Check out this article
from 2010 in the New York Times on a school founded by the mime troupe the Blue Man Group:
The school, which is entering its fourth year, has remained true to its
progressive roots, with “imagination stations” and “glow time.” Children
help direct the curriculum, and social and emotional skills are given
equal weight to reading and math.
And:
After a teaching candidate read “The Great Kapok Tree” to a class of first graders, they took interest in the rainforest.
A provocateur built the classroom into a rainforest, replete with a
kapok tree whose (plastic) leaves cover the ceiling. The children have
studied the animals that live in the rainforest and are now exploring
whether the Littles, characters from another story they read, might live
in the kapok tree. They write letters to the Littles and even create
math tests for them.
Well, two years later, and
the predictable result has occurred:
Parents are yanking their kids out of the “progressive,” $32,000
per-year private school founded by the Blue Man Group — which has no
books and no tests — because their kids are barely learning to read, The
Post has learned.
Yes, but they are doing great in rain forest. You can't put a pricetag on that kind of knowledge! Well, you can ($32K), but apparently the philistine parents are more concerned with Bush's old formulation: "Is our children learning?"
