What's Become Clear

I used to be surprised, I’m not anymore. It used to be noteworthy when I would read a book and the author would give some advice to help individuals overcome the effects of public education. Today I’m more surprised if I read a book and they don’t give advice to help individuals overcome the effects of public education.

Just recently I have read Linchpin by Seth Godin, Book Yourself Solid by Michael Port, Drive by Daniel Pink, and Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan. In each of these books there is significant advice for the reader about how they might overcome the learning that they experienced in public school. And these are just a few of the recent examples.

One of the reasons I’m sure I see this a lot is because I read so many books that deal with how to be successful in the 21st century. And our schools have nothing to do with being successful in the 21st century. Our core curriculum has nothing to do with preparing students to be successful as adults. While there is some movement in our high schools to try to do a better job it’s the side dish, not the entrée. Their focus is much more on improving standardized test scores, and preparing kids to go to college. And even in those subjects that don’t do standardized testing, raising test scores is still their excuse for not changing education.

Our two-year post secondary education institutions, community colleges and technical colleges, are doing an excellent job of preparing their students for the real world. Unfortunately we lack emphasis in K-12 schools to prepare our kids to attend those post secondary institutions that prepare students for industry-standard certifications and associate degrees, that lead to high-paying, highly satisfying careers.

I was especially struck by Dan Pink’s description in Drive of the two kinds of work that exist today, the algorithmic and heuristic. Our schools focus almost entirely on preparing students to do algorithmic work, and almost completely ignore preparation for heuristic work. This, in spite of the fact that estimated 70% of all the new jobs being created involve heuristic work. So perhaps the advice that the authors give to overcome the effects of public schools is important and valuable. – Steve Wyckoff

For the 34th and 35th time I had the opportunity this week to speak to students in the College of Education at the University Kansas. Twice each semester for the last nine years I’ve had the opportunity to speak to students in Dr. Mike Neill’s class. These are students who hope to become teachers. Usually there are 80 to 100 students in each class. That means that over the last nine years I’ve had the pleasure to interact with between 2,800 and  3,500 students. Okay, so if you do the math it should have had the 35th and 36th time right? Well they missed one day a couple of years ago because school was dismissed because they won some basketball game. You may remember

Anyway, these are always some of my favorite days. I have the opportunity to interact with students who are pretty much fresh out of high school, but also are committed to becoming educators. In many ways it’s refreshing and uplifting. In other ways it’s depressing.

Let me explain. I always love their enthusiasm and their commitment. They possess a passion for what they think they’re going to face. They are bright, engaged, and ready to take on the world.

The depressing part, I always visit with them about authentic engagement. The flow that learners are in when they are so engaged they lose track of time. I tell them it is my opinion that the most important thing they can do is to create learning experiences that are so engaging that their students are regularly authentically engaged. But then I ask them how many of them were authentically engaged on a regular basis in high school.

Yesterday was most one of the most depressing days when I asked this question. Not one hand was raised. Think about it, these are young adults who want to spend the rest of their life in school, and yet none of them were regularly authentically engaged in high school.  Normally, there are only five or six students in the entire class who were regularly authentically engaged in high school, but still to have no students raise their hand was a little bit shocking.

Through our dialogue it was clear that they understand what being authentically engaged is. They even talked about their school experiences that were authentically engaging. They listed them, year book, drama, athletics, and other experiences that were almost all outside of the core curriculum.

When we talk about the core curriculum students in this class through the years have rarely, if ever, identified them as authentically engaging. Interestingly enough  when students did find a class in the core curriculum that was authentically engaging to them, that is typically the subject they are preparing to teach. I hope they don’t model their teaching after the teachers they had simply because it was authentically engaging to them.

The other thing that I’m always aware of when speaking to the students is how pervasive the thinking is that the way our system operates is the only possible way the system can operate. I wish that we had more time to talk about how the system could be modified in order to engage students and yet still learn the things that we want students to learn, that usual in education time limited how much we can accomplish.

