A Case for Reinventing Public Schools

Here’s a perfect example of the kind of thinking that will ultimately lead to more problems than it solves. Researchers are predicting the development and use of ‘smart drugs’ for ‘enhancing’ the memory, attention, mood, or motivation of young people.

Think about this. These are the things that ‘schooling’ values and requires: memory, attention, mood, and motivation. 

The fundamental underpinnings of schooling has the need to control the behavior of the ‘student’ in order for them to demonstrate they can repeat the desired behavior (repeat behavior and also regurgitate desired bits of content to demonstrate both paying attention and the form a learning that is valued by schooling – memory).

In fact repitition is the primary tool used to ‘teach’ specific subjects. 

It makes sense then  that at some point people involved with schooling would conjur up the ‘bright idea’ to develop drugs as a tool to enhance the things that are valued.

These same things that are valued in the current schooling system are some of the primary reasons why there are so many dropouts. The reason why mood, motivation, and attention are lacking in the schooling system is because the experience is NOT interesting nor connected to any other aspect of young people’s lives. Humans have a natural ability to pay attention and be motivated when there is something that is interesting to them. People will naturally remember what they ‘learned’ when the experience they have is both interesting and challenging, and has some emotional component to the experience. 

Here is the article that stimulated this blog post:

Schoolchildren could be given ‘smart drugs’ in a bid to boost brainpower
By LAURA CLARK - Last updated at 9:32 PM on 19th September 2008

Schools will soon have to ensure all pupils have access to brain-enhancing ‘smart drugs’, according to officially funded experts.

They said teachers risk claims of bias against poorer children if they fail to give all pupils the same chance to take a new generation of pills which boost attention, concentration and memory.

Researchers predict that within a generation, cognition enhancing drugs – or ‘cogs’ – will be so advanced that parents and teachers will be able to ‘manipulate biology’ to enhance pupils’ brainpower.

—

It also predicted that within 25 years, so-called ‘smart drugs’ will be specific enough for pupils to choose drugs for particular mental faculties.

These could include improving memory, attention, mood or motivation.

Where are the people advocating for the interests of young people? How could we allow this thinking to continue and come to fruition. It is wrong and damaging. But without a change in thinking about the difference between schooling and education this kind of thing is almost inevitable. 

What’s the Goal of This Education System?
Leaving Every Child Behind
By JOHN GOEKLER

As we head deeper into the “silly season” of an election year, all the old position papers on education are being recycled. John McCain touts market forces for school improvement. Barack Obama endorses more accountability and higher standards. School boards speak of efficiency (to pass bond issues) while teacher unions speak of commitment (to earn higher pay).

But the simple fact is, our public school system is irretrievably broken. It doesn’t need to be tweaked. It needs to be tossed.

This system is the dysfunctional remnant of a bygone era. It is a nineteenth century model, imported from Germany, that emphasizes punctuality, obedience, and rote, repetitive work suited to turning out assembly line workers. In short, it teaches kids to fill jobs that have long since moved to China, and are now heading toward Bangladesh.

In an era in which collaboration, creativity and adaptability are vital to success, most schools remain authoritarian, banal and inflexible. They separate and alienate children from community life, even as integration and relationship are ever more important to a cohesive society. Schools remain linear and left-brain oriented, although imagination and self-direction are far more critical to problem solving. And they are competitive and elitist, separating children into “winners” and “losers” through designations such as Advanced Placement, VoTech, and Special Needs.

Despite frantic efforts by schools, districts and states to cook the books with inflated test scores, lowered standards and underreported drop out rates, all objective data says our schools are failing our children. But never mind test scores and assessments, which are all about politics and nothing about learning. The single most important indicator is as simple as it is harsh – our young people are turning their backs on school in record numbers and walking away without a backward glance.

Why?

Because we’re failing to engage them. Because they don’t see what we offer as relevant to their lives and futures. Because – despite entire libraries of data that tell us how to engage the human brain in ways that support learning – we blindly persist in teaching the wrong things, in the wrong ways, at the wrong times.

What’s the Goal of the System?

