But Oliver said, the project will be taken to other schools in Newton and to other communities if it succeeds. "We've gotten away from the idea of a pre-arranged product coming off the assembly line," he said. "From sow on we'll be assessing problems within real communities."
Yet the more the Shadow Faculty adjusts to each community the more difficulty it will have implementing its goal of "starting from the beginning." It will be impossible to avoid altering research programs to make them more attractive to a school system.
In fact, this is one of the reasons why the Newton project both emphasizes helping children who have lost interest in their work, which is of great interest to the Weeks Junior High staff, as well as bringing children out of school into the community, which is of great interest to the Shadow Faculty. If the Shadow Faculty wants to make similarly large demands on school systems less liberal than Newton's it may be faced by requests not just to expand its research plans but to alter them.
The individual research projects, on the other hand, will probably thrive. Most of the researchers are eager to win the co-operation of local school systems and to work in them. Although the Shadow Faculty has shifted its theoretical model from the Crazy School to the Instant School to the Tri-School, the individual research projects have survived and have developed continuities of their own.
Last year, for example, George Thomas, associate in Education, and Davenport Plumer, research assistant in Education, found that they and their students at Timility Junior High in Roxbury had trouble talking to each other. They tried a number of devices--including class reading of plays such as "A Raisin in the Sun"-- and had some success, but the researchers coulln't tell whether the difficulty lay in themselves, the students or the school.
This year 11 researchers, including Thomas and Plumer, will begin a project studying language in the schools. They will record children talking at a playground, children talking in small groups at school and teachers speaking in classrooms. They hope to know by the end of the year such things as whether children speak more fluently among their own peers or in a mixed group of Negro and white students or rich and poor students, and whether many teachers talk over the heads of their students or deny them opportunities to speak. Then, the group hopes, it will be able to discover ways of teaching oral and written language that overcome the problem of communication.
Some programs that the Shadow Faculty finances are neither planned nor are run by it. These include James R. Reed's attempt, beginning this fall, to teach interested Harvard Faculty members and students about Roxbury.
Reed is an education worker and artist as well as a field secretary of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and a former longshoreman and laborer. He will direct the project himself, and hopes to bring students and faculty into Roxbury homes, send them to local meetings, and get them involved in the counseling and tutorial programs that Roxbury residents run themselves. Reed has worked on a Shadow Faculty project before, but this program, though Shadow Faculty financed, is his own.
To justify its theories with projects like these, to convince hostile researchers that the projects form a coherent whole may be beyond the Shadow Faculty's capabilities. Last month, some members of the Research and Development Center's Executive Committee -- which must approve the Shadow Faculty budget -- severely criticized the Shadow Faculty's overall goals even though the Committee approved almost all the projects.
"I feel pressured to try solidifying what we're doing," Olds admits, "to concentrate on the results of our projects and try to improve the tri-school model." In other words, the Executive Committee has been asking to see some tangible results from the Shadow Faculty's debating and theorizing.
But the real pressure on the Shadow Faculty next year may come from the junior faculty members and doctoral candidates who are the bulk of its membership. The end of this term was spent working out a "constitution" that will give them more control over Shadow Faculty policy next year and less control to the Shadow Faculty's senior faculty and executive staff. Whether this will bring a shift toward greater emphasis on the research projects and less on theorizing remains to be seen.
The researchers give from one quarter to all of their time to the Shadow Faculty. It is possible that they, and the Faculty's unusual combination of disciplines, will continue to attract new research projects. "We might die is two years, or we might double in size," is Oliver's summatione.
Either way, there is a fair chance that Oliver's idea of remaking elementary and secondary education, it "starting from the beginning," will be forgotten.
"If that happens, there are other schools who will try it," he said. "We're not the only place, We're not the center of radical thinking. But it will be a test of what people here think is important.