Wildflower Montessori Secondary Schools

Wildflower’s radical vision for middle- and high-schools uses Montessori methods and Wildflower principles and technologies to create a network of teacher-led micro-schools serving intentionally diverse communities. Through open work periods, youth create and run businesses, grow food, build technology and gain skills to fulfil their potential and transform communities.

Our education system isn’t working for anyone. Every year children spend in school, they get less engaged, less curious and less alive. By middle school, too many children are checked out, shut off from the beautiful opportunity school offers to explore the world and find their place within it. For low-income children and children of color, the situation is worse, as the majority learn to devalue their own identity. School doesn’t work for employers, who find graduates don’t have the skills they need. School doesn’t work for teachers either, who are demoralized and dissatisfied. It is actually remarkable that a system that is so universally regarded as a disaster has persisted so long and changed so little.

At Wildflower, we’ve developed a new approach - life-affirming, teacher-led, neighborhood-nested, intentionally diverse Montessori schools, supported by new technologies that help teachers startup and administer schools without the bureaucracy typically associated with public funding and oversight.

We’re already in the process of building technology and scaling our solution for early grades and we’re seeing enormous interest from parents, teachers and children in developing a solution for secondary education. While we’d use those same principles that led to the creation of Wildflower Schools, this is really a new project - micro-secondary schools would have different characters from micro-schools serving much younger kids and technology required to support them will be different. But the basic idea - that we can break down the barriers that prevent the development and deployment of human-scaled, teacher-led, life-giving educational environments - applies in the same way.

We’re excited to kickoff a working group to design educational environments and start building technology, and just as the MIT Media Lab served as the birthplace for the first Wildflower school, we’d love to have MIT serve as the birthplace of our secondary school initiative.

In the US, 11% of low income and 6% of African American students complete high school ready for college. High schools globally fail to prepare students for the changing workforce. Mindfulness, entrepreneurship, social skills, and technological fluency are largely untaught. Young people are intensely social, but they are forced to sit quietly, discouraging social interaction; they know they can make real contributions to the world, yet we put them in artificial environments where they cannot. Meanwhile, teachers are more dissatisfied than any point in the last 30 years and feel trapped in the school system. It isn’t working for anyone.

Montessori secondary methods align with extensive research regarding adolescent development by Piaget, Brighton, Kellough and Kellough, Scales, Stevenson and many others.

Wildflower has already illustrated the power of organic, technology-enabled growth processes in preschool/primary education, as we’ve grown from one school in 2014 to 11 in 3 communities today with dozens more on the way. We’re also showing how to make schools accessible through charter applications, district partnerships and state/county/city preschool subsidies.

We are confident that the same organic processes, technological tools and funding model will support secondary schools based on conversations with families and teachers.

Wildflower Schools create beautiful learning environments for children and families, prepare adolescents to be leaders and peacemakers, support teachers as professionals, and transform neighborhoods. As they scale, we believe Wildflower Schools can transform cities and even the world.

Our schools support children and families directly, with funding through district and charter systems and as independent preschools taking public funding. Our tools for teachers supporting school startup and administration make it possible for them to create schools without leaving the classroom.

Our tools for communities to support the launch of Wildflower hubs support the global, exponential spread of our approach.

Track: school leader participation in working group discussions and events - A working group of 5-10 school leaders designing model secondary school plans

Track: a completed prospectus for three schools and school committee or state acceptance of each prospectus - A pilot network of three racially and socioeconomically diverse and financially sustainable secondary schools open by fall 2019

Track: hours of administrative time saved per teacher captured via survey - A series of useful software and process management tools that leverage the work of teacher-leaders and support staff

We are an experiment in designing a radically different school model supported by a radically different approach for managing quality and supporting growth. The regulatory environment surrounding K-12 education has led to large, institutional schools and top-down control.

Because the core problems that impede the development and spread of teacher-led micro-schools are administrative, technologies can alleviate them. We use technology to make it possible for micro-schools to meet public oversight expectations, to extend the observational power of teachers and aid record-keeping, to share best practices and to support communications between students, families and teachers.

We use an iterative, agile approach to technology development - for both software and organizational technologies.

As we design and test our software, our primary learning will be from teacher-leaders and young people as they use the actual systems. Increasingly, young people will be involved in the design, creation, testing, and support.

Young people and families will be directly involved in the design of the schools. Their interests and goals will drive their work and study.

Young people enter lotteries to enroll in public, tuition-free Wildflower schools. We engage racially and socioeconomically diverse families and community members who may contribute skills, knowledge, networks, and time. We nurture school leaders from within communities, from Montessori training to ongoing growth supported by our network of school leaders and coaches.

We make our software and tools available upon sufficient completion (testing and improvement, of course, continues). Sensory technology, operations tools, family communication apps, etc. will roll out to more and more schools, first within Wildflower, then beyond as it becomes easier and more effective.

Partners such as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Walton Family Foundation have generously funded our startup activities.

Beyond the startup and training phase, each Wildflower school is self-sustaining on tuition and public funding.

Our overall financial model is to charge each school an affiliation fee of about $10,000 per year, which supports our direct school support and our central R&D and engineering efforts. We expect to be self-sustaining once we reach 1,000 schools.

We will rely on public school funding for operating costs, including innovation school and charter school pathways depending on local context and need. We have done this successfully in Puerto Rico, but each community is unique. Autonomous Wildflower schools in a district landscape require close partnerships based on respect and trust.

Tools and technologies for schools are complex and take a long time to develop, even using an agile process that our founder used at Google, MIT, and Stanford. We must build development time in upfront so that our tools are ready to use when our schools open.

http://wildflowerschools.org/blog/

https://www.facebook.com/wildflowerschools/

We’re excited to learn more about how the Solve community can support our work, but given the way we’re working to design cutting edge educational settings that leverage what is known about adolescent development, break educational settings down into pieces that are smaller than what has historically been considered minimum efficient scale, and change the work required through technology, we expect that the types of technology and social entrepreneurs involved in Solve will be able to help us in a range of ways.

The Wildflower Foundation

MIT Media Lab

Transparent Classroom

University of Virginia’s Early Development Lab

Walton Family Foundation

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

New School Venture Fund

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

We don’t see other schools as competition but seek to help everyone by open-sourcing our materials.