Page 141 - Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company

122 The Disney Way

considered “cheating.” The child’s passion for the subject translated into
real learning and, best of all, she wasn’t saddled with what the author of a
textbook thought she should learn. Tracy explains the direction given to
students at Downtown School: “If you want to know something, here’s
how to find it. I don’t know all the answers, and the students won’t have
someone next to them all their lives telling them the answers.”
During our interview at Downtown School, we met a fifth-grade stu-
dent named Amanda who shared with us her perceptions of her teachers,
“Very, very fun. I have never heard them yell. They never talk loud. They
are really nice. A lot of my other teachers (from her previous traditional class-
room) were nice, too, but they can get a lot louder. So, it’s better here.” Tracy
Donovan believes that children feel this way because Downtown School
chose to build an environment where children are treasured and respected.
In the words of one Downtown School parent, “There is a close, per-
sonal relationship between the kids and teachers, and the teachers know
those kids very well. On the last day of third grade, I came in and saw my
daughter Lillian with three or four of her friends crying their eyes out because
they wouldn’t see each other for six whole weeks. I had a flashback to my last
day of a Catholic parochial school where I was shouting Hurray!”
The rich and energized learning environment of Downtown School
may indeed have a direct relationship to the surprisingly low incidence of
children who are taking medication for a diagnosis of Attention Deficit
Disorder (ADD) or Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).
Today, it is commonplace that behavioral problems in schools are addressed
with drugs like Ritalin. USA Today reported in 2003 that “Ritalin is pre-
scribed at disparate rates.” And, if you live in Louisiana or North Carolina,
your child is more than twice as likely to be medicated as children living in
New Jersey or California. David Fassler, child psychiatrist, reports, “There
is no evidence that ADHD is more common in one region than another.”
The AMA reports that as many as 5 percent of U.S. students ages 5
through 14 suffer from ADHD and 80 percent of those are medicated. As
was reported in Megan Farnsworth’s article “Schools a High-Test Formula
for Success,” Principal Thaddeus Lott of Houston’s Wesley School stated
recently, “Disruptive children are either bored or frustrated. The easiest
way to maintain order is to teach to everyone’s appropriate instructional
level.” But, instead, we have become a nation where it is acceptable to label
these kids’ “special education status” and pour drugs into them. In most
public schools in the United States today, the fastest growing and often