September 17, 2003

What Would Teachers Do if They Had the Chance? This

alaries for teachers at the new primary school at Columbia University go as high as $100,000. The student-teacher ratio is five to one. And the school, which opens today, intends to develop individual learning plans for every student.

In a bold and costly bid to attract and hold professors, Columbia has created one of the most ambitious private elementary schools in the city — one where 20 percent of the staff members have doctorates. Formally known as the School at Columbia University, it offers a glimpse of what educators might come up with if they had the time, the money and the freedom to do whatever they wanted.

"It's every educator's dream to invent a new school starting with a blank sheet of paper, and with the resources of an Ivy League university behind you," Gardner P. Dunnan, whose title is head of school, said happily last week as he sat in the school's spacious cafe, which will dispense free juice, fruit and coffee all day.

The school is unusual in other ways, too. Its original market was the children of Columbia professors. But to placate critics who argued that the university should improve local public schools rather than create another private school, Columbia agreed that half of the students would come from the neighborhood, and that it would provide the financial aid for them to attend. And to ensure that it would not skim top students from the local public schools, Columbia agreed to choose the students by lottery.

More than 1,700 neighborhood children applied for about 100 openings this year.

The school, at West 110th Street and Broadway, includes only kindergarten through the fourth grade this year, but by 2006 it will go through eighth grade and enroll 650 students. The ratio of students to instructional staff will rise to 7 to 1, which Mr. Dunnan said is typical of independent schools and top suburban schools.

All of this comes at a high cost. Columbia is paying at least half of the $22,000 tuition charge for all children of faculty members (more than half for lower-income faculty members), and an average of 80 percent of the tuition of the community students. Only 6 of the 200 students entering this week are paying full tuition, school officials said.

The total cost of the school is to be more than $12 million a year, including building costs, university officials said. School officials hope to bring in revenue through consulting, product sales and donations.

Lee C. Bollinger, Columbia's president, declined to discuss the school's finances, except to say: "There is no question this is expensive. But there are lots of things we have to do to maintain pre-eminence in higher education in the United States."

Few universities have such schools. But before drawing up their plans, Columbia officials visited two campuses that did — the University of Chicago and the University of California at Los Angeles — as well as public schools in the Boston area attended by children of faculty members.

Last week, construction work was still going on at the school. But there were beginning to be clear spaces, like the lime-green cafe with purple chairs, and classrooms where teachers had begun putting up posters, arranging books and laying rugs for students to sprawl on.

One of the most inviting spaces was Theresa Kubasak's first-grade classroom, which she had outfitted with sofas, rugs, tree stumps and 2,000 of her own books, collected in more than 25 years of teaching.

Over the years, she has been torn between teaching needy students at public schools in a city and the excitement of working at a laboratory school in a university. What drew her to the Columbia school, she said, was the chance to do both.

"This is a grand experiment to meld Columbia with the neighborhood," she said. "I see my role as keeping that experiment on track, combining the commitment to teach neighborhood kids with the academic freedom of an independent school, where I can really feel free to run my classroom based on best practices, without succumbing to the restraints of public schools or the political constraints like No Child Left Behind."

She and the other teachers are building their lessons around a unified curriculum designed by Marc Meyer, the school's director of research and curriculum design. Dr. Meyer, a medievalist, said he had shaped the curriculum around the questions: "What does it mean to be a human being?" and "What does it mean to be an educated person?"

"The best way to search for truth is to question," he said. "Gosh, Socrates told us this. There is nothing new in any of this. But the way it comes together in an educational institution — in an integrated curriculum — is innovative."

For each grade, he has mapped out specific themes, like "Me and Myself" (kindergarten), "Me and My Family" (first grade), and "Me and the World" (fourth grade). Older students will explore the individual's position in society, the clash of culture and civilization and the quest for justice and liberty.

One morning last week, Talía González, a Spanish teacher, and Katherine Henderson, a wellness teacher, were discussing ways to collaborate. One idea they discussed was staging a Mayan ball game while students were studying Mayan creation myths and Mayan art. Another was offering flamenco dancing to enrich the study of Spanish.

Over and over again, the teachers — 39 academic staff members were selected from about 1,700 applicants — talked of their awe for their colleagues and how much they expect to learn. About a third of the faculty are male; 40 percent come from public schools, 40 percent from university-related schools and 20 percent from independent schools.

Mr. Dunnan, 63, has worked at both public and private schools. He was superintendent of schools in Briarcliff Manor, in Westchester. And for 23 years he was headmaster of the Dalton School, a private school that draws the children of New York City's rich and famous. He resigned under pressure from the trustees in 1997, prompted in part, school officials said, by his affair with a married administrator, whom he later married.

Several teachers said they had always wanted to create their own schools. One was Patricia G. MacDonald, a second- grade teacher who left the Laboratory School at the University of Toronto to move to New York and was waiting for her husband and child to join her. Another was James Haywood Rolling Jr., an arts teacher who has had a one-man art exhibit at Cooper Union (his alma mater) and sings in the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir.

"I toyed with the idea of starting my own school, but I didn't really have the skills," Dr. Rolling said. "The mission of this school enthralled me. And starting a new school was a carrot, along with the idea of having ownership in designing the curriculum and not fixing up someone else's mess."

As the school opens, some community leaders who battled with Columbia over the school expressed approval. "We're thrilled," said David B. Harris, a member of the Community Board 7 task force on the school. "We think it's a win-win for the community."

But others, like Edward C. Sullivan, a former state assemblyman for the district including Columbia, are still unhappy. "They had an opportunity to do something with the public schools that could have been great, and could have been a model for other universities in the city," he said. "But they chose not to. I'm sure this school will be fine for the kids who are in it, but that's a select group."

Hannah Sachs, the 8-year-old daughter of Jeffrey Sachs, the economist who was recruited by Columbia from Harvard, will be entering third grade at the school. Since she has just moved to New York, she is pleased that she will not be the only new person in her class. But she is impatient to get started.

"All of my friends have started school, and they're like: `How's your new school?' " she said yesterday. "And I have to tell them I haven't started yet."