Locked in Place? (Part 1)

The Practical Impossibility of K-12 Education Reform, But...

Schools probably hold the dubious distinction of being the least-changed American social institution in the past century. Since compulsory attendance laws of the early Progressive Era, young people have marched into factory-like facilities, then moved from room to room through a set of daily routines, under the watchful eye of a cast of hardworking adults. After a sufficient number of years and requisite courses, a diploma follows. And so it has gone, worshipping in the temple of the familiar.

Wave after wave of futurists predicted the demise of this well-worn model, and they’ve all been wrong. The question is— why? Because outcomes are so convincingly good? Because of the impressive adaptability of the system, responding to changing societal needs? Because the timeless beauty of these routines make change unnecessary? Because constituents embrace this way of doing things so enthusiastically? None of these seem to be the case. On the contrary, frustrations abound, but the basic simplicity of the whole setup makes it hard to modify. The ingredients, so few in number, limit our options unless we’re really willing to think of a whole new enterprise, which we’re not. We’re stuck. And yet we’re not satisfied.

A look at the K-12 recipe tells the story. For school to happen, we need: students, teachers, a curriculum, a schedule, and a building, right? Let’s call those the Big 5 and explore each in turn. It won’t take long to identify the ongoing forces for stasis, and just over the horizon, some realities that leave me wondering if we are not already living on borrowed time by doing school this way.

Let’s start with our edifice complex. The big front door of education occupies a mythic place in our notions of education, whether it’s the Norman Rockwell typical version of a red brick neighborhood point of pride or his Ruby Bridges version that stood as the ominous tip of the segregation spear. Outside, we might find columns that suggest a neoclassical temple of learning. Inside, predictable corridors of classrooms, resembling assembly plants more than homes, with a stark regularity of shape and structure. If function follows form, we’ve built spaces that admit very little in terms of variation from a single modality of instruction.

In the overdue national conversation on infrastructure, we should include the fact that thousands and thousands of school buildings are well past their prime, and disproportionately so in areas with the least capacity to fund projects to restore and rethink these aging community resources. The gulf between the ritziest campuses nationwide, whether at pricey independent schools or affluent suburbs, and their most deprived counterparts in high-need districts, grows wider by the year. How long will we tolerate that trend? And what’s the best long-term response?

It has been interesting to watch the charter school sector, the greatest challenge to the K-12 status quo in this generation, cleave to the need to anchor themselves to buildings, whether rented from their under-enrolled district neighbors or purchased from collapsing diocesan church systems. Having sat on several of those startup charter governing boards, I watched attention and focus sapped from virtually every other important topic in pursuit of real estate acquisition and the security that would signal. Given a clean slate, those idealists defaulted to seeing schools as inherently based on buildings— no doubt informed by the mandate to serve as a safe haven for children during the adult work day.

Still, anchoring education in a building means committing to the fiscal demands detailed above, complete with corresponding equity issues, and, as with office spaces, invites the question of sufficient use to justify the expense. Do the math. Subtract the statutorily required number of days from 365 in a year and consider the percentage of time these spaces sit empty. Then look at the required number of hours in typical school day and consider that fraction relative to 24. Even if these buildings remained nothing more than education factories or child care providers, how much longer will we justify the cost relative to the expenses, with rising energy costs, growing transportation challenges, and different emerging patterns of work in most sectors of the macroeconomy?

Those material considerations may be less urgent than other worries connected to the limited range of activities and pedagogy imposed by an egg crate style architecture, augmented by occasional showy maker spaces, labs, and studios, that was built to accommodate programs to prepare the majority of students for repetitive shop floor or clerical or desk-based destinations. There’s the recurrent story about Rip Van Winkle waking up after 100 years of slumber, wandering his transformed home town, and only recognizing the school as something familiar. Have we taken a similar nap in terms of our educational imagination?

What will push change, though, will not be a big spontaneous, collective realization that we’re missing an opportunity to innovate— who has time for that? More probably, it will be dissatisfaction from the people who frequent these antiquated physical spaces— the families working different schedules, the students finding a relevance gap in their daily experience, and the faculty finding the weight of all that’s expected of them to be not worth the lift that they can generate in that setting, for themselves and for those in their charge.

Freeing school from the being a single place, especially for young adults, opens innumerable doors for individualization of program and for new permutations of ways for learners to gather, in numbers large and small, using all the time at our disposal. The question of how best to build community absent the mandate to work the same shift together still looms large, but with equal measures of challenge and opportunity. What we need are some new models and a willingness to explore, rooted in our new rhythms of living. Absent that energy, look for growing numbers of homeschoolers, voting with their feet, with all the associated tribalism and corrosive social division— can that be good? That movement represents a crude indication of the imperative that we start doing some thinking and acting on our ideas.

Here’s my commitment to keep writing on those Big 5 ingredients, seriatim, with this reflection on buildings as a start, a foundation of sorts. The next installment will focus on the students who walk the halls of these buildings and the schedule they keep. As always, any reactions welcome.