Public Montessori Research Articles

Racial Discipline Disproportionality in Montessori and Traditional Public Schools: A Comparative Study Using the Relative Rate Index

<p class="normal">Research from the past 40 years indicates that African American students are subjected to exclusionary discipline, including suspension and expulsion, at rates two to three times higher than their White peers (Children’s Defense Fund, 1975; Skiba, Michael, Nardo, & Peterson, 2002). Although this phenomenon has been studied extensively in traditional public schools, rates of racially disproportionate discipline in public Montessori schools have not been examined. The purpose of this study is to examine racial discipline disproportionality in Montessori public elementary schools as compared to traditional elementary schools. The Relative Rate Index (RRI) is used as a measure of racially disproportionate use of out-of-school suspensions (Tobin & Vincent, 2011). Suspension data from the Office of Civil Rights Data Collection was used to generate RRIs for Montessori and traditional elementary schools in a large urban district in the Southeast. While statistically significant levels of racial discipline disproportionality are found in both the Montessori and traditional schools, the effect is substantially less pronounced in Montessori settings. These findings suggest that Montessori schools are not immune to racially disproportionate discipline and should work to incorporate more culturally responsive classroom management techniques. Conversely, the lower levels of racially disproportionate discipline in the Montessori schools suggests that further study of discipline in Montessori environments may provide lessons for traditional schools to promote equitable discipline.</p>

Obituary: Alison Des Forges

Obituary: Alison Des Forges Claude E. Welch Jr. (bio) “What are they scared of? I’m just a little old lady.” With this disarming comment, Alison Des Forges would make light of her extraordinary accomplishments as a human rights activist and scholar. Under normal circumstances, she would have had many years ahead of her. Instead, on 14 February 2009, her accomplished, vibrant life ended tragically early, in a winter plane crash outside her home city, Buffalo, New York. But to me and many others, Alison will be remembered not as a gray-haired, middle-aged woman, but as a person known for her ever-buoyant youthful energy. This obituary comes with mixed emotions: to commemorate a dear friend whom I knew for a half-century, and to mourn a cherished colleague whom I respected for almost as many decades. She grew up in Schenectady, New York, a major manufacturing center near Albany. She compiled such an impressive record in high school that she was admitted to Harvard as a sophomore in 1960, arriving there when men outnumbered women three to one. Alison threw herself into the challenging academic setting—we met in freshman German class, where her quick grasp of its complex declensions, genders, and the like made her intelligence apparent, and she wrote her senior thesis on the history of Alsace-Lorraine. Her turning point came through volunteer work. In the summer of 1963, she decided to teach in Tanzania, a decision that transformed her path in life. For the remaining decades, she would combine the diverse careers of [End Page 1167] teaching by example, involving herself in matters African, and serving as a quiet, persuasive spokesperson for the voiceless. Her initial orientation lay in the scholarly world in which she showed such promise. Following marriage to her high school Model UN acquaintance Roger Des Forges, who attended a different high school, Alison embarked on her Yale doctorate in African history. Her dissertation on one of Rwanda’s most noted, longest-lasting mwamis (kings) gave her deep and detailed insights into how “Hutu” and “Tutsi” ethnicities developed with substantial influence from German and Belgian colonial practices. The purported “ancient tribal hatreds” that less-informed commentators turned to in trying to understand the 1994 genocide in Rwanda became one of the easy explanations she showed to be false. Alison and Roger came to the University at Buffalo in 1973, following two one-year stints at Middlebury and Yale. The academic marketplace in those days in African history was not promising. The arrival of son Alexander and daughter Jessie by the mid-1970s also affected her career. Community activism became the center of her energies for a decade, manifested in her spearheading a successful effort to integrate and upgrade public schools in Buffalo through the establishment of several “magnet schools,” so-called because they were designed to attract parents and students by virtue of their distinctive features. The schools included one of the first public Montessori centers in the country, deploying a method of individualized instruction that was based on the principle that learning is fun and that all students should be allowed to grow at their own pace. Alison’s work on human rights started informally in the late 1980s when she was asked to serve as a volunteer member of the board of directors of Africa Watch. Her linguistic expertise in French and Kinyarwanda and her extensive prior field work in Rwanda made her invaluable to the organization which soon became part of Human Rights Watch. Part-time unpaid involvement turned into full-time and eventually salaried work as her children matured and headed to college. While others at HRW gave attention to different parts of Africa, Alison focused on Rwanda, Burundi, and affected parts of neighboring Uganda and Congo. She traveled there often, her mild, open, and unassuming manner inviting others to share their ideas. I recall the morning we sat together on an early-morning flight from Buffalo to New York City. I would attend a meeting of HRW’s advisory committee for the Africa Division; she would fly that evening to Africa for a few weeks of field work, followed by consultations in Europe. The small...

Situated in school scripts: Contextual early childhood teaching

This article presents findings from a qualitative case study of a public Montessori magnet school in the United States. It focuses on two teachers' experiences, identifying how their teaching is situated in school scripts, that is; ways of speaking about teaching and learning within particular school micro-cultures. The focal teachers utilized contradicting school scripts for a variety of purposes and to incorporate diverse practices. This article describes the teachers' experiences of and responses to contradicting scripts. Findings suggest that teaching is contextualized in particular school micro-cultures and that school scripts present contradictions that have the potential to be both indoctrinating and transformative forces for teacher preparation and professional growth.