Other interesting topics we cover: standardized tests, which always realize a conversation; the need for individualizing instruction; innovation; and our system is pervasively focused on preparing kids to go to four years college rather than preparing them for their life. – Steve Wyckoff

In the innovative educator’s dilemma part 1, I talked about how your best customers can drive you out of business if you’re not careful. That your best students with the most influential parents will keep you in the old paradigm of education, traditional schooling, right up to the point that they leave for private schools, and your school isn’t meeting the needs of any of your students.

But there is a further dilemma to this story. Even the parents of students who are the least successful, and those that are far less successful, than your best students, believe that every child should be prepared to go to a four-year liberal arts college, and that schools should look much like they did when the parents were students.

This is a real problem. I talk to school leaders all the time who tell me that the fastest way for them to get in trouble is to suggest to some parents that their kids should not go to a four-year college. We’ve done a tremendous job getting parents to believe that education is the key to success. Now we’ve got to convince them that a four-year liberal arts degree is not necessarily the kind of education that is the key to success for their child. Only about 25% of jobs today require a four-year professional degree. On the other hand about 65% of jobs are what we refer to as skilled. These skilled jobs require post secondary education.  But the post secondary education may be in the form of certification programs, associate degree programs, and yes even bachelors degree programs.

Four of 10 of the most popular majors include Social Sciences (ex. History and Political Science) Psychology, Communication, and English

Popular careers of these majors include:
retail store manager
customer service representative
administrative assistant

So the dilemma for school reformers is that we must not only convince educators that they must redesign how they prepare students for their future, but we must also help parents understand that we need to change how their children are educated if they are to be successful in the 21st century. – Steve Wyckoff

Of all the things I speak about, the slide I use that lists 10 behaviors that I identify as  “21st-century behaviors” is one of the most popular. I put this list together over the last many years from various sources. To be added to the list a behavior must be frequently mentioned in many sources. The 10 behaviors are:

1. Technological Fluency: The ability to use technology as a tool. To be completely comfortable using various forms of technology and use it with the ease that we would use paper and pencil.
2. Communication … Verbal proficiency: Of all the subjects we make students take, the one we make them take every year of their educational experience is English/Language arts. You would think with all that effort our students would be excellent communicators. Yet one of the most commonly heard concerns from the business community is the inability of our students to communicate either verbally, or in writing.
3. Collaboration … Leadership/Coordination/ Teamwork/Interpersonal Skills/Relationships/horizontal collaboration: The ability to work with others in all of its forms is critical today. Most of our kids will function in work environment that requires them to be a team player.
   
4. Solve Complex Problems: The world we live in and the problems that arise in that world are growing ever more complex. Often times requiring skills and knowledge from multiple disciplines, including use of technology. It is imperative that our graduates have the ability to work in this complex society and solve problems.
5. Gumption … Self-Direction and Reflection Skills: Gumption is not a word that we hear often but it describes clearly what employers today expect. We sometimes hear stick-to-itiveness  used as a synonym for gumption. The point is in the workplace today when confronted with difficulties individuals are expected to work through the issues, to be self-directed and to stick to a problem until it is solved.
   
6. Creativity and Innovative: Creativity is more often thought about in the extracurriculars but that’s not necessarily the kind of creativeness I’m referring to. While art and music are excellent preparation for the real world, the creativity I’m talking about is the ability to think differently than others and to come up with solutions that not only work but are innovative.
7. Analytical and  Critical Thinking Skills: Related to gumption and complex problem solving, individual today are expected to analyze the situation and think about it critically and solving problems.
8. Initiative, Work Ethic, Honesty, Integrity and Ambition: This collection of adjectives centers on the attributes that are desirable of all employees, and many times are referred to as character.
9. Adaptable … Versatilist: In a rapidly changing society it is imperative that individuals are able to adapt to change and modifications in the workplace, practices, and even knowledge. Versatilist is a term that was coined by Thomas Friedman in The World Is Flat to describe those individuals who are versatile and adaptable.
10. Inquisitiveness: Last but not least those individuals who are asking why and how, in other words always inquiring in order to improve their knowledge, or processes, or procedures.

