“Jonathan, what do you do?” There I was—sitting in the front row in an audience of nearly 400 participants, and the lecturer called upon me, singling me out, to answer her question in front of the room. Now I don’t know about you, but I was never comfortable as a student being called upon for an answer—I was a good student, but something about being called upon always made me freeze. But there I was, in February, being asked a question by Madeleine Levine, our Parent Education speaker and author of The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids.

“Jonathan, do you publish at Saklan where students go to college?” How should I answer the question? I paused—really I froze. Does she remember our school, of which she knows little, only goes through 8th grade? Does she mean do we publish where our graduates, 4 years later after high school, go to college? Should I amend her question to the appropriate analogy, publishing where our graduates go to high school, and answer it that way? I couldn’t figure out how to answer her question, and 400 people were waiting.

“Yes, kind of” I answered, finally, falteringly. She then carried on to make her point—a wise one— to criticize, attack really, the custom of schools publishing in local newspapers the name of each high school graduate and the college he or she is attending, and only that information, nothing else about them. The schools are reducing, if you will, the value of each child’s entire educational experience to a single outcome, as if that was what really mattered about the student and the school. Education is a journey, not a destination; measuring our schools, or our children, by their admission to and attendance at prestige colleges and universities is a rat race, a fool’s game. It is to mistakenly narrow the definition and measurement standards of excellent child-raising and education; it is a reductio ad absurdum.

Instead we should talk about and deem important who our children or students are holistically: what kind of friend they are, how invested they are in whatever their passions may be, their civic consciousness and service to others. Let’s talk about how happy they are and how confident they are about their future. For Levine, who practices child psychology in Marin County to upper middle class families, health indicators are her focus: let’s aim for students who do not abuse drugs and alcohol; who are not depressed, anxious, or stressed; who avoid risky behaviors, sexual and otherwise; who do not cut themselves or feel empty inside.

We do—we do, every year, in our final Saklan Monthly each June, publish a list of our graduates and the high schools each is attending. We try to avoid the extremes: we do it in a more holistic way, publishing several pictures of each graduate, asking them for a favorite quote, favorite Saklan experience, advice to younger students. We try, thereby, to avoid allowing to extreme a reduction in their judgment—don’t judge this outstanding young person solely by their high school. But nevertheless, there it is; we want to celebrate the great high schools they are attending, and we want to share with our community the success of our education in this way among others.

In spite of Dr. Levine’s wise advice, I do want to trumpet to our school community how successfully prepared for high school our students are, and how many options they have for high school attendance. It is great and wonderful that our graduates have excellent public high school options, here in Lamorinda and elsewhere, and we are very happy to see them, three of our eleven graduates going off to Campolindo and Miramonte, and cannot wait to hear more about their successes at those schools.

Nine of our eleven graduates completed the application process to selective, academic, independent (private) high schools, and nine out of nine of them were admitted to their first choice school. For the first time to my knowledge, we had a graduating student selected for admission to (and selecting to attend) Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, the school I have long considered the most outstanding US independent high school, and certainly one of the very most selective private high schools not just in the US but very literally on the planet.

Among the three top NAIS high schools in our East Bay region, Athenian admitted five Saklan students (five applied), and four of them are selecting Athenian, Bentley admitted six (six applied), and two of them are selecting Bentley, and College Preparatory School in Oakland admitted three (four applied). Another graduate was admitted to, and has chosen to attend, Bishop O’Dowd in Oakland.

We are concerned for more than placement, of course, but also our students’ success upon arrival. One of the way we know of their success in actually embedded in the data above—the private high schools would not come courting our students the way they do, and we would not record year after year of outstanding admissions success if our graduates were not so successful at their schools. After the dust had settled in early April, I received the following email from my friend the admissions director at Athenian: “Lumley, Thimesch, Madden, and now Marseille - that’s four to Athenian! A very good year for our schools!”

