Dare to Be Different

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CHARLES Dickens Elementary School, with its scarlet brick exterior, is a hundred-year-old relic from a time when schools were built as no-nonsense fortresses to contain and socialize a swelling immigrant population. In spite of its down-at-the-heels condition, it manages to retain its grandeur, wearing its red coat as a banner of bravado: Dare to Be Different. For Charles Dickens Elementary is as distinct in its ethos as in its appearance from most other public schools in the city of Vancouver--and perhaps throughout the entire province of British Columbia. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Vietnamese pho shops and other low-rent cafes that hawk sushi, samosas, pizza, and dim sum on the Kingsway, just up the block, manifest the diversity of the area and signal the ethnic mix of the children in the school. Many of them are new Canadians; some speak English as yet haltingly; others, not quite yet. In Annie O'Donaghue's class of third-through fifth-graders, a children-drawn world map on the bulletin board shows the students' countries of origin: El Salvador, Honduras, India, Canada, Portugal, China, Vietnam, Philippines, Ireland. Many of the children who are identified as coming from Canada are of First Nations heritage. Dickens is not the school one would have picked as most likely to defy every new curriculum du jour handed down by school boards and ministries of education over the last 30 years. It is certainly not the school one would have picked to remain true to its child-centered roots, facing off against such educational tsunamis as the back-to-basics movement, Madeline Hunter's direct instruction, and now the high-stakes testing madness that is passing for educational quality. And this is certainly not the school, given the challenges of the student population, that one would have picked to demonstrate such high performance levels, showing us once again what many educators know: that given the stuff --the right teachers, the right administration, the right conditions--all children can be successful learners. I came to visit Charles Dickens and left humbled at what I saw, for surely this is the kind of school and the quality of education that we all say we want for our children. I wanted to know what made it work and how, in the past 20 years, it has held onto its autonomy and endured as a beacon of what a school can and should be. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] SCENES FROM THE SCHOOL I walk up the steep stone steps and enter a large hallway, looking for the general office. The floor is patterned linoleum worn by the footsteps of hundreds and thousands of winter boots, but the visitor's eye is immediately drawn to the colors--children's art on every wall, including large-scale murals painted directly on the hallway lockers. Even the tops of the lockers are used to display children's dioramas. The colorful exhibits speak of the value put on children's creative work, and it is obvious that the students themselves, not the teachers, have put this art on display. In the rear area of the hallway, under the staircase, an old couch, some easy chairs, and a small bookcase containing paperback books and magazines make an informal reading corner. No one is on guard here; all the doors are unlocked, and the school can be entered from any side. There is a sense of non-orderliness here--not sloppy or unclean, but put together by children. The informality of it all is striking, and it is immediately clear that children own this environment and that order and control are not key issues in this school. John Perpich, principal of Charles Dickens Elementary School for the last six years, escorts me upstairs to Annie O'Donaghue's classroom. Like every other class in the school, this is a multi-age grouping: grades 3, 4, and 5 combined. The rationale for multi-age grouping, Perpich says, is that the numbers of same-age children in the school population of 455 children do not allow for even distribution into grade-level classes. …