MAAP Conference — Feb. 18 – 20, 2004
Have you ever wondered what schools would look like if we started over and designed them without thinking about Thorndike, Skinner, industrialization, and the assembly line? what would schools look like if we could structure them with consideration for variation in student learning and individualizing programs and how the brain worked and students learn?
This past Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, I attended the Minnesota Association of Alternative Programs annual conference. On Friday, we heard 
Joe Graba, former teacher, legislator and Senior Policy Fellow at Hamline University, talk about his efforts to encourage policy makers to make room for schools that work for students, as opposed to forcing students to fit into a system that may not work for them.
Thursday, two keynote speakers, Kimberly Marciniak and Wayne Jennings, inspired us to think about the direction that NCLB is taking us, and the educational future we should be pursuing. 
Kimberly Marciniak is a high school student from Texas who is boycotting the state tests as part of a moral position she has taken to point out the unfairness and wrong-headedness of the tests. She told a heartfelt and inspiring story of her courage and resolve to take a stand for something she believed in. The other keynote speaker, 
Wayne Jennings, founder of Designs for Learning is one of the early pioneers of progressive education in Minnesota and has a national reputation as someone working for and developing school reform that works. He is the chair of the board of directors of the International Association for Learning Alternatives (IALA),
an association I helped form in 2000.
The MAAP conference has consistently been one of the state’s best education conferences over the past twenty years, offering an array of presentations by alternative educators and Minnesota Dept. of Ed. specialists. This year, I gave four presentations, one was a panel discussion on IALA and how we define alternative education, another on the importance of identifying core values and operating assumptions in developing and maintaining high quality programs. I also conducted an education legislative issues discussion and my fourth was a group participation discussion on the uses of poetry in life and the classroom. All of the presentations were very well attended by an enthusiastic audience.
This year’s award for ‘Exemplary Contributions to Alternative Education’ was presented to Don Glines, the founder of the Mankato Wilson School, one of the country’s most innovative K-12 schools. Don has been active in school reform most of his adult life. He’s authored several books on the subject and is an honory member of he IALA Board.
Many of the Alternative educators at the conference expressed concern about the effect of NCLB legislation and the rigid rules and standards that it mandates that limit innovation and, for us specifically, the ability of teachers in alternative programs to create learning experiences that meet the needs of students. Alternative education has a different purpose and fulfills different needs than traditional education, and the NCLB does not recognize these differences or provide a distinct means of evaluating these schools, and under NCLB criteria, alternative education cannot ever “measure up.” We focused much of the discussion about efforts to develop alternate methods of assessment and data gathering (you can find most of this information online in the most recent MAAP newsletter) that reflect the success of our programs and that show the importance of supporting an array of choices to meet the diverse needs of our students. MAAP’s newly elected President, 
Terry Lydell is an expert on this, and is helping many programs develop methods of data gathering and producing an ‘Annual Report,’ which helps them communicate to others how they are doing.
Next year the conference moves to Duluth Entertainment Civic Center (DECC), Feb. 9th through the 11th, 2005.
