Kansas City MO school superintendent John Covington

The current system of public education in this country is not working. It’s an outdated, industrial, agrarian kind of model that lends itself to still allowing students to progress through school based on the amount of time they sit in a chair rather than whether or not they have truly mastered the competencies and skills.

It’s at the same time painful and liberating to hear a mainstream educrat saying this publicly for all to hear. But it is an important step to break through the mass denial of the dysfunctional ordeal we are putting so many million of our youth (and the adults who give their time to work with those youth) through.

I assume Covington is attempting to respond to President Obama’s well intentioned but (in my opinion) inappropriately named “Race to the Top” program. The word “race” is loaded down with so many connotations of competition, a few winners and many more losers, and doing things to be better than others rather than to develop ones self. And where the hell is the “top” that we should all be racing to? Is it the top of some “heap”? Is this any kind of metaphorical framing for a democratic society that aspires to be some sort of circle of equals?

The Obama administration’s challenge to the nation’s educational leaders (including Covington), to quote the President’s July 2009 statement on “Race to the Top” is to “enforce rigorous and challenging standards and assessments”, rather than something like “find innovative new approaches to learning”, which is what Covington is courageously trying to do anyway.

In simplest terms, Covington’s effort is to transition Kansas City schools from a focus on grade levels (and every student at the same age doing the same thing at the same time… very Henry Ford) to a very different framing based on skill development and mastery. According to the Education Week article…

Students — often of varying ages — work at their own pace, meeting with teachers to decide what part of the curriculum to tackle. Teachers still instruct students as a group if it’s needed, but often students are working individually or in small groups on projects that are tailored to their skill level… Advocates say the approach cuts down on discipline problems because advanced students aren’t bored and struggling students aren’t frustrated.

This certainly is not rocket science, or wildly avant-garde thinking, but acknowledges the natural way most humans have learned stuff since the dawn of time. And my point here is not to argue the details of this approach (you can read the article itself for that) but to instead acknowledge an attempt at pragmatic innovation and to think about other common-sense ideas (at least from a lefty parent’s point of view) that seem to mostly get short shrift in educational policy.

Like…

1. Getting regular feedback from students on what is working and not working for them in their learning process, including acknowledging, respecting and publishing that feedback, and engaging students as one of the stakeholders that can be included in efforts to make their educational process work better. In a democratic society this seems to me a total no-brainer, but so many of us adults (school staff, parents and others) seem to be caught up in the conventional wisdom of authoritarian school governance.

2. Reframing curriculum mandates to acknowledge that (unlike perhaps 150 years ago when mandatory public education was implemented throughout the country) today there is such a wide diversity of things that could be learned along with an acknowledgment of human diversity, that we should have less required curriculum rather than ever and ever more. I think this is counterintuitive to a lot of people, but think about it. Constraining 90% of every youth’s learning within an externally mandated subset of “core” curriculum works against young people plunging into an array of compelling subject matter until they are liberated from their youth by adulthood and high school graduation. Let’s let learning be more fun and based more on what interests us.

3. Reframing school assessment to encourage a wide diversity of learning environments rather than a Henry Ford “any color as long as it’s black”, OSFA approach. As a parent I recall my frustration at failing to find a learning environment for our own kids that was in tune with their learning style, instead forcing them day after day into a regimented instructional environment that acknowledged them only as “product” rather than as “stakeholders”. (See my post on “The Case for Many Educational Paths”.)

From the point of view of a parent who sees their kids as autonomous human souls with unique developmental paths ahead of them, education is not a race to the top. I can understand how a national bureaucracy with the responsibility for outcomes for 50 million youth can get caught up in talking up standardized rigor, for CYA political purposes. But it’s just not pragmatic humanistic thinking and “right-sizing” for effective human development that accommodates the diversity of how we all interact with the world and chart our own courses.

