No Justice for Dean: A Fable of Creative Destruction

By Dennis Francione

Why do so many educators leave the profession defeated and deflated after years of tirelessly advocating for students? No Justice for Dean uncovers what can happen to such an educator who strives to give students an educational framework in which they could flourish. Here is the story of one man’s quest to change the landscape of secondary education in America. Dean, a public school administrator, pursues his dream of creating a school where there is classroom democracy, respect for student voice, and authentic career preparation based on students’ interests and talents.

Unfortunately, his charter school becomes more of a nightmare as Dean is met with plenty of obstacles. Rigid testing requirements, self-serving teachers and board members, and an unsympathetic state charter school authorizer stomp on Dean’s vision and divert him from his mission where students come first. In the end, Dean learns valuable lessons about why it really is so difficult to change an education system that has been in place for well over one hundred years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796026788

Book preview

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Who is Dean?

Who is Dean? He could be anyone with a big dream. He is a visionary at heart, longing to create and develop a teaching and learning environment that promotes student empowerment and democracy. Dean is author and founder of a small alternative charter school.

Dean takes the readers on his roller-coaster ride while creating and developing a secondary school that perhaps could change the lives of struggling urban students. Most of these students he meets come from single-parent households whose moms work strenuously to pay the bills, or whose parents either dropped out or never graduated from high school. Unfortunately, most of these parents never enrolled in or attended college. In some instances, a father figure was absent from the household, which left a huge void in the family structure, especially for the boys.

Dean introduces readers to characters whose fictitious last names have been created to describe their personalities and behaviors. These characters eventually play an important role in the charter school’s demise. Emotions, egos, and hidden agendas prevented something exceptional from happening. The frequent repulsive exchanges among these characters, which Dean reveals, could actually occur in any small business, not just a small school.

Dean wants the reader to learn from this book. It is the underlining behaviors of the characters he encounters that affected his school’s development. He simply points out throughout the book how some of these individuals acted horribly and interacted offensively with each other, and how their ungodly interactions influenced the demise of his dream.

Dean is partially to blame for the school’s demise because he did not listen to good advice given to him by those who honestly believed in his school’s concept. There were times he went with his gut feelings about certain people and issues when he should have been more strategic in his decisions. The reader can learn from these mistakes, as well.

Creating a small charter school was a personal ambition of Dean’s, and he sincerely wanted to help high school students succeed in their lives by offering them an alternative approach to education—an approach that would connect students to a more personalized, student-centered teaching and learning focus, while exploring their career interests. Students would be allowed to work in an internship program, which would provide them the specific skills needed to become productive, employable workers in society.

In this book, Dean will explain clearly the dos and don’ts of developing a charter school and the unconscionable events that turned it into an incredible nightmare.

His ultimate quest as an educator was to help poverty-stricken urban students who were mainly African American and Hispanic. There has got to be a better way of engaging urban high school students in the classroom by making them proud of both their accomplishments and improvements in and out of school, Dean often said to other educators.

His charter school demanded a whole new way of thinking; it was based on project and activity development rather than focusing strictly on test skills. He would not endorse the notion that students learned more and better simply by taking notes and memorizing facts in a classroom. He would rather have his students embrace performance-based assessments, which could better assess students’ application of what they actually learned in class.

Rather than having students work independently, Dean’s charter school would allow them to work in teams or pairs. Students would not be forced to work in isolation—as was the case in most high schools—but rather would share concepts, facts, and skills with one another. He wanted to duplicate the teaming process most businesses demanded in America today. He found in his research that over seventy percent of the 21st-century workforce makes collaboration and team-building a priority. In most cases, no one worked in isolation in today’s world—work teams played an important part in defining a business’s success.

As Dean researched educational reform, he found that during the early stages of students’ education, they were often grouped together in the primary grades, especially during kindergarten through second grade. But grouping students in the upper grades was less prevalent, especially in middle and high school. Play time was also a huge part of primary students’ lives, and recess was always integrated into the classroom’s schedule. However, when these same children entered third or fourth grade, their lives changed from teaming with other students to one of isolation. Plus, recess was not as integrated in the upper graders than the earlier ones. In most cases, Dean determined that student collaboration lessened when students sat in single desks that were placed in straight rows. The emphasis in third grade was more on the teacher’s instructions and directions rather than on relationship-building.

So Dean’s commitment was to create an alternative urban high school that would motivate students in the classroom, similar to the excitement exhibited in the early primary grades. The student population of the charter school would be less than four hundred, allowing students to receive individual attention by having teachers address each individual’s learning styles. Also, students would be allowed to use technology as a learning tool (the Internet would be their primary source of information) and they would be permitted to choose a career focus based on their current interests.

