建议Recasner回绝这一请求：“不要接那所学校，它会害死你的。”但在那一区长大的Rescasner，希望能对那里有所回馈。
By this stage, Altman was a hot commodity in education – and was recruited by the ARK charity to help bring the charter school ethos to its nascent network in the UK. But then fate intervened. “We moved in June 2005, and the levees broke here in August.” New Orleans essentially shut down: schools were boarded up with no idea of when, or whether, they would be reopened. James Lewis, by now renamed the New Orleans Charter Middle School, never was, because there was no longer a neighbourhood for it to serve.
那时候，Altman在教育界炙手可热——无保留援助儿童基金会邀请他，希望他能将特许学校的经验带到他们在英国的新兴校网去。但天意难料，“我们2005年6月进驻学校，洪水8月就来了。”新奥尔良基本上陷于瘫痪：学校被木板封门，也不知道何时能够重开，甚至还会否重开。当时已更名为新奥尔良特许初中的詹姆斯刘易斯中学，就再没有重开过，因为它所服务的社区已不复存在。
But amid this disaster, there was an opportunity. Back in 2003, Louisiana had passed a controversial law declaring New Orleans into a Recovery School District – essentially, an admission that the city’s education system was not fit for purpose. There were too many bad schools, bumping along at the bottom, and letting down their pupils in the process.
但灾难之中也有转机。在之前的2003年，路易斯安那州通过了一条有争议的法案，宣布新奥尔良为“学校重建区”——这实际上承认了该市的教育系统不如人意。糟糕的学校实在是太多了，它们把学生也拉进了泥潭，一同在底层挣扎。
Under the legislation, any school that did not meet basic standards could be taken over by those promising to do a better job: exactly what happened at Samuel J Green. Yet progress was glacial – until Katrina.
在这条法案下，那些达不到基本要求的学校，可以由那些承诺做得更好的人来接管：塞缪尔格林正是案例之一。但事情的进展极其缓慢，直到飓风卡特里娜的出现。
As it rebuilt, New Orleans decided to break with tradition. Instead of rebuilding the school system, it decided to set up what Altman calls “a system of schools”. Now, more than 95 per cent of public schools in the city are charter schools. Each has the freedom to specialise; each is open to any pupil in the city, with long yellow school buses ferrying them back and forth; and each is accountable for meeting those minimum standards. FirstLine now has 3,000 pupils at its four schools.
新奥尔良决定在重建中打破常规。与其重建单独的一所所学校，政府决定要像Altman所说的那样，重建一个有机结合的学校网络。如今，该市超过95%的公立学校是特许学校，每个学校都可以决定各自的特色，也可以在全市范围内招生，由黄色校巴负责每日接送，每个学校都需要就是否达到基本标准而接受问责。如今在“前线学校”属下的四所学校里已经有3,000学生。
If this sounds familiar to British readers, it’s because this was – consciously – the same recipe of choice, autonomy and accountability that powered the free schools and academies reforms in the UK, as well as other charter school movements in the US. The move was bitterly contested – but the results are impossible to argue with.
这对英国读者来说也许并不陌生，因为这有意识地借鉴了催生了自由学校与学院的英国教育改革的自由择校、自主办学与可问责三原则，而且同样的原则也推动了美国其他地方的特许学校热潮。这一举措本身充满争议，但其效果却无可辩驳。
As we sit in the shade of Samuel J Green’s “Living Playground” – on the exact spot where a powerboat washed up in the wake of Katrina – Altman shows me the figures. In 2005, 62 per cent of New Orleans schools were judged to be “failing”. Now, the figure is 7 per cent – even though the benchmarks for failure are tougher. A decade ago, 35 per cent of pupils were reaching basic standards, 23 per cent below the average across Louisiana as a whole. Now the figure is 62 per cent, and the gap is just six points. The proportion of disabled students hitting the same benchmarks has gone from 11 per cent to 39 per cent – and the gap with the state average has gone from 23 points to two. New Orleans has, in short, seen the most significant educational improvements of any city in America.