I could literally write out a scene in prose, with various other players linking their prose to mine, in threads that could range anywhere from a couple to a hundred posts long, depending on the content.

It was in the forums where Emma was inspired and able to do extensive writing in the voice of her characters and began to find her muse as a fiction writer.
After completing her last semester of conventional schooling in ninth grade Emma started unschooling, which meant her schedule was completely her own, with no particular daily routine she had to follow other than ones she set herself. Since some of the other key players she collaborated with lived as far away as Great Britain, Sweden, and Australia, she preferred the nighttime for playing “in game”, and daytime for writing posts on the forums. She would generally spend anywhere from 4 to 10 hours a day.

Emma found herself drawn particularly to the forums, and would write long posts (in character) in forum “threads” (a series of posts weaving the same story line) where other players were posting in character as well. Sometimes she would spend hours writing one post alone, eager to make it well written and captivating, honing her budding craft as a writer in the process. As she told me…

A good role-play thread was the highlight of my day, and I’d constantly check to see if my writing partners had written their own pieces so I could follow on their heels.

Although Emma created and brought to life many characters, her most memorable was a female elf she named “Eldeen Alencia”. Eldeen was an elven noble, who ran away from home and all the privilege it entailed, and struggled for many years, overcoming hardships and losses. She ended up becoming the first mate on a pirate ship captained by another player (logging into the game from Australia, who she eventually flew across the Pacific to visit in person). Emma spun the tale of the pirate elf for several years “in game” and on the forums through adventures of triumph and tragedy.

Woven into her tale were such things as a secret illuminati organization, a guild of duplicitous seamen known as “The Brotherhood”, a betrayal and subsequent blood-letting, a “complicated” love relationship between her and the captain (who unlike her character was a human), and all that sort of grist for pulp fantasy, swashbuckling and soap opera.

Day after day, Emma wrestled with the choices her character would make given the array of changing circumstances (introduced by the decisions of the other players) that confronted her buccaneer elf. As Emma wrote me replying to my recent email, enquiring about the details of what I knew was a very formative experience for her…

I made the choice to let her life unfold organically instead of doctoring what I thought would be a compelling story, and I could not predict all of the fabulous role-play that came out of that decision. At times I was a mere passenger to what felt like her emotions and the decisions that stemmed from them… I learned how to lose myself in a character’s inner self, and be guided by their thoughts and emotions, often to the point of being moved by them myself.

The simple wisdom on how to become a good writer is to write as much as you possibly can, and day and night Emma was in her room on the computer or talking across the world to her writing comrades (for free) using Skype. She was not thinking of it as teaching herself how to write. She was just having fun using her imagination to collaborate with others and build a grand tale. It was learning while following ones bliss. She had all the time she needed to settle into the creative writing process and develop her own style of prose, and learn the critical skills on how to collaborate creatively with others.

Eventually, she tired of some of her online community’s internal drama (out of game) and her real life situation began to change. No longer a recluse in her room, she got involved in the Unitarian-Universalist older youth community (see my post “Camps, Cons & Compasses”) plus scoped out and got a job in her favorite little local coffee place (see my post “Mom & Pop Coffee Shop”). Now with some real-life adventures, she could not devote the same amount of time to her role-play. Plus, she was frustrated that all of her writing was tied to the writing of others, and she did not have a story she could call her own.

Finally in 2008, at age 18, after not writing much of anything for a couple years, Emma got back to her computer and over the course of eight months made a first attempt at a science-fiction novel, writing a 20,000 word draft of an unfinished story. Since then she has ditched the story, but kept the characters and the initial concept. She enrolled in a novel writing class through UCLA extension. After completing the class, she and a handful of her classmates started a writer’s group, which has met every week for the past six months and continues to do so. With the help of her comrades, who act as both an audience and a sounding board, Emma feels confident enough to push forward on her novel, and is now about 40 pages into her manuscript.

