Durham Public Schools’ network of Montessori schools is more than 20 years in the making, and its newest project — Lucas Montessori, formerly known as Lucas Middle School — is preparing to welcome students back this fall for the first time since its transition.
Lucas joins Little River, George Watts, Morehead and Lakewood Montessori, making it the fifth in Durham’s web of public Montessori schools as part of the district’s Growing Together plan. While many may think of Montessori schools as being exclusively private institutions filled with wooden toys and children under 5, some schools, like those in DPS, are rewriting the script.
The National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector says the essential elements of a Montessori education include letting children choose their own work, trained teachers support children’s development, classrooms are in mixed-age groupings, uninterrupted periods of independent work and the use of Montessori materials.
[Subscribe for FREE to Carolina Public Press’ alerts and weekend roundup newsletters]
Rita Rathbone, the magnet school specialist at DPS, told Carolina Public Press the district began offering Montessori schools in the ‘90s because there was interest from parents and local education leaders strongly believed in the philosophy.
“In addition to knowing we had the demand from the lottery applications and parent feedback, we also know that there is a lot of data out there that supports Montessori as an effective educational strategy, that it does improve student outcomes and especially for the lot of the students we serve in the district,” she said.
“Even though Montessori philosophy is now well over 100 years old, everything that we’re seeing now in modern research, there’s a lot that confirms what Maria (Montessori) figured out just from observing students.”
How Durham does public Montessori
All of DPS’ Montessori schools are magnet schools, meaning they accept students from across the district regardless of address. But Rathbone said almost all of their magnet schools operate on a hybrid model, so there is a designated attendance zone for the schools, but they also accept students through the lottery process. This keeps the process equitable and lessens logistical burdens like bussing.
“The purpose of that policy is it helps ensure diversity and ensures that folks living right there near that school aren’t locked out or have barriers put in front of access to the school that’s most convenient for them,” she said.
Families can opt out if they are zoned to attend a Montessori or other specialized school and feel the school is not a good fit for their child.
Cory Hogans is the principal of Little River Montessori, which transitioned to a Montessori school last year. He said students hardly feel a difference in their day-to-day since becoming a Montessori school, and noticeable changes come in the form of instructional design, the process of creating learning experiences to achieve outcomes.
“Certainly in terms of programs, what’s being offered at the public Montessoris in Durham is not different than what’s being offered at any of the other schools,” Hogans said. “Now the particular instructional design — there are some differences there.”
“Classroom design is a little bit different. And I would say one of the significant differences is the interdisciplinary nature of the work cycle, where for extended periods of time, students are working in a facilitative way with the adults in the classroom through the content areas. So there’s not necessarily an ELL literacy block or a math block, but it’s interdisciplinary.”
Assistant Principal of Lucas Montessori George Ward said when educators think of the general goals they have for their students like teaching them independence, building confidence in their work and making real-world connections, Montessori is a good vehicle for achieving those goals.
“We try to have some longer periods of work time for students to be able to go deep and explore different subject areas, more time for the teachers to make sure every student is getting what they need to learn the content material, for them to work with small groups of students, for students to do some independent works based on the different levels, for students to be engaged in our environment at our school,” Ward said.
“We’re still doing state standards, Durham curriculum expectations, but we’re just trying to provide students with developing some good life skills and a way to access the curriculum with different options for them inside the school learning environment.”
Since Lucas is gearing up to welcome its first batch of students as a Montessori school, it remains to be seen what sorts of growing pains the school will experience. But Ward said interest and excitement from families has been palpable, and it’s up to Lucas to rise to the occasion.
Perceptions of Montessori as private
Because modern Montessori schools have a tendency to be tuition-funded — although there are now more than 500 public Montessori schools in the U.S. — Dave Ayer, director of communications for the National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector, said there’s a misconception that Montessori is just for affluent families.
But he said Montessori schools were not designed with a tuition-funded model in mind. In fact, founder Maria Montessori opened the first Montessori schools in Italy during the early 1900s to serve underprivileged children and families in Rome.
But because Montessori diverges from the structure of traditional schooling, public districts have tended to stick with more conventional models, Ayer said. But that doesn’t mean it only works in a private school setting. And public Montessori schools make it easier to measure growth because there is less selection bias, he said.
“It’s been traditionally hard to measure, to sort out the effects of families who chose Montessori from what happens with their kids. There’s a selection bias effect — maybe families that are going to have kids that are going to do well already choose Montessori,” Ayer said.
“But in charter schools, you often have lottery admission, and when you have lottery admission, then you can keep track of the people who chose Montessori but didn’t get it because there’s only so many slots. And the ones who chose Montessori and did get it, you can look at their outcomes years down the road. The studies that look at that see those kids doing well in academic achievement, doing well in executive function.”
Struggling with equity
While Montessori has a framework intended to promote equity in education, researcher and former director of Yale’s Education Studies program Mira Debs has said that even public Montessori schools show a pattern of “becoming whiter and wealthier with time.”
Ayer said this phenomenon is a top concern for the National Center, and it could have to do with most public Montessori schools being part of a school choice program of some kind.
“Even if a choice school is doing outreach in their neighborhood, it’s possible that they may just encounter people with more time and and resources on their hands to access that kind of system,” he said.
“In this country, because economics and race are closely linked, you may end up with those disparities. So when we work with schools, we work with them to encourage doing additional outreach, to look at the neighborhoods that they really want to target to make sure they have a representative population of teachers.”
Rathbone said the district has several lines of defense, in addition to the hybrid attendance model, for ensuring its schools maintain socioeconomic diversity and accurately represent Durham.
This includes a weighted lottery that would go into effect if a school isn’t representative of the district’s enrollment by 10 percentage points. The district also sends out all communication in both English and Spanish. The existing Montessori schools have proven to be representative of Durham so far, she said.
“Little River, for example, just based on its attendance zone before we even pull in lottery folks, is actually one of the best demographic representations. Its student body really mirrors the population of our county very well, and Lucas as well,” she said.
“Lucas is majority students of color. There’s several mechanisms we’ve worked in to ensure that we prevent that in the future, we don’t have a student body that doesn’t reflect the community.”
Administrators in DPS encourage those who are curious about the Montessori approach to visit the schools and see the action for themselves.
Rathbone highlighted Lucas’ focus on outdoor learning and agriculture education as a special factor in DPS’ Montessori education, citing its idyllic northern Durham campus.
“They’re just joy-filled schools, and they were before this work started,” she said.
“Every time I walked in those buildings, my faith in so many things was restored because they were just joyful places to begin with. And then Montessori brings that extra energy of focusing on what’s known as peace education.”
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. You may republish our stories for free, online or in print. Simply copy and paste the article contents from the box below. Note, some images and interactive features may not be included here.