In the lower right-hand corner of the slide that I use during presentations I place the following picture. And the question I ask is this, in the classroom pictured can these 10 critical behaviors be practiced on a regular basis? The typical answer, “no.”

For our schools to give students the opportunity to develop these behaviors it is essential that schools, especially high schools, engage in school improvement processes that involve learning by doing rather than memorization for standardized tests. Practicing these behaviors to make them habitual cannot be done sitting in a desk listening to a teacher in a traditional classroom.

Dan Pink would say that we need less algorithmic practice that we see in traditional classrooms, and more heuristic practice to prepare kids for the 21st century. Those heuristic behaviors, innovative and creative, can only be practiced in an environment that is more customized and individualized for each student. – Steve Wyckoff

We’ve never seen the kind of financial cuts that are taking place in education today. Regardless of how you feel about school finance, and the ability of school districts to utilize their money wisely, the cuts that are being made today in the majority of school districts are painful at best. Decisions are starting to impact staffing decisions, including classroom teachers.

But every cloud has a silver lining. And often times the silver lining doesn’t show itself until much later. School districts are looking at ways to save money, cut costs, and yet at the same time improve the quality of the educational opportunities their students receive.

Down the road we’re going to look back at the decisions that are being made and many of them will have historical significance. Some because they devastated the district, and some districts will never recover from those decisions. But others will lead to creative and innovative solutions that will indeed increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the education our kids receive.

Our industry has been amazingly stagnant for the last century. We are long overdue to redesign major parts of our educational system; what we teach, how we teach it, how we organize to teach it, and how we assess what we have taught. Hopefully,  we will talk about, what the kids learned, how they learned it, where and how they were grouped to learn it, and how they demonstrated their understanding and use of what they learned.

Hopefully there will be enough examples of creative and innovative solutions that they will impact the educational system systemically. What would I like to see those systemic changes be?

I’d love to see all of our students emotionally (authentically) engaged in their learning experiences  on a regular basis. I’d love to see the content of what they are learning be the knowledge and skills that will make them more productive in their lives after school. I’d love to see them organized like we organize for work in the real world, in ways that allow them to collaborate with their peers and with experts from the fields of their choice. I’d love to see us scrap the entire standardized testing system and instead evaluate student learning based on the skills and knowledge they obtain which are aligned with their desired career  areas. I’d love to see teachers functioning as cold learners with the students, assuming a much more Socratic role. And most of all I love to see our students leave school loving to learn, and self-directed in their lives.

Is there hope? Only time will tell. Right now there is little reason for hope. Almost all of the discussions are centered on what to cut. On the other hand I was at the Topeka USD 501 Board of Education meeting last night and they are doing a great job of discussing the changes they can make to reduce expenses while at the same time focusing on improved opportunities for all of their students.

We can only hope that education and educators don’t blow it. – Steve Wyckoff

We have an interesting situation developing across the state of Kansas that I suspect has happened, or will happen, and many other states. With the recent financial crisis we are seeing a dramatic increase in discussions about virtual courses for high school kids. To this point in time there has been very little interest among K-12 educators to use virtual courses, but as schools get more desperate to compensate for reduction in funding, school administrators are warming to the idea.

But the dilemma on the horizon is this. In traditional schools it is not uncommon, in fact it is very likely, that students will show up every day, sit passively in class, do the absolute bare minimum required, and get a passing grade. It takes very little effort on their part to do enough to make it through the system.

However, as students begin to take virtual courses they are required to engage differently and more intently in the course. The reason this occurs is that there is not an adult at the front of the room simply “dishing out” the information to them. They must actively seek the content knowledge and do with it whatever is required.

For the highly engaged, highly motivated student, this isn’t an issue. But for the student who is not highly engaged and isn’t self motivated it creates a dilemma. These students may well be sitting in a school room ostensibly taking a course in a traditional sense, but they aren’t doing any, or much, of the work.