There’s a rule in systems dynamics that says to understand a system’s behavior, diagnose its purpose. If the purpose is uncertain, analyze its patterns of behavior and see what beliefs, choices and structures underlie them.

Take the typical school schedule – roughly 8:00 to 3:00, five days a week, 180 days a year, closed for summer. Why? Because it’s convenient for adults. We start and end at times that accommodate bus schedules and drivers’ contracts. We go five days because that’s the work schedule for most families. And we close for summer – originally because kids worked in the harvest, now because staff contracts say so. (And part of why we perpetually underpay teachers is, “Because they get the summer off.”)

But any neuroscientist can tell you that body rhythms of high school age teens cycle from about 9 am until midnight. (And any high school parent can tell you their kids would qualify for “legally dead” at 7:00 a.m.) A better schedule for their brains to optimize learning might be 10 to 5, four days a week. We run the schedules we do because it’s all about us – not about learning.

As to curriculum, we’re still teaching core subjects prescribed prior to World War II. That was fine in 1930, when there was only so much bandwidth in the world and knowing X percentage of it made one a literate person. (At least literate enough to work on an assembly line.) But today, there’s exponentially more information available on Wikipedia than even existed in 1930. And we live in a very different world that calls for very different skills. In an era of nuclear weapons and jihad, for example, which seems more relevant – calculus or conflict resolution?

Why do we insist on delivering content that’s largely irrelevant to students’ lives? Again, it’s all about us. We tend to believe that whatever we learned is the mark of a literate person. That’s why parents and administrators consistently stonewall true reform. It was good enough for us (and we turned out OK, by golly!) so it’s damn well good enough for our children.

And our pedagogical models? Same thing. It’s all about us. More specifically, it’s all about the convenience of teachers and administrators. Standing in front of a class and lecturing is largely useless for imparting information, typically providing 10 percent retention or less. But it’s easy. Using standardized tests is essentially worthless in assessing true learning, but again, it’s easy. You can grade them with a machine.

True learning, on the other hand, looks a lot like chaos. People are running every which way in their excitement to find out what they want to know. They’re building things and tearing things apart. They’re scribbling on whiteboards, walls and scraps of paper. They’re asking questions, jumping online, running to the library or the science lab or outside to make observations or run experiments. They’re bombarding teachers and each other with questions, testing assumptions, trying things out, making mistakes. It can be messy, maddening and exhausting for “command and control” teachers, but it works!

The most basic thing neuroscience tells us is that emotion drives attention and attention drives learning. The human brain is designed to learn. It wants to learn. In fact, it needs to learn. Why do we throw prisoners into solitary confinement as extreme punishment? Because a lack of contact, stimuli and curiosity is painful. It drives us mad.

So, examining what, how and when we teach, what can we infer about the system’s purpose?

Sadly, the answer is that our schooling system seems primarily intended to baby-sit our children – to warehouse them during parents’ working hours and to keep them out of an already saturated job market.

Warehousing is increasingly necessary because the share of wealth controlled by the vast majority of households in America has declined steadily since the 1970’s. In most families, both parents must now work to stay afloat. (If there are two parents.) There’s no one home to care for kids, so schools get the job by default. (Hence, a major force behind the push for schools to take on “out of school time”.)

Keeping young people out of the job market is considered necessary (though unspoken) because if the roughly two million 16 to 18 year olds in the US were to compete for employment, the already underreported jobless rate would go through the roof. Even though most modern service jobs can easily be performed by 16 year-olds with minimal training, we keep them in school because in a downsized, outsourced economy, there’s nowhere for them to work.

The third leg propping up the status quo is the desire on the part of far too many school officials to keep collecting enrollment money from state and federal governments to support an immense – and largely useless – bureaucracy. In a modern school, to paraphrase John Steinbeck, you can’t shoot a marble “knuckles down” without hitting an administrator, consultant, or “education specialist”.

How’s this working? Well, we’ve spent roughly $3 trillion on “school reform” over the past four decades and not gained any traction, so you make the call.

