Montessori and Public Schools

Welcome to the future of education. I'm Michael Horn. Montessori education is a topic that I've been passionate about for a long time. It's an area of the education system that I would say I think works really well. It focuses on personalization for students, meeting students where they are with their needs, developing their social and emotional well being. I will say full disclosure that my children are in Montessori education. But even early on, when I wrote my first book, Disrupting Class, and I would speak about it, people would often come up to me and say, we hear what you're saying, but it sounds like you're just describing another version of Montessori education. And I've taken that to heart over the years. My guest today, Sarah Suchman, is the founder of the national center for Montessori in the Public Sector. And I think this is not a well known thing about the number of Montessori schools in public schools. And so I'll bring Sarah up to the main stage, so to speak. It's good to see you. Thank you for doing this. This is a conversation I've been dying to have because I wanted to know first about your own personal background and how you came to start an organization called the national center for Montessori in the public sector that is really focused not on where I think Montessori schools are often associated with, in the private sector, but, but really around public schools themselves. So love to hear your personal background and why this organization when you started it.

Great. Well, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here. And I always love talking about this. And I need to correct. I am one of three founders.

Thank you.

Yeah, and I'll get to that in a second. So I actually, I went to Montessori School as a middle schooler and my mother had said, you know, I knew I wanted to be a teacher. If you want to be a teacher, you should see that there are lots of ways to do this. And so she sent me to a variety of different kinds of schools. And one of them was a Montessori school. Fast forward to graduate school. And it was the early 2000s and no child, it was no Child Left behind heyday. And everybody was talking ed reform. But as I listened, most people, what most people were talking about was, are bigger, bigger, louder, faster of what we'd all experienced in school. Most of us have experienced in school ourselves. And nobody was really talking about the idea that there was a substantively different way to do school. It wasn't just about doing the same thing. Bigger but we could actually do it a different way. And so I decided that somebody needed to keep this conversation on the table. And I chose to do my doctoral research on public Montessori schools. And in so doing, I met Jackie Cosentino, who was one of my readers for my research. And then right when I was graduating from the doctoral program, Jackie Cosentino and her husband Keith Weitzgarver, had just gotten funding through the American Montessori Society to start a non profit to start an organization that looked specifically at public schools. And so that's how we got started. The interest came because there are these national Montessori organizations and public schools were not affiliated. So we knew there were public schools and we knew that private schools liked to be part of these other organizations. But why weren't public schools joining them and what were the needs of public schools and were they being met? And so one of the first things that we did is we started off with our Montessori census, which was just learning, where are these schools? Sorry about the cat. Where are these schools and how many are there? Where are they? What ages are they serving? And then we kind of. And what do they need? And we did a national tour of visiting schools to figure out what they needed. And we've been off.

So tell us a little bit then about what, what do they need? And what is the organization? What sorts of supports does it provide? Obviously you track the sector and I'm curious to get into trends in a moment. But first let's talk a little bit about the supports and what activities the center actually does to help these public schools that do or don't affiliate with Montessori, but have that philosophy.

Okay, so we have three main areas. One is creating, just creating a national ecosystem, a robust national ecosystem, bringing all together all these disparate schools. Montessori is not. It is not. There may be charter networks, but it is not in itself a chart network. Anybody can start a Montessori school, which we may get to later, is one of the challenges. And they're all, they're sort of all up on their own. So one of the things that we're working on and that we've done and continue to do is building an ecosystem, bringing schools together, bring people together who are involved in this work through communications, conferences, publications. The next is actually helping in the development of new schools and continuous improvement of schools that already exist. And then we do that through tools, trainings, technical assistance, all focused around equity, access and sustainability for these public Montessori schools. One of our first big Pieces of work besides the Montessori census was an assessment playbook that looked. Because assessment is often one of the things that people think should be challenging in a Montessori school. Public Montessori schools are accountable in the same way that any other public school is. And so we wrote a book around Montessori assessment and Montessori through an Assessment Lens, the Montessori Assessment Playbook.

Yeah, it's interesting. I want to go there in a little bit as well, a little bit deeper. But let's talk about then broad trends. You know, you've been running the center for several years. What have you seen in terms of the growth of Montessori schools in the public sector? And, and I'm curious, you know, where is the brand in your view of Montessori right now in the public sector as well versus the private sector? How does that interplay with the work that you do?

So at current times, There are about 565 public Montessori schools. Most people have no idea. They are split about evenly between charter schools and districts. We have recently seen a little bit more. For a while, I mean, even just 10 years ago, there was, it was mostly people who were contacting us who wanted to write charters and open a charter Montessori school. We're actually getting a lot of interest from districts now.

