A few days ago my friend Dave Murray, writer for The Grand Rapids Press and MLive.com (no, I’m not kidding, I consider Dave a friend even when we disagree on issues, which is quite often) reported on Michigan’s plan to change its school accountability grading system from the traditional A, B, C… to a color-coded system (Parents understand an 'A,' but what about a 'yellow' on a school report card?). Dave’s article focuses primarily on the potential for confusion in the general public understanding what the colors mean. Usually when I read his articles I get angry primarily because he has a “monopoly” on communicating his ideas while I have to depend on word of mouth, blogging, and other means. I wanted to shout out to all who were reading it that, “The very idea you can’t change to a new system of reporting IS the reason public education doesn’t change!” First it was the inability of our neighboring Grand Rapids Public Schools to successfully change to a report-card system that focuses on student’s actually learning course content, not student failure, and now it was this. We’re stuck in an 1890’s rut and can’t get out of it because of the lack of support from Dave and others who appear to advocate “better sameness” as the only acceptable form of change.

I’m tough on Dave (and he has no problem giving it right back) because he puts himself out there when he writes in a manner that reveals how he feels about an issue. That’s his style and I admire him for his writing skills even when I want to stand on his front lawn and scream at the top of my lungs. But if public education is truly going to change for the benefit of kids, we need the help of the media and not just more hurdles thrown on the track.

We need to once and for all face up to the only logical conclusion: Educational outcomes are not going to significantly change until the practitioners of education ignore the overwhelming societal urge for sameness (i.e., I want schools for my kids that were the same as when I went to school) and abandon the industrial model of education, a.k.a., the factory-style graded school.

We are averse to change because we fear it. We build or hold on to structures that make us comfortable and reduce our fears. Embracing change has potential for putting us in the spotlight as if we were living in a house made of glass, and we fear uncertainty, risk and failure. Adding to that, we also tend to be a bit on the lazy side and not wanting to invest time in the hard work of change including having to learn something new. It’s likely one of the reasons so many of us Americans – particularly my generation – only know one language (bad English) and rarely travel through foreign countries. To do so requires change that can be stressful and hard work. We’d rather remain within the comfort of the American way because it involves less change.

But schools MUST change for the sake of this and future generations. Our system of education, while tended to by professionals with the highest degree of care and concern for their charges, is outmoded and cannot be improved on enough to produce the different results needed. We can test our kids until the cows come home and it won’t make a damned bit of difference if we don’t actually change to a learning system that meets their needs for a 21^st century technology-driven world economy.

The industrialized mass nature of school goes back to the very beginning, to the common school and the normal school and the idea of universal schooling. All of which were invented at precisely the same time we were perfecting mass production and interchangeable parts and then mass marketing.
 
Large-scale education was not developed to motivate kids or to create scholars. It was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the system. Scale was more important than quality, just as it was for most industrialists.
 
Of course, it worked. Several generations of productive, fully employed workers followed. But now?
 
As long as we embrace (or even accept) standardized testing, fear of science, little attempt at teaching leadership, and most of all, the bureaucratic imperative to turn education into a factory itself, we’re in big trouble. ~ Seth Godin, Stop Stealing Dreams

Here are just some of the outdated structures and habits that inhibit real change in public education:

1.     Schedules – a nine-month calendar filled with class schedules based on a rigid length of the school day that’s divided up by bells (or the more modern tones), that serve primarily to teach our students that learning is only accomplished during certain months of the year and hours of the day. And you only learn math for this hour and English for that hour, etc. In the meantime, like Pavlov’s dogs, wait for the calendar page to turn or the bell to signal a class change. But summer and weekends are sacrosanct and parents expect order in their children’s schools, so don’t change these structures, even though I believe they can be shown to be some of the worst forms of child abuse there is.

2.     Buildings – a rectangular structure labeled a school is the only place real learning should ever occur. Heaven forbid that learning takes place at a shopping mall, a beach, the bowling alley or even in the comfort of one’s own home. This is the source of constant friction instead of cooperation between teachers, parents and students over homework, summer bridge activities or even summer school itself. Learning spaces can be anywhere but unfortunately we think such things weaken the physical boundaries between the school building itself and the rest of the world. We can’t have that! School is, after all, for school.

3.     Grade levels – it’s sadly pathetic that we still believe grade levels were designed to provide a structure that improves student learning. What’s more, we reinforce that belief by dividing up the curriculum into age groups and then test everyone each year to see if they are progressing or failing. We tend to ignore mountains of evidence that says physical, emotional, and intellectual development can vary as much as 2-3 years between children who by virtue of sharing the same year of birth are grouped together, for better or for worse, for thirteen years of schooling, and pushed through year after year regardless of whether they learned it or not. Add this to my list of child abuse.

I’ve just touched on some of the structures, including my earlier mention of report cards, that limit our creativity in building an educational system that’s based on the needs of kids, and not of the adults. School should not be primarily about efficiency, order, control, low-cost conformity, and separation of learning from real life. It should be a system of support for learning 24/7 regardless of when, where or how it occurs. Technology is just one tool that can help us leverage wholesale change.

