Name: Joan Countryman
Position: Head of Lincoln School in Providence
Backround: Before coming to the Lincoln School in 1993, she served as assistant head for academic planning and director of studies at Philadelphia’s Germantown Friends School. Countryman also taught math there starting in 1970. In addition, she lectured at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania from 1988 to 1993, and served as a consultant to the School District of Philadelphia. She published the book “Writing to Learn Mathematics” in 1992. She has also published numerous articles and frequently lectures on math education, gender and math, and the use of writing in math classes. Among her other duties, Countryman serves on the boards of The Providence Journal Co. and the Association of Independent Schools of New England.
Education: B.A. from Sara Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., in 1962; M.U.S. from Yale University in New Haven, Conn., in 1966; graduate study includes work at the University of London, London School of Economics, as a research student and Fulbright Fellow in 1966.
Family: Married, two grown children, three grandchildren
Residence: Providence and Philadelphia
PBN: The school has its roots in the Quaker heritage and the goal for an education here is to instill confidence, give students a sense of achievement, and instill a life-long love of learning. How do you go about doing that?
COUNTRYMAN: One of the reasons we talk about the life-long love of learning is actually a very practical one. If you think about the way our lives have changed let’s say even in the last 10 years, with technology, there’s so much stuff that you might use in your work. If we only taught specific skills and didn’t engage them in loving to learn, they would be very limited. So what do we do? Well one of the things we can do, particularly in a K-12 school like ours, is take advantage of the fact that most children do love to learn. They think going to school is a very exciting adventure, because children are curious. They want to know about things, they want to try things out. Our school celebrates the idea that children really do love to learn.
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A second thing I would say about that is that sort of excitement about learning is contagious. And one of the things that happens here is girls are surrounded by girls who are excited to learn, and we build on that. How about instilling confidence, do the girls come to school confident already? One of the things the girls say as they get older is that Lincoln helps them feel confident. Again, I think younger children tend to think they can do things, until something happens to prove them wrong. I think they are willing to try. But part of what we do is expect them to try. I always tell the story that at Lincoln you see fifth grade girls raising the flag every morning. Now that means they sometimes get it upside down and they have to take it down again, or the wires get twisted; but they believe after the first time that it’s possible to get that flag right and get it up there at the top of the flag pole. If girls don’t have a chance to do something like that, then they don’t think they can do it.
It’s the same thing with computers. An awful lot of people who are afraid of them just have never touched them. The American Association of University Women just sponsored a study that indicated nationally girls are lagging behind boys in taking advanced computer classes … and that only 17 percent of the students taking the national advanced placement computer science exam were female.
What’s your experience at Lincoln?
We are well aware of the statistics and are very much concerned about them. We promote the use of technology throughout the school. We have a lab in the upper school, grades nine through 12, that we’re very excited about, because there are more girls doing more work in the physical sciences because of the computer. In our physics lab, most of the materials there are computer-based. It’s very exciting because the girls love it. So we have girls doing advanced placement work in physical sciences and in computer science. I’m less concerned about that issue particularly, but I do want to make sure all our girls have access and really have the experience of using the materials and doing advanced level work on computers. Every girl in ninth grade at Lincoln takes a computer science course.
What grade do you start them using computers?
… I think there’s a need to be careful, because the computer is a tool. It’s not the answer to all your problems. We in fact have computers in the classrooms in the lower school, we use the computer as part of the curriculum in our lower school…. But we really try not to get too tangled up in their use. In the middle school there’s a computer course and there they learn the inside workings of the computer, how to make it work. They understand what all those boards are and how the computer is put together, which I think is another important way of building confidence.
What are some things girls feel more comfortable doing in an all girl school?
I teach trigonometry now; it’s a two-period a week course. One of the things girls will do, high school girls will do, if there aren’t boys there is take the risk of making mistakes. They will say ‘I think the answer is something,’ or ‘I approached this problem a certain way.’ What I have seen girls do in a coed setting is not say anything if they are uneasy about what they think about a situation. Boys are more willing to just blurt out anything. Girls are more reluctant to do that. In a single sex setting, girls are more willing to take the risk, to go out on a limb.
Your science department has been praised for its curriculum, which is designed specifically for female students. How do you do that?
Actually I think our science program is wonderful for anybody. What we have tried to do is recognize that girls often are a little bit wary about science at least as they get older. What the AAUW study points out is that girls were less often found in advanced-level science courses and computer science advanced placement courses. We have tried to address that by … by first of all encouraging girls to reconsider the idea that girls shouldn’t take physics. We have actually reorganized our program a little bit, we do more work in the physical sciences earlier, in an effort to show girls that in fact they are capable of doing physics, for example.