我们坐在塞缪尔格林那“生活乐园”的树荫下——当年有一艘快艇被卡特里娜一直冲到了这里——Altman让我看了一组数字。2005年，新奥尔良的学校里有62%被评定为“不及格”。现在，尽管标准比以前更严格，该百分比仍然降到了7%。十年前，只有35%的学生达到基本标准，比路易斯安那州整体平均水平要低23个百分点。如今达标的比例是62%，与全州差距仅剩6个百分点。残疾学生达到同样标准的比例从11%上升到39%，与全州平均水平的差距也从23个百分点降到了2个百分点。简而言之，新奥尔良的教育改善幅度在全美的城市中首屈一指。
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The lessons of Samuel J Green are not just about exam results, however. What shines through above all is its devotion to character. Since 95 per cent of the pupils are African-American – and 95 per cent are on free school meals – the hallways are festooned with inspirational pictures of pioneering figures: the first black president, the first black senator, the first black ballet superstar. Banners dangle from the roof containing inspirational quotes, stressing the virtues of manners, self-discipline, ambition. The walls are decorated with the pennants of universities from across America, after which the classrooms are named.
塞缪尔格林的经验并不仅仅体现在考试成绩，其亮点在于对品格的追求。由于95%的学生是非洲裔——由学校提供免费膳食的学生也达到了95%——走廊上挂着前辈们的励志照片：第一位黑人总统、第一位黑人参议员、第一位黑人芭蕾巨星。屋顶上悬挂的标语也是励志的名言，宣扬着美德、自律与梦想。墙壁上点缀着全美各所大学的校旗，教室也以这些大学来命名。
Most pointedly, the year groups are labelled “2024”, “2025”, “2026” – the years that these children will graduate not from high school, but university. Everything about the place is designed to ram home the message that going to college is not a rarity for these kids (as, statistically, it still is) but their natural and inevitable destiny.
最引人瞩目的是，学校特意用“2024”、“2025”、“2026”来标识年级——那不是孩子们从高中毕业的年份，而是从大学毕业的年份。这里的所有东西都旨在让这些孩子们明白，上大学对于他们来说并不是小概率事件（尽管目前的统计数据仍然如此），而是很自然的，甚至是理所应当的。
So what can others – such as the UK – learn from New Orleans? There are, obviously, special factors at play, from changes in the city’s demographics after Katrina to the determination, not just in New Orleans but more broadly, to build something better after the disaster. When FirstLine decided to tear up Samuel J Green’s concrete playground, Alice Waters, the gastro-goddess who created California’s Chez Panisse restaurant, helped plan the garden. The New Orleans Saints, the local football team, helped pay for the all-weather sports pitch in the other corner of the playground – and their star quarterback, Drew Brees, chipped in towards the kitchen classroom, as did celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse.
那么其他地方，比如英国，可以从新奥尔良学到什么呢？当然，很多特别的因素在这里起作用，从卡特里娜后这个城市的人口结构变化，到这城市内外希望灾后重建更胜以前的决心。当“前线学校”决定敲开塞缪尔格林的混凝土操场时，创建了加州Chez Panisse餐厅的女厨神Alice Waters帮忙规划花园。当地橄榄球队新奥尔良圣徒队捐助操场另一角的全天候运动场，而他们的明星四分卫Drew Brees则与名厨Emeril Lagasse共同资助了烹饪教室。
Some of the more general lessons have already been learned. For school reformers in the UK, New Orleans is further proof of the importance of autonomy, accountability and diversity: of giving schools the freedom to build themselves around a particular vision or specialism, but forcing them to meet certain standards at the same time.
人们已经从中得到某些更有普遍性的经验教训。对于英国的学校改革者来说，新奥尔良再次证明了自主权、问责制和多样性的重要性——给学校予自由空间，根据各自的愿景和特点建校，但同时要求他们达到某些标准。
FirstLine, for example, uses its Living Playground to teach kids about nutrition, biology and stewardship of the natural world, but other charters have another focus: the Bricolage Academy, says its head Josh Densen, is built around “creating innovators and creative problem solvers” – it has “an innovation classroom where we teach engineering and design and computer coding and electrical circuitry and robotics”, growing in complexity as the children advance from kindergarten. Teaching practices also vary: where FirstLine uses a split classroom, in which some kids talk to the teacher, others work on problems, and others work on computers to the side, Bricolage takes a workshop approach, “which we find drives learning better than traditional instruction”.
