Tag: Industrial-Era

For America’s Schools, Is This the Beginning of the End of Average?

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on For America’s Schools, Is This the Beginning of the End of Average?

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:

  1.     Learning must be joyful, hands-on, and relevant to life;
  2.     Kids must become good people;
  3.     The school must be welcoming to all; and
  4.     The education must be well-rounded.

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.)

What (& Where) Are the World’s Most Transformational Schools?

Posted on | by Sam | 18 Comments on What (& Where) Are the World’s Most Transformational Schools?

OK, people, let’s get specific: Out of all the schools in the world, which ones are the most transformational when it comes to imagining a new way to think about teaching and learning in the 21st century?

There are a lot of inspiring schools out there, so I want to repeat: which are the most transformational – by which I mean schools that are demonstrating, by policy and practice, 10 or more of the 22 core categories from QED Foundation’s Transformational Change Model?

What I find so useful about the QED model (scroll down a bit on their home page to see it) is the way it identifies the central pillars of a high-quality education, and then demarcates what each pillar looks like in a traditional, transitional, and transformational setting. In a traditional school, for example, we tend to assume the student bears the primary responsibility for learning; in a transitional environment, that responsibility shifts to the teacher (see, e.g., just about every recently proposed accountability policy in the U.S.); but in a transformational context, the responsibility is shared via a learning team that includes, and extends beyond, teacher and student.

Of course, learning teams are just one part of a holistic system of environmental conditions. That’s why, taken together, the QED change model helps clarify what we need, and which stages our own evolution will need to pass through, in order to pull K-12 schooling out of the Industrial-era model and into a new, Democratic-era paradigm.

Because that sort of clarity is in short supply, too often we hold up models of school reform that are, at best, examples of transitional progress, not transformational change.

With that caveat in place, please help me find the best set of transformational schools the world has to offer – and please ground your recommendations in the QED change model.

I’ll start the bidding with two examples, and a sample of the ways in which the school is modeling transformational practices:

Science Leadership Academy (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) – SLA is an inquiry-driven high school that opened its doors in 2006. Students at SLA learn in a project-based environment where the core values of inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation and reflection are emphasized in all classes.

Selected Transformational Practices:

  • Philosophy: Traditional – Coverage; Transitional – Depth/Breadth; Transformational – Standards-based Inquiry
  • Goals: Traditional – Test Results Targets; Transitional – Curricular goals; Transformational – Learner Aspirations & Life Options
  • Assessment: Traditional – Of Learning; Transitional – For Learning; Transformational – As Learning
  • Educator Development: Traditional – Re-certification Hours; Transitional – Group Learning; Transformational – Collaborative Inquiry

Riverside School (Ahmedabad, India) — Riverside offers a curriculum and experiences of engagement with the city that enables children to better understand their skills, potential, and responsibilities as citizens. It is also developing social intervention initiatives in the city to provide a wide array of activities (cultural, instructional, and recreational) that can be synchronized with the regular school curriculum.

Selected transformational practices:

  • Model of Success is Based On: Traditional – The Willing and Able; Transitional – Inclusion; Transformational – Racial and Social Justice
  • Context for Learning: Traditional – Classroom; Transitional – School; Transformational – Learning Community
  • When/Where Learning Happens: Traditional – In School; Transitional – Coordination between in- and out-of-school; Transformational – Anywhere/Everywhere
  • Student Investment: Traditional – Requirements; Transitional – Engagement; Transformational – Passion

To be sure, Riverside and SLA are just two of the schools out there doing several things really well, and being very intentional about the way they do so. What other schools are demonstrating a transformational approach to teaching and learning? And in which specific ways are they doing so?

I look forward to your recommendations and ideas.

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

New Rules for School Reform

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on New Rules for School Reform

You know there’s a dearth of creative thinking in education when an article trumpeting cutting-edge teaching quotes somebody, without irony, saying the following:

“Get a computer, please! Log on . . . and go to your textbook.”

Yet that’s what the Washington Post did this morning – and they’re not alone. Despite ubiquitous calls for innovation and paradigm shifts, most would-be reformers are little more than well-intentioned people perfecting our ability to succeed in a system that no longer serves our interests.

Compounding the problem, even the best new ideas face a minefield of the same old obstacles that, left unaddressed, will lead to nothing new. For example, there’s a growing push to make homework more passive (i.e., watching a lecture at home, something that in the past would have taken up a class period), so that the school day can become more active (i.e., venturing outside to leverage community resources, something that in the past would have required a field trip). Yet the early-adopter schools are finding a familiar nemesis – inflexible definitions of “seat-time”, and strict requirements associated with course credits that inhibit teachers from letting different kids proceed at different paces and in different ways. They are, in short, the intractable rules of the Industrial Era, which was about standardization and scale, being applied to the flexible needs of the Democratic Era, which is about individualization and customization.