Says Emma…

I do have other interests, but this is my primary career goal at the moment. Of course I grew up in a rich environment full of great science fiction literature. I’ve always loved escaping into other worlds with larger than life characters, but you can partly thank Eldeen for opening my eyes to my potential. In fact, had I been able to pursue this interest from day one, instead of having to spend my time in school, I might have realized long before age 14 that I had the chops to be a fiction writer, and there’s a good chance my first novel would already be completed.

I certainly did read her and her brother a heck of a lot of science-fiction books when they were little, and encouraged her to read other books once her own reading skills were up to the task. By the age of 12 she was reading very sophisticated stuff like John Varley’s “Gaea Trilogy” and Isaac Asimov’s seven-book “Foundation” series. (See my posts “Foundation” and “The Mists of Avalon”)

FYI… Emma (now 20) has a “day job” working at a small local woman-owned restaurant where she works two days a week waiting tables and two others as the manager. She moved into her own apartment last December, leads her own busy life, and unfortunately we don’t see her as often as we would like.


Looking back at letting her leave school after ninth grade, I am more convinced that it was the right choice for her. Unschooling is not for everyone, but it was the right ticket for our daughter. Had we forced her to finish high school, she might have more knowledge of a range of subjects she was not so passionate about, but she would not be nearly so far along in pursuing her muse.

Most high school students feel bored and disconnected from school, according to a new survey of students from 103 high schools in 27 states. Begun in 2004, the annual High School Survey of Student Engagement aims to take a pulse on teenagers’ attitudes toward school and learning. But the latest results, released last week, show that students were just as bored in 2009 as they have been every year since 2006.

The study is “Charting the Path from Engagement to Achievement: A Report on the 2009 High School Survey of Student Engagement”, Conducted by the Center for Evaluation and Education Policy at Indiana University in Bloomington. I think it is a critical bit of input into our needed effort to transform our education system in the 21st Century.

When presented with this sort of crisis, our public school systems tend to have very bureaucratic responses, with decision-making that emanates from a very high district, state or even (in the last couple decades with Goals 2000, NCLB and Obama’s “Race to the Top”) national level. That response is generally well within a “box” of hierarchical “command and control” top-down edicts that are generally focused on fine-tuning mandated curriculum, further scripting how teachers interact with students, and generally continuing a perhaps three-decade trend that disempowers teachers and students as agents of educational change.

Among the most disturbing findings of this study is that only 41% of the students surveyed said they went to school because of what they learned there. So why are the other 59% attending? Please really think about that… Why are the other 59% of students attending? What is their motivation for going to school?

Wouldn’t you agree that this study illuminates a very fundamental crisis in how are society is framing education and human development? I don’t understand why more people don’t realize that we are looking at our youth in school more as the raw material for creating a product rather than key stakeholders in a process. We are still generally caught up in the logic of hierarchical power-over thinking where well-meaning adults charged with stewarding youth feel they need to make all the significant decisions for those young people, or they are not doing their jobs.

I am particularly troubled by what I read about and see in most high schools (confirmed by this study), because I have seen a very different way of setting up a venue for the development of older youth.

An Alternative Approach for Older Youth

I have worked with older youth not as a teacher but as an adult facilitator of Unitarian-Universalist youth-led camps and conferences. We UUs are “process junkies” and we teach these group process techniques (which are designed to empower everyone to actively participate) to adults and youth. We empower our older youth (high school age) to program, staff and run their camps and conferences themselves, with minimal adult intervention.

A youth governing board is elected each year by all the youth attending the district-wide summer camp. That board meets quarterly and plans week-long camps and weekend conferences throughout the year. The board appoints youth “deans” to coordinate each event.

The dean(s) put together their youth “staff”, which collectively develops the camp or conference curriculum and programming, each youth playing a specific role leading the various programmed events, working as counselors or “chaplains” to informally handle individual issues, handling registration, managing the budget and money, and in some cases even providing the food. Programming can include adult or youth-led speakers and workshops, facilitated “rap sessions”, youth-led “worship services”, arts and crafts, dances, talent shows, hikes, and all the array of typical camp or conference curriculum.