Interesting.

So it may be that, that 50. We thought for a while that the charters would surpass the districts, but it may be that it stays more or less at that 50, 50 split. I forget what was the rest of your.

Oh, just in terms of what's the brand, I guess of Montessori in that sector. Right. In terms of it's a well known brand. Well, let me give my two cents for a moment and then I'm curious. Your reaction is it's a well known brand in the private school sector. It tends in the minds of parents to be associated with frankly, what would be called children's house or students who are, you know, know, up through kindergarten. But Montessori actually has a very robust elementary school program into middle school and there's even high school Montessori's as well, fewer of them. But, but, but there are high school Montessori. How does that play out in the public school? What do people think about it? What is, what is the brand of Montessori in public education right now?

So a lot of people don't know about it. And so just raising awareness in education is a piece of the work because people just don't know. When people know, they tend to want it especially when they've seen a classroom. Right. There's really nothing that is the same as walking into and seeing a Montessori classroom at work. There is a reputation and some of the popular media and book reviews and things they're having now are not helping us any. There is a reputation that it is for elite schools for rich, primarily white students. And that's who it's for. That's where There are about 545005000 independent schools in the United States that are montessori and about 500. So the reputation that there is more is accurately earned and there are historical reasons for that. But the reputation that it would for some reason only work in those settings is really questionable. I think people really need to sort of dig deep about why they think that something might. I can understand why it may only be available in those settings, but why would it only work in those settings? That doesn't make sense. And we have evidence that that's not true.

So let's actually dig deeper there for a moment and then we can zoom back out again. But you know, the biggest thing that I think jumps out to me is that Maria Montessori first piloted a lot of the techniques and the philosophy. She didn't just theorize about it, she actually put it into action with low income, in most cases kids in Italy. And then at least in my experience, even in the independent school sector, it's a lot of these schools have very robust financial aid programs, are often trying to serve low income students, underrepresented minorities, and focuses actually like that, such that the Montessori school where my kids go to is actually more diverse along those metrics than our local district school. Curious what it looks like in the public sector, sort of tackling that stereotype, if you will, heads on who's attending to serve what communities do these do these public Montessori schools tend to be popular in. Is it more suburban, is it more urban, rural? Do you see trends along those lines?

So There are about 200,000 students in public Montessori schools by our estimates. And about half of those are students of color and a little bit. And they are just as likely to be on free and reduced lunch as not. So it's a diverse population. Some of the really big districts, their schools will be much bigger. So a single school, you can't just count the number of schools to try and get a guess of who's represented in the schools. So that is. So it's diverse. They're gaining steam. I mean it's every. It's we get calls from Detroit and we get calls from suburban schools. So it's. Both places are picking up on it. And it works beautifully and it works beautiful. You know, historically, one of the reasons I think that Montessori is more in private schools is when Maria Montessori first came to the United States with this method of education. William Herc Kilpatrick, who was at Columbia University, wrote sort of a scathing piece against Montessori education. And it kind of got pushed to the side and pushed out of the public realm. When it got brought back in, it got brought back in by parents of means who wanted it for their kids. And then that's where it grew. It came into the public schools again. It re entered the public schools largely during desegregation efforts, because it was a form of education that white parents who had left the cities would send their kids back into the city schools in order to be in a Montessori classroom. So that was in Cincinnati. That was in Milwaukee. As the magnet school program, the desegregation efforts around magnet schools grew, so did the public movement.

That's fascinating, actually. Right. So it was really a proactive move, if you will, by the districts to bring students back and families back into the fold. What are the trends now? You said districts are growing in terms of Montessori. So why are they doing it? Now?

We're seeing that. Again, one of the reasons is because they're feeling competition from charter schools.

Interesting.

Right. So if they're. If a district is losing kids to charter school, then they look at what program can we put in that would be really appealing and would keep families in our district? Whatever families would keep families in our district. And very often what they look for, very often we wish it were even more often, but sometimes what they look for is a Montessori program. And it work. It does actually serve that purpose. And they're usually. They're quite successful at doing that. And then the second one or a

third one, and it goes on, it creates a ripple. That's fascinating. So what is it about the Montessori education in your mind? If we get below the brand and you said when people see the prepared learning environment, like, they get really excited. What are the things you think that jump out to families that are really pulling them in? Like, what are the two or three elements, if it can be boiled down to that, that says, like, yeah, this is a place that I want my child to be learning.

