Locked in Place (Part 2)

What students and programs need from K-12 ed reform

Last time around I flagged the ingredient list for schools as comprising five elements, namely buildings, programs, schedules, teachers, and students. Then followed a summary of our fixation on learning happening in a particular type of physical space. Now let’s turn our attention to the learners and the set of experiences we prescribe for them once they arrive in those classrooms. The century-old pathways constructed for that purpose now fit worse and worse, but our capacity and willingness to respond remains overwhelmed by a combination of inertia and a collective uncertainty or ambivalence about what to do next.

What might jar us in the near term is students voting with their feet. Have you seen the numbers on chronic absenteeism and what seems like the general optionality of actually showing up for school post-Covid? Our checkered foray into remote learning and “come if you want” education turns out to be casting a long shadow. Families worry less and less about getting kids to class if there’s some other competing priority— the notion of attendance as a sacred or patriotic duty did not survive the pandemic. That phenomenon underscores the importance of schools providing something that’s worth the trouble in the first place. Otherwise, watch out for the home school surge.

Put school attendance on the growing list of things we cannot take for granted any more, maybe alongside voter turnout, church membership, common sense, and vaccinations. In each instance, we see a growing, maybe defiant, confidence in doing what moves us and turning away from what just doesn’t seem worth the effort, for any number of transactional reasons, some more compelling than others. But the result is no less important, with heavy and lasting implications.

I remember standing on the sidelines not long ago at a public HS football game in downtown Nashville, with an amazing, dynamic principal as more than 100 players ran onto their home field. It struck me that the roster was impressively large, then my colleague shared that she’d buy 200 uniforms if that many players wanted to be on the team, since “if they get a jersey they show up for school.” That spoke volumes about relevance and lack thereof, perhaps in part explaining our growing preoccupation with sports and other extracurriculars, inviting the question about how schools meet the needs of their students to connect. We have joked (kind of) for years about the fact that the reason kids get out of bed and come to school is to see their friends.

What if schools made a more affirmative, intentional case for the benefit of the educational opportunity they offer? What if we actively responded to the surveys that indicate barely half of grades 6-12 students nationwide feel valued at school or find meaning in being there? The enduring benefits of K-5 basics hold pretty obviously, rooted in skills for everyday functionality in literacy and numeracy. What are the skills students need beyond that foundation? When is the last time we zero-based that list?

AI provides another reconciliation point, in tandem with what Covid did in terms of a reset. A quick visit to ChatGPT or Claude can already generate in minutes the research paper that once took months of construction, sufficiently polished to look legit, and those technologies are just getting started. How many other tools will make our current methods look like slide rules did at the dawn the of calculator age? When a student opens the relevance door by asking that most powerful question, i.e. “why do we need to know this,” how might our answers be changing, or falling short?

Since the early 20th century, we’ve denominated educational accomplishment in Carnegie Units, essentially a set of tokens to indicate how many years of which academic subjects a student studied well enough to earn credit for having done so. What resulted was an egg-crate transcript not altogether different in design from the egg-crate schoolhouse in which the learning happened. Fast forward several generations and that system is buckling under pressure to meet evolving needs. The days of two credits of science or math toward a 14-unit diploma are no more, and the range of authors worthy of inclusion in the canon, of history now essential to understand our world, grows exponentially. And what about world languages? Is there also any room left in the bucket for coding, for the arts, for civics, for those basic competencies we once labeled home economics and now call adulting?

The quick answer is, sadly, no. Our programs, in the name of equity, have largely experienced a kind of regression to the mean, to a vanilla transcript that would suit generic interest in a four year college experience, leaving precious little room for expressing individual talents, loves, and capacities— and populated by inflated grades that make them virtually indistinguishable from one another. No wonder students don’t feel heard. No wonder colleges are backtracking into reliance on the SAT and ACT. No wonder college enrollments drop as skilled trade programs boom.

One of the only bold challenges to this orthodoxy came from the less than artfully titled Mastery Transcript Consortium, established in 2017 by the remarkable but similarly difficultly-named Scott Looney at Hawken School in Cleveland. Since its creation the group, committed to measuring learning more broadly, unshackled from traditional subject boundaries, has grown to scores of blue-chip schools, now internationally, but launching a system that would prove credible to colleges at scale has proven a massive task. It appears that even the gilded nail that stands up keeps getting hammered down.

What’s the likelihood that the academic suit that we sewed in place before WWI still fits today? But elements of that fashion still predominate, and like so much else, make it nearly impossible to reach critical mass, to reach escape velocity. That leaves students (and teachers, and families) going through the motions, waiting for some kind of educational Godot that we think should be here soon. Is anyone making an affirmative case for this status quo, or is what we are doing just part of an unspoken, admitted, defeatist understanding that change is practically impossible, no matter how obvious the need? Put another way, what are the chances that what worked for our great-grandparents is the best way forward for us, and where do we look for the green shoots of a genuine response matched to our times?

Date-stamping our children for a compulsory, homogenous basic education, organized chronologically through grade levels, served a purpose as an important preventative to consigning them to factory labor too young. But that was then. Consider even for a moment the complexity of the challenges young people face as they imagine lives of purpose and fulfillment, then reflect on the systems available to them, and then ask how important it is that we establish some working alternative models and agree to learn from what those initiatives generate.

The next message in this trilogy will rightfully focus on the adults who we’ll need to put theory into practice and on what we’ll ask from them each day— perhaps the most urgent consideration at hand. Thx for reading.