We have seen this situation before. Their expectation is, and the expectation of their parents is, that if they were in the room and it’s a course offered by the school, then they should receive a passing grade and credit for the course. The conflict will occur when they don’t get a passing grade or are required to actually do the work before the grade is given, and it’s the end of the term.

A friend of mine who is a superintendent has already had to deal with this exact situation. Not only did the parents expect their child to receive a passing grade, they expected the grade to be an “A” or “B.” The kicker to all of this, some of the parents demanding this passing grade even though the students didn’t do the work, were teachers.

This is an indictment of the system and the pervasiveness of the thinking surrounding the expectations of schools. Even our educators believe that the student simply shows up and put in their time they’ve met minimum requirements. – Steve Wyckoff

Erie school district has been blessed. By Mike Carson, Rose Frey, Ted Hill, and many many others who were involved in the transformation of their school. Erie high school is unique. What makes them unique is that their focus is on their students, and their student’s futures.

Erie high school has changed what the students learn, how the students learn, and how they organize the students to learn. In addition, while the students do take the state mandated standardized tests, their students are measured in much different ways than almost all other kids across the country.

The curriculum used in Erie high school is based on projects and problems designed by each individual student, based on their own interest, needs, and desires. And the results have been equally unique, students, and I mean all students, have far exceeded the normal expectations we have for high school kids. And, as former superintendent Mike Carson is fond of saying, “It isn’t just the head cheerleader and the quarterback that are doing great things.”

What Erie high school has figured out is how to not just expose their kids to curriculum with all the standards, but how to actually engage the students in meaningful work, whereby the kids learn the things that they want them to learn. Is it perfect? No. There have been, and continue to be, many issues. But unlike school improvement in traditional schools, they are getting better at the right things, rather than just getting better at what schools have always done.

I’ve observed for the last 40 years scores of creative an innovative projects. Some big, some small. The thing that they all had in common was a champion. The sad truth is, as soon as the champion moved on, and eventually they always do, the gravity of the status quo always pulled the project back into the mainstream and morphed it into a traditional program. There seems to be no way to make real systemic change in the educational system.

So I’m watching Erie high school with great interest. The superintendent has retired, as has the high school principal responsible for the project-based, problem-based learning curriculum. Other changes have been made with key personnel. My hope is that the model employed in Erie high school will spread across the state and the country.  The hope is that new champions have replaced the old champions.

I have low expectations. In spite of the fact that their kids are doing exceptional things and are truly well-prepared for the life they’re going to live; and in spite of the fact that it is actually cheaper to educate kids in this model; and in spite of the fact that we are in a financial crisis; I fear that it is impossible to actually make sustainable systemic change in public schools.

Time will tell.

I had the opportunity earlier this week to interview almost 20 educational leaders. I asked each of these individuals what the biggest issue is that they were facing has an educator in their role. Almost without exception they identified the financial crisis as the single most important issue. No surprise there.

But the follow-up question that I asked each of these individuals was, “What are you doing to address this issue?” Again, almost without exception, they described the cuts they were making. With a few of the individuals, because of their role in education, I asked them about innovative and creative solutions. I was very disappointed that almost all of the responses were the same, find ways to do what we always done with less money. It’s almost as if, as educators, we can’t see any solutions for educating children other than what we’ve done for more than 100 years.

But I did have three conversations that were very interesting to me. First of all I interviewed the interim commissioner, Dr. Diane DeBacker. Diane is an individual that I have the utmost respect for. In fact, I’m very perturbed that she isn’t a candidate for the commissioner’s position. She would be outstanding. But in our discussion I asked her if she was seeing creative and innovative solutions emerging as a result of the financial crisis. Her response was that she thinks schools are reverting back and becoming more traditional and more entrenched in traditional solutions.