We also stay in touch to evaluate our graduates’ success: for the first time ever, we formally surveyed our recent graduates. To what was the main over arching question, “Overall, Saklan gave me excellent academic preparation for High School”, the average response was a 4.4 on a scale of 1-5, landing about halfway between good and great. From the six member class of 2003, we have learned college choices about five of them, and they will be attending college at Willamette, UC Santa Barbara (2), UC San Diego, and New York University. I should say too that though we have little data, we are proud too of the great accomplishments of our former preschool and elementary students; one fine shining example is Elena Dillard, who attended Saklan for Preschool through Kindergarten, and Extended Day for many years thereafter, and is now bound for Princeton (Elena’s sister is currently a Saklan Rainbow Kid!).

I know you too, the readers of the Saklan Monthly, share my great pride in our graduates, and are delighted to know of their accomplishments and progress. I hope you will join me at our Graduation Ceremonies, June 7, to hear each introduced and presented for diplomas, and to see that in every case, we are proud of all in all the things they do, are, and have achieved, and not just for the prestige of the school they are attending.

Jonathan E. Martin
Head of School

student scoop

Eighth Grade:
African American Study

The 8th graders just wrapped up their African-American studies unit in Humanities with an extraordinary project: student-penned speeches in the spirit of—and conveying the messages of—Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and the Black Panthers at various times in their respective activist careers. The presentations were true to the historical record: powerful, provocative, and respectful. Check out the range of their arguments: “Love is a power, quite possibly the only power that can end this war in Iraq, AIDS in Africa, and world hunger” -- “African-Americans must remember that their color and roots are things to be proud of, not to hate” -- “We ask for solidarity in the fight for freedom” -- “We must cast aside white-fueled ideas of non-violence” -- “Live as if you were living in justice.”

This assignment was the culmination of an intensive multi-media cultural analysis, which kicked off with a “Deep Listening” project of the earliest “Negro” recordings of spirituals, work songs, blues, and everyday tunes. The students identified predominant themes in African-American culture through the music, including ancestral/family ties, religion, overcoming struggle, solidarity, hard work, and creativity/play. They then designed “patchwork quilts” to illustrate these themes.

Next, we watched a portion of the PBS documentary “Africans in America,” which traced the roots of slavery in this country. The students translated their analysis of the film into a “graphic novel” (comic book) format, which covered 200 years of U.S. history.

After this, we studied the Abolitionist Movement, and students were challenged to embody the spirits of the leading activists of the era (Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Nat Turner, and William Lloyd Garrison, among others) with “Back from the Dead” presentations and improvised role-play dialogues, in which the kids had to debate “in character” the most effective means for achieving freedom. To conclude this activity, the kids drew composite character sketches to show the common attributes of an abolitionist.

Then we studied the Civil War (including a close reading of Ambrose Bierce’s horrific “Chickamauga” short story) and the Reconstruction, focusing on the complex power dynamics of the struggle for political, economic, and social equality. Students wrote outstanding short stories of their own addressing the key concepts of Reconstruction, from the uplifting 13th, 14th, and 15th constitutional amendments to the crushing Compromise of 1875 and Plessy vs. Ferguson decision.

From here we examined the work of pioneering African-American writers and musicians (from the late 19th century through the late 20th) with special emphasis on the Harlem Renaissance leaders. You may recognize of few of these names: Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Paul Robeson, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, War, Arrested Development, and Public Enemy. The kids wrote numerous in-class essays analyzing the literature and music and connecting the messages with historical precedents and the political/artistic/social controversies of the time. The students created stunning abstract paintings interpreting the “color and texture” of early jazz and spontaneously danced a sort of lindy hop (I kid you not) after viewing a video of this wildest of swing crazes.

In the end, the class analyzed various speeches by Martin Luther King, Malcolm, and the Panthers, and put the messages into their own words, drawing examples from 400 years of history to support their arguments. We concluded this final project with an open debate on the most effective activist

approaches. The kids’ insights were articulate, mature, and at times profound. I encourage you to check out a published copy of their speeches on the “Hey You, Read This!” board in the Humanities classroom.

Sam Prestianni,
Humanities Teacher