This is all youth-designed and youth-led (other than say a particular workshop where an adult is invited to present and/or lead). Both my now young-adult kids had the opportunity to participate in these events as attendees, staff and even as “deans”. My daughter served on the youth board for two years, the second as the board president. She co-coordinated one of the week-long summer camps. My son designed and led several of the weekend conferences.

Just FYI, in case you are wondering or otherwise concerned, adults do attend these camps and conferences. To meet insurance regulations, the events have to have at least one adult on site for every ten youth. But the attending adults don’t run anything; they are basically there to be available in case there are significant calamities.

But even when a serious situation arises that calls for specific intervention, it is still handled mainly by the youth, with perhaps more significant adult participation than with the day-to-day stuff. During the week-long summer camp my daughter led, two of the youth campers were found to have violated the camp rules for sexual conduct. Over the course of two long nights without much sleep, my daughter, the rest of the camp youth staff and several of the attending adults met in long sessions with the campers who had broken the rules. They were heard out, the issues were discussed in depth, and the appropriate consequences were agreed to by the assembled group. The two campers were asked to leave camp the next morning and I recall were also not allowed to attend another camp for another six months.

I would like to testify to all of you the energy of empowered young people I am surrounded with at these events is so exhilarating and gives me such hope for the developmental possibilities of the human race. How capable we are if given the opportunity, even at the age where some people still call us “children”, to run our own lives!

Applying this Paradigm to Public High Schools

So I contrast my experience with empowered, highly capable UU youth with what I witness when I walk into a conventional high school and see how relatively un-empowered the kids are, how much of their potential for individual agency and wisdom and collective ability to problem solve and design and mnage an enriched environment is untapped and even suppressed.

I would suggest that at least some of these principles and methodologies for empowering youth be employed in high school environments to change the paradigm from youth as passive consumer and “product” of an educational process to active stakeholders in designing or at least managing their learning environment. Even though the curriculum and programming of a year-long instructional high school can be very different than a week-long camp or weekend conference, the fundamentals of governance and programming are essentially the same, and can be done by youth alongside adults, if not led primarily by youth with adults as consultants, mentors and subject-matter experts.
As I have noted before, there are schools that actually run using these kinds of youth-led principles and processes. Most notable in the United States, and a model for other such schools elsewhere in our country and others, is the Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts. Though this is a “free school” with individual students setting their own curriculum, the democratic empowerment of students can be applied to any type of school, whether instructional (like most conventional public and private schools), holistic (Dewey, Waldorf, Montessori, etc) or “free”.

So I would suggest that conventional high schools confront the crisis that this study highlights by implementing regular egalitarian and democratic process into the high school program. Have facilitated discussions among the students about the issues of student engagement (or not) in school. Solicit suggestions and actually try all or some of the suggestions that gain consensus. Have students and teachers participate on the various governance committees within the individual schools and at the larger district level that manage these new initiatives and other suggested changes.

From my experience with the collective wisdom of the UU high-school-aged youth, I would suspect your typical high school class would be able to muster enough collective wisdom and “solutioning” to move the needle of student engagement at least some of the way in the right direction. Give this disengaged majority of students a third avenue of expression beyond checking out or acting out.

A small but influential group of economists and educators is pushing another pathway: for some students, no college at all. It’s time, they say, to develop credible alternatives for students unlikely to be successful pursuing a higher degree, or who may not be ready to do so.

As a big supporter of “many paths” rather than “one size fits all”, I applaud this group, going against the conventional wisdom of our culture. I’d like to see all our youth have the chance to be successful, to transition into adulthood and find work and build a balanced life that leverages their unique interests and talents, and allows them to make a significant contribution to the larger community. But I don’t believe any one path, such as a conventional academic high school leading to an academic four-year college, can possibly be right for everyone. I can’t even fathom how anyone, including President Obama, would think that it could be.

