It comes courtesy of my new friends in Memphis (who we’re working with to design a pretty remarkable new high school), and it captures everything I think we want school to embody: fun, teamwork, problem-solving, a culture of experimentation, productive failures, and soul-satisfying successes.
How might we infuse every school in America with the spirit of this project?
story booth: Engineering the Ridiculous from Crosstown Arts on Vimeo.
I’ve yet to meet a grown-up who, at some point, hasn’t felt a bit like a hamster in the wheel – spinning mindlessly towards some opaque goal, and for some abstract, poorly understood reason.
Life can feel that way sometimes.
So you can imagine my surprise when, while visiting a small public high school in the Excelsior neighborhood of San Francisco, I encountered a group of boys working on an indeterminate project out of plywood and a handsaw.
“What are you guys doing?” I asked.
“We’re building a human-sized hamster wheel,” they replied.
Of course they were.
That’s because they were students at the June Jordan School for Equity (JJSE), where the goal of every adult is to help every young person see the world for what it is – and what it needs to become.
To do that work well, say co-directors Matt Alexander and Jessica Huang, a school must help children make sense of the world they inhabit. “This school was explicitly founded to be a force for social justice,” Huang explained, “and to do so for the kids in our city with the greatest need for it. We’re a college prep school, but our primary concern is not getting kids into college; it’s putting them in a position to have good options, and helping them see the both the oppressive aspects of our society, and the ways to make it better.
“The only way to get off the wheel,” she added, “is to realize you’re on it.”
Since its founding by a group of local parents and families in 2004, JJSE has resided in the same single-story building at the Southern edge of San Francisco, in a neighborhood that doesn’t even make it on to the tourist map.
For Excelsior’s longtime residents, the anonymity has been a good thing. Since its inception in the mid-19th century, Excelsior (which means “ever upward” in Latin) has been a refuge for working class families. Yet as median home prices continue to soar in San Francisco – and space remains finite – Excelsior is starting to gentrify, a development I heard about repeatedly during my time at the school.
“We’ve lost several of our strongest teachers in the past few years because they just couldn’t afford to stay in the city,” said Giulio Sorro, himself a longtime teacher at the school, and, like his colleagues, someone who embodies the best of the profession. “With more middle-class white parents moving in, we’re starting to hear new voices that see our black and brown kids not as assets but as deficits to their own kids. That’s going to change things. It’s already changing things.”
It may seem like the gentrification of a San Francisco neighborhood is a storyline that runs parallel to the lifeblood of a school that is trying to help its students become the first in their families to go to college, but at June Jordan, those sorts of incongruities are in fact the river running through the center of the school’s entire approach to learning.
The first hint of this occurs the moment you arrive, as I did on a recent sunny morning. The school, which shares space with a larger charter school, is surrounded by a ring of trees and greenspaces. Hillsides littered with houses, like favelas, poke up in the distance.
You must enter through a parking lot in the back, which is lined by a procession of graffiti. A particularly striking one near the school’s front doors, in colorful purple and a highly stylized script, quotes Martin Luther King to reinforce the spirit of the place:
Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of justice.
At first blush, the inside of the school feels familiar: wide hallways lined with lockers, low ceilings, and hastily-tacked up posters for next week’s afterschool meeting or upcoming dance. Yet one thing, for a high school at least – let alone a high school serving young people whose lives have been disproportionately clouded by trauma and adversity – feels decidedly unfamiliar: the ubiquity of laughter and levity.
I asked Sorro about that, just before the start of his 9th grade Health class. “We have to redefine education,” he said while his students filed in around us. “What are we here for? Is it to compete with China and India? Is it to get into college? I don’t think it should be about those things.
“I believe good teaching is good teaching anywhere, but there’s a whole other mind-state here. Young people of color, coming from oppressed communities in America, it is set up for these kids not to make it – you can see it.”
In response, June Jordan’s diverse team of founders crafted a mission for the school that was designed to help young people of color “make it” in three key ways: as Community Members who live with respect, integrity, courage and humility; as Social Justice Warriors who stand against oppression and work to create positive change in themselves and their communities; and as Independent Thinkers who possess the intellectual skills they need to succeed.
There are other essential design principles. June Jordan is a small school – just 250 students. Students are assessed not by taking standardized tests, but by presenting detailed portfolios of their work. Teachers teach subjects, but their most important job is to integrate the school’s six habits of mind (perspective, relevance, original research, precision, evidence, and logical reasoning) into the curriculum. Every student has a personal advisor for all four years. And every member of the community – from students to parents to staff – has a meaningful, accountable voice that shapes the overall health and wellbeing of the school.
“Too often,” explained Mr. Alexander, who, like Ms. Huang, was a teacher at the school before becoming its co-director, “everyone in schools is driven by the spirit of compliance, or the idea that there is someone external to the school who needs to come in and turn it around. It’s the mindset of your job being to fix something, or to do something to people instead of building capacity or doing the work with people.