Creating New Models

Bucky Fuller observed that we don’t create real change by fighting existing structures, but by building new structures that are more attractive and functional. Then the old ones die of simple neglect.
So what kind of model would be more attractive and functional? And, more importantly, what kind of model would protect, foster and engage our children and young people while effectively preparing them to thrive in an uncertain and rapidly changing world?

First, it would be a “whole child” model, based on a goal of making sure every one of our children is safe, healthy, loved, affirmed and fulfilled. It would not separate economic, social and educational arenas, but view each of those as essential pieces of a whole system whose goal is whole children.

It would embrace Einstein’s observation that, “Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.” So this new system would have a new mission – helping families and communities raise and educate healthy, capable young people. It would be a locus of child advocacy and its loyalty would be to the well-being of kids, families, communities and the planet, rather than to administration, curriculum or political correctness. It would be an integral part of the community, not a separate entity.

Because the work of raising healthy children begins long before the commencement of structured learning, it would start with making sure every child is welcome and wanted. (That’s a polite euphemism for effective and accessible family planning and reproductive health care.)

To make sure every child is ready to learn when “schooling” does start, prenatal care, and child and maternal health care would be universally provided, along with education and mentoring to instill and expand parental skills. Nutrition programs, environmental health programs, and affordable, accessible day care and preschool for every child are also vital.

To make sure schools are ready to receive kids who are ready to learn, they would employ a very different model from today. First, it would start at a later age, typically about seven, when children become neurologically capable of abstract thought.

Contrary to trends in the US, where academics and testing now begin in kindergarten, studies show that starting children on academic studies at an early age generally does not increase performance. All too often, the opposite occurs. Children who are not cognitively capable of logical thinking tend to self-identify as being “bad at school” when they cannot meet the demands unfairly placed on them. That self-imposed (and system reinforced!) label often follows them right through school until they bail out.

Anyone concerned that a “delayed” start on academics will limit a child’s later performance need only look around the world for reassurance. Finland, which is consistently rated as the most creative society in the world and regularly scores highest of any OECD country on international academic tests, starts formal schooling at age seven. Prior to that time, kids are in pre-school and quality day care.

The focus with those younger children should be on reinforcing their love of learning and helping them develop social skills. Just as anti-social behaviors in young children are associated with later learning difficulties, acquisition of “pro-social” skills is closely associated with later success.

The pre-school ages are a time to identify physical, neurological and emotional deficits, and remedy those to the greatest extent possible through interventions from nutrition, counseling, movement and play therapies, to visual and hearing correction.

Once formal learning commences, it should be student-directed, immersion or “expeditionary” based and community-centered. And it should occur in safe, comfortable, environmentally benign settings. Facilities must be well lighted and toxin-free, with child-friendly proportions and high indoor air quality, all of which have been shown significantly to increase learning, and student and staff health.

“Teaching” in these whole child contexts would not be “stand and deliver”, but more on the lines of facilitating each learner’s success. That means helping them identify strengths and weakness, connecting them with mentors and coaches, helping them find things that fascinate them and gain the skills necessary to pursue that attraction.

And we absolutely have to avoid trying to instill what learning we value based on our own experiences. The US Department of Labor says students in school today will have between 10 and 14 jobs – by the time they’re 38! The jobs we tend to train them for likely won’t exist by the time they’re ready to fill them. The jobs they will hold likely haven’t been invented yet. (Ever know anyone 10 years ago who was training to be a biomimeticist, paleo-astronomer, nanotechnologist, podcaster or eBay marketer?)

Instead, we can help them gain the necessary social, emotional and intellectual skills to move seamlessly through the overlapping and often messy realms of their future – work, play, partnership, citizenship, parenting, health, service. We can help them learn to make sense of the world and their place in it.

We can help them understand complex systems, envision their desired futures and facilitate change. We can help them gain the interpersonal skills necessary to initiate and maintain healthy relationships, and the intrapersonal skills necessary to sustain themselves through times of uncertainty and struggle. Most important, we can help them become proficient at thinking, learning, unlearning, relearning and communicating.

