SHOPPING MALL VS BOUTIQUE HIGH SCHOOL. \doc\web\99\17\shopmall.txt From: "acronin" Ann Cronin Lake Wash Arthur, You have picked up on one of the bigger hypocricies of Sizer & Co. The theme based, tiny high school such as the International School or the Environmental School at Finn Hill, are models of "essential" learning. To me they are just another "boutique" program as defined by Cohen's "Shopping Mall High School", a book published by Houghton Mifflin in 1985. The book is one of the new testaments of the Coalition of Essential Schools movement. A boutique is defined as a specialty shop in a high school. Specialty shops are bad things according to Cohen, et al, and examples of specialty shops are band, AP classes (the Top Track Shop), football, special-needs classes, & auto shop. Debate, student council, drama, algebra and geometry are not specialty shops. One criteria for identifying football and band as bad is because they involve many students. Yet so does algebra and geometry and they are not bad. The Top Track Shop is singled out for heavy criticism as being a cause of the dilution of excellence in the comprehensive high school. The learning in top track is not essential. Small is better, and something pure that treats everyone the same and without "specialness" is advocated. Yet what is the International or the Environmental School but a handpicked, ghetto of specialness? The inconsistencies in their thinking will drive you mad. Get a copy of this book if you can. When you read it, you will find out why it is open season on the comprehensive high school, and you will see the perverted thinking of the less is more crowd. Having had a kid at a Sizer type school (Forest Ridge) and seeing how miserable her life was there, even though she graduated as valedictorian, I can tell you these small Sizer schools are dull workhouses. They strip away all that is exciting and fun. Gulag learning is what I call essential learning. Note that the Shopping Mall High School was written as a "research" project. The data was gathered by interviews and direct observations in field visits. There is no database presented or analysis of any quantifiable nature. The book reads like an editorial rather than research. It does not meet the standards of even an anthropological ethnography, yet Cohen was a Harvard Ed professor at the time. Big question to ask is who sponsored it?? None other than our favorite National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) and a commision chaired by Sizer. We are fifteen years out on this thinking now and it is very entrenched in the ed establishment. ------- From: arthur hu Subject: Re: [wa-ed-deform] Re: (Fwd) Breaking Ground: Changing an American Institution; LONG Date: Tuesday, December 21, 1999 2:23 AM Hey thanks, what's up with these "choice" schools or theme schools, they say that "shopping mall schools" are bad, so is the alternative putting everybody through one STW or environmental track? Is that what these other LWSD high schools are about, I can't get any info on what these are about.