“But if you really believe in democracy,” he continued, “and you really believe that everyone has equal dignity and worth, then you have to build everyone’s capacity and let everyone be their best selves. The accountability has to go that way, too – our primary accountability is to one another, not to the state or to test scores. Our main job is to build that capacity and to recognize that everyone comes with strengths and abilities. But you have to create the space for people to develop that – and it’s really hard.”
I asked Alexander and Huang how the school went about doing that.
They talked about schema theory.
“We know from the research,” Huang began, “that your brain builds schemas, or organized patterns of thinking, in order to understand your environment. We’re hard-wired to look for patterns; it’s what kept us alive thousands of years ago. So everyone is doing this, all the time, and when it comes to education, we have an eerily consistent set of schemas we have all called on for generations. So the bulk of what we do is construct a new counter-narrative that helps kids see the invisible layer of schema that has held us all unnaturally in place for so long – from institutionalized racism, to inherited feelings about what a math class can and cannot be, to internalized notions of inferiority. This helps them start to figure out how to disrupt those patterns, and imagine a different set of possibilities.”
To make this more actionable, the school has developed a pedagogy that encodes what teachers like Sorro are setting out to do. Indeed, over years of work retreats, trial and error, and sustained, challenging, collegial revisions, June Jordan’s faculty and staff have articulated an approach that is, in their words, “expressly designed to help our students understand the forces of marginalization they have experienced growing up, and begin the process of freeing themselves from oppression, especially the internalized oppression which we see preventing so many students from meeting their potential.”
The physical manifestations of this are ubiquitous at the school – from a clear set of preferred teacher behaviors to the classrooms themselves, which feel like bursts of color and texture and collage, and in which probing academic and personal work is always in some vital stage of unfolding.
In one class, for example, students were using the facts from a real case to play out a scenario about sexual harassment and the creation of a hostile work environment. In another, a group was strategizing how best to show their support for students at another school that had recently experienced a widely publicized racist incident. And in Sorro’s classroom, each person was asked to briefly share one thing they did over Spring Break that had benefitted their health – and one thing that hadn’t.
“I went to Pismo Beach to drive ATVs,” said one young man, innocently enough.
“And why was that good for your health?” Sorro asked.
The answer he received was a reminder that part of the reason the school culture feels so light is because the burdens their students carry feel so heavy. “I have a lot of anxiety,” he explained, “and I have a real rage in me; sometimes going really fast is the only thing that can make me feel better.”
Later, after several other intense and highly personal recollections from the previous week, Sorro asked the group, “Is it always good spending time with family?”
“Family can be poison sometimes,” said one student. Sorro nodded calmly. Throughout the class, his demeanor stayed constant; he did not over-react to the highly charged stories, or under-react to the quotidian ones. “In my teaching I try to go to the depth and the heart of it all,” he explained. “You have to put it all out there. I believe in going to the pain – and to the love.”
That duality – the intellectual and the emotional, the pain and the love, the heavy and the light – is what makes June Jordan such a different place to go to school.
“We try to create space for real collegial accountability,” Huang explained towards the end of the day. “We have real honest conversations here about the things that matter to us. But that’s taken years to build – years to build.
“What it means now is that if you have an idea, you understand that it’s your land to work here. That’s an Emiliano Zapata line: ‘The land belongs to those who work it.’ No one is going to do it for you.”
I reflected on her words as I walked the hallways of the school, which were blanketed by quotes, murals, and personal reflections.
Written across an upraised fist above a doorway were the words of Shirley Chisholm: “You don’t make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.”
Down another hallway, just past a mural honoring two former students who were shot to death, I saw a sign telling me: “Healing doesn’t mean the damage never existed. It means the damage no longer controls our lives.”
And then, just outside a classroom, I found the JJSE Secrets Wall, where all members of the community were invited to anonymously post a secret (no matter how silly or somber) – and, in so doing, perhaps feel less burdened by its weight.
I don’t like myself.
I smoke weed.
I tried to kill myself.
Depression rules my life.
I feel like my parents won’t be proud of me when I’m older.
I can’t live without my Playstation!
I grew up around drugs, police, and losing family.
It felt jarring to see such naked admissions posted so publicly, and in such an otherwise-traditional looking place. But that is precisely what makes the June Jordan School for Equity so special. Spend time here, and you will feel the dialectical pull of the world as it is, awash in both beauty and heartbreak; and the world as it ought to be – empathetic and equitable, devoid of the mindless churn of the human-sized hamster wheel, and reoriented around a different sort of body in motion: the wheel of democracy, which, though it grinds slowly, propels us steadily toward justice, and the society we seek.
One year, early in my teaching career, I got reprimanded for giving too many “A’s.”
“You can’t give everyone the same grade,” I was instructed. “Give a few A’s and F’s, and a lot of B’s and C’s. Otherwise, everyone will know that your class is either too easy or too hard.”
