Published: April 1, 2000

Let It Be

If any place seems like a perfect spawning ground for a revolution against the burgeoning standards and accountability movement, it is San Francisco Community School. Stubbornly iconoclastic since its founding in the fading counterculture of the early 1970s, the K-8 alternative public school feels more like an old college-town cooperative than a traditional public school. The building itself, like the surrounding neighborhood of California bungalows, is both shabby and charming: odd flourishes of aqua trim, scarred floors, and huge wood windows blazing with light. Many teachers on the mostly young faculty favor piercings, flowing shawls, and rope bracelets. They're warm, thoughtful idealists working hard to empower the school's 300 students, many of whom live in poverty.

Strongly anti-hierarchical, Community School has no principal. Teachers run the show, electing a colleague to a three-year term as "teacher-leader" and deciding together what they will teach and when they will teach it. In true Deweyian fashion, the curriculum is project-based, with nine weeks each spring and fall devoted to hands-on work and deep study of a single topic. Last semester, a 3rd through 5th grade teacher-mixed-aged groupings are standard practice at the school-launched a project called "Green Dreams"; with the assistance of an architect, students researched and designed a garden and outdoor learning center for the school. This semester, her students will shear sheep on their way to weaving a Navajo rug.

Believing that coercion invites frustration, teachers let students structure many of the projects. In a middle school class, students studying the American legal system staged a downtown protest against a juvenile-crime ballot initiative. A passerby told the students, who were chanting and waving placards, to go back to school and learn to read and write; the students countered that it was their reading that had persuaded them that...