Learning is More Than A Test Score

After several years of processing, a plan for redesigning secondary education heads to the Connecticut legislature. It could not show up there at a worse time fiscally as the state confronts a dire budget situation. Local school districts know what that means for them. Hard times. Just this week, for example, the Bridgeport mayor will come before the school board to explain why he needs the school system to cut $7 million from its current budget. With the yet unresolved school finance issues in Connecticut, concerns with the cost of this proposal are very real.

I’d like to look at it from a different perspective. The proposal has been through a number of iterations and the “final” product approved by the Board of Education is 31 pages long. To their credit, they appear to have listened to some of the concerns raised in a statewide “listening tour”. Most would agree, I think, that American high schools are generally ill-equipped to meet the demands foisted upon them by the 21st century and a radically transformed global economy. In the century long trajectory of school change in the United States perhaps no nut has proven itself more difficult to crack by would be reformers than large scale transformational change to secondary education in the United States.

In the early 80’s, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching conducted a fifteen month long study of secondary education under the leadership of Ernest Boyer. The report was published in 1983, (High School: A Report on Secondary Education in America.) Many of the conceptual elements in the Connecticut proposal were hatched in the Carnegie report 25 years ago.

A decade later in an interview for NEA Today (June 1995), Boyer was asked why it was so difficult to restructure high schools. “School renewal isn’t impossible in the upper grades,” he said, “just far more difficult. In the higher grades, children are less active, parents are less engaged, the schedule tends to be inflexible, and the curriculum more rigidly defined. We also put curriculum into boxes where teachers must shift their attention from students to subjects, and where assessment tends to focus on knowledge of facts built around a discipline. As a consequence, the areas of learning are less integrated.” In 1988 the prescient Boyer had proposed a convocation of educators to plan reforms for the 21st century.

A year after the Carnegie Report, Ted Sizer published another seminal book, Horace’s Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School, which was highly critical of American high school education. Sizer founded the Essential Schools Movement based on 9 principles called the “Common Principles”:

1. Learning to use one’s mind well
2. Less is More, depth over coverage
3. Goals apply to all students
4. Personalization
5. Student-as-worker, teacher-as-coach
6. Demonstration of mastery
7. A tone of decency and trust
8. Commitment to the entire school
9. Resources dedicated to teaching and learning

Sizer also paved the way for a revelation in which that the Gates Foundation has invested heavily, the notion that when it comes to high schools, size does matter. And Boyer foresaw the dramatic (and yet unrealized) potential technology could have on the learning process. Just this week the Gates Foundation has changed its strategy regarding Secondary Education. (See Gates Revamps Its Strategy for Giving to Education.)

So here’s my point. The proposal before the legislature is complicated. If implemented well, with appropriate support and adequate resources, it would no doubt be good for Connecticut. In my opinion, however, it is not new and does not as yet offer any breakthrough thinking on how best to accomplish its laudable goals within the constraining, but persistent architecture of the American high school. We have not yet figured out what we must do to truly individualize the learning process for each child and the pressure is building. I suspect that the ubiquitous internet holds the key to resolving this piece of the puzzle. The unspoken question is really: are we up to the challenge?

Clay Christenson, author of “Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns” predicts that there will be a sharp rise in online high school instruction in the next four years and by the year 2019 more than 50% of all high school courses will be online. It may be way out of the box, but certainly not beyond the pale. When random access meets rigor, who will win? For a cautionary tale, see Nicholas Carr’s essay in Atlantic Monthly “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

And if your curiousity has peaked, you really should read Maryanne Wolf’s wonderful book Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

Yes, I probably have too much time on my hands or, even more likely, am suffering from a form of Post Traumatic Stress peculiar to burnt out school change optimists!

Sometimes it helps me to clear my mind by revisiting the meaning of the words we use.

reform |riˈfôrm|
verb [ trans. ]
make changes in (something, typically a social, political, or economic institution or practice) in order to improve it : an opportunity to reform and restructure an antiquated schooling model.

redesign |ˌrēdizīn|
verb [ trans. ]
design (something) again in a different way : the front seats have been redesigned.
noun
the action or process of redesigning something.

transform |transˈfôrm|
verb [ trans. ]
make a thorough or dramatic change in the form, appearance, or character of : lasers have transformed cardiac surgery | he wanted to transform himself into a successful businessman.

rigor |ˈrigər|
noun
the quality of being extremely thorough, exhaustive, or accurate : his analysis is lacking in rigor.
• severity or strictness : the full rigor of the law.

random access Computing
noun
the process of transferring information to or from memory in which every memory location can be accessed directly rather than being accessed in a fixed sequence

Definitions from the Dictionary distributed with Apple OSX