例如，前线学校利用生活乐园来向学生们教授营养学、生物学和园艺，但其它特许学校有别的侧重点：Bricolage 学院的校长Josh Densen说，他们学校的建校宗旨是“培养创造性解决问题的创新者”——学校“有一个创意课堂，在那里我们教授工程、设计、计算机编程、电子电路和机器人技术”，随着孩子们从幼儿园一路升学，课程的难度也随之加深。学校的教学方法也多种多样：前线学校采用分组学习的形式，一部分孩子与老师讨论，一部分孩子做题，其余的就可以使用旁边的电脑。而Bricolage 学院则采用讨论会的形式，“我们发现这种方式比传统授课更有助于学习。”
Another lesson is the importance of finding – and developing – teaching talent. While he was in the UK, Altman worked with Sir Iain Hall, founder of the King’s Leadership Academy in Warrington, to set up Future Leaders, in order to train and promote the very best teachers, including those who have come in via direct-entry programmes such as Teach First, Schools Direct or Teach for America. Altman explains that “one of the things we’re trying this year – and this is really experimental – is giving our lead teachers a four-day week, so they can come together one day a week for shared planning and professional development”.
另一个经验是发掘和培养教育人才的重要性。当年在英国的时候，Altman就和沃灵顿英皇领导学院的创办人Iain Hall爵士共同设立了公益组织“未来领袖”，旨在培训和选拔最出色的教师，当中包括来自直接衔接项目“教育第一”“名校指导”以及“教育为美国”的教师。Altman解释道，“我们今年尝试的事情之一——这还只是实验性的——是让我们的骨干教师一周工作四天，以令他们每周能有一天聚在一起，学习共同规划，接受专业培训”
The growth of diversity in the education system will also, its architects hope, lead to cross-fertilisation, as experiments such as Altman’s four-day week are evaluated by others. Even just spending a morning at Samuel J Green, it is easy to see ideas that could be profitably employed elsewhere: assessing the performance of each class every week, not every term, to enable regular course-correction and adapt to their needs; letting parents access their children’s computerised learning programmes from home; getting each class to do 10 minutes of exercise every few hours (done, as I see when I tour the classrooms, by getting them to dance along with pop videos); using education technology, which is finally starting to live up to its promise after years of wildly overstated claims for its effects.
它的设计者们希望，随着像Altman的每周四天授课的这类实验接受他人的评估，这个教育体系日趋多样，能够促进相互学习。哪怕只是在塞缪尔格林呆一个上午，也很容易观察到那些可以推广到别处的理念：每周评估各班的表现，而不是每个学期一次，以确保能及时纠正偏差，根据需要进行调整；让家长在家就可以了解孩子的电脑化的课程设置；让各个班级每几个小时就活动十分钟（确有做到，当我参观教室时，就看到学生们跟着流行曲的录像跳舞）；使用电子教学，这些高科技手段的效果多年来被过分地夸大，如今终于开始达到预期效果了。
Above all, however, Samuel J Green is tribute to the power of a single idea.
然而最重要的是，萨缪尔格林体现了一种简单理念的力量。
“People, whether they’re conscious of it or not, have these biases around low-income students and students from deprived areas,” says Altman. The guiding principle of FirstLine is “this real belief in the potential of all young people… a real sense of shared moral purpose”.
“不管他们自己是否意识到，人们对低收入与来自贫困地区的学生总是存在着各种的偏见，”Altman说道。“前线学校”的办学原则就是“坚信所有年轻人的潜力……和共同的道德追求”。
In New Orleans, those problems are usually linked to race – but in Britain, the culprit is more often class, especially in the former industrial areas of the North.
在新奥尔良，那些问题通常会与种族联系起来。但在英国，问题的根源更多是社会阶层，尤其在北部的老工业区。
“In the whole of the OECD, there’s a bigger correlation between parental income and child aspiration and success in the UK than anywhere else,” says Sir Iain Hall, who is now CEO of the Great Schools Trust. “If you’re a young child in a three-generation household, where there’s been no employment for a long time, aspiration’s died. You have to break through that aspirational poverty to get the child to say ‘I can succeed despite these circumstances’.”
“在经合组织内，英国的父母收入与子女的抱负和成就的相关性比其他国家更强，”现在担任伟大学校慈善信托CEO的 Iain Hall爵士说。“如果一个小孩子家里三代同堂，家人长期没有工作，他的志向就会消沉。你必须打破这种胸无大志，让孩子相信‘我能在逆境中成功’。”
His work, like Altman’s, is driven by “an emerging understanding that if you can improve the character of young children, you can actually improve their educational outcomes. That’s what Jay and I have been doing, either side of the Atlantic – working on motivational messages and strong values that motivate these children and build resilience into them.”
