Living Faithfully: The Transformation of Washington School

by Frances Schoonmaker

Living Faithfully is for anyone interested in education and education policy, whether parent, community member, teacher, student of leadership or policy maker. It looks at school leadership and reform in an alternative way, following the story of change at Washington School, a troubled grades 56 center in a small town in Western Oklahoma. Not only does the book address a neglected population, the more than 1/3 of the nation’s children who go to school in small towns and rural areas, it uses the occasion to invert thinking about school reform. It argues that in today's policy climate where guaranteed, standard outcomes are touted as goals of education, leadership schemes, even those designed to challenge topdown, bureaucratic models, are quickly coopted to produce the appearance of learning. Prevailing leadership theories beg the question of who is being transformed and to what end, failing to challenge assumptions and dominant ideas of contemporary education and leadership thinking.

Drawing on Philip Phenix’s idea of the faithful life, the book proposes an alternative way forward. Phenix talks about connections between school and life. According to Phenix, the faithful life is concerned with the normative question of what is good, true, right, just, beautiful, and holy. This is not the vocabulary of current education policy. But it describes the kind of community created at Washington School despite its history of failure. And it describes what most families want for their children whether they live in the city or country, America or an education that matters.

216 pages, Paperback

First published May 21, 2012

About the author

Frances Schoonmaker is the award-winning author of The Last Crystal Trilogy for middle-grade and young adult readers in addition to her professional books on education.

She sees her writing for young people as an extension of a career that has served them. After teaching school for a dozen years, she became a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University where she taught in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching and was Director/Co-Director of the graduate-level teacher preparation program in childhood education.

The Last Crystal Trilogy is the recipient of multiple awards. The Black Alabaster Box won the Firebird Award for Historical Fiction. The Last Crystal has won the 2019 Agatha Award for Best Middle Grade/Young Adult Mystery, The Coffee Pot Book Club Gold Medal for Historical Fiction, the Outstanding Creator Award, the Midcrest Media Award and the London Book Festival Award.