The second conversation was with former Erie school district superintendent Mike Carson. Mike retired last year partially due to health considerations that were at least exacerbated by, if not caused by, the stress associated with making systemic change in the school system. For my money Erie high school is the best school in the state of Kansas. I have no idea what their standardized test scores are but what I did see when I visited Erie was every student authentically engaged in their work. Csikszentmihalyi would’ve said that they were hand “flow.”

If you’ve read my blog posts you know that I think standardized tests are the curse on education. Erie he doesn’t seem to focus on standardized test scores but rather on preparing students for their lives. What Erie high school has done is create a curriculum that is project based in problem-based. Where every student is engaged in learning centered on what is important to them and what they are interested in.

So when I asked Mike what the biggest issue in education was, he responded that our kids not being engaged in what they’re doing is the single biggest problem. And when I asked him about solutions he didn’t automatically say, “we need more money”, but he described a curriculum that met the needs of the students and was more relevant to their lives. What a breath of fresh air.

The third interview of interest was not with an educator, but rather with an architect, Allan Milbradt. Allan designed the new high school for the Erie school district. Allan told me that it was the best project he ever worked on because the school design was based on the curriculum that would be taught within the school, not simply modeled after every other school. Allan probably has more expertise in learning then many educational leaders.

So to answer my opening question, are we wasting a good crisis? I think the answer is yes. We have an opportunity to make lasting systemic change in the educational system. Changes that are sorely needed. Yet very few educational leaders are seeking really innovative and creative solutions.

Every school district has a mission statement, they’re all pretty much the same. In some way they all talk about preparing students to be productive members of society. But in spite of the fact that society has changed dramatically not just over the last hundred years but in the last 15 years, schools are doing pretty much the same things they’ve done for my entire life, and that’s a long time.

I think that the three most important things that schools try to accomplish, from their perspective, are:

1. Custodial care … make sure that we provide a place for every child to be in a safe secure environment.

2. Raise standardized test scores …  the growing emphasis on standardized test scores has almost every school obsessively focused on raising their standardized test scores.

3. Cover the content required by the Board of Regents for students to get into a four-year colleges … I’ve written many times about the core curriculum but as obsessive as we are about standardized test scores, we are even more obsessed with covering the content mandated by the Board of Regents, and in a manner mandated by the Board of Regents.

I’ve been spending time trying to make sense of this and thinking about what I believe the mission of schools should be. In fact I agree for the most part with the mission statements that schools have. The reality is they rarely have their systems aligned with accomplishing their mission. With that in mind three things that I believe are the most important for schools to try to accomplish are:

1. Custodial care … yes, it’s the same number one is traditional schools but I do think it’s important. I think it may look a lot different in that a safe and secure environment is necessary, but may not occur within the walls of the school.

2. A love for learning … okay, so I stole this one from W. Edwards Deming. Deming is one of the great thinkers of our time and he said if schools did nothing but send every student out into the world loving to learn that most of our issues could be dealt with more effectively. I agree completely. Our students come to school not even intending to learn, let alone developing a love for learning. They most often described high school as boring and irrelevant.

3. Self-directed … I believe that if kids love learning and are self-directed in their learning, whatever they need to learn to do to be successful, they will learn. In addition on top of learning they will learn how to do something with what they’ve learned. I would observe that over all the years that I’ve been involved with hiring and watching new employees integrate into the organization, the single greatest characteristic that they can have in the workplace is to be self-directed.

Tell me what you think I’d love to know your opinion. And to be honest my three most important areas of accomplishment are not written in stone, so I could be persuaded of others.

I love technology. I’m a gadget guy. I use technology to learn. when I want to learn something new I google it, I look it up in Wikipedia, and I try to watch it on YouTube. And I always try to figure out what is the best tool to accomplish the work I’m doing, and to improve my productivity.

So what does that have to do with kids in school? I have the opportunity to interact with lots of educational technologists. And I’m always kind of disturbed by the discussions that occur between educators and the instructional technologists. It appears to me that the goal of educational technology is to make the things we have been doing in school for the last 115 years tolerable for the kids.