This was unremarkable advice; indeed, it was as close to the educational Gospel as you could find. It was human nature in action.
And, according to a new book, it was completely wrong.
“We have all come to believe that the average is a reliable index of normality,” writes Todd Rose, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and the author of The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness. “We have also come to believe that an individual’s rank on narrow metrics of achievement can be used to judge their talent. These two ideas serve as the organizing principles behind our current system of education.”
And yet, Rose suggests, “when it comes to understanding individuals, the average is most likely to give incorrect and misleading results.”
In fact, the origins of what Rose calls “averagarian thinking” had nothing to do with people; they were adaptations of a core method in astronomy – the Method of Averages, in which you aggregate different measurements of the speed of an object to better determine its true value – that first got applied to the study of people in the early 19th century.
Since then, however, this misguided use of statistics – by definition, the mathematics of “static” values – has reduced the whims and caprices of human behavior to predictable patterns in ways that have proven almost impossible to resist.
Consider the ways it shaped the advice I got as a teacher, which was to let the Bell Curve, not the uniqueness of my students, be my guide. Or consider the ways it has shaped the entire system of American public education in the Industrial Era – an influence best summed up by one of its chief architects, Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose applications of scientific management to the classroom gave birth to everything from bells to age-based cohorts to the industrial efficiency of the typical school lunchroom. “In the past,” Taylor said, “the man was first. In the future, the system must be first.”
Uh, yeah. No.
Of course, anyone who is paying attention knows that the end of the Taylorian line of thinking is upon us – and Rose’s book might be a way to expedite its demise. “We are on the brink of a new way of seeing the world,” Rose predicts, and “a change driven by one big idea: individuality matters.”
In systems thinking, there’s a word for this approach: equifinality – or the idea that in any multidimensional system that involves changes over time, there are always multiple pathways to get from point A to point B.
But if that’s true – and The End of Average paints a very compelling picture that it is – what are the implications for our public schools?
To seek two variations of the myriad ways we could answer that question, I visited two very different schools – one, a neighborhood elementary school in suburban Maryland, and the other, an urban charter school in Washington, D.C. – to see what the principle of equifinality, and the mission of uncovering the uniqueness of every child, actually looks like in action.
Ducketts Lane Elementary School: A Strengths-Based School
Ducketts Lane is a big, brand-new K-5 elementary school in Howard County, Maryland – about an hour outside of D.C. The school, whose 800 students reflect the diversity of the surrounding community, with significant amounts of Black, White, Asian and Latino students, opened just three years ago in response to rising enrollment in the district. And as principal Heidi Balter explains, it, “the fact that we all started the school together and built it together has made a big difference in the culture you’ll find here. And the core of that culture flows from our decision to see one another through our strengths.”
What Balter means is the school’s decision to utilize the Gallup Strengths Finder tool, an evaluative instrument that has been used by more than 12 million people, and which is finding a growing audience among the nation’s public schools. Similar to the more widely known Myers-Briggs tool, respondents answer a series of questions, which then reveal one’s top five strengths (there are 34 in total).
At Ducketts Lane, the process of placing strengths at the center has been a slow and deliberate process across the school’s first three years of existence. “Year one was about ensuring that every faculty member knew their strengths,” she explained to me amid the din of several hundred schoolchildren. “Year two was about making sure that all of the adults were familiar with their colleagues’ strengths. And this year has been about extending that awareness to the students – specifically, to the 4th and 5th graders.”
The school’s emphasis on strengths is impossible to miss; its imprint is ubiquitous, from the sign I saw in the front door as I entered (“Kindness is caring – show your caring strength”) to the conversations I had with adults and children alike, almost all of which began with people sharing their “top fives.”
For Balter, a thirty-year veteran with wavy blond hair and the cheerful, focused air of an elementary school principal, that common language has been revelatory to the way she approaches her work.
“One thing I hadn’t thought about before in my career was focusing on strengths, not weaknesses. This is the piece that’s different. But what we’ve found is it helps you understand why someone is doing what they’re doing. Our teachers have started to see that student behavior that in the past would have been described as combative or disruptive is usually just something a child is doing because it’s what the learner in them needs. So we feel like we’re starting to get the language we need to identify the positives in kids, and to help them see what makes them uniquely special. And that’s helped us all see qualities in our kids that we might have missed before.”
Derek Anderson, Balter’s Assistant Principal, agrees. “Before we started using this assessment, we all had our habits and preferences – but this gave us a language to talk about the ways in which we were all different. As an educator, we’re used to asking what we can do better. But now, we’re talking about what’s going well and what people do well.”
