Schools: The Persistence of Failure; Paths to Success

I have spent a lifetime in schools–as student, teacher, administrator, parent, and trustee. I am a weary veteran of the endless wars over what’s to blame for the sorry state of education. As covid and virtual schooling have made even clearer, we need to do a better job. Test scores are lousy; achievement and learning gaps are terrible; classes are too large; bullying and social media are wreaking havoc; poverty and racism are debilitating; young people are increasingly depressed and suicidal.

Over the years, educators have tried various strategies to address these and other problems, yet no matter what they try, learning outcomes for the majority of students do not improve. Typically, people blame teachers. People invest billions in teacher-evaluation systems, but evaluating teachers in our schools makes as much sense as evaluating pilots who fail to fly a plane that is not aerodynamically sound. It’s time to rethink the plane.

Brains and schools: a mismatch

The main reason for the persistence of failure of our schools is the mismatch between how people actually learn and how we have designed schools. It doesn’t matter whether schools are charter schools, public schools, or private schools; it doesn’t matter if teachers use lectures or discussions; it doesn’t matter if assessments are based on projects or multiple-choice tests. These debates always miss the point: The fundamental school structures don’t support learning in the majority of students. Schools retain the basic one-size-fits-all design elements that have characterized school forever. They require all students to jump through the same hoops:

• graduation requirements based on a fixed number of years studying unrelated core subjects that adults have determined are essential–math, science, English, history, and a second language;
• course loads of five or six subjects taught in blocks that meet x number of times a week for y number of minutes, from early September to mid-June;
• the same topics, assignments, and expectations for everyone taking a particular course;
• an emphasis on memory and retrieval as indicators of learning.

Although there are a few happy exceptions, if you read through the literature of most seemingly innovative schools, you eventually encounter some form of the traditional graduation requirements: “an analytic essay on literature, a social studies research paper, an extended or original science experiment, and problem-solving at higher levels of mathematics”–all bases covered: English, history/social studies, science and math.

People who focus on school issues seem strangely unwilling to let go of this traditional model. Stranger still, despite the insights from neuroscientists who study how people learn, is the failure to include their voices in discussions on how to improve learning. Educators prefer researchers who offer proposals for fixing rather than challenging the basic system. There are reasons that so many of these well intentioned fixes continue to fail. They are focused on the classrooms, not the structures into which those classrooms must fit. Important though they are, growth mindsets, grit, memorization strategies, emotional intelligence curricula, etc., fail to address the larger structural problems. Educators and, especially, students might benefit more from insights that suggest a need to rethink the structure of this old model:

• Neuroscientists Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Antonio Damasio (University of Southern California) have studied the role of emotion in learning. They write that people “think in the service of emotional goals.” Immordino-Yang is even blunter: “It is literally neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about things that you don’t care about.” We think and learn about things that matter to us, but schools are set up so that young people learn what matters to adults, what adults have determined should matter or will matter to students. Although this role of school (to introduce students to the range of possible study and career options) is important and necessary, so is the need for students to experience school as emotionally relevant and meaningful to their life in the present.

Even a casual look will reveal that the emotionally relevant learning centers in schools are the cafeteria, hallways, fields, gyms, and cyberspace–the social hubs of student life. If the classrooms are ever going to compete for deep, emotional engagement, students will need to spend a meaningful chunk of their days pursuing genuine questions and interests that matter to them. Designing such schools would radically change the traditional model.

• Todd Rose and the late Kurt W. Fischer (Harvard) are two of many researchers who have helped us understand that all brains are different. Learning involves building and rebuilding webs of interrelated skills that connect different regions of the brain. Although brains have the same basic structures and exhibit developmental similarities, the connections among the various regions of the brain, the trillions of neural networks, are not identical. They are as individual as fingerprints and our DNA. Different combinations of cognitive strengths and weaknesses, different experiences, and different needs result in different neural connections. And these differences determine how people see the world, how they learn, and how they solve problems.

The standardization that schools embrace, reinforced by the myth of the existence of an average brain, tends to assume there is only one way to understand concepts or develop skills, only one solution to a problem, only one path to a meaningful education, when, in fact, there are many. Using Fischer’s lens to examine the fundamental assumptions embodied in school structures, practices, and policies would also result in dramatic changes.

Paths to success

For almost two decades, I taught in such a school, a school-within-a-school that offered an alternative approach to high school. Students who applied and were accepted to this Independent Immersion Program (IIP) were freed from the standard graduation requirements. Instead, they worked with the IIP director and an advisor to create individual programs of study based on their interests. Topics were as varied as the students: astronomy, music composition, Great Books, genetics, philosophy, math, Spanish literature, radiology, environmental science, writing short fiction, visual art, architecture, veterinary science, sports medicine, education.

Students created their programs and schedules by writing individual contracts that specified learning goals and the components of each program. These included some traditional classes in the regular school curriculum, some specialized classes at other secondary schools or colleges, some individual tutorials, and some internships or guidance from outside professionals. Students did not receive grades; all assessments were narrative: reflective self-assessments and assessments from any adults with whom the students studied.

What most students discovered was that one thing does, in fact, lead to another. A music student asked me, an English teacher, to help her improve her ability to write personal essays because she believed the skill would support her songwriting. Another student, who wanted to read literary classics, realized his understanding of these books required him to study their historical context. These students experienced the interrelationships among what schools tend to treat as discrete departmental domains–English, history, the arts, etc. Instead of “taking” history as an isolated course exploring topics that fascinated their teacher, they discovered for themselves that certain historical knowledge and skills mattered to their development in their chosen program of study.

But perhaps more important were the increased motivation and deeper thinking that characterized the engagement of these students, in contrast to their prior experiences in school. One student joined the IIP as a senior to study film-making and to escape what he characterized as the prison of the “state-imposed mandatory four-year sentence of high school.” “Once I enrolled in IIP,” he wrote, “it felt like I was actually pursuing my long-term goals. In other words, prior to IIP, I was waiting for school to end so I could start the real learning and work I wanted to do in my life. With IIP, I felt like my senior year of high school was the first year of the rest of my life.”

Another wrote, “The only thing I felt truly connected to was my poetry writing and the English classes. I did poorly in all of the other classes and was on academic probation off and on during my sophomore and junior years. I remember feeling like I wanted to give up if I had to follow the standard coursework that was in front of me. I was not engaged, and I desperately needed the physical and emotional freedom that came with a course of study that was created out of my own interests.” She went on to graduate summa cum laude from college and become a poet and teacher.

My observations of students in the IIP program and my studies particularly of the research of Immordino-Yang have convinced me of the huge potential that exists if we seriously rethink our approach to school design. Scattered about the country are a few schools that are moving toward meaningful change, like the Mastery School at Hawken in Cleveland. But the pervasive entrenched resistance to systemic change continues.

Differentiated schools

Change can be both terrifying and expensive. So can continuing to dump billions of dollars into essentially futile tinkering with a system that demands a fundamental overhaul. A more effective system will contain a variety of paths to diplomas to meet the variety of needs of learners. Self-directed programs of study like the IIP will work for some students, not all students; some students will find success in improved versions of the traditional model, just as they do now; and others will learn in models we haven’t yet imagined.

The keys are to involve neuroscientists who are exploring the biology of learning and to consider not just differentiated instruction but differentiated schools, differentiated curricula, differentiated schedules, and differentiated graduation requirements. Perhaps teachers need different qualifications–more interdisciplinary skills and experiences, not to mention different training. But certainly, the conversation about improving schools needs to move beyond tired either/or debates: less testing or more testing, more facts or more skills, more STEM or more arts, more money for public schools or more vouchers–either this failure or that failure.

Alden Blodget is a mostly retired high school teacher and administrator who currently volunteers as a writing tutor at LEAP for Education (Salem, MA).

Like most of the pictures on TeensParentsTeachers, the picture posted with this article is courtesy of a free download from Pixabay.com.