So why the title of this blog? It is my belief that we should be using technology with every single student in a manner that is much more congruent with how technology is used in the real world. What I see in schools is technology being used as a method to increase the engagement of our students in curriculum that they consider to be boring and irrelevant. As if somehow using technology will entertain the students enough that they’ll ignore their emotions, or lack of emotions, they have about the curriculum we make them cover.

Of course this isn’t a technology problem, it’s an education problem. It’s just that I’m bothered when I see technology used as a strategy to deal with a symptom rather than the systemic problems that are causing it.

Consider this, if we had kids using technology like it’s used in the real world, we would have to give them real world problems, or at least simulations of real world problems. That in turn would require us to integrate our curriculum, and tear down the silos between content areas. That in turn would mean that instead of covering a list of standards and benchmarks we would cover the things that are inherent in real-world problems.

The problem with that? Well obviously our kids wouldn’t be prepared for college after such an experience. But on the other hand, they would be much better prepared for the real world. Perhaps, we should have a discussion with postsecondary education, specifically the four-year colleges, about changing their requirements and their curriculum! And perhaps then we could change the core curriculum in our schools to meet the needs of our students rather than the needs of colleges.

I know this is a novel thought, and for some heresy, but perhaps colleges should look at how well they are preparing their students for the real world. Just a thought.

This post is cross posted with Kansas Career website.

Regardless of how old you are you’ve heard for most of your life that you need to go to college. You’ve heard it from your mom and dad, grandmother and grandfather, and even the President of the United States. In fact, from many presidents of the United States. And when you go to school you are constantly reminded that what you’re learning is preparing you to go to college.

You need to understand, however that going to college today can have different meanings. In the past it meant that you were going to go to a four-year college. Plain and simple. And in the past that was good advice. For decades and decades having a college degree was the ticket to a good job. That is simply no longer true. A college degree in the wrong area isn’t much better than no college degree. While many employers still see the college degree as a sorting mechanism, what you learn in college, and more importantly what you learn to do in college, is more important

Today there are important factors to consider before you decide what “college education” means to you. Today more than ever you need to consider the path that you’re going to take to a four year degree. The first level of education in post secondary education that may be the best way for you to proceed is to obtain an industry accepted certificate in a community or technical college. Many certificates can be obtained in less than two years and yet open many doors to high-paying careers.

The second level that you may consider it a two-year, or associate degree. Often times after completing your certification program the completion of required gen ed courses will complete your associate degree. Both the certification program and the associate degree will enable you to acquire a well-paying job and a career.

The third level of education would be the pursuit of a bachelors degree. By pursuing these three levels in order, your bachelor’s degree will be much more meaningful and engaging. Typically students pursue their bachelors degree, associate degree, and industry certification in the same field. This enables the individual to learn not only in the classroom, but in their field of their choosing as they pursue more advanced degrees.

By pursuing the ultimate goal of a four-year college degree following this path, the students will have a better education and typically can leave school without any accumulated debt. It isn’t at all uncommon for a student to graduate from college today with debt exceeding $40,000. While students who follow the industry certification, associate degree, bachelors degree path leave with little or no debt, and in many cases have had employers pay for their education beyond the industry certification.

So while you contemplate your options, and everybody is telling you you have to go to college, remember there is a path other than going directly to a four-year institution a better suit your needs.

Drive by Dan Pink

One of the biggest issues that we face in education is that we are in adequately preparing our kids for their future. I recently finished Dan pink’s new book Drive, and sure enough more evidence that we’re not preparing our kids for the 21st century.

Let me explain. In his book he talks about two kinds of work. The first, algorithmic, “are those tasks in which you follow a set of established instruction down to a single pathway to one conclusion.” The second, heuristic, are  “tasks that are just the opposite. Because no algorithm exists for it, you have to experiment with possibilities and devise a novel solution.” Now, which of those most sound like school. You got it, the vast majority of the work done by our kids in school is algorithmic. In fact, the measure that the public, well politicians anyway, love is the standardized test. Most of which measure how well the student follows established instructions down a single pathway to one conclusion.