To be sure, that doesn’t mean everything at Ducketts Lane looks and feels different from the classrooms of our youth. In fact, much of the school feels joyfully traditional. Kids aren’t doing asynchronous learning on computers, or self-directing their own time; they’re still in English or Art or History class (in age-based cohorts), and they still have bells and passing periods and grades. Yet it’s clear that the school’s emphasis on identifying each student’s strengths can only lead in one direction: the days for all those averagarian features are numbered. And it’s clear that, even at this early stage, the school is giving its students something precious. As one 5th grader put it – a sweet, self-possessed girl named Izetta – “I feel like I’m understanding myself more now, and that feels good.”
Two Rivers Public Charter School: Building a Culture of Metacognition
In the crowded landscape of public charter schools in the nation’s capital, Two Rivers finds itself at the top of the list; last year, its waiting list for preschool ran 400 deep, and its traditional metrics (i.e., test scores) all trend upward. Like Ducketts Lane, it is also highly diverse. But whereas Ducketts Lane was founded to deal with overflow district enrollment, Two Rivers was founded by parents who wished to create something they hadn’t seen elsewhere in the nascent DC educational marketplace.
I remember one of our first meetings,” said Jessica Wodatch, the school’s principal and one of those founding parents. “There were a bunch of us in this crowded townhouse, trying to imagine the school we wanted to create and what it should say about learning. And the things we talked about fell into four buckets are still at the core of what we do today:
Today, Two Rivers is at capacity – over 500 kids – and its classrooms feature children with a wide range of skills. Typically, this has led educators to apply a “method of averages” approach and teach to the middle. But at Two Rivers, it has led the leadership team to think more innovatively about staff development, and about what it will take to ensure that all kids – not just the ones who come to school most ready to learn – get to participate in all aspects of the learning experience, and not just remediation.
“What is core for us is that we’re a community that comes together around rich and exciting problems in search of common solutions,” said Wodatch. “That is the essence of what we are about. But that means we have to think differently about how we assess student learning, and how we prepare teachers to create classrooms that are able to meet each child’s individual needs.”
The way Two Rivers has done that is through a detailed deconstruction of the essential skills they want young people to develop – critical thinking, collaboration, problem-solving, character and communication – and a detailed evaluative rubric that describes what each of those skills look like in action. “This approach requires us to be thinking about learning in its totality,” Wodatch explained. “That means we choose instructional foci that connects with our assessment priorities. And since we have to really invest in our own staff development, it means we spend a lot of time focusing on student work together, and looking at our instructional moves.”
I saw this on display recently, at a staff development day in which teachers from different teams met up to share and respond to examples of student work from their classes. Two 4th-grade teachers, Ben Johnson and Anya Rosenberg, shared examples from a class project to clean up the Anacostia River, while 2nd-grade teacher Jessica Hall wanted feedback on some student essays about the trailblazing African-American female pilot Bessie Coleman.
The depth of their feedback for one another, and the extent to which each teacher was willing to open themselves up for a detailed examination of their own individual decisions (and hidden biases), was evident throughout the 90-minute session.
“I wonder how we can help kids get better at discriminating between what’s good to cite from the text and what’s not,” offered Johnson.
“I notice how well you’ve scaffolded this assignment,” Rosenberg told Hall. “But I’m also realizing how this conversation has opened up a can of worms for me. We spend so much time thinking about complexity, and about how to help kids become more complex thinkers. But now I’m realizing that what matters more is examining the worth of the assignment. How can we start to gear our tasks in ways that connect more deeply to the worth of the material, and to the deeper epiphanies we want them to have?”
Creating space for those types of adult epiphanies, which are happening in service of the needs of kids, is precisely the point of work like this. “We’re so used to boiling everything down to the aggregate or to trends or to quantifiable numbers,” Johnson said afterwards. “But these sorts of exercises are reminders of how important qualitative data is, and how much we need to understand not just each individual child, but also our own individual habits and assumptions – the sorts of things we might not be able to see without the help of our colleagues.
“To be a great teacher, you have to be vulnerable with your practice. And that’s what we’re doing here.”
The Beginning of the End of Average?
What schools like Ducketts Lane and Two Rivers show, I think, are the ways in which the principle of equifinality is already at work in more communities than you might imagine.
And that, too, is the point. The goal doesn’t need to be to make all schools use evaluative rubrics or the StrengthsFinder tool; the goal is to ensure that all schools find ways to uncover each student’s strengths, challenges, passions, and abilities while remembering that there are myriad ways to do so – and that all roads to transformation must pass through adult minds and bodies first.
“So much of being successful,” said Wodatch, “is being innovative within the constraints of the current system so we can impact the lives of these kids. We’re doing that now, as are lots of other schools. But if we could make more of those constraints go away – if we could stop sorting kids by the Bell Curve, and instead set each kid on their own individual “J-curve” trajectory – I think you’d see the beginning of something truly transformative for kids.”
One of my favorite educators, Ron Berger, has been saying this for a long time. “To build a new culture, a new ethic,” he writes in his book An Ethic of Excellence, “you need a focal point – a vision – to guide the direction for reform. The particular spark I try to share as a catalyst is a passion for beautiful student work and developing conditions that can make this work possible.