Getting back to my initial thought, I think I for one may have over-consumed college. Even though my BS in Computer Science was a critical item on my resume to get my first (relatively high-paying) corporate IT job, it was my second bachelor’s degree (received at age 31) and not my first (received at age 23). I had spent five years (and lucky for me financed mostly by financial needs grants from the State of Michigan) getting my first degree in Speech, with a concentration in TV and film production.

If I had had to borrow the money (and particularly at today’s higher costs for a college education) it may well not have been worth it, from a financial point of view. I spent the next five years after obtaining that first degree doing low-paying jobs, but work (including as a community organizer) that was very meaningful to me developmentally, and I think I would have been hobbled financially if I had had to pay back significant loans. The truth is that having gotten my degree had very little to do with the skills I needed to do these jobs, I had learned most of those skills outside any school or academic program.

According to Steinberg…

College degrees are simply not necessary for many jobs. Of the 30 jobs projected to grow at the fastest rate over the next decade in the United States, only seven typically require a bachelor’s degree, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

It was the acquisition of my second bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a path forward I launched into in 1983 at age 28, that really leveraged the money I spent for that degree (all my own money this time, but still not as dear as college is today) towards a worthwhile economic return in terms of the kind of salary I could command in the corporate world.

I think I needed to have those seven years of life experience outside of school, including various lower paying jobs in the real world, to develop the worldly wisdom to choose this path forward, including the investment (for the second time) in a four-year degree. If I had been saddled with significant loans from getting my first degree, I don’t know if I would have made it.

Attending college today is more of a high-stakes endeavor, particularly for those people who can’t get significant academic scholarships. Says Steinberg…

Whether everyone in college needs to be there is not a new question; the subject has been hashed out in books and dissertations for years. But the economic crisis has sharpened that focus, as financially struggling states cut aid to higher education.

In today’s world, more and more, older youth, young adults, and their families are paying a significantly higher percentage of the cost of a college education. I see too many of my son’s and daughter’s peers sink a lot of their family’s or borrowed money in a four-year college right after high school, coming to realize two or three years into that higher education, that maybe they picked the wrong major, or this otherwise wasn’t the right path forward for them. They may in fact have over-consumed education, without enough real world adult experience to best leverage their educational investment.

According to Steinberg…

Among those calling for such alternatives are the economists Richard K. Vedder of Ohio University and Robert I. Lerman of American University, the political scientist Charles Murray, and. They would steer some students toward intensive, short-term vocational and career training, through expanded high school programs and corporate apprenticeships.

From my experience, and the stories I’ve heard from my kids’ friends, this sounds like a really good idea. Some 17 and 18-year-old kids are clear about what they want to be when they grow up, but many are not. Let’s give kids transitioning into the age of majority more initial options, beyond a four-year academic education to get them into the real world of adult life, including initial careers.

If one can start an adult life with at least a living wage and garner real world experience and wisdom, then I think a person can build a much better strategy, perhaps later in their mid twenties, towards investing in the right, now more pricey, four-year college towards a more high-powered, high-paying career.

According to James E. Rosenbaum, an education professor at Northwestern, as quoted in Steinberg’s article…

“I’m not saying don’t get the B.A,” he said. “I’m saying, let’s get them some intervening credentials, some intervening milestones. Then, if they want to go further in their education, they can.”

I think I agree.

Education Innovators Horace Mann, John Dewey & Homer Lane

1. A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them.

2. Education alone can conduct us to that enjoyment which is, at once, best in quality and infinite in quantity.

3. Education is our only political safety. Outside of this ark all is deluge.

4. Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance-wheel of the social machinery.

On the moralistic basis for education as social engineering and reform…

5. Let us not be content to wait and see what will happen, but give us the determination to make the right things happen.

6. Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.