Core content would support all the above, and might include environmental science and sustainability, yoga and meditation, travel and adventure. Kids can still learn calculus and chemistry if they choose, along with how to bake, dance, play music, make movies, write poems, build fires, sew clothes, use a compass, design a fort or tree house, nurture a garden, raise critters, build and program a computer, navigate in the wilderness, create a business . . . In the process, they’ll acquire the math, reading and communication skills all those demand. And because they’re invested in it – because it’s theirs – they’ll be good at it.

Throughout, we need to re-envision who our learners are. Because in times of drastic change – which will be the rest of our lives – “students” will be everyone. We must all gain, enhance and maintain those skills if we are to succeed in living the lives and creating the futures we hope for.

Schools must become centers of community to support this. They are already the most extensive (and expensive) pieces of public infrastructure in most communities, and are generally the least utilized. So why not integrate pre and post-school care, family health services, adult education, community technology access, cultural activities, sports and nearly any other content needed by the community for its well-being?

We are in a stage of human history where vision, compassion, communication and creativity are far important than traditional literacy. Re-envisioning what learning is about and redesigning our schooling system around that provide the single most powerful avenue available to help us navigate an uncertain future. And to begin to create the kind of future our children and grandchildren deserve.

John Goekler is the founder of Change Factors, a training and consulting firm in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His work is applying complexity science to help individuals and organizations learn to act with greater clarity and effectiveness to create a better future for our children, our communities and the planet. www.changefactors.com

Here’s an article about a school board that is voting to allow corporal punishment in schools. This is abuse and should be outlawed! But this is included in the ‘theory’ being employed in schools to ‘force’ young people to be obedient. If you can’t provide something young people are interested in you shouldn’t be in business! 

This makes me sad…

More and school states and school districts are developing programs designed to ‘motivate’ students to improve on standardized tests. Combine that with incentive programs for teachers to improve test scores and we have a train wreck in the making.

I still marvel at the fact that good, well meaning people, have a limited understanding of how people (and the brain) actually work. Unless of course these aren’t well meaning people (which I refuse to think about). 

Everyone acts from theory – whether they are aware of it or not. The brain develops ‘models’ of the world and how it works and we behave consistent with those models (even abhorrent behavior is consistent with some mental model in the brain). 

So what are the theories in use by the people that develop policies for the public schooling system? It appears, from where I sit, the theory employed in school policy and practice includes:

• people need extrinsic motivation
• incentives motivate people
• memory is learning
• control and compliance are highly valued
• learning is teacher and testing centric
• memory and tests demonstrate ‘knowledge’ 
• order and discipline are requirements for learning
• school can be disconnected from life
• curriculum determines what is learned
• schooling develops good people
• emotions have no place at school
• people aren’t people when they are at school
• school is disconnected from the rest of life

The public schooling system is the one institution that touches just about every single person in the country. There is tremendous ‘potential’ there. But what happens when we use extrinsic motivation and incentives to ‘produce’ an outcome?

Extrinsic motivation slowly destroys self esteem, dignity, cooperation and a yearning for learning – all of which are innate and high early in life. They are diminished throughout our life by what Dr. Deming calls the forces of destruction – of which extrinsic motivation is one of these destructive forces.

To paraphrase Mary Walton’s presentation on Dr. Deming’s teaching on performance appraisals, such an approach will “encourage short-term performance…discourage risk-taking, build fear, undermine teamwork, and pit people working against each other for the same rewards.” (“The Deming Management Method,” chapter 19, page 91). As Dr. Deming noted in “The New Economics,” Ch. 4, p. 113, “When children are given rewards, such as toys and money, for doing well in school…they learn to expect rewards for good performance.” This leaves the child, and then the adult, extrinsically motivated, relying on “things to make them feel good.” And that destroys essential self-esteem. Dr. Deming expanded on this in pages 147-153.

So what should schools do? Here’s a quote from a review of Dr. Deming’s book, The New Economics.

To achieve notable improvement, the education system should abolish grades, merit ratings for teachers, comparison of schools on the basis of scores, and gold stars for athletics. Joy in learning comes more from learning than from what is learned. A grade is a permanent label for opening doors or closing doors, a way to achieve quality by inspection, rather than building in quality, a way to produce competition between people, rather than cooperation, a way to label people as winners or losers, a way to humiliate those at the bottom, rather than to promote their desire to learn and future achievement.