“Work of excellence is transformational,” he writes. “Once a student sees that he or she is capable of excellence, that student is never quite the same. We can’t first build the students’ self-esteem and then focus on their work. It is through their own work that their self-esteem will grow.
“If schools assumed they were going to be assessed by the quality of student behavior and work evident in the hallways and classrooms – rather than on test scores – the enormous energy poured into test preparation would be directed instead toward improving student work, understanding, and behavior.”
And so,” Berger and a growing number of educators have concluded, “instead of working to build clever test-takers, schools would feel compelled to spend time building thoughtful students and good citizens.”
Imagine that.
The age of the Individual is upon us.
(This article also appeared in Medium.)
The first time he got in trouble, 7-year-old “Z” kicked his teacher — getting him into more trouble.
A few months later, shortly after his grandfather passed away, he kicked his teacher again.
In many schools across the country, where zero tolerance policies allow little wiggle room for understanding why a child may be misbehaving, Z would have been suspended, expelled, or even arrested.
That was how Z’s school district in Broward County, Florida, had operated for years — enforcing zero tolerance policies, and arresting or suspending children (most of them students of color, and often students as young as Z) at a higher rate than any other school district in the state.
On one level, of course, a zero tolerance policy makes sense. After all, schools can’t be safe places if students are allowed to kick their teachers. Order must be maintained. What could be clearer than saying that misbehavior will not be tolerated?
But on another level, every child is different, and students need the right kind of support if they are to be able to learn and grow. Different kids bring different sorts of issues with them to school, and punishment is rarely the best way to help a child who is most in need of love and support.
Punishing children harshly does nothing for their ability to succeed academically, and statistics show that it contributes to the achievement gap. Suspended students spend less time in class, which correlates to lower test scores and grades and increased apathy and dropout rates.
Instead of being suspended, Z was placed in a Behavior Change Program the district had organized, where trained professionals teach children how to deal with their emotions and make better choices. His mother is relieved; Z still has a chance to be whatever he wants to be in the future, she says.
That distinction — keeping kids in the classroom, and out of the courtroom — is what Broward County superintendent Robert Runcie and a growing number of school leaders across the country are saying can make the difference in putting a child like Z on a path to success, instead of a path to prison.
This is a major challenge for American schools today — changing the way adults respond to student conduct, particularly with students of color. Consider this: Today, American public schools suspend roughly 3½ million kids a year — more than twice the rate in the 1970s — and we refer a quarter of a million children to the police for arrest.
Every year.
Worse still, educators suspend black students at more than double the rate for white students — even though statistics show that a student who is suspended or expelled is three times as likely to be in contact with the juvenile justice system the following year.
“When adolescents experience injustice in any context,” explains UCLA professor Phillip Goff, “they end up committing crime at much higher rates later in life regardless of how likely they were to be involved in crime to begin with. That is a sobering statistic. It means we can now show that injustice causes crime.
“When you expose young people to injustice, they lose hope that playing within the rules and working hard is going to pay off. They start to believe more and more that we live in a world where the goal is simply to get by and get over — and when you are teaching that implicitly, you shouldn’t be surprised that discipline becomes a problem.”
The good news is that more schools are heeding the advice of experts like Goff, and adopting restorative justice programs — alternative approaches to discipline in schools.
Restorative justice programs provide a way to repair the harm that occurs between people when conflicts arise. What they’re showing is that when victims, offenders and community members meet to decide how to do that, and do it well, the results can be transformational.
This is happening in Oakland, California. The city’s school district is nearly 75 percent nonwhite and 75 percent of student’s meet the requirements for the free lunch program and has experienced extensive discipline and violence issues. In 2012, however, it expanded its adoption of restorative justice work, and has seen change for the better.
It works like this: instead of suspending or expelling students who misbehave, schools with restorative justice programs bring kids together under skilled facilitation by a trained adult — and, often, fellow students — in order to resolve their conflicts peacefully, and build a stronger community in the process.
Howard Zehr, a distinguished professor at Eastern Mennonite University who is regarded as the “grandfather of restorative justice,” puts it this way: Typically, the questions our traditional systems try to address are: What rules or laws were broken? Who broke them? And what do they deserve?
By contrast, restorative justice (RJ) asks a different set of questions: Who has been hurt? What are their needs? And who has the obligation to address those needs and remedy the harm that has been done?
Students are now asking for a circle, says one Oakland school staffer. “Instead of throwing a punch, they’re backing off and asking to mediate (conflicts) peacefully with words. And that’s a great thing.”
Better yet, it’s working. According to a September 2014 report that the district submitted to the Office of Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education:
• More than 88 percent of the teachers reported that restorative practices were very or somewhat helpful in managing difficult student behaviors in classroom.
