A Harmony Chorine: Reform Conferences Work in Spite of Themselves

A woman clutching several folders and a hardcover book shuffles past an overhead projector to the center of a cozy auditorium, her unmade-up face caught in weak lights as she steps in front of the microphone. She flips through her folder, props it up on the lectern and says something into the mic, words exploding in magnification to slice through whatever everyone else has been talking about in hushed voices. This is kind of abrupt, kind of incongruous with the friendly, self-conscious milieu evoked at a conference of teachers and students gathered to talk about democracy and student empowerment.

Our speaker blushes, giggles apologetically?tech equipment kicks into action to exploit that laugh?and switches off the microphone. She gestures to the scattered listeners to move in, move in, create a little circle up front. Awkward lines rearrange themselves, groups from the same school sticking with familiar faces and moving their own folders and fliers and books with them to be included in the intimate, sloppy formation that has been requested.

"That's more like it," she says as we congregate.

I am in the back of the room?up high, looking down at everyone cramming themselves into different cushy seats?sitting with my feet propped on the back of a chair, reluctant to move.

"I don't want to move," Heidi says, slumped in the seat next to me.

Heidi's the assistant director of my alternative school. I'm the student representative.

"I hate it when they do this," I say.

But we do move. We are the last to join the group in front of the lectern, sitting down just as the woman begins her speech again, without the microphone. She welcomes us to Vermont and to Cabot, the rural public school in whose auditorium we are all seated. Then, predictably, her voice declines until we can't hear what she's saying.

Most of the school reform conferences I've been to begin like this?only if I'm in Cleveland, then we're sitting in a gorgeous chapel with holy light spilling in through windowed walls, our backs curled against wooden pews, a cross mounted behind the speaker. Or in Boston, in a huge, cavernous auditorium with a cluttered stage in the back and an out-of-tune piano blocking the middle row of chairs. Or at my own high school in Indiana, crammed into the mismatched furniture, the old couches, old office chairs, old La-Z-Boys that make up the seating options of my classroom, kids slurping Cokes and eating lunch on the floor while that first speaker kicks off the conference.

They begin, similarly, with an explanation: we're here to talk about our schools. We're here to discuss the success of implementing systems of learning that support democracy, community, comfort and awareness, so that the colleagues with whom we share the information can improve their own institutions.

This does happen, this exchange of ideas and philosophies, but the more lasting impression these conferences make is one of social culture shock. As students?two or three or sometimes six per school?we've volunteered or been nominated to travel to some other city and live a few nights with a stranger roughly our age. We take duffle bags of clothes and arrive the evening before the conference begins, crumpled and exhausted, at the doorstep of a new school. My alternative school, with its dirty old furniture and individually painted lockers and sliding-scale tuition, doesn't prepare one to step into a small, private, religious school like the host institution in Cleveland?a school that looked from the outside like a hotel, with a huge white dining room and elegant brick buildings and football, baseball and soccer fields. On the tour, I was led in and out of school buildings, past various grade levels, past a room of second-graders working quietly on their laptops. Boys wore plain buttondown shirts and slacks; girls wore the cliche Catholic schoolgirl attire. I stayed with a girl whose father opened the car door for me and belligerently instructed his son to carry my bag. The evening was spent hanging out down the block in a huge house with four floors and rolling staircases and rooms into which a floor of my own house could fit. The basement overflowed with tv's and video games and a pool table and a minibar. I spoke to one student's mother?in her ankle-length skirt, with her waxed eyebrows?who had never had a job.

My first encounter with Cabot, the rural Vermont school whose small windows open onto huge, snow-capped hills, was during the visit several Cabot students made to Indiana, to my hippie school, appropriately called Harmony. I'd volunteered my home to two of the students arriving; all the hosts and visitors planned to spend the evening showing off whatever we could find to boast about in Bloomington. We ended up downtown, eating burritos on the minute stretch of road that constitutes a youth hangout. The burrito place, above a used-CD shop, overlooked a slightly dilapidated park of stoners and punks and goth girls. Our Vermont visitors were shocked. We hit the street with them lurking suspiciously behind us.

"Is that normal?" one of the girls whispered to me when a boy with a green mohawk passed us. "Is this what it's like to live in a city?"

I exchanged wordless smiles with one of my classmates, a girl who shared my anti-Indiana sentiment. Bloomington's barely city population sprawls through trees and short buildings and college-town chain-store establishments. I didn't know what to say.

Instead of pressing forward with the Bloomington tour, I asked my guests if they'd rather just go back to my house. They agreed.

So we ate ice cream in my dining room and they talked about Vermont and what it's like to grow up in a town dependent on its cheese production, to buy all your clothes from catalogs, to shudder at the notion of streets as busy and dangerous as Bloomington's. They felt better inside the safety of four walls, and I was left to contemplate the notion of Bloomington as a...city?

It could be those moments that force me?and those girls from Vermont and students from Cleveland, if they were ever to visit Harmony?to question my home, and the rest of the world, and the significance of my parents' tax bracket, that also make something about the conferences that bring us together irrelevant. How is a school like mine?with students who don't always have the money to go on school trips or buy prom dresses or tickets?going to take advice about improving academics from a school like the moneyed Cleveland prep school? How can Cabot, a public school that has to enroll all children in a certain proximity, consider modeling student-teacher relations after the ones encouraged at Harmony, where students are admitted by their peers after an interview, where we are bound by contract to respect each other's feelings?

Each institution operates its own, strange program; when we share ideas, it's often hard to put them to good use without the full context of the school philosophy. My freshman year of high school, for instance, my class?all 60 high-schoolers?walked out on April Fool's Day. It was raining and we paraded out the front door in the middle of the school day to a back alley (unofficially dubbed the smokers' alley) and had an impromptu meeting. We nominated a chairperson. The day amounted to little more than a disgruntled bitch session in which we purged ourselves of the animosity we'd developed toward the school?we have too much homework, we don't have enough homework, no one has any work ethic, no one listens to us.

That single incident was less impressive than those that followed it?the respectful, encouraging reaction of our teachers, their willingness to allow time for more student meetings, our more constructive criticism and consequent brainstorming of solutions. We didn't fix the school, but we certainly felt better about attending it.

Weeks after our Vermont visitors went home, one of them?one of those students who occasionally comes out of the woodwork at these conferences with enormous drive and poise and intelligence?organized a lunchroom walk-out in protest of insufficient, inedible food that did not accommodate some dietary restriction. The response was disastrous. The lunchroom staff was insulted and hurt; the teachers were disapproving and unwilling to listen to students; and the school's state-sponsored budget prohibited significant change. The students had been noticed, but they were immediately quieted and, in a teleconference with several Harmony students, expressed increased frustration at the faculty's reaction.

Swapped ideas don't always translate from school to school, and while that may be the goal of reform conferences, it isn't what makes them successful. It's the fact that two days in a hugely different environment at a place like Harmony can inspire a student to go home and mobilize her entire student body. It's students, more than teachers, who return with a sort of directionless desire to instigate change. Changes tend not to take when thrown in an unsupportive environment, but at least we are exposed to something new?second-graders with laptops or students on a first-name basis with their teachers and their teachers' spouses. We settle back into the routine of our uniquely problematic schools with the reaffirmed awareness that what we want isn't necessarily what we're used to.