The idea that human interaction can be enhanced by the environment is something we take for granted. It is so much a part of what we do we often forget that this way of thinking and working is not common for much of the world. 

The concept that work environments can contribute to or inhibit the productivity of the people in those environments is not new.  What might be new however is the idea that the people that work in the environment could/should participate in the design process – to determine the environment within which they will work.

From an article in Education Week by Frank Kelly:

What does the architecture of our school buildings tell us about the activities that take place in them? How do those buildings influence learning (positively or negatively)? How can we re-conceive the physical environment so it encourages and enables the type of learning required for success in the 21st Century?

In the 70′s I came upon a book that contained photographs of the architecture – buildings – of schools, hospitals, and prisons. I haven’t been able to find that book but I did find some photos that might give an idea of what this book showed. 

School, Hospital, or Prison? When looking at the pictures that follow, which one is a school, a hospital, or a prison?

What does this say about the way we think about the activities that take place in each of these buildings? 

In a recent NY Times article entitled, Technology Reshapes America’s Classrooms, it suggested the activities in the ‘school of the future’ will be different from the activities that take place in the current schools. But what does the building look like? Have they considered the physical environment when developing this new school? Were teachers involved in the design process to ‘re-think’ the way they interacted with young people, the type of learning taking place and how the physical environment might enable this?

Here’s a short quote from that article:

Education experts say her school, the Lilla G. Frederick Pilot Middle School in Boston, offers a glimpse into the future.

It has no textbooks. Students receive laptops at the start of each day, returning them at the end. Teachers and students maintain blogs. Staff and parents chat on instant messaging software. Assignments are submitted through electronic “drop boxes” on the school’s Web site.

“The dog ate my homework” is no excuse here.

The experiment at Frederick began two years ago at cost of about $2 million, but last year was the first in which all 7th and 8th grade students received laptops. Classwork is done in Google Inc’s free applications like Google Docs, or Apple’s iMovie and specialized educational software like FASTT Math.

“Why would we ever buy a book when we can buy a computer? Textbooks are often obsolete before they are even printed,” said Debra Socia, principal of the school in Dorchester, a tough Boston district prone to crime and poor schools.

We won’t really see different types of knowledge, behaviors and skills being learned in our schools until we see the types of environments that learning takes place in re-thought and re-designed.

Answers: the pictures above from top to bottom are   1) hospital   2) prison   3) hospital   4) hospital   5) prison   6) school   7) school – (the label on this was ‘school for blacks’)

Anyone that has been involved with public education can see that the school system is a very complex system. There are a great many rules that guide the behavior of everyone involved (everyone! including parents, teachers, administrators, young people, and the communities in which schools exist).

I’ve been in many situations over the last 25 years where teachers and administrators were asked, what the future of school ‘should be.’ Or they were asked, what kinds of things would need to happen to make schools ‘ideal.’ 

The kinds of answers that were given will not surprise anyone. These answers have been the same or similar with a few variations in almost every setting I’ve been in. 

The kinds of things that were suggested included:

• community involvement
• parent involvement
• creativity
• personalized learning
• problem solving
• thinking skills
• alternative assessments
• choice
• brain-based learning

I could go on – but the point is, when asked, most people want the same or similar things for schools (and for the young people) but why aren’t those thing happening? or better said, why aren’t those things happening in a systematic and systemwide way (all of these things are happening in little bits somewhere in some school or district – but no where is the kind of schooling we need for young people to be successful in the 21st Century happening in a systemic way).

Why is that? 

I would contend the reason schools and schooling is the way it is – is because of the initial conditions that were present when the idea of free public schooling was conceived. In other words, the patterns established at the early stages of the development of the schooling system are the very same patterns that make it difficult, if not impossible, for schools and schooling to do the things on the list above.

In other posts in this blog I have written about some of the original conditions. 

The free public school system was created to ‘school’ the 20% of the young people that were too poor to attend a private (meaning a paid) school. The intention for this free public school system was to provide ‘the basics’ (reading, writing, and arithmetic) so that these poor young people would be good citizens and there would be less crime.