• More than 47 percent reported that RJ helped reduce office referrals, and 53 percent said it helped reduce disciplinary referrals for African American students.
• Suspensions have declined significantly — and most significantly for African American students suspended for disruption and/or willful defiance, a decrease of 40 percent.
Knowing this, here are a few good questions to ask the leaders at your child’s school:
• “What is your approach to discipline? Do you have a zero tolerance policy here?” (And, if they do, are they willing to consider exploring a shift to a restorative justice program?)
• “What are the disciplinary statistics of the school?” “How often do you suspend students?” “How often are kids behaving violently?”
• “How are you helping students develop the skills they need to manage their emotions and make better choices in their interactions with other people?”
• “In what ways are the teachers here being trained to become more sensitive to the different cultural needs of their students?”
In sum, the key to a safe and healthy school climate has less to do with the children — and more to do with the adults. The approach school administrators, teachers, and other adults take to discipline in schools can make all the difference. As Broward County superintendent Robert Runcie puts it, “It isn’t about improving student conduct, as much as it is about changing the way adults respond to student conduct.”
(This article originally appeared on GreatSchools.org)
It’s been the no-brainiest of no-brainers for as long as anyone can remember: If you’re a parent, and you have the means to do so, a mark of your commitment to your children is measured by the amount of money you’re able to sock away for their college education.
But what if it’s no longer true?
What if, in the wake of impending seismic shifts in higher education, the parents of today’s Kindergartners (aka the Class of 2032) need to stop worrying about their 529’s, and start preparing for a radically different landscape – one in which the very notion of “admissions” is an anachronism, the price tag is reasonable, and the experience doesn’t unfold over four years, but one’s entire life?
Before you block me from your Twitter feed for inanity, hear me out.
First, let’s consider the present state of higher education:
Meanwhile, the majority of our colleges and universities are not even set up to give students an equivalent return on their investment: after all, the central function of the “hybrid university” is research, not teaching.
So what does that leave us with? An increasing disconnect between the skills young people have, and the skills their prospective employers need. As Forbes put it in 2014: “With the large numbers of recent college graduates who can’t find employment that pays well enough to justify the costs of going to college, it appears that we have reached the final stages of a process that has driven costs up but value down.”
Even the U.S. Department of Education sees the writing on the wall: “Today,” they write, “college remains the greatest driver of socioeconomic mobility in America, but if we don’t do more to keep it within reach for middle-class families and those striving to get into the middle class, it could have the opposite effect – serving as a barrier, instead of as a ticket to the American Dream.”
That’s bad news for middle-class families, but it’s devastating news for low-income families, who are constantly told that the only way to change their fortunes is by making sure the next generation is college-bound – despite the fact that just 9% of the country’s poorest students actually graduate with a bachelor’s degree by age 24 (as opposed to 77% of the wealthiest).
This is all starting to sound as sham-tastic as Trump University.
To be clear, the promise of college as a pathway to prosperity is still true for many – just not as many as before. Making college more accessible and affordable helped create the modern American middle class, thanks to policies like the G.I. Bill and the Higher Education Act. In fact, Title IV of the law focused on ensuring equal access for students from low-income families. It created support programs to help those students enroll in and afford higher education. And the 1972 reauthorization of the bill saw the beginning of the modern framework for federal student aid.
The problem is that while Congress has built out its own framework for federal aid, the overall costs of higher education have risen dramatically, resulting in a lower purchasing power for Pell Grants and a greater reliance on federal student loans. Consequently, whereas middle class kids can still get saddled with unwanted debt and a degree of limited utility, poor kids can get buried altogether.
This is not, therefore, merely a question of privilege. It’s a question of priorities – and of making sure that our institutions of higher education have the right ones.
The good news is there are more examples than you might think of colleges and universities that are changing their practices in ways that better serve the needs of kids and their families – and there are compelling reasons to think that by the time today’s five-year-olds graduate from high school, the landscape they face will be filled with options that are more personally relevant, affordable, and accessible.
If you’re looking for a future-oriented public university, for example, take a close look at Arizona State. As recently as a decade ago, ASU was little more than a party school with nice weather. Now, it’s the top-ranked university in the country for innovation – ahead of places like Stanford and M.I.T. Yet it’s still pretty affordable, and still pretty easy to get into.
And if you’d rather see how one of the world’s top universities is reimagining itself, check out Stanford 2025 – and see what you think of the creative ways they are redefining the structure and purpose of college (Goodbye Transcripts, Hello Skillprints). Or take note of Nike founder Phil Knight’s recent decision to give Stanford $400 million – not for its endowment or a new sports facility, but to create a new scholarship that recruits students from around the world to solve the world’s most intractable problems.
As Google’s Jamie Casap argues, this is precisely where education should be headed. Today’s students shouldn’t be thinking about what they want to be; they should be asking themselves what problems they want to solve.
