Designing, and making, the new American high school

Technos: Quarterly for Education and Technology, Spring, 2002 by Bob Pearlman

Newspapers across the country are filled with stories of high school failure. "More than Half of California 9th Graders Flunk Exit Exam," a recent headline in Education Week (June 20, 2001), typifies this trend. In the next 10 years we can be sure that there will be high school failure everywhere unless states artificially lower the standards, a real possibility, or schools change the high school experience to engage and motivate students to learn. This author presents the case for the latter event.

The push to reinvent the now 100-year-old institution of the American high school has just gotten a big boost. The Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced in October 2001 a $60 million Schools for the New Society investment in seven urban districts to "reinvent the high school experience for more than 140,000 students in more than 100 schools."

What changes in the high school program and in its supporting facilities and technology will be needed to "reinvent the high school experience"? And even if you get the design right, what are the challenges in starting up schools like these and establishing a new culture of teaching and learning?

The Design Challenge

Would you want to be a student in high school today? Listen to Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls, one of this past summer's best reads. Russo, in his acknowledgments, thanks his daughter Kate "for reminding me by means of concrete detail just how horrible high school can be, and how lucky we all are to escape more or less intact."

Haven't we all had a nightmare where it's discovered that somehow we didn't get all our high school credits and had to go back to high school, like Kathleen Turner in her 1986 movie, Peggy Sue Got Married?

If you had it to do all over again, what would you change in the high school experience? The starting point in redesigning the high schools, and the high school experience, is specifying what you want to change. Ask any group of adults what high school was like, especially educators, and they will come up with a similar list. Here's what the 200 educators from the United States and Europe said at Alan November's 2001 summer institute, Aligning Technology Resources: Empowering Teaching and Learning:

* "I felt no influence and control over my learning."

* "I was one of the herd. There's no personal element."

* "I couldn't pursue my interests."

* "The teachers seemed miserable in their teaching."

* "They steered girls away from math, science, journalism, etc."

* "I was not a partner in my own learning."

* "What we knew wasn't valued and respected."

* "There was rigidity in thought and in the physical structure."

* "It was not a `workspace.' It felt like a prison."

And what would the kids say? Shouldn't we ask them? That's what England's Guardian newspaper did in June 2001 when it reprised a public competition first conducted in 1967, in which kids across England wrote essays about "The school that I'd like" (edited by Edward Blishen, Penguin Education Special, England, 1969). One 15-year-old girl summed up school at that time as "institutions of today run on the principles of yesterday." Has anything changed?

In the summer of 2001, here's what the kids wrote (see http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/ story/0,5500,501374,00.html).

The school we'd like is

* a beautiful school with glass dome roofs to let in the light, uncluttered classrooms, and brightly coloured walls.

* a safe school with swipe cards for the school gate, anti-bully alarms, first aid classes, and someone to talk to about our problems.

* a listening school with children on the governing body, class representatives, and the chance to vote for the teachers.

* a flexible school without rigid timetables or exams, without compulsory homework, without a one-size-fits-all curriculum, so we can follow our own interests and spend more time on what we enjoy.

* a relevant school where we learn through experience, experiments, and exploration, with trips to historic sites and teachers who have practical experience of what they teach.

* respectful school where we are not treated as empty vessels to be filled with information, where teachers treat us as individuals, where children and adults can talk freely to each other, and our opinion matters.

* a school without walls so we can go outside to learn, with animals to look after and wild gardens to explore.

* a school for everybody with boys and gifts from all backgrounds and abilities, with no grading, so we don't compete against each other, but just do our best.

The English kids are not alone in their thinking. The International Society of Technology in Education (ISTE) also asked the kids at a special Student Technology Leadership Symposium, June 23-24, 2001, held in conjunction with NECC. As reported by student Pooja Agarwal in "If I Could Make a School" (Learning and Leading with Technology, November 2001), the U.S. student leaders want schools that

* are fun

* end lecturing from a textbook

* institute problem-based, discovery-based, and inquiry-based curricula