他的事业，和Altman的一样，都被一个新兴理念驱动：“如果你能提升孩子们的品格，你就能改善他们受教育的效果。这就是我和Jay (Altman)在大西洋两岸一直做的——向孩子们灌输励志的信息和强大的信念，以激励他们奋发向上，坚韧不拔。”
Hall claims that Nicky Morgan, the Education Secretary, is beginning to pick up on this. “She started to see, through the KIPP schools in US [another chain of charters], that a greater emphasis on character is starting to produce quite amazing outcomes,” he says. The concept of “high expectations and no excuses”, which was at the heart of Future Leaders, is now, he says, “on the website of almost every school. Whether they apply it or not is another matter…”
Hall声称教育大臣Nicky Morgan已开始接受这一理念。“通过美国的KIPP【另一个特许学校联盟】，她开始发现对品格培养的重视会带来令人惊讶的收获，”他说。“未来领袖”的核心理念——“目标远大，不找借口”，如今已经“出现在几乎所有学校的官方网站上，至于他们是否真正实践这一理念是另一回事……”
In many ways, Britain’s education reforms put it well ahead of the United States: the old New Orleans system was, says Altman, not just pre-Blair but pre-Thatcher in its lack of standards, inspection and accountability. But in other ways, says Hall, we have still much to learn. “There are more and more schools [in the UK] naming their classrooms after universities. But you’ve got to get it into teachers’ vocabularies – all day long they’ve got to talk about aspiration and endeavour.” That can come more naturally to Americans, with their can-do spirit and sense of manifest destiny, than hidebound Brits.
英国的教育改革在很多方面都领先于美国：如Altman所说，新奥尔良过去的教育系统，缺乏标准、监督和问责制度，不仅仅落后于英国的布莱尔时代，甚至是落后于撒切尔时代。但在另一些方面，Hall认为英国也有许多需要学习的地方。“（英国）越来越多的学校以大学校名来命名教室。但你还必须让老师们去配合——他们也要经常谈及个人抱负和不懈努力。”这些对美国人就比因循守旧的英国人来得更自然，因为他们有着万事皆可能的性格和明确的使命感。
Still, success stories such as New Orleans are, says Nick Timothy of the New Schools Network, “tremendously exciting”. It is a vindication of the idea that the best way to get schools is to give dedicated teachers and parents the power to control them – and set them up. The free schools built in Britain are, Timothy points out, “more likely to be rated outstanding than other state schools, more popular with parents, and more likely to teach the so-called facilitating subjects that get young people into top universities. We know that they are improving the quality of education and creating more opportunities for children whatever their background, just like charter schools are doing in the States.”
尽管如此，像新奥尔良那样的成功案例，用“新校网”的Nick Timothy的话来说，依然“令人欣喜若狂”。这也是该办校理念——最好让投身其中的老师和家长们有权参与学校的运营和建设——的一大佐证。Timothy指出，英国的自由学校“与其他公立学校相比更经常被评为表现优异，更受家长们欢迎，也更普遍设立所谓的提高课程以帮助年轻人考上顶尖大学。我们都能看到，它们和美国的特许学校一样，在不断地改善教育质量，为不同背景的学生创造更多的机会。”
But there is still work to be done, on both sides of the Atlantic. “In all honesty, all that we’ve done in New Orleans is gone from an F to a D or a C,” says Altman. “The schools aren’t failing any more, but we’ve got to do more than ‘not failing’, right?”
然而在大西洋两岸，要做的事情都还有很多。“坦率的讲，我们在新奥尔良做到的，只是从‘不及格’进步到‘尚可’和‘中等’”Altman说，“这些学校都不再不及格了，但我们也不能只满足于‘及格’是吧？”
Robert Colvile is the former comment editor of the Telegraph and news director of BuzzFeed UK. His new book, ‘The Great Acceleration: How Life is Getting Faster, Faster’, was published by Bloomsbury on April 7th.
Robert Colvile是英国《电迅报》评论编辑，也是BuzzFeed英国版的新闻总监。他的新书《伟大的加速：生活如何变得越来越快》由Bloomsbury出版社在2016年4月7日出版。
翻译：小册子(@昵称被抢的小册子)
校对：pathto(@pathto)
编辑：辉格@whigzhou