Of course, that sort of shift requires a very different model of higher education – and a very different price point. But as Kevin Carey writes in The End of College, what schools like ASU and Stanford are showing us is where other universities will need to go if they want to survive. “To prosper,” he argues, “colleges need to become more like cathedrals. They need to build beautiful places, real and virtual, that learners return to throughout their lives. They need to create authentic human communities and form relationships with people based on the never-ending project of learning. They need to do it in ways that are affordable and meaningful for large numbers of people.”
For Carey and others, that means that many of the things we associate most strongly with “the college experience” may, once today’s Kindergartners reach university age, no longer exist. “The idea of ‘applying to’ or ‘graduating from’ colleges won’t make as much sense in the future,” Carey suggests. “People will join colleges and other learning organizations for as long or as little time as they need.”
Before that can happen, however, a vital monopoly must be broken: the sale of recognized credits and credentials. But Carey believes the exponential advances in information technology, coupled with the widening understanding of how people learn, will soon result in a digital marketplace of credentialing that reduces the diploma to its rightful, antiquated place. “The way the Internet allows people to connect with one another and share information creates new sources of authority that can be used to validate credentials,” he argues.
“They will allow people to control and display information about themselves in new and powerful ways, by assembling credible evidence of knowledge and skills gained in a variety of contexts – in college, in the workforce, in life.” And they will make each person’s educational identity “deep, discoverable, mobile, and secure.”
This is certainly the bet LinkedIn made when they spent $1.5 billion to acquire Lynda.com a year ago. It’s what new organizations like Accredible or Mozilla’s Open Badges platform are starting to develop. And it’s why some of the world’s top universities have combined to launch EdX and offer free online courses from top instructors.
So if all of these future-oriented efforts are already underway, why are they still at the margins of how we think about college?
Simply, because old habits die hard.
The comfort we get from continuing to imagine college as it has always been – as a symbol of acculturation and access, more than a vehicle to meaningful skills acquisition – will take a bit longer to collapse under the weight of its own untruth.
But make no mistake about it – we are already chasing chimeras. The unquestioned promise of college is, for too many, an illusion – and, worse still, an increasingly unaffordable and reckless one to pursue.
That means change is upon us. But perhaps by the time today’s five-year-old is graduating from high school, greater affordability, access and relevance will be, too.
I spent the first half of this week in Memphis, Tennessee, working with a remarkable local group of educators, parents and developers (yes, developers) who are all dreaming big together as part of Crosstown Concourse, an ambitious effort to redesign a 1.5 million square foot former Sears warehouse into a “vertical urban village” of residents, retail outlets, non-profits, and — wait for it — an innovative public high school.
It’s a thrilling idea — a city within a city, organized around an overarching umbrella of arts, education and wellness, and imagined as a learning ecology that helps all people examine multiple pathways to healthy living. And clearly, if it works, the high school it houses (there will also be an adult education high school, by the way) will need to look nothing like the high schools of our collective past, which were designed for efficiency, and for batching and queuing unprecedented numbers of young people into an Industrial economy that was largely fixed and known.
Indeed, if this project is successful, Crosstown High School will be, according to the lead developer (who happens to be an art history professor), “the beginning of the end of education in a vacuum.”
YES!
So what does that look like?
That’s the task we at WONDER now have before us — along with some great local partners. And while the specifics remain to be hammered out, we already know enough to say this:
In other words, a school like this must mark the beginning of the end of not just education in a vacuum — but of the Industrial Age itself, and its emphasis on efficiency.
Behold: the “Age of Expeditioncy” — an era in which learning is deeply public, and contextualized, and relevant, and dynamic, and hands-on — is upon us.
It comes from the Fullerton (CA) School District, which has developed “epic storylines” and a gamification around core skills in order to make learning more technologically integrated, experiential, and fun.
It also looks and feels very different from the sort of educational experiences almost anyone above a certain age has ever had. Is that a good thing, or does an approach like this take us too far from the tried and true backbone of what teaching and learning has always looked like — and should continue to look like into the foreseeable future?
Or, more specifically, this is a video about a conversation of those issues. It features yours truly, but also Jaime Casap, the head of education at Google, and a number of other great educators in both K-12 and higher ed. Check it out, and see what it ignites in your own thinking . . .
By announcing last month that I wanted 2016 to be a year of wonder, I put friendly pressure on myself to pursue on all the big questions that occurred to me. We’ll see how well I’m able to sustain the energy over the course of the rest of the year, but my first riddle was this: ‘If empathy is what makes us distinctly human, what do we know about the neuroscience of empathy itself?’
If a person wishes to wonder deeply about the world, which ingredient is more important – the person, or the world?
Until recently, our answer was clearly the latter.
For the great majority of our time on this planet, human beings have viewed the world almost entirely through the prism of “we,” not “me.” As foragers, we lived in unquestioning obedience to the unknowable marvels of the natural world. And in the earliest civilizations, we lived to serve the needs of our Gods in Heaven – and then, later on, their hand-chosen emissaries on Earth.
