Bard comes to New Orleans
by J.p. Lawrence
It was a storm that brought the Bard high schools to New Orleans. Stephen Tremaine, a native of the city, was an undergraduate at Bard College when Hurricane Katrina, with all its rage and winds, struck the city in 2005.
And Tremaine had an idea.
Today, that idea has become two Bard early college high schools in New Orleans – one downtown, and one in the Second Ward.
The goal is to take a Bard liberal arts education, with both its resources and its expectations, and give it to students who typically wouldn’t have access to them, said Tremaine, who is now Executive Director of Bard Early College in New Orleans.
In New Orleans, Ph.D. faculty lead tuition-free classes based on Bard’s First-Year Seminar and Language and Thinking seminar. There are rounds and rounds of free writing, informal group work, and a heavy workload of Nietzsche, Plato, and Susan Sontag.
The program, which is funded by the Patrick F. Taylor Foundation and other philanthropic groups, draws from Bard’s experience with Bard College, Simon’s Rock and the New York and Newark Early High Schools.
Classes focus on the Bard style of thinking, and not on standardized tests and mechanical repetition, Tremaine said. Admission is not based on test scores, but on interviews. Students read texts at the same level with the same expectations as Bard College first-years.
“We want students to understand writing as a powerful force in the world around them, before we talk to them about why a semi-colon matters,” Tremaine said.
Metrics that measure school performance have traditionally not been kind to Louisiana’s public schools. In 2011, 44 percent of Louisiana's public schools received a failing grade, and within the state, New Orleans schools ranked 60 out of 69 districts.
A massive overhaul of the city’s educational system in the wake of Hurricane Katrina has led to better rankings, but for many students in New Orleans, the Bard program is a welcome change from the “apathy” of public schools.
“In my high school, education isn’t really taken seriously by some teachers – not all, but even some students,” said Wesley Alexander, a graduate of the Bard New Orleans schools. “It’s like this whole apathy that affects everyone.”
Alexander began Bard-taught AP English classes in 11th grade. He officially enrolled in the program in his 12th grade because he liked the challenge of taking college classes.
Tareain King, also a graduate of the program, said the Bard program was the only reason she went to school during her senior year. Students take the Bard courses, which are offered junior and senior year, concurrently with normal high school classes. The differences, King said, were stark.
“The public high school was so bad that basically my workload was Bard… I really didn’t have anything to do in the other classes,” King said. “So it’s easy to see what’s Bard, and what’s not Bard.”
Alexander and King, now both first-years at Bard College, both credit the Bard curriculum for preparing them for college.
“From ninth to eleventh, if I would have had regular English –” King paused, and then let out a long sigh, “I would be so overwhelmed. I would not be prepared for this, at all.”
President of the College Leon Botstein has long been a vocal critic of the American system over the years. His 1997 book, “Jefferson’s Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture,” argued for overhauling the system so students graduate high school at 16.
High schools using the current test-based and standardized system “produce graduates who do not write well enough, have limited reasoning skills, are unable to use the tools of mathematics and whose command of science is far inferior to that of their counterparts in other nations,” he wrote in a 2009 New York Times piece.
The reasons Bard is in the high school business, Botstein told the Free Press, is out of “civic concern for the well being of our public education system” and “a real belief that we’re not doing the right thing by the younger adolescents in the nation.”
The solution to America’s sickly education system, Botstein has long advocated, would be more schools like the New York and Newark Early High Schools, Bard-affiliated schools where students effectively complete two years of college while in high school.
The New Orleans schools, while a different model, are a continuation of Botstein’s idea that in terms of experiencing Foucault, more and earlier is better.
The fact that so many New Orleans students are interested in the program, Tremaine said, refutes the narrative that low-income students in low-performing schools want to avoid the hard work of learning.
In fact, it was all those hours of reading densely that converted King to the Bard way. She jumped at the change to come to Bard for college, but before she left, she and other members of the program became schoolyard evangelists for the program – what it is, what it does.
“What about the students who aren’t taking the course?” King said. “Now that I’m in college and I’m seeing what college is about first hand, that’s scary, how are they going to do in college? I can speak for the people in my high school, because I know what it’s like. They are not prepared at all, so it’s kind of devastating, because you want the best for people.”
Tremaine’s idea is now part of the network of Bard schools.
“These are your classmates,” Tremaine said. “You are part of the same intellectual community as our students in New Orleans, as the Bard students in the early colleges in New York City, as the Simon’s Rockers, as the students enrolled in the new Bard Al-Quds honors college, as the students enrolled in the Bard Prison initiative.”
“And that’s something,” Tremaine said, “that really means something to Bard.”