Said Patti, "I really had to give some thought to what were all those forces holding schools so strangled and stifled and why weren't we able to change. The people outside the system were saying to me all the time 'What are you guys doing there? Why aren't you picking up any of these new teaching methods that have been around for 30 or 40 years and actually implementing them ?' Well, I just have a secret to tell you, Teachers are implementing change all the time.... I made enormous changes. I changed an entire 2,200 person high school, all the teachers got together and it was collaborative, wonderful. We had activities for all the freshmen. We did interdisciplinary kinds of teaching things like English, History, Math and Science and got the kids involved in an activities-based curriculum, that was wonderful, the teachers got all into it, they loved it," she said.
It wasn't long before the whole thing fell apart, not because of Patti, but because of some untold circumstance which caused her to have to move away. But why did it fall apart ? Said Patti, "Because somebody wasn't dogging it every step of the way and making sure it happened. What happens all the time to thousands of teachers and administrators all over the country, is that their changes do not survive the ability of the system to just snap back into place just like an overstretched rubber band........"
One of most celebrated school reformers whom Patti follows, the extremely famous John Goodlad, former Dean of the Graduate School of Education, UCLA (for some twenty years) has said over and over again, the system isn't broken, it's doing exactly what 'we' set it up to do in 1910. That over the entire 20th Century this turtle shell, called "Education" has been dragged along on our backs and it's designed to do something that we might have needed in 1910, which was the Henry Ford Factory Model. The model, where the kids are put on the conveyor belt, they go down the line, one little segment at a time, teachers throw some knowledge in, the lid closes, we push 'em out the other side.

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She goes on to talk about modern "education" and the harm done to kids - the lasting effects, "We see these kids every day. We see the adults every day, who grew up and are damaged.... You can have all the most wonderful teacher training and the teachers could love it, and we know teachers who want to do all of those, but if you don't change the laws. The laws that keep the teachers from implementing what so many of them know, then their hands are tied and it's one of the reasons so many good teachers leave after a while because they can't do what they know needs to be done."
Agrees Patti, "It's the system itself that has to change; stop blaming the teachers, we need equity for all the kids, definitely, and we do need to make sure good teachers are everywhere, and trained better, but mostly we need to get the system off the backs of the teachers. That's what really needs to happen, ok ?"

Patti points out that as long high stakes testing (APT, Advanced Placement Testing, college entrance exams, etc.) where a kid's future may fly or die, on the answer of a test question like, 'Who is Achilles' father ? a. Britney Spears b. Apollo Creed c. Jose Mourinho d. Zeus, things won't change.
The fact is the methods are driving kids out of the classroom like wholesale lambs to the slaughter, confirmed Mariaemma, "You know.... 'Well kids, you didn't make your numbers so you know you gotta go,' and some of them are running corporations where we're creating widgets and worried about the bottom line.... That's what's holding up everything; not only bureaucracy, but of course, plenty of self-serving agendas in those huge bureaucracies, the text book publishers with huge lobbies, construction companies with huge lobbies.... There is a lot of money to be made in schools, so naturally that system which is an economic one really, an industrial model, is what is holding..... sitting actually like a big heavy boulder on the heads of teachers and kids everyday.
"That's not a model for learning, it's a model for filling up little empty robot shells. Our idea is to explode that paradigm by having a grass roots movement get started, and here we are, our little group is going to start it right here, and online because we think obviously schools need to be more like what is happening; small, personal, immediate, technology rich, able to adapt, have kids work on projects where they actually can show what depth of learning they might have," Mariaemma said.

- Joel Anderson, editor