In these long chapters of the human story – which together make up more than 93% of our history as a species – our ancestors were most likely to find comfort, and a sense of identity, through their ability to fit usefully and invisibly into a larger community.
To stand out from the crowd was undesirable, since, in reality, doing so could mean ostracism or death.
To walk in someone else’s shoes was unnecessary, since, in effect, everyone wore the same shoes.
And to wonder about the world was to focus one’s gaze outward, or upward.
Over time, however, the human gaze has shifted. Beginning with the rise of the great religions, continuing through the citizen revolutions in France and the Americas, and running right up to and through the age of social media and the Selfie Stick, we humans have begun to increasingly look inward – and to find an equally endless source of awe and wonder as we do.
At the same time, a wave of new discoveries in fields ranging from neuroscience to psychology have taught us that our need to wonder is more than just a desire to daydream; it is the way we deepen our empathic capacity to connect with our fellow creatures.
“What do we human beings do all day long?” asks neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni. “We read the world, especially the people we encounter.” And according to Iacoboni and his colleagues, we do so by relying on “mirror neurons” – a special subset of the more than 100 billion neurons that are busily and ever at work in the most complex structure in the known universe: the human brain.
They’re called mirror neurons to describe the ways that observing the behavior of someone else – from eating a peanut, to yawning, to experiencing sudden pain – can trigger the same brain activity in the observer as in the observed. “Our brains are capable of mirroring the deepest aspects of the minds of others at the fine-grained level of a single brain cell,” Iacoboni explains. “This is utterly remarkable. Equally remarkable is the effortlessness of this simulation. We do not have to draw complex inferences or run complicated algorithms.
“When we look at others, we find both them and ourselves.”
Similarly, a growing chorus of researchers has begun to suggest empathy is a foundational building block in our process of developing social cognition. “The brain is a social organ, made to be in relationship,” explains psychiatrist Daniel Siegel. “What happens between brains has a great deal to do with what happens within each individual brain . . . [And] the physical architecture of the brain changes according to where we direct our attention and what we practice doing.”
And yet, as far as words go, empathy is a new one – it didn’t even appear until the early 20th century. It comes from the English translation of the German word einfühlung, which was used to describe the relationship between a work of art and its subject; it was later expanded to include interactions between people.
Those interactions, according to social theorist Jeremy Rifkin, are what give rise to a deeper human capacity for making sense of the world. “Empathic consciousness starts with awe,” he contends. “When we empathize with another, we are bearing witness to the strange incredible life force that is in us and that connects us to all other living beings.
“It is awe that inspires all human imagination. Without awe, we would be without wonder and without wonder we would have no way to exercise imagination and would therefore be unable to imagine another’s life ‘as if’ it were our own.”
In other words, we have slowly flipped the paradigm of human understanding: strictly speaking, it is not the world that makes us wonder; it is our wondering that makes the world. Or, even more specifically, as the Chilean biologist-philosophers Francesco Varela and Humberto Muturana point out, “the world everyone sees is not the world but a world, which we bring forth with others.”
This epiphany is changing more than just our understanding of the brain. In recent years, scientists in fields ranging from biology to ecology have revised the very metaphors they use to describe their work – from hierarchies to networks – and begun to realize, as physicist Fritjof Capra says, “that partnership – the tendency to associate, establish links, and maintain symbiotic relationships – is one of the hallmarks of life.”
The downside of all this navel-gazing? A heightened risk of narcissism, consumerism, and reality television.
The upside? A steadily increasing empathic capacity, anchored in our development of a shared sense of vulnerability, and a paradoxical desire to seek “universal intimacy” with the world.
“We are learning,” Rifkin writes, “against all of the prevailing wisdom, that human nature is not to seek autonomy – to become an island to oneself – but, rather, to seek companionship, affection, and intimacy. We have been sending out radio communications to the far reaches of the cosmos in the hope of finding some form of intelligent and caring life, only to discover that what we were desperately seeking already exists among us here on Earth.”
Here’s the thing about me: I love schools. And I’m in them all the time. Lots of them, all over the country. So it’s safe to say that I am as aware as just about anyone what is out there when it comes to American educational options.
And yet here’s the other thing: I’m constantly hearing about new places doing great work — new to me, at least, because the folks there have been doing their thing for a long time — and whose approach to learning is precisely the sort of thing we should be hearing a lot more about.
The latest entry in that category? The June Jordan School for Equity, a remarkable public school in San Francisco.
See for yourself, by watching these three short profiles of three recent JJSE students.
And here’s the final thing to consider: schools like JJSE are filled with amazing young people like Lupe, Henry, and Sintia. So when you hear about the declining state of American education, just remember this:
The future of learning is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.
Lupe Carreno
Henry Eik
Sintia Henriquez
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