So they are joyful. They're joyful settings. They're joyful and kind and respectful. And what parent doesn't want their child to be revered? What parent doesn't want their child to be seen for the full, sometimes even abilities that the parent didn't realize that their child had. And so that is a piece of it, children, because it is self paced, self directed. Children don't get messages that they're not good wherever they are, they get a lesson for that where they are. And they go forward. So often when you see the younger grades, any grades actually kids are being told a lot to sit down, be quiet, turn around. They're getting a lot of messages during the day that what they're doing is not right. When you take away the kids don't need to sit still all day. You don't need 25 kids all doing the same thing at the same time altogether. So many of the areas that where teachers have to correct kids, correct kids, correct kids and kids get this message, school's hard, I'm not good at it. Those just disappear. We're sometimes asked by teachers who are just being introduced to Montessori, like how am I going to manage the classroom if I can't use star charts, if I don't give rewards? What they have done is. It is a totally different environment when you're not trying to get 25 kids to all do the same thing at the same time. So many of the challenges in a non Montessori classroom just disappear. Not that it's easy work, I don't want it all implied that it's easy work. It is still quite hard, but it's hard in a different way.

No, that makes. It certainly resonates with what I've seen on the ground. I'm curious, why aren't more public schools than in your view, moving to this model? What's holding them back either in regulation, policy or perhaps perception of what a Montessori education is? That is meaning that more of them are not turning to the solution for their schools right now.

So I think one is just awareness, right? So that that is a big piece of it. Just being aware that it is an option and a viable option. Another is that there are some barriers to entry, not so much barriers to continuation, but barriers to entry. So teacher getting trained teachers is. It's an expense. Very specific. And it is not a two week training as some other programs are. It's a year or it's three summers or depending on where you go. But it is a lengthy training. And that training and then this becomes a policy issue is not at the moment, it is only recognized in 10 states. I believe it's 10 towards teacher licensure.

That's interesting.

In a district school or if you're in a state where the charter schools require teachers to be state licensed, then teachers are needing to do both courses of training.

That's interesting. So they're having to go through typically a traditional accredited college or university that gets them a teaching degree or certificate and then alongside that the methodology to actually be able to teach in a Montessori environment, which to your point is a completely different playbook of what a teacher is doing on a daily, weekly, yearly basis. Right.

And so and then there's some people who have their mind who start off as a Montessori teacher in a private school and then they want to move to a public school and then they need to get their teaching credits for the state license for the public school. So whichever way it goes, it's extra work. There is the Montessori Public Policy Initiative is working very hard on getting more states to recognize Montessori training for state licensure. And it's as many policy things are, it is a steady but slow drum

beat forward that makes that, that makes sense. It's. So that's the Montessori Public Policy Initiative. I'll flash that up there. It seems like an important effort. What about you mentioned assessment early on and that how that and how you've worked to help schools sort of map into the frameworks that exist in state policy and federal guidelines and so forth around that. What are in your minds the actual barriers and what are the perceived barriers of a Montessori school working within, let's call it the traditional accountability test driven framework that exists at the moment.

So one of the real challenges is that so one is that the test, when the testing happens frequently, that doesn't accurately reflect how children learn perhaps period. But certainly how they learn in a Montessori classroom. So being tested every year a lot. Montessori classrooms have three year age groupings. So you have three year olds, four year olds, five year olds first through third grade, fourth through sixth grade. And a lot of the learning comes together in that third year at each level, kindergarten, third, sixth. So although on the test often you'll see that the Montessori students don't perform as well as other schools in I'm going to get the exact data wrong on this, but they don't perform as well in fourth grade on the math test they do on sixth they're doing as well or better if the school, if the superintendent at the central office Gets nervous at fourth grade because the scores are low and they start to eat away at the Montessori program and say you need to do the traditional math program because look, your math scores are low. Then we're not going to get to those higher math scores in sixth grade because the program has deteriorated. So part of it is that awareness and seeing examples elsewhere and the Montessori community being better about communicating where there are those proof points and then giving schools the breath in the breathing room and the space to wait until the sixth grade to not say if you don't know. Because really it doesn't matter what you know in fourth grade. What matters is what you know in the end.

Right?