I think it’s clear that school was designed with a particular function in mind, and it’s one that school has delivered on for a hundred years.
 
If school’s function is to create the workers we need to fuel our economy, we need to change school, because the workers we need have changed as well.
 
Changing school doesn’t involve sharpening the pencil we’ve already got. School reform cannot succeed if it focuses on getting schools to do a better job of what we previously asked them to do. We don’t need more of what schools produce when they’re working as designed. The challenge, then, is to change the very output of the school before we start spending even more time and money improving the performance of the school.
 
The current structure, which seeks low-cost uniformity that meets minimum standards, is killing our economy, our culture, and us.
 
School’s industrial, scaled-up, measurable structure means that fear must be used to keep the masses in line. There’s no other way to get hundreds or thousands of kids to comply, to process that many bodies, en masse, without simultaneous coordination.
 
And the flip side of this fear and conformity must be that passion will be destroyed. There’s no room for someone who wants to go faster, or someone who wants to do something else, or someone who cares about a particular issue. Move on. Write it in your notes; there will be a test later.
 
A multiple-choice test. ~ Godin

Let’s begin anew by ending our propensity for inhibiting real change and simply improving on the same thing. Get over our fears and get on with creating a whole new educational system, one free of industrial-age structures and personal bias, a system of learning for the age of real-time communication and collaboration.

A real school.

Eric J. Ban left the corporate headquarters and took over as principal of a large suburban high school. In 2008, he published a work about the lesson learned during his experience titled, College Acceleration: Innovating Through the New American Research High School.

The leaders of corporate America live in suburbia. The traditional suburban high school serves the needs of their already well-served kids. Their image is important in the most confident country in the world. As NCLB begins to label their schools as failing, NCLB will be quietly whisked away [emphasis added] like the mimeograph machine after Xerox developed the copier. There are too many problems with the current federal accountability picture for high schools. High schools are a complicated animal for oversimplified state accountability systems to be applied in a fair and relevant way. Corporate and political leaders will redirect the focus and embrace a new acronym to beat up urban education [right again -- it's now called PLA or persistently low achieving], and the cycle of reform that ignores suburbia will continue indefinitely. (p. 6-7)

I couldn't have said it better than David Brooks did when he recently wrote about The Campus Tsunami of online learning in The New York Times:

“The most important and paradoxical fact shaping the future of online learning is this: A brain is not a computer. We are not blank hard drives waiting to be filled with data. People learn from people they love and remember the things that arouse emotion. If you think about how learning actually happens, you can discern many different processes. There is absorbing information. There is reflecting upon information as you reread it and think about it. There is scrambling information as you test it in discussion or try to mesh it with contradictory information. Finally there is synthesis, as you try to organize what you have learned into an argument or a paper.” 

I'll try to keep this short and succinct. Suppose you were the commander of an early 20th century military unit mounted on horseback and a major war came along. Somebody, somewhere sees the utility of combining automotive technology with materials that protect you from enemy fire. So you trade your horses for these new-fangled vehicles but you line them all up in a row and advance on the enemy's positions just as the British did during the America Revolution. But alas, the other side rapidly discovered a new missile technology that pierces your armor protection and unleashes it on your advancing throng of vehicles. Nevertheless, you are a stubborn commander and don't change what you are doing because that's the way mounted troops have fought battles for centuries. When the shooting stops, the battlefield is littered with smoking hulks and dead soldiers all because you refused to see the new technology as a way to change your tactics and get more desired outcomes. You just replaced your horses with "faster horses."

I've been reading Off the Clock: Moving Education From TIME to COMPETENCY by Fred Bramante and Rose Colby. It's a compelling read that causes you to question just about everything that contributes to our outdated education model.

The 20th century model of delivering content inside of classrooms during specific times is so highly flawed that it will never work the way it needs to work, but we continue to put in an honorable yet futile effort into trying to make an outdated system better.

Schedules drive schools -- daily schedules, yearly schedules, and examination schedules -- all are part of the current framework. In order to move to 21st century learning, we must first begin by deconstructing the elements of the 20th century model of school structure and operation. We must deconstruct the elements of the framework that obstruct the natural process of teaching and learning.

You have to watch this amazing short video about Caine's Arcade. You'll be puzzled, you'll smile, you'll choke up and all at once. Have tissue in hand.

Then, you might even get mad and wonder why learning can't be more like this for every kid like Caine.

And to think no one had to test little Caine or his Arcade's learning outcomes to determine if he was proficient. No one checked to see if it was aligned with the government-mandated curriculum or met the state's one-size-fits-all graduation requirements. 

No data was collected on his "teachers" and no one was fired over the results. No schools were labeled as failures or closed.

Yet he learned! How the hell could that happen without state or federal intervention?