High School Outcomes for Students in a Public Montessori Program

The study compares two groups of students who graduated from high school in the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) during 1997–2001. Students who had participated in MPS Montessori programs from preschool through 5th grade were matched to a comparison group on the basis of gender, SES, race/ethnicity, and high school attended. Data from the ACT and WKCE, as well as overall and subject-specific high school grade point averages, were used in exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Once a model was established, the factors were regressed on the students' demographic characteristics and type of elementary education in a structural equation modeling framework. The Montessori group had significantly higher scores on tests associated with the math/science factor. There were no significant group differences for the factors associated with English/social studies and grade point average.

Comparison of Academic Achievement Between Montessori and Traditional Education Programs

The purpose of this study was to compare the academic achievement of 543 urban 4th- (n=291) and 8th- (n=252) grade students who attended Montessori or traditional education programs. The majority of the sample consisted of minority students (approximately 53 percent), and was considered low income (approximately 67 percent). Students who attended a public Montessori school were compared with students who attended structured magnet, open magnet, and traditional non-magnet public schools on standardized measures of math and language arts. Results of the study failed to support the hypothesis that enrollment in a Montessori school was associated with higher academic achievement. Implications and suggestions for future research are provided.

"Glocalizing" Chinese Higher Education: Groping for Stones to Cross the River, Mo zhe shi tou guo he

"Glocalizing" Chinese Higher Education:Groping for Stones to Cross the River, 摸着石头过河 Heidi Ross (bio) and Jingjing Lou (bio) Introduction Over two and one-half decades have passed since Deng Xiaoping proclaimed that Chinese education must face in "three directions"—toward modernization, the world, and the future.1 At that time leaders had yet to articulate the driving purpose of reform as the creation of a robust market integrated with the global economy. Today Chinese educators and policymakers use "globalization" rather than modernization to approximate the pedagogical and social means (including cultivating a citizenship capable of creativity, flexibility, independent thinking, and innovation) they believe will ensure China's engagement in an international knowledge economy.2 In response, Chinese universities grapple with how to shape institutional frameworks that fit the social, political, economic, and intellectual contours of this evolving context. Most Chinese commentators have jumped on the globalization bandwagon, praising globalization for injecting into education a forward-looking "Olympic spirit." Some, however, describe the impact of globalization on education more cautiously, using a Chinese proverb, "groping for stones to cross the river." We [End Page 227] see in this proverb an apt metaphor for the tentative searching on the part of Chinese higher education for a firm foothold in a globalizing world. The proverb also alludes to a number of contemporary metaphors for dislocation and economic change, such as diving into or crossing dangerous waters. Such images may represent the outward-looking, risk-taking, profit-seeking values associated with China's goal of "connecting" with the world. Our paper offers a modest response to challenges set by two comparative educators who have contributed to our understanding of education and globalization processes. First, Nelly Stromquist has asked, "How can we apply the theory and knowledge of unfolding globalization developments to create an understanding of new educational phenomena?"3 We begin with that application in our examination of higher education reforms in China. Second, Philip Altbach has noted that "a balanced perspective [on how globalization trends influence education] requires careful analysis of the downside—viewpoints often not articulated in the rush toward the global future."4 Current scholarship on Chinese higher education suggests three particular downsides that compromise the ability of Chinese leaders to create and sustain effective interaction between purposive public policy and "growing expectations and demands of different stakeholders in society."5 These include the danger to schools' missions and social relationships of managerialism; the danger to educational quality of the massification and marketization of schooling; and the danger to social stability of educational disparity.6 In thinking about these downsides, we have found it helpful to adopt the strategy of thinking "glocally." Universities in China, like their counterparts around the world, are simultaneously national and international institutions.7 We agree with Robert Arnove that the study of higher education necessitates [End Page 228] coming to terms with the "dialectic [that] is at work between the global and the local."8 Recently, theorists have employed this insight to create the neologism "glocalization," sometimes defined as "global localization."9 Glocalization implies a search beyond the contributions and the downsides of globalization in order to conceptualize a world of greater balance between the potentially empowering trends of global communication and the concrete challenges faced by local communities.10 We hope that readers will see in our "glocal" analysis that specific economic, political, and historical contexts of China are crucial determinants of educational reform processes. Policies that look like, and often are, responses to globalization are also "pursued within the context of managing state-building and economic growth in a state-directed (or government-directed) paradigm of governance."11 I. Universities as the Spearhead of Glocalization All levels of Chinese education have undergone profound transformation in the last decade. Public Montessori preschools vie with private international kindergartens for the children of affluent parents; internet connections and international textbooks, particularly for English language instruction, are available to students in urban classrooms. A small number of all-girls' secondary schools, both public and private, are experimenting with gender sensitive curricula.12 These initiatives are a direct result of Chinese policymakers, educators, and parents training their eyes and their minds outward as they attempt to educate their children...