The American Education System is a system that works, it just doesn’t work well. We currently have an 89.1% graduation rate in this country, which means our massive education system leaves 1 in 10 students behind. Out of the 51 million currently being served by the public school system, it will fail 5.5 million children. Let me write that out for you, again.
Our current system WILL fail 5,500,000 of the children it is designed to serve. That is completely unacceptable, and there are two major questions that need to be asked: “Why is it failing?” and “How do we fix it?”
Why is it failing?
Imagine, if you will, that at the end of some major civil war or period of revolution, a new nation state on the other side of the world contacts you and asks you to set up their national education system for them. You are building this from scratch, no retro-fitting old models; you’re starting from a clean slate. Naturally, one of your first questions would be, “How are we going to organize and group the students to foster the greatest possible learning outcomes?” There are so many ways to go about this, but you have to begin at the earliest level - for common vocabulary’s sake, we’ll call that “kindergarten.” You could group them all by their reading level on entry, or perhaps by their math level, since every student enters with a wildly different level of base knowledge and skill based on what they learned at home. You could conduct learning style inventories and organize them by learning type, which is really nice because then you could maximize that by organizing your teachers the same way, and have every student in a classroom with a teacher who teaches exactly the way they learn best. You could organize them by cultural background to ensure high levels of trust and understanding early on. Or… you could group every child by the year they were born, regardless of background levels of math and reading literacy, regardless of dominant learning style, regardless of cultural background. Just scrap all of that, take all of the babies born in 2017, and they go in one room with the random teacher assigned to them by whoever is in charge of scheduling. If you went with that last option, you would be organizing this new system much like the American Education System and sadly, also like the education systems of dozens of other nations around the world who have chosen to follow the American Model because of the international prestige that name carries.
Next comes the curriculum design. The reason it comes second is because it’s based so much on how you organized your learners. Most education systems tend to break their curriculum into annual bands, or as we think of them here, grade levels. If you are organizing this way, there are two ways to do this, by depth or breadth. The depth model says that you will cover fewer topics every year, but at greater depth so students only have to learn them once - this is how we organize our science curriculum, for the most part. The breadth model says that you will cover more topics each year, but you will review them year after year to accumulate depth - this is how we organize our math curriculum, for the most part. Regardless of which method you choose, it ignores a major flaw in grade level organizing in that students do not all begin public education at the same level. One of the most successful models of curriculum design is the constructivist model, most popularly implemented by Montessori style schools. This model allows students to move through a more comprehensive track of primary curriculum at their own pace, starting at their own level. Since students are not all working on the same lesson, they can choose the order of their lessons each day, and even choose to work ahead on something they find more engaging. This gives the students a greater sense of ownership in their education and learning, which helps with long-term retention, as well. This is a completely different setup than a traditional American classroom though; in order to be effective, a teacher would have to have every possible lesson over a three year span ready to go for a student, prepared ahead of time. The majority of the teacher work comes in preparing the classroom for the student, but that enables the majority of the work happening during the school day to be done by the student. Classes still organize for group lessons, projects, and activities, typically based around science and culture.
There are also a ton of really interesting ways you can adapt these designs based on regional goals to supplement learning, outside of core curriculum. One incredibly successful model is bi-lingual instruction, which is great in areas that have high percentages of non-native English speaking students. What this model does is organize each class to be comprised 50/50 of students who speak English as a first language, and students who speak an alternate language as their first language. The students spend half the time each day with a teacher who teaches all lessons in English, and half the time with a teacher who teaches all lessons in the alternate language. This not only fosters full fluency and academic literacy in both languages for the children, but it places each group in the position of being the primary learner (and aide to the secondary learners) every day, regardless of their background. By the end of primary, you have an entire grade level of students who are completely bi-lingual and who can continue to study and learn in both languages for the rest of their lives.
Finally, we have to look at your instructional model. This isn’t a question of what you are teaching but more, how are you teaching it. The prototypical American instructional model is the one designed by Madeline Hunter back in the 1950’s, which features three main parts of a lesson: Direct Instruction, Guided Practice, and Independent Practice. Our de facto way of implementing these is by having a teacher present the direct instructions to all students at once from the front of the classroom, which is the part most people think of when they think of teaching. Then, before leaving, students begin practicing or implementing what they learned from the lesson, while the teacher is there to spot check, and see if they are doing it properly. Then they go home and complete the independent practice as homework, demonstrating mastery by performing the task without any oversight or assistance. It sounds great in principle, but anyone who has ever had their child stand in front of them with a worksheet they have absolutely no idea how to begin knows that it is not perfect. In fact, this model was never really perfect. Much like the way we organize our students’ and curriculum, it goes back to what is known as the “Little Red Schoolhouse” model, which was the best way of trying to teach everyone back in a time when there was only one school, probably only one teacher, and no other way of obtaining the information the teacher was providing. That isn’t even remotely close to the massive system of modern education we are currently looking at, but since we’ve been retrofitting that model for more than 70 years, it’s still present in the DNA of everything we do in schools today. Many secondary classrooms, and the majority of post-secondary institutes have switched to what is known as a “flipped model” of instruction, which can be most simply explained as students getting their lecture at home, and doing their homework in school. What it is really designed to accomplish is take the lowest level of learning (the direct instruction) and have that done at home using the plethora of digital and print resources we have at our disposal today, and saving the higher levels of practice and refinement for when the teacher is around. This is the way most adults learn today, when they have questions about something. If you have a medical question, (hopefully) you don’t go to the doctor for a textbook definition of cancer, and then go home to diagnose yourself on WebMD. You do what most of us do, which is to explore the low-level background information online at home before you visit the doctor, and then ask all your questions during the time you have an expert available to help give you a deeper level of understanding. This is what the flipped model hopes to accomplish, and with the right amount of investment in infrastructure, is the key to unlocking a more successful future for American students.
How do we fix it?
The simple solution is by starting over, and with lots of patience. One of the things that makes enacting large changes on our education system so difficult, is that most of them can only be successful if implemented from kindergarten forward. That means that a complete adjustment to any new system takes a minimum of 13 years, with a gradual rollout model that naturally expands as the first group of kindergartners to start in the program age their way through the system, bringing the new model with them. For much the same reason as why we haven’t been able to accomplish any major space-based initiatives for the past 50 years, if the project takes longer than the tenure of the leadership who are bankrolling it, it is unlikely to survive all the way to fruition. One thing that does outlast the term of a President or Governor is federal education legislation. The three largest pieces of educational legislation ever passed were the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, No Child Left Behind in 2001, and the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015. The rapid expansion of technology over the last 30 years has caused us to revisit these policies and guidelines slightly more often, but even the most recent piece of legislation is still standing in its original form for its third President. The great thing about federal legislation is that it helps move the whole country forward, while still allowing for autonomy in the way individual states and districts address their unique populations and histories.
In order to begin constructing a system that can break out of the box that has been stifling our educational progress for so long, we have to build a bigger box - this means infrastructure. We’ve learned so much about what we can and can’t do outside of the classroom during the recent COVID-19 pandemic, and one thing that has been crystal clear is that it doesn’t work without Universal Broadband. In order to succeed at school, every child must go home to a house with electricity, clean water, and reliable high speed internet. Every child is also going to need a device (laptop or tablet) capable of accessing their educational content from home. The great thing about that is that putting a computer or tablet in the hands of every child is considerably less expensive than putting a complete set of grade-level texts in their hands, and a lot better for their backs. Larger school districts around the country have been able to bulk purchase 1-to-1 quantity of devices for their students for years, but smaller districts have struggled to make the initial investment. A federal, single payer supply for schools around the nation would provide the same purchase opportunity and access to every student nationwide. Primary aged children still need to be in school during a traditional school day, but secondary students can, and should have a more flexible schedule. This includes having varying start times, and adjusting what “seat time” means in a modern school. With a flipped model of education, students should not need to spend 36.5 hours every week sitting at a desk in a classroom to meet a time quota, rather they can be logging time at home and coming at varying times, based on their personal academic need and home situation. This requires a more flexible transportation infrastructure, one that can get students to school at a wider variety of times, but fewer students at each individual time. The added benefit to this is that it also solves one of our other prevailing problems in the modern school, which is class size. If students don’t have to physically attend to learn, and can come less often for fewer total in person minutes, that means teachers will have the opportunity to work with students in the far more productive small group and one-on-one settings that many learners really need. The third, and final, logistical consideration to begin the transformation is the design of our school buildings. Most of our traditional school architectural models are based on considerations such as privacy, safety, and efficiency, over designs that heightens and improves learning. Those considerations are important, but should not be the alpha priori when building an ideal system. Especially in our primary schools, we need buildings that incorporate more natural light to make it easier for students who are looking at screens more often than their young eyes would prefer. Students also need the ability to move throughout the day, this means no cramped classrooms. Open air environments like courtyards are fantastic, when possible, and require that considerations for privacy and security are made at the perimeter of the building to allow more freedom for students inside. States and school districts will need at least 5 years to get all schools up to a qualifying level capable of implementing with efficacy improved models for curriculum and instruction.
By creating an infrastructure appropriate for a new system, and providing the guidelines and support necessary for implementation, schools can begin a 13 year rollout of a new program. That’s great, but how can you know if it’s working? Nobody wants to wait 13 years to find out if the graduation rate is any better, and graduation rate here isn’t nearly as important as the type of graduates we are producing. Standardized testing is a great way of comparing individual students against each other, but it doesn’t tell us much of anything about the population as a whole. Individual oral assessments have been shown around the world to be a far better indicator of mastery, and with the technology we have available today can be recorded and verified for posterity, and part of a cumulative record of production and achievement that can follow a student through their academic career. Without test scores to rely on, the evaluations of teachers can be based upon the achievement of personal, year-long objectives put in place by the school or district administration. With individualized progression in math and reading during primary years, testing is not necessary to track the learning gains and progress of each and every student. That tracking is a natural part of the constructive education process.
We say things like “No Child Left Behind and “Every Student Succeeds,” but until we develop an entirely new system that organizes the classroom, the curriculum, and the instruction in ways that complement one another and are flexible enough to work for every student, we will never really get there. We can’t continue to rely on a system that works for most students, or works if students are able to buy in, or works if we just throw more money at it. We need a system that works, period, and when we build that system it will work for everyone, and students will buy in, and it won’t need any more money than it needs. When we build this system, and implement it with fidelity, we will build a society that doesn’t know what a graduation rate even is, because the idea of anyone not graduating can be eradicated from our realm of possibilities. That’s what it looks like when no child is left behind and every student succeeds. That’s what we can build, together.