In 2010, Principal Joan Franks was given the task of doubling the size of Armatage Montessori in Minneapolis. The school board gave her nine years to complete this task; she did it in three months. Franks sent out flyers, knocked on doors and beat the bushes looking for students. She rounded up as many new Montessori trained teachers as she could find, and for those not trained, she established a Montessori training program.
For students who had no Montessori experience but would be entering the fourth or fifth grade, Franks established a two and one half week summer program to get those students up to speed. That program was run by one of her teachers, Ralph Sievert, a nationally recognized award winning teacher. Students who had previous Montessori experience were expected to help the new students understand the Montessori program.
Franks is not some wide-eyed idealist new to the Montessori culture. She has twenty years experience in Montessori education and holds a masters degree in Montessori administrative leadership from St. Catherine University in St. Paul. She was recognized as Minnesota’s Distinguished Principal for 2011.
“We have always taken students in upper grades at our school without previous Montessori experience,” Franks told me. All she had to do was expand the program to take in a lot more students.
“We are a public school. We take everybody,” said Franks.
Franks says that her experience is that many private Montessori programs do screen prospective students, but she believes this is not the case for most Montessori public school programs.
Historically Milwaukee Public Schools Montessori programs have refused to take students in upper grades who did not have previous Montessori experience. Milwaukee Montessori educators have argued that students need the Montessori foundation to do well in Montessori schools.
But prohibition of taking older students comes at a cost. During these tight budget times, a Montessori elementary school with just a handful of empty seats can mean a loss of thousands of dollars and even risk the loss of a teacher or two.
If we wish to expand Montessori education in MPS, it will take years to dramatically increase our programs if we are willing to only add one grade a year to a school.
More importantly, what is the sense of allowing an empty seat go to waste if, through a transition program, Montessori programs could benefit older students.
We have to be careful not to just throw the doors open and have our Montessori programs hemorrhage through wild expansion. No student should be placed in a program just to increase numbers if that student is likely to fail. And increasing the number of Montessori teachers will be a real challenge. We can’t have just anyone teach in a Montessori classroom. But Milwaukee’s prohibition against taking older students in Montessori schools is unrealistic and not the norm for many public Montessori programs across the country.
I am personally sold on Montessori education. Both our son and daughter attended MacDowell Montessori in the 1980s. Research shows that a Montessori program can be especially beneficial for students coming from lower socioeconomic families. After all, Maria Montessori started her program specifically with the children from the slums of Rome.
Joan Franks says that the transition at Armatage this past year was a real challenge, but it was rewarding and highly successful. And Armatege’s test scores for last year? They were some of the highest in the Minneapolis Public Schools. We could learn a lot from another MPS system.