Interestingly, those activities in school that are most algorithmic are in our beloved core curriculum. Which by the way happen to be the classes that kids see as the most boring and irrelevant. On the other hand, those activities   which are the most  heuristic are found in the co-curricular courses, and extracurricular activities. Drama, band, art, newspaper, yearbook, athletics … you get the picture.

But here’s the kicker, again from Pink’s book, “McKinsey & Co. estimates that in the United States, only 30% of job growth now comes from algorithmic work, while 70% comes from heuristic work.” He goes on, “A key reason routine work can be outsourced or automated; artistic, empathic, nonroutine, work generally cannot.”

One of my favorite educational researchers Larry Lezotte always said, “What gets measured gets taught.”  Well, what we’re measuring in schools is the algorithmic stuff, that means that it will get taught! So we are doing a great job spending most of our time making sure that students acquire the skills and behaviors that are most likely to be outsourced to other countries.

What do you think? Leave me a comment.

Just a couple of years ago I started asking my audiences if schools were fine, they just needed tweaking; broken, they needed fixing; or obsolete, they need replacing. As you might imagine this provoked some lively conversation. When I first started asking the question the most common answer was, schools are fine they just need tweaking. But in the last couple of years the answers and the conversation have changed.

One of the real eye openers was when I was at Lawrence high school almost 2 years ago. Lawrence high school is almost literally in the shadow of the ivory tower. University of Kansas is just a few blocks away. So when I asked this question I thought that I might get a very emotional response supporting the way schools are today.

To my surprise, by a show of hands, about a third of the teachers in the room said that schools are fine they just need tweaking. About a third said they were broken and needs fixing and about a third said they were obsolete and needed replacing. I think I can generalize the groups that fit in to each of those answers.

Those who say schools are fine tend to be older, and teachers in core curriculum areas. Those who say schools are obsolete tend to be younger and not teaching in the core curriculum. The interesting group, those who say schools were broken, tends to be more of a mix in terms of age. But this tends to be the group who are more veteran teachers who just understand that something is not right with our educational system.

It really is impossible to stereotype the three groups. I often talk to very new teachers who think the system is absolutely perfect. In conversation with them their dream has always been to stand at the front of the room and teach kids. The current system suits them just fine. And some veteran teachers, especially in the core curriculum, think the system is perfect also.

The thing that is most disturbing to me, in the conversation with teachers who think the system is fine, is that they blame the students and parents for all the problems in the educational system. what they are really saying is if kids would come to us just like they did 25 years ago, and would be passive and compliant, schools would be wonderful. I always try to point out to these teachers that parents aren’t keeping their good kids at home and just sending us the bad ones. Kids, and society, are just different today, and we must change to accommodate those changes.

Of course all of these opinions are unburdened by data. But I can tell you there has been a dramatic shift over the last several years when I asked for a show of hands each of these categories. Where we lack consensus is what’s wrong with the system. And I’m always amazed how politically incorrect it is to even propose a discussion about the educational system as a system.

So you ask, what is my opinion? Well if you read my blog I think you know what my opinion is. I think schools are obsolete. Let me qualify that. I think that the younger our students are the better job we do with them. And the older our kids get the worst job we do. I’m preparing another blog post on this topic so more on that later.

It is my opinion, and again in a future blog post I’m going to go into this in more depth, that our system at the high school level is hopelessly obsolete. In three major areas we need an overhaul. First of all how we teach our kids is all wrong. If we truly want her kids to learn we must more specifically define what it means to learn. I think that it means that they not only retain the information long enough to take a test but long enough to use it long-term and unique situations. I think the only way we can accomplish that is by moving to a system where the kids learn by doing.

Secondly, I think that what we teach, especially in our core curriculum, is completely out of date. See my blog post on the curse of the core curriculum for more information. Our core curriculum is 115 years old and out of touch with our children’s needs in the 21st century.

And thirdly, how we organize to teach. We’ve had many