 

For a number of years now, public schools, teachers and administrators have been under assault by a certain faction whose obvious aim is to eliminate public education in America. Now they won't admit to that but if you study the many one-sided debates and main-stream media-aided attacks on public schools, you would be deft if you considered any other conclusion.

Zakaria's take, however, may be a perfect distillation of much of what's wrong with mainstream media coverage of education. The prevailing narrative – and let's be wary of our own sweeping generalizations here – is that the nation's educational system is in crisis, that schools are "failing," that teachers aren't up to the job and that America's economic competitiveness is threatened as a result. Just plug the phrase "failing schools" into Nexis and you'll get 544 hits in newspapers and wire stories for just one month, January 2012. Some of this reflects the institutionalization of the phrase under the No Child Left Behind Act, the landmark 2001 law that ties federal education funds to school performance on standardized tests (schools are deemed "failing" under various criteria of the law). But much of it reflects the general notion that American education, per Zakaria, is in steep decline. Only 20 years ago, the phrase was hardly uttered: "Failing schools" appeared just 13 times in mainstream news accounts in January of 1992, according to Nexis. (Neither Zakaria nor CNN would comment for this story.)

Sometimes we prefer to act like we don't know what we already know. Diane Ravitch makes this clear when she points out that cycles of poverty are not created nor can they be eliminated by schools and teachers alone.

If it were true that we now know how to break the cycle of poverty, poverty would be declining. But poverty is growing in the United States; child poverty is more than 20 percent and rising. Among the world's advanced nations, we are number one in child poverty. It's facile to blame schools and teachers, but more realistic to recognize that poverty is a reflection of economic conditions. Schools cannot create jobs, provide homes for the homeless, or change the economy.

(Wendy) Kopp (Teach for America) dismisses Finland as a model because less than 4 percent of its children are poor. But that's part of the story of their success and should not be waved aside as unimportant.

Gov. Snyder signs dues collection bill; teachers union leaders call move 'blatant political retribution'

“It is essential that state public school resources be devoted to the education of our children. This continues the fiscal reforms designed to save schools money and help them operate even more efficiently.” ~ Snyder

“This legislation furthers the goal of good government by promoting greater transparency...,” Snyder said in a release. (emphasis added)

Today's educational system is being pushed towards a mythical state of perfection, where all students (theoretically) achieve at the same high level at the same time. There's no room for failure in a high-stakes testing environment. It's no longer important to encourage discovery, failure, and perseverance in life's quest for success. It's now only important to be able to regurgitate what one has learned on a winner-take-all multiple choice test that's disguised as the only gateway to college and career. If you don't make it, you're a failure (and so are your teachers and your schools).

As a young man, Abraham Lincoln went to war a captain and returned a private. Afterwards, he was a failure as a businessman. As a lawyer in Springfield, he was too impractical and temperamental to be a success. He turned to politics and was defeated in his first try for the legislature, again defeated in his first attempt to be nominated for congress, defeated in his application to be commissioner of the General Land Office, defeated in the senatorial election of 1854, defeated in his efforts for the vice-presidency in 1856, and defeated in the senatorial election of 1858. At about that time, he wrote in a letter to a friend, "I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth."

Thomas Edison's teachers said he was "too stupid to learn anything." He was fired from his first two jobs for being "non-productive." As an inventor, Edison made 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb. When a reporter asked, "How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?" Edison replied, "I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps."

Albert Einstein did not speak until he was 4-years-old and did not read until he was 7. His parents thought he was "sub-normal," and one of his teachers described him as "mentally slow, unsociable, and adrift forever in foolish dreams." He was expelled from school and was refused admittance to the Zurich Polytechnic School. He did eventually learn to speak and read. Even to do a little math.

Henry Ford failed and went broke five times before he succeeded. 

Rocket scientist Robert Goddard found his ideas bitterly rejected by his scientific peers on the grounds that rocket propulsion would not work in the rarefied atmosphere of outer space.

When Julie Andrews took her first screen test for MGM studios, the final determination was that "She's not photogenic enough for film."

Enrico Caruso's music teacher said he had no voice at all and could not sing. His parents wanted him to become an engineer.

There is a professor at MIT who offers a course on failure. He does that, he says, because failure is a far more common experience than success. An interviewer once asked him if anybody ever failed the course on failure. He thought a moment and replied, "No, but there were two Incompletes."

"When the Columbia space shuttle broke apart above Texas in February 2003, no one knew that it could one day result in success. NASA astronaut Dr. Charles Camarda, however, believes the tragedy has provided both current and future engineers with a motto to live by - where there is failure, there is knowledge and understanding that doesn't come with success."

Most of us probably don’t remember learning to walk, but surely our parents do, and they can vouch that we didn’t get it right the first time we tried. Did we give up and continue to crawl? No. We tried again until we got it right. But not only did we try again, we practiced walking so much we were eventually able to run. We weren’t born knowing everything, but we were born with the ability to learn and grow. ~ Katie Barbaro