Dean researched, studied, and visited other alternative high schools that were similar to his concept and found that they offered students alternative assessments to measure their knowledge and skills. Unfortunately, the success of Dean’s charter school would be solely defined by standardized tests results, not on the quality of student work generated by alternative assessments (such as the construction of projects, activities, and events). This restricted the creativity of the students and the schools ability to realize its vision.

Creating a charter school takes time, patience, and effort, and as the school’s founder, Dean, had to find the right people to assist. This is where the ugly moments began. Dean found it difficult to select people willing to give their time and effort to help him make his dream school a reality. He received some interesting advice from college professors and business professionals, but nothing that one would consider earth shattering. There was one professor, though, who told Dean to not even consider creating such an extreme charter school because he suggested that the charter authorizers would never change the education landscape of drilling and testing students to death and welcome alternative assessments into the educational process. As it turned out, that professor was right.

The professor continued, The time is not right for your charter school concept. Too much emphasis is being placed on testing results, not the socialization of students. Yet, Dean felt he could pull it off with loyal people, and that the charter school authorizer would endorse his alignment of classroom skills with technology and student career interests.

Dean had to complete the initial research and first draft of the charter application by himself. No one had the desire or energy to help him because the application process was too time consuming. He began working on the application by producing the outcomes he would like students to achieve. Once he had written the outcomes, he constructed a curriculum outline based on the integration of academic and career skills that would culminate in suggested projects and activities. This was not an easy task to accomplish, and it took Dean several months of long hours to produce.

Dean named his charter Vocational Charter School, and he wrote a mission statement strictly based on the requirements of the charter school law’s standardized testing requirements and expectations. He knew that by following charter school law guidelines, it would perhaps help get his charter school approved more quickly. He knew that too many authorizers were archaic in their instructional thinking and were not motivated by innovative thinkers like Dean.

There was an unexpected boost on the road to approval. A few politicians subscribed to Dean’s alignment of academics skills taught in the classroom with career exploration, which eventually played a big role in helping him get his charter school approved. Without their guidance and support, he would not have gotten his school off the ground. Some felt it would improve urban students’ learning and career interests and, more importantly, keep them in school. The dropout rate for the urban area where Dean lived was atrocious. He found that close to ten percent of high school students had dropped out, and most did so in the ninth grade. Dean felt that by allowing students to use the community as a resource, they would be less bored and become more excited about learning. Boredom in the high school classroom was one of the biggest pitfalls students faced. He wanted to change that by having students learn not only in the classroom but outside of it as well. He wanted community and business mentors to connect with his students by providing them real-life working skills. Students would actively engage in every lesson taught in their classes by producing activities, events, and/or products they could call their own. That certainly outweighed the value of any multiple-choice or written tests they frequently had to take.

Funny—Dean himself was a rebellious high school student, and as he recalled, only a few teachers reached out to help him succeed. He knew he had to take ownership of his learning problems while at middle and high school. Books and studying meant little to him because his retention of what he read and studied fell short of what was expected of an honor student. Like most middle and high school students, Dean found school boring and was not ashamed to say it. Dating girls and going out with friends became considerable distractions to his studies. He just was not into school. Fortunately, he had family support and a few teachers willing to lift him up when things were not going the way they should have.

Dean never hesitated to admit that he was an average high school and college student, but he was always driven by a challenge. There were times both in high school and in college that he made terrific efforts to prove to everyone that if he wanted to pass a course with flying colors, he could do so. In his senior year at the private high school he attended, the principal demanded that he get As and Bs in every course, or he would be expelled from the school. Dean lacked motivation; often, he just did not push himself to take his studies seriously and excel. But all that changed during his senior year. He was on a quest. His parents not only supported his quest, but provided him with the necessary resources to improve his study habits. With great determination, he got As and Bs in his senior year, which pleased his principal, teachers, and his closest classmates. When Dean put his mind to it, he always came out of a challenge successfully. Unfortunately for Dean, all he did was prove that he could pass tests. The tests said little about his talent or motivation.

Interestingly, even though he received excellent grades, it was the creative writing class he enrolled in as a senior that motivated him the most. He loved to share his humor by writing short stories and plays. He was given opportunities in class to read his stories to his classmates—they were very receptive of what he had written. The creative writing class allowed Dean to take ownership of what he wrote, which eventually led him to read novels and short stories written by established authors. His parents had the resources available to purchase the readings he liked the most.

Given his own experience, Dean came to appreciate why certain urban students failed to develop individual talents and did not progress completely as learners. Most of their parents were supportive of their children, but they did not have the adequate resources to provide them the education like their wealthy and healthy suburban counterparts. He concluded that if urban students were given adequate resources equal to those in the suburbs, they, too, would achieve at a higher level. It all came down to financing schools justly, something he would never see in his lifetime.

Dean was an innovator; he felt he was a true change agent.