By Doug Berg
For those of you who did not know it, there is a National Center for Grading/Learning Alternatives. It is the business of this organization to know what alternative schools exits in the country, to know what these alternative schools do, and to encourage the development of alternative programs in public schools throughout the country. On November 15-16 this organization had a conference in Chicago. I attended this conference.
Before I went, I really did not know what to expect. I guess I envisioned a convention of hundreds of people. It turned out to be a much more intimate conference, 25-30 teachers, mostly on the high school level, mostly from the Detroit, Chicago, Omaha, and Cleveland areas. Since the group was small, we were able to get together in small groups and rap a lot about philosophy, curriculum, and, the main theme of the conference, “Creating Effective Alternate Learning Programs.”
Because the conference dealt primarily with starting alternate programs, I found that in many ways I was educating the people who were there more than I was learning from any of them. Most of then were planning to start alternate programs in their schools or were in the process of starting one. They were dealing with problems that Mini-School had solved long ago. When they found out that Mini-School has been in existence for 6 years, and when they found out all the things that this program has done and is doing, they all got pretty excited and pumped me for all the information they could. This was somewhat disappointing to me, in that I had hoped to learn more from this convention than I did, but, at the same time it was somewhat encouraging to see more evidence that Mini-School is one of the finest alternative programs in the United States and is considered so by the National Center for Grading /Learning Alternatives.