In another recent post the origins of the high school system was discussed. High schools were designed to educate about 5% of the young men in this country so they could make the connection between elementary school and higher education (college). High schools were designed to be ‘feeder’ schools for colleges.

From a recent article by ASCD Executive Director, Gene Carter: 

This month, as high school students across the United States receive their diplomas, our failure to improve that system will be evident in the number of students who don’t. Studies of graduation rates indicate that nearly one-third of high school students drop out before graduating. That means that one student drops out every 26 seconds; between 6,000 and 7,000 drop out every school day; and 1.2 million drop out every year. Among African American and Hispanic students, the graduation rate is about 55 percent, or roughly one in every two students.

Furthermore, the studies raise questions about whether the students who do graduate will be prepared with the problem-solving, critical-thinking, and oral and written communication skills needed to succeed in an increasingly global market—questions that are echoed in the public’s perception of high schools as reported in last year’s Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll. The poll found that 40 percent of respondents do not think most public school students leave high school prepared for college, while 50 percent think the same students do not leave school prepared to do skilled jobs.

Today the cry is to transform schools to teach 21st Century Skills. These include life and career skills, innovation and learning skills, as well as information, media and technology skills.

It is clear that schools and schooling as we know them have not changed much since their conception. Sensitivity to initial conditions – and the patterns initially established when schools were first implemented – make changing schools very difficult. Even when we know what ‘should be done’ it still isn’t. 

That makes me think that we need to change our thinking about what schools and schooling are, why they exist, and what they should do. Schools and schooling must be re-conceived and re-designed if we are to establish patterns that can be useful and successful now and in the future.

To me, this is a rhetorical question but I believe there are people in the world that might not think so. There are many people in the world that have no desire or see no need to change the public school system – except maybe to ‘get back to the basics’ (which are reading, writing, and arithmetic). 

Human beings have a natural capacity to learn, to change, to grow, to improve and to create. These natural tendencies are systematically drummed out of people that attend public school. 

Why? Because the school system wasn’t set up to encourage creativity or encourage growth and improvement. The school system was set up to support the industrial revolution and produce people that could follow rules and stay within the lines.

The hierarchy of subjects taught in schools is designed to put the creative elements at the bottom (or not at all). The schooling process values ‘academics’ and much of the natural capacities that people have.

Here’s a short video that makes an argument for the reinvention of schools and for rethinking the fundamental principles we have for school and schooling. He says our task is to educate the whole being of children. 

One thing I didn’t know is where the design for high school came from. In reading the first chapter of a book called, Personalizing the High School Experience for Each Student, I have learned that it comes from a model to reach about 5% of the young people in this country – and it was developed in the 1890′s. 

In a previous post I included a table that shows the graduation rates in US High Schools. Now that I understand that High School was really designed to graduate about 5% of the population I think we can reasonably say it’s a miracle that more than 50% actually graduate. 

In our work we make a distinction between incremental innovation and breakthrough innovation. In a previous post I’ve asked the question whether schools as we know them need to be improved or redesigned. 

I hope we can see that it’s time to provide support for the re-invention of public schools and to move beyond incremental improvements and get to breakthroughs. We are, or were, the innovation leader in the world. With a public school system that we have now that leadership is surely in jeopardy. 

Here’s a quote from the first chapter of that book:

In the 1890s, Harvard College, a regional institute of higher education, desired to become a national university. To guide Harvard leaders in how to do this and to ensure that they would be getting students from across the country who were properly prepared to be successful in higher education, the college convened the Carnegie Commission. Yes, we’re talking about that Carnegie Commission—the commission that decided that our high school students needed to earn course credits based on seat time. This 19th century concept, which is based solely on educating students who would be able to go on to Harvard, is still the basic organizing structure of our high schools in the 21st century.

The United States in the 1890s was a country whose population felt that an education past the 4th grade was a waste of time for most individuals. It was a country where high school was only for those who needed the connection between elementary school and higher education. It was a country where very few women and at most 5 percent of the young men went to college. That’s who our high schools were designed to educate: 5 percent of our young men. The rest of our adolescents were employed in our mills, mines, and farms.