And so allowing that sort of flexibility or that sort of time and patience for that to come to fruition, just

to geek out for a moment, why do you see that there's that sort of lag from the fourth grade to the sixth grade in terms of the outcomes? Is that a curriculum decision? Is that a conceptually Montessori really deeply builds first concrete and then abstract conceptual understanding? Is it that? Or is it because children perhaps are starting at wildly different points? Some students maybe aren't ready for the on grade curriculum. They need something that matches their needs. But as a result of getting all the gaps filled in, they start soaring by the time that they're in sixth grade. What in your mind is really attributable to that?

Montessori moves to abstraction later than non Montessori classrooms will. So students will be using the manipulatives both in language and in math. They're also manipulatives for language movable output. They'll move to that later than they do in non Montessori classrooms. So that. That is one reason they don't. There doesn't tend to be an emphasis on. Well, there is no emphasis on testing. So part of it may just be familiarity with tests and having a couple years to become familiar with taking the test. But I think it is a lot that move to abstraction. There is some different vocabulary that is used in a Montessori classroom versus on the test. One of the classics that people talk about is Montessori will talk about units. And in a non traditional class you talk about ones, the ones, the tens, the hundreds. Montessori uses units. But kids can catch on to that difference. They can become bilingual, but they need time in order to incorporate both.

Gotcha. That makes sense. If you could wave a magic wand as you look at the public policy landscape and change anything about it, that would have the most Impact not just on the growth of Montessori schools, but by, you know, by extension on the students themselves. Right. So that they had more pathways to success. Where would you focus? You know, the one, one or two things in your mind that that could most help this landscape?

You know, a lot of teachers would say the standardized assessments and we've seen Montessori schools work within that. So I'm not sure that I would say that that's the first one though it is a challenge. The teacher licensure is big, big. So getting teachers that are very well prepared for Montessori classroom and in a district sometimes what you'll see is when they have to hire someone, if they can't find a state licensed and a Montessori trained person legally, what they have to hire is the state licensed person. And then you have a teacher in a Montessori classroom who is not, hasn't

been trained for it and they look

around the classroom at all these materials they've never seen set up in a way they've never seen and they either can't teach or they revert to what they know. And then it's no longer a Montessori classroom. So the teacher licensure is really big. We're seeing a lot of states now begin to do dropdown menus of curriculum that people can use that is going to become, that is going to become more and more challenge. And we are as a community, we're thinking about how we want to work with that on those dropdown menus. Different in different states. In some states it's a matter of having a tier. What works Clearinghouse. Right. Quasi experimental design study. And so then that takes investment in research and takes time to get Montessori onto those drop down lists. And what do we do in the meantime? So those drop down lists are also a portending challenge.

It's interesting on that front just because at least my experience again with our Montessori school is how, with the research in terms of how to teach reading, say, where a lot of the emphasis on that drop down is coming from. I mean the phonics, the phonemic understanding of my kids is so vastly superior to anything I had that I don't worry about those things. But you're right, they don't fit in. Sort of a broad bucket of ed reports or whatever has reviewed this curriculum because it doesn't manifest itself that way.

One of the tools, one of the big pieces of work that we've done is a Montessori curriculum to standards alignment that leads with the Montessori incorporates testing considerations, assessment considerations. And for example, we were working with the Arizona Department of Education and they have, I think, five criteria that need to be met in order to be an acceptable reading curriculum. And with that document, we can show that it incorporates the five elements of the science of reading. We can show that it aligns with the standards. We've got that what we're missing is that research study

work needs to be done.

And most research, most curriculum. The companies do their research. They do their own research. Right. And so who is the Montessori company? There's not a Montessori company. And so there's no company making money from the Montessori curriculum. So who is going to do the research on it? And it needs to be funded and it takes time. All right.

Well, people tuning in that are from ed schools and researchers and they want to do that with their grant funding. Contact Sarah, because this seems like a really important. Right. This is an important thing to have occur. Last question is we as we wrap up with which I'm just curious your take. One of the things that I've also heard about Montessori education is that the brand is often used cavalierly, shall we say, on both sides of it. Sometimes programs that are not strict Montessori use it. Sometimes programs that are strict Montessori don't want to use it because they're nervous about what that might mean. Let's go here. And then I have actually we have a question also from someone so we'll go there in a moment. But I'm just curious in terms of the branding, because that's part of the counting and the census work that you do and the creation of community, how does that play out in your work you do and how do you think about what is Montessori education, how we brand it.