In ninth grade and 10th grade our girls do some work in chemistry and physics, which have traditionally been courses and topics that have been treated later on. But we want to introduce them early on, so they see in fact they are interesting and accessible.
It’s a matter of trying to catch them early on, engage them?
Engage them, exactly. The other thing we recognize, for example, is that girls like to work in groups. We try to celebrate that, we encourage them to support each other. The old fashioned idea that you put your hand over your paper and do it by yourself is really not very useful for most girls, particularly in math and science.
That seems like it would be a good approach for any student, boy or girl.
Exactly. The difference is that, and I think it’s a very telling difference, is that some students naturally figure that out. So that if they’re not allowed to do it in the classroom, then outside the classroom they’ll have their own study group, they’ll support each other. Some students think you’re not supposed to do that. What we do is encourage it, we say you can help each other, you can make sense of this material by talking to each other…. Because in fact in the world of work, most of the work we do is not alone.
You charge tuition here, but you also offer financial aid. What’s the reason for that?
The problem for schools like ours is we have no other source for income except for tuition. Although our costs look high virtually even that doesn’t pay the full cost of an education. We have to raise money in addition to that. On the other hand we believe that this should not be an education simply for people who have money. We believe we have something to offer that’s really significant and important for everyone in the community.
What is tuition here?
It varies, it starts out at about $9,000-something in kindergarten and this year $13,400 in the top four grades.
What’s your take on the charter school debate (in which public money can used to fund privately-run schools)?
It’s a complicated issue isn’t it? I’ll tell you what concerns me about the charter school movement, I think that governance of schools turns out to be a very complicated and important problem. Who runs the school? The way public schools are run is really quite different; there, in effect, the community is responsible for running the school. You elect the school board and the school board has certain kinds of responsibility.
That’s very different from what goes on here. We have an independent board, the board selects the head, and essentially says to the head: ‘you run the school.’ Obviously there’s lots of give and take, there’s evaluation of what I do and so forth. It’s a very significant responsibility at the same time to be, as a board, responsible for looking ahead, because you want to make sure the school survives and also make sure you have the right people in place.
Now the charter school movement obviously has arisen because people are concerned about public education…. My experience here is somewhat limited, we’re in a transition period on this, but what I’ve observed in certain other places is that often it’s who’s really responsible for running the school? Do you really have an independent board and the head? Or do you really have a lot of people sort of milling around trying to make decisions about curriculum and faculty?
I applaud the enthusiasm that people have for education. On the other hand, you may be surprised to hear me say this, but I am deeply committed to public education. I don’t think that the existence of a school like mine does, or should in anyway suggest that we don’t in fact in this country have a major commitment to providing public education. I think in a democratic society we desperately need to have strong public schools. And I think part of the work of a school like mine is to show the way, to say in fact that students can do well, these are the kinds of things a good education can provide. What we should work for is that everybody has an opportunity to reach for them.
So charter schools are sort of a symptom that people are concerned?
I understand the desire to make it better. Running a school is very hard; it’s much harder than most people realize. What if you’re suddenly responsible for teaching 20 children to read? It’s not something you can just do. So in fact our public schools, and I’m talking now generally, in this country in spite of what everybody says, there’s a lot of expertise there. There’s a lot of professionalism. Years and years of study and work has gone into creating an educational program. We can criticize it and certainly there’s room for improvement, but lots of our schools are very, very good indeed.
On the other hand we have some problems. We have problems in our cities, partly because the cities are complicated places. Cities are large, they don’t have the resources, or we don’t put the resources into them. We have crowded classrooms, we have children from a variety of backgrounds, we have language problems. It’s harder to run a school if you’re in a more complex situation. Nevertheless, I think there are an awful lot of good schools in the country and I think we should not forget that. As far as the charter movement, again I applaud the enthusiasm, but I’m concerned a little bit about whether people are in fact biting off more than they can chew. They can be very naive about how hard it is to run a school.
Did you have anything that you wanted to touch on that we didn’t cover?
It’s nice for me to have the opportunity to talk about the issues particularly in the context of what I consider the Providence financial community. In fact we are all part of a society that needs to work together. And I think what we as educators are trying to do with the business community, with all the parts of the community, is to look to the future and the children are the future. If we don’t care about our children I don’t think we will have a future.