Instead of installing Smart Boards, and then using them as Blackboards, how can we think more imaginatively about the opportunities and obstacles in our field?

In the spirit of Bill Maher, I’d like to suggest three “new rules”:

1. Name your non-negotiables – I’m not expecting everyone to agree on these, but we should at least be clear as individuals about what our efforts are designed to accomplish. For example, do you think 3rd and 8th grade reading and math scores are a sufficient metric, by themselves, for evaluating whether or not schools and teachers are successful? If so, fire away with any and every study that supports your claim. But if not, stop cherry-picking the studies that benefit your argument (i.e., “schools that add art classes show a XX% rise in achievement.”) Either these tests are a valid stand-alone metric or they aren’t. Decide what you believe, and be consistent.

2. Begin with the end in mind – Thanks to Stephen Covey, this mantra has been with us for a while now. Yet I rarely encounter schools or school reformers that clearly understand what they’re looking for, and why it’s different in a transformational way. If we let current policies answer this question for us, we’re back to test scores; after all, nothing else matters in an era of high-stakes accountability. But what if we seek a more balanced learning environment, and a more balanced set of skills and competencies in young people? What would we need to do in order to bring that environment about, and how would we know if we were successful?

This goes beyond merely a new organizational mission statement – although for many places that would be a good start. Instead, it gets to the core questions we as a field must grapple with: What should be the primary context for learning – the classroom, the school, or the larger community? Will our goals be evaluated by test results, by curricular goals, or by individual learner aspirations? And does the responsibility for learning rest primarily with the student, the teacher, or a learning team that includes both?

Until we ask and answer these questions, both as a field and as individuals seeking to contribute something meaningful, the structural dysfunctions of the Industrial model we’ve worked within for nearly a century will remain invisible to us, and we’ll do things like get rid of textbooks  . . . so students can read them online. Or renovate old schools  . . . without also asking what new schools should look like. Or celebrate our increased efficiency in the old system . . . rather than create a truly disruptive new set of values and models.

At least one organization has clearly thought this through – check out the QED Foundation’s change model, in which they break out the primary components of a learning environment and then characterize reforms in each area as traditional, transitional, or transformational. QED has decided it will commit no less than 80% of its efforts in the transformational space. What have the rest of us decided? Have we even though our work through to this degree?

3. Stop waiting for the planets to align– Too many educators feel as though the current test-obsessed system has been imposed upon us. This has led too many of us to spend too much time complaining about what’s wrong, and not enough time actively amplifying what’s right. We are all complicit in the current system, and we all have a responsibility to change it for the better.

So if you’re a teacher or a principal, what are you waiting for? Be more proactive in demonstrating a better way to equip young people with the skills and self-confidence they need to be successful in school and in life – and show us how you did it. Band together with others to generate your own sense of political cover if the current policy environment continues to hinder your capacity to create a balanced, healthy learning environment. And define, and then maintain fidelity to, your own non-negotiables and end-goals.

In the end, transformational change really is that simple – and that difficult.

(This article also appeared in the Washington Post.)

Is School Renovation The Change We Seek?

Posted on | by Sam | 5 Comments on Is School Renovation The Change We Seek?

OK, I realize I’m late to the game – I was in China last week when President Obama first outlined his jobs proposal to a joint session of Congress. But I’m back now, and I just read it, and as I look at it I’m wondering if anyone else has made a simple observation about his idea to renovate America’s crumbling public school buildings:

Is this really the change we seek?

Don’t get me wrong – scores of schools need renovating, and lots of people need jobs, so anything that tackles both of those issues must have some merit. And yet it’s odd that, at a time when we’re all in search of the best ways to transition from the Industrial-Age model of schooling to an as-yet unnamed future vision (the Democratic-Age model, anyone?), we would choose to double down on the use of buildings that were designed to accommodate the needs of a bygone era.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since I’ll be spending the 2011-2012 school year observing three different schools — district, charter, and private — here in DC. The traditional neighborhood public school is housed in a traditional American school building – first constructed in 1924. By contrast, the brand new charter school is located in a brand new office building.