7. If evil is inevitable, how are the wicked accountable? Nay, why do we call men wicked at all? Evil is inevitable, but is also remediable.

8. Jails and prisons are the complement of schools; so many less as you have of the latter, so many more must you have of the former.

And on the teaching process…

9. A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.

10. Manners easily and rapidly mature into morals.

I can clearly see in Mann’s quotes his vision that education must be driven by the state, and in fact he was successful in getting his home state of Massachusetts to pass the first universal compulsory education, which inspired other states to follow. Schools alone can save our democracy by instructing all kids on exactly what they need to know to be righteous American citizens.

I think it is particularly interesting that the father of our public school system was not at all about reading, writing and arithmetic (which later became the staples of public education and are the featured skills today in most high-stakes testing). Mann was about instructing all of America’s children – Protestant, Catholic or Heathen – in good non-sectarian Protestant values – on which to build a unifying moral basis for American society (Protestant style, of course).

It was American Catholics, migrating to the U.S. in ever greater numbers throughout the 19th Century, who led the fight to eventually remove this religious indoctrination from the public schools. It was replaced by the “Three Rs” (which facilitated the education of the worker-bees of the Industrial Revolution) that still dominate state-standardized instructional education today.

John Dewey and the Teacher-Driven Holistic Vision

From Dewey’s book, Experience and Education…

1. Unless a given experience leads out into a field previously unfamiliar no problems arise, while problems are the stimulus to thinking… it is part of the educator’s responsibility to see equally to two things: First, that the problem grows out of the conditions of the experience being had in the present, and that it is within the range of the capacity of students; and secondly, that it is such that it arouses in the learner an active quest for information and for production of new ideas.

From Dewey’s essay, “The Child and the Curriculum”…

2. The value of the formulated wealth of knowledge that makes up the course of study is that it may enable the educator to determine the environment of the child, and thus, by indirection, to direct. Its primary value, its primary indication, is for the teacher, not the child. It says to the teacher; Such and such are capacities, the fulfillments, in truth and beauty and behavior, open to these children. Now see to it that day by day the conditions are such that their own activities move inevitably in this direction, toward such culmination of themselves.

Swartz notes in his article that, “For Dewey, the teacher was a behind-the-scenes authority who should help students learn those ideas and values which society considered to be important.” Dewey added this element of the teacher as the highly talented artist that would direct their students own sense of inquiry to obtain the knowledge that society wanted to have, which is beyond Mann’s more external vision of compulsion.

Homer Lane and the Student-Led Free School Vision

In his book, Talks to Parents and Teachers (page 109), Lane says…

The relationship between teacher and child should be pure democracy – the child should not be on the defensive, but should be free to ask all questions… self-government must be given, both in the team play of games and still more in team play made possible for work… We must give responsibility for, say, history and get the class to discuss the syllabus and the allotment of tie to the part of it, and to assume responsibility for getting through it.

Swartz calls Lane’s approach “the policy of personal responsibility”, and definitely speaks to an educational curriculum and process driven by the student and not by the state, that breaks radically from both Mann and Dewey. As a contemporary of Dewey, though across the ocean, he was the alternative road less taken to the conventional instructional model put in motion by Mann. Lane was the educational mentor of A.S. Neill, who later started Summerhill, the most famous free school in the world, which has inspired many others, including Sudbury Valley.

As a parent, I think you should know about these three very different types of schools, though many or most families do not have the resources to send their kids to alternative schools, which generally are tuition-based rather than public (tax-based). Depending on your own expectations and your kid’s proclivities for self-direction, learning style and integration of education in real life, you may want to consider these options or add your voice to the beginning effort to broaden the range of public charter school choices.

My partner Sally and I had the resources to homeschool our kids during their high school years in a free school type approach generally called “unschooling”. (See my post titled “Unschooling Rather than High Schooling” about how our son Eric took to this approach.)

Horace Mann