Right. So it is a challenge. There was a law suit or law legal case in the 50s and it was deemed that Montessori could not be branded. It was a name and it could not be a trademark. The result of that is that anybody can use the word Montessori in the name of their school, regardless of what's going on inside. And yes, that absolutely hurts the movement. Absolutely. When we look at there are organizations that do they call it affiliation or accreditation, but will do school visits and sort of give us whether or not a school meets the criteria to be accredited by that organization. We don't in creating a movement we've wanted to say we have taken the approach more. You're welcome. And we'll help you get better. We want to bring people in rather than keep people out. But for schools that want that process, there are other organizations that do it and there are a few agreed upon essential elements that you can look for in a school to get some idea whether or not it's at least trying to implement a Montessori.

Trying to implement a Montessori program. So you want to look for a

trained teacher, you want to look for multi age groups, you want to look for extended work periods, those sorts of things.

That makes sense. So let me flash up my friend J.W. marshall's question who I know he knows about Montessori as well, but he's curious how does Montessori incorporate technology or intentionally not incorporate technology at the underages? And how did successful Montessori programs navigate the last two years that often necessitated remote learning? I know there's a whole modern Montessori movement in some of these schools, but I love your take on that question.

So our take, my take is that in the three to six year olds in the early childhood they do not need the technology and it's not developmentally what is best for them. Their hands need to be working, they need to be moving, it needs to be three dimensional and so and the materials themselves are open ended enough that kids can stay busy and not need the teachers help all the time which lets the teachers give individual lessons to other kids. And so we don't in the early ages, once you get into elementary school, technology would be used as it would be used as a tool for communication and research by an adult. So not it's not a software program that would be used in place of or even as a supplement to the teacher or the materials. But it is if you're doing a research project, you can do your research online. If you're creating a presentation, create the pie charts using a program so as a tool for research and communication, but not as to learn how to read, for example, or to do math drills.

Gotcha. And then what about the question about the schools that successfully moved or grappled with remote learning during this what were their techniques or how did they do it?

So clearly there was technology then that was not an option. One of the advantages that the Montessori teachers had is that they were already used to doing individualized lessons and planning for kids. So that so wrapping their heads around how to give individual lessons and let kids do things at their own pace and at different times K that at least culturally or familiarity the Montessori teachers already had, you know, it wasn't ideal There were people sent home. There were schools that were able to send home materials, right. So packages of materials, so the kids actually had them. There were some that gave instructions on how to create materials at home. There were others that tried to recreate the materials 2D on the computer screen. But I would say that the Montessori, the Montessori school struggled with it, just as all schools did, with some advantages, but also some disadvantages.

Gotcha. All right, so last question for me as we wrap up. Which is your vision for what this field in the public landscape looks like in five, ten years from now? What do you hope to see? What are you driving toward? What would success look like from your perspective?

So, you know, we are passionate about this. We, I mean, it's just, it is such a gift to children and to families. It's such a gift to teachers who are in classrooms that are letting them teach the way that, as many have said, this is the way I always wanted to teach but was never able to, that we really want to see this be way more accessible to way more families and children. And it needs to be equitably accessible. That's very important to us. It needs to be high quality because if it's not high quality, then it's not really access, you know, access to something that isn't any good doesn't really count as access. And it needs to be sustainable because the schools are in sustainable means that it needs to be a human sized job for teachers, that people need to know how to be prepared for it, need to know how to keep getting better at it, need to know how to do okay on whatever the external pressures are. And there will always be, until every school's Montessori, there will always be external pressures that don't match Montessori. So people need to be skilled in how to navigate those for it to be sustainable. And so that's what we're working on. But it would really be that every family, every child who is aware of Montessori and would want to be in a Montessori program would have access, would

have access to it. Sarah, thank you so much for the work you're doing. Thanks for spending some time and sharing these insights. And for more, you can certainly check out the website.

Site.

It's, there's a lot of trends there. There's a lot of research up there. National center for Montessori in the Public Sector. Thank you again for joining us today.

Thank you.

And we'll be back next time on the Future of Education. Oh, yeah, please, please.

So I spoke a lot about Montessori. I also want to say that another hope for mine would be that some of the pieces that are so integral to Montessori, others would look at and say oh yeah, kids don't need to be controlled so much. There can be more freedom with responsibility in the classroom and would be able to draw on some of the pieces even if they're not doing a full Montessori program. But it will have.

I'm glad you said that. Yeah, I think that's a really important point because we can take a lot of the principles without replicating perhaps everything and that makes it more portable and accessible perhaps to more families. So I appreciate you jumping in with that, Sarah. Thank you.

All right. Thank you.

All right. And everyone stay tuned for the next we'll have future episodes in the Future of Education, but if you like this one, give us a thumbs up and we'll see you next time.