For her senior project at Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School, Katie Collins decided to learn how to play guitar. She’d originally planned to learn and record four or five songs in eight months, but by early May she told a small crowd, “I chose, in a very Parker fashion, to do two songs, in depth.
” If a school’s ethos can be summed up in a single sentence, that might be it: Less is more. It guides much of what happens in this unusual, if influential, school 30 miles northwest of Boston. “I went into this having slightly unrealistic expectations of myself,” Collins told judges at her presentation, having predicted this time last year that she’d be “a rock star by May.
” Asked whether she considers herself a guitar player yet, she was unequivocal: “My idea of being a guitar player is ‘shredding.’ I’m not there yet.” One day, she said, she’ll be a rock star.
“I’m gonna keep at it.” Founded in 1994, Parker is a throwback to , when educators rebelled against the impersonal tyranny of bell schedules and the very idea of letter grades. It has found a way to operate without these, laying the groundwork for some of the most influential school experiments happening today.
America’s Innovative High Schools Parker students aren’t assigned grades. Instead, they constantly revise their work, which teachers judge on a continuum from “beginning” to “meeting” expectations. Work that fails to pass muster doesn’t receive a traditional D or.