At first blush, you’d think the neighborhood school would have all the advantages when it comes to its use of physical space, and its capacity to think creatively about how to create the optimal learning environment for children. And, to be sure, the building – large, airy, and complete with playgrounds, art rooms and science labs – does afford certain privileges and conveniences (the children at the charter school, for example, must traverse a busy street in downtown DC just to reach an outside playground). But as I watched the staff of the new charter school use the final weeks of August to transform an otherwise nondescript office floor into an engaging and attractive learning space, I realized that the absence of a traditional building was also liberating, and, ironically, providing the space for people to think more innovatively about what a school actually needs to look like.

This point has been made before. As Rick Hess notes in The Same Thing Over and Over, “If the schools erected over centuries past were a road map for the system of schooling that we want, the strategy of walking the same path faster and more energetically would have much to commend it. But our schools do not provide that road map. They were never intended to take us where we desire to go. Our schools are not a solid foundation for twenty-first century schooling but a rickety structure that wobbles under the weight of each new addition.”

I agree with Mr. Obama when he asks rhetorically: “How can we expect our kids to do their best in places that are literally falling apart?  This is America.  Every child deserves a great school – and we can give it to them, if we act now. “ I also think it makes sense to make needed repairs. But as we do so, we would be wise to be more intentional in thinking about what the school buildings of tomorrow will need to look like – and not look like – and Mr. Obama would be wise to lead us in that process, else we move ahead blindly to renovate a sea of rickety structures that will do little more than provide cover for our ongoing efforts to succeed in a system that no longer serves our interests.

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

The Three Most Important Questions in Education

Posted on | by Sam | 3 Comments on The Three Most Important Questions in Education

(This column also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

It’s graduation season again – yet nobody seems to be celebrating.

On college campuses, graduates are entering an economy in which the stable career paths of yesteryear are disappearing – and the specialized job opportunities of tomorrow have yet to appear. And in communities across the country, parents and young people are left wondering what exactly those past four years of high school were in service of – and how much, if any, truly transformational learning occurred.

Something’s gotta give. The Industrial-Age model of schooling, which benefited 20th-century generations by serving as a legitimate ticket to the middle class, has clearly run its course. In its place, we need a model for a new age – the Democratic Age. And we need strategies for ensuring that young people learn how to be successful in the 21st-century world of work, life, and our democratic society.

We can get there, but to do so we need to start asking – and answering – the three most essential questions in education reform:

1. How do people learn best?

Over the past several years, a slew of research from a range of fields has helped illuminate a much deeper understanding of what powerful learning actually looks like – and requires. We know the ideal learning environment is challenging, engaging, relevant, supportive, and experiential. And we know that learners of all ages are more motivated when they can apply what they are learning to do something that has an impact on others – especially their local community.

The bad news is that too many schools are still crafting environments in which learning – if you can even call it that – depends less on these attributes than on obedience, memorization, conformity, and a set of requirements first deemed important a century ago.

The good news is that we already have schools across the country lighting a different path. At High Tech High in San Diego, for example, all learning opportunities are hands-on, supportive, and personalized. As school founder Larry Rosenstock explains, “Students pursue personal interests through projects. Students with special needs receive all the individual attention they need. And facilities are tailored to individual and small-group learning, including project rooms for hands-on activities and exhibition spaces for individual work.”

Best of all, the High Tech High model isn’t so precious or rare that our only hope is to remake every other school in its image. Instead, the rest of us can create our own success stories by doing what Larry Rosenstock did – heeding what we now know about how people learn, and operationalizing those insights into an actual school.

It’s environmental standards for learning we need – not a standardization of content or teaching practices.

2. What are the essential skills of a free people?

Whether we intend them to or not, every school is structured to value a different type of citizen. In China, for example – the site of my first teaching experience – the needs of the community are valued more than the needs of any individual. As a result, in the school in which I taught, free expression was discouraged, conformity was encouraged – and China got the citizens it sought.

In the America of the Industrial Age, one could argue we experienced similar alignment. After all, the early 20th century was characterized by exponential growth in its general and school populations, and a stable set of jobs for young people to fill. Today, however, the forces of globalization and democratization have elevated a different set of challenges and opportunities – and, by design, a different set of skills. Yet schools have not caught up to the shift, which is why so many of our graduates are emerging unprepared for the challenges and opportunities of the modern world.

What would happen if every school in America scrapped its current set of graduation requirements, and started over by identifying what it believes to be the essential skills of a free people – in work and in life?

One school in New Hampshire, the Monadnock Community Connections School (or MC2 for short), is already doing this. At MC2, students must demonstrate mastery in seventeen habits of mind and work in order to fulfill the school’s mission statement – “empowering each individual with the knowledge and skills to use his or her unique voice, effectively and with integrity, in co-creating our common public world.” These habits – which apply to every imaginable learning experience, from internships to classes to personal learning that occurs outside school – all have concrete indicators that are delineated in levels ranging from Novice to Expert. And not surprisingly, the habits reflect the skills most essential for the challenges of the Democratic Age – from self-direction and creativity to critical thinking and collaboration. As school founder Kim Carter explains it, “In preparing a student for their chosen post-secondary path, be it college or work, it’s critical to know what skills and knowledge will help to shape the decisions that impact their life.”

Makes sense, right? So what are the rest of us waiting for?

3.     What does it mean to be free?

In the end, our ability to answer the first two questions is in the ultimate service of the third. And yet the reality is that too many of us still understand what it means to be free in terms of the style of jeans we choose to wear, not the quality of ideas we choose to express.

The Founders certainly understood it differently, and so must we if wish to recalibrate our schools for the modern era.  In such a world, what it means to be free would mean having the space to discover one’s full worth – and developing the capacity to unleash one’s full potential.  Our schools and colleges would be places where we proactively created healthy, high-functioning learning environments. And our graduates would know, embody, and be able to apply the essential skills of a free people.

The answers we seek for creating such a system of schools are all around us. We just need to start asking the right questions.

Let’s Scrap the High School Diploma

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on Let’s Scrap the High School Diploma

This month, schools across the country are hard at work preparing auditoriums, printing programs, checking commencement speeches, and readying for the arrival of one of our society’s most cherished rites of passage – the high school graduation ceremony.

Perhaps by this time next year, we can do our students an even greater service and scrap the high school diploma altogether.

OK, maybe not next year, but soon. After all, almost every component of today’s traditional diploma reflects yesterday’s traditional thinking – if by yesterday we mean the 19th century.

It was 1893, to be precise. That’s when the first blue-ribbon commission was assembled to study the nation’s schools, which, at that point, were still largely decentralized. Among its findings, the ten-person committee recommended that “every subject which is taught at all in a secondary school should be taught in the same way and to the same extent to every pupil.” Not long thereafter, the College Entrance Examination Board was established in order to create a common assessment and set uniform standards for each academic subject. Couple those developments with the rise of the Industrial Era, the exponential growth of immigration, and the need to move an unprecedented number of students through the system, and you have the seeds that slowly gave shape to the public schools we have today.

Although these developments were clearly pivotal in fueling American growth in the 20th century, it’s equally clear that same system is ill-suited for the particular challenges and opportunities of the 21st. Which brings us back to the high school diploma – a document that still depends, in most places, on the same set of required courses, the same set amount of “seat time,” and the same set of curricular content that students have been studying since the end of the second World War.  No wonder that more than half our students have been classified as chronically disengaged – and that figure doesn’t even include absentees and dropouts!

We can do better. But first we need to shake free from the comforting familiarity of the pomp and circumstance of high school as we have come to know it.

The good news is that several schools across the country are already taking this courageous step. One such place is the Monadnock Community Connections School, or MC² for short (mc2school.org). A public school of choice in New Hampshire, MC² was founded to fulfill a distinctly 21st century mission: “Empowering each individual with the knowledge and skills to use his or her unique voice, effectively and with integrity, in co-creating our common public world.” As school founder Kim Carter explains, “Learning at MC² is personalized – so it can be tailored to each student’s learning needs; experiential – because students learn best by doing; negotiated – so that students can participate in decisions about what they will learn; and community-based – because learning takes place through a variety of community interactions.”

As you might expect, MC²’s goals and mission force it to look quite different from the typical high school. Instead of annually promoting kids from one grade to the next, students at MC² cannot progress until they have demonstrated mastery in a set of core competencies. Students spend as much time learning out of the school building as they do in it. Every student must write a 100-page autobiography in which they reflect on the people and events that have shaped the person they have become. And no one receives a diploma until they have successfully made a public presentation of their own personal growth and preparedness for adult life. (You can view a few of those presentations here).

In schools like this, the old adage is turned on its head: children are to be seen and heard. In schools like this, academic learning is balanced by an equal emphasis on emotional and vocational growth. And in schools like this, teachers and administrators have stopped relying on Industrial-Age benchmarks, and started identifying which Democratic-Age habits of mind and being will be most essential to their students’ future success as global citizens.

To create places like this for every child, we don’t need to sacrifice our desire for greater rigor, equity or accountability – but we do need to scrap many of our most time-tested symbols of schools, and of schooling. Redefining the requirements of a high school diploma is a great place to start.