Dreaming of the show: rating major-league high schools - importance of treating every high school student as a future member of the US labor force - includes mission statement from Connecticut's Regional School District #6

Business Horizons, Sept-Oct, 1993 by Bob Nolte

Marilyn Hohmann is the principal of Fairdale High School in Jefferson 24 County, Kentucky. Tim Breslin is superintendent of Regional School District #6 and the former high school principal in Newtown - both districts in Connecticut. Hohmann and Breslin have thought a good deal about, and worked extremely hard at, attempts to restructure their high schools into environments that might better meet the needs of their students - young adults who will be stepping into the twenty-first century, not the twentieth, and most assuredly not the nineteenth.

Their task is not easy, for it involves developing an entirely new conception of the purpose of the high school, as well as a fundamental rethinking of the rules, roles, and relationships that should govern the activities of older and younger adults in a different kind of learning environment. They are engaged in moving everyone's thinking about the high school from the metaphor of the factory-model delivery system of an outdated and limited curriculum to that of - in Peter Drucker's terms - the "knowledge-work organization" appropriate to the accelerating demands of the future.

In the movie "Bull Durham," the sustaining dream among the minor league players is being called up to play in the majors, "The Big Dance," "The Show." One problem we face in thinking about the American high school is that we often regard it as Triple-A ball - a staging ground for the more important league, be it the work force or the university. The problem with the metaphor of the minor leagues (and of the traditional high school) in relation to the health of our society and economy is that it assumes a sorting-and-selecting function that lies at the heart of the organizational design. The Show cannot possibly absorb all those who want in; some mechanism is needed to coach and develop - but most of all identify - a few who will be highly successful.

The business community and national policymakers have been saying for some time that this will no longer suffice. We can no longer afford to leave anyone in the minors; we need to be developing competence, initiative, and ingenuity in all our students and all our citizens if we are to hold our place in an information-based, multinational economic environment.

High school students themselves often complain that they would like to have experiences that are personally meaningful. Many young people today feel they are in something similar to suspended animation between adolescence and young adulthood. In their view of the future, The Show is successful adulthood - in work, in family life, in intellectual accomplishment, in self-definition - and they dream of getting on with it. The unhappiest students speak in prison metaphors - "doing time," "beating the system," "getting out." The unhappiest teachers speak of "running a tight ship," "keeping the lid on," "getting out." When the experience seems unpleasant for parents and teachers of high school students, admonishments about the forthcoming demands of the "real world" are not uncommon. We seem trapped in outdated metaphors, in which the world of the high school is unreal. We need new dreams and metaphors to help us reshape this world.

We need new visions to guide us, visions that accommodate the culture (values, commitments, and meanings) and the structure (rules, roles, and relationships) of the high school. Few tasks are more demanding than attempts to change the culture of an organization, even within freestanding businesses. In the public arena, traditional visions and metaphors are so deeply ingrained that change is infinitely more demanding. Concerning the public high school in particular, the traditional expectations of parents, students, boards of education, communities, and administrators and teachers can offer strenuous resistance.

The question for those thinking about high schools from this perspective is: "How do we organize our thinking, our work, and our allocation of resources to ensure that all students develop the capacities for success?" We must come to think of high school itself as The Show, a real world in which all young people engage in work and activities of high quality, where the business of school personnel is to create high-quality work and challenges for students to pursue, and where human resource development - not the identification of winners and losers - is everyone's business. This is a systemic change proposition, not a school-improvement one.

Professionals in the field of human resource development know that the essential characteristics of adults as learners must be taken into account if the human resource developers want their work and their messages to be taken seriously and, more to the point, implemented. For one thing, adults need to be treated with dignity, or at the very least with the respect due to peers of average intelligence. For another, not all adults will learn at the same pace or hear the same messages at the same time; some of them, for instance, will make more sense of what they learn the morning afterward. All are conditioned to some extent by their world experiences and the biases they have generated; they will not all hear the same words or ideas in the same way. They can be quite impatient with lessons that are handed to them; they need to put ideas into use and test them against what they know and what they think they might want to learn. They also want choices that are personally relevant. They want meaningful interaction with their peers. They want the recognition due thoughtful individuals engaged in important work.