Content vs. Skills vs. 'The System'
May 28, 2009
The deeper I get into this project of writing a guide for creating theme-based schools, the more I realize how stuck we are in a system that just doesn't work anymore. The popular debate right now is about the relative value of teaching traditional content versus teaching 21st century skills. My thoughts on that are summed up in the last sentence of the first paragraph.
(I wrote this back in March, but my site was down. Fortunately, things don't change that quickly in education :/ Anyway, I'm still working on the same damned guide, and given the pace of educational change, it should be quite evident that nothing else mentioned here has changed other than the time frame of articles described as 'recent'. )
The deeper I get into this project of writing a guide for creating theme-based schools, the more I realize how stuck we are in a system that just doesn't work anymore. People are beginning to realize it. Some great stuff has come out of the Center on Reinventing Public Education and CNN just posted a commentary by Pedro Noguera called "Throwing billions at schools won't fix them." But it's just overwhelming to think about how much needs to be undone before a network of effective learning institutions for all public school students can be counted on to do what needs to be done. So instead, the pundits are debating the relative merits of teaching traditional content versus teaching 21st century skills. It's prettty much all bull, but if you want to read about it, check out Education Week's recent article on the subject.
There is a lot of hope being hung on charter schools, and as Noguera points out:
The most successful charter schools -- and let's be clear, not all charters are successful -- have demonstrated that increased autonomy, combined with site-based decision-making over the use of resources, can sometimes contribute to greater effectiveness. There is no reason why similar strategies cannot be deployed in regular public schools.
But unfortunately, there are countless reasons why increasing autonomy and allowing site-based decision-making cannot be deployed in public schools, beginning, perhaps, with teachers' and administrators' unions and ending, most likely, with the fact that the people who run schools are rarely, if ever, prepared to think outside the box as a condition of employment. Yes, we have a few inner city systems being run by non-educators -- Chicago was one, and their superintendent is now running the whole shebang -- but as I suspect Arne Duncan, or Joel Klein in NYC, or Michelle Rhee in D.C. would admit (maybe after a few drinks :) the obstacles to real, meaningful change are just stupefying.
I like the idea of theme-based schools. I think they're one way that public schools can tweak their approach and potentially make things a little better. But that pre-supposes that the passion that goes into forming one of these schools can be maintained long enough for the change to be institutionalized, which essentially is the biggest challenge in effecting any significant change. And it pre-supposes that the city, state and federal governments will stay the course -- whatever the course is -- long enough for the school system to understand it, train teachers in it and adjust it to meet all the myriad special needs each system has.
I love the ideas of game-based curriculum and teachers as facilitators rather than instructional experts, and I'd love to use that as my core example for the theme-based schools guide. (BTW, Noah sent me a link to one that's supposed to open in NYC next September.) But even though this fits right in with the technology emphasis in the Fed's stimulus plan for education (ARRA) and could probably get substantial funding, I can't get past the thought of preparing teachers to teach in this still-hypothetical school. And even if we find a school that needs to be reconstituted under NCLB, and then find a bunch of young, technologically literate teachers, and then find a similarly literate principal who is willing to sign a contract saying that (s)he will remain at the helm for at least five years, we'd still have to find jobs for the displaced teachers ... thus creating a problem somewhere else. (It makes me think of that game where you hit the mole on the head in one hole and it pops up in another. We've got to kill that damn mole, not just force it to move!)
Anyway, I've got no answers here. Best practices based on data-driven decision-making are all the rage now. In fact, I'm writing this guide as part of a contract that initially involved a school reconstituted as a theme-based, k-6, classical studies academy. It was extremely successful ... at first ... but then the principal left, and now it's right back to struggling. So much for data-driven decision-making. New school principals, just like new company presidents, tend to want to bring their own vision to their work; they're not usually interested in just following an established pattern. I have no idea how you overcome that very human tendency!
So, I need to write an easy-to-follow guide that will, at least theoretically, help the district create more successful schools. Right now, successful is defined as improved student performance on standardized tests. But by the time any of this actually happens, the definition of success will, hopefully, have changed. But then, we'll have spent our grant money on hardware and software that was almost certainly obsolete within the first year or two, and there will be no money to update. And then what ? Maybe we need to create a theme-based school that uses a Sims-type game that let's kids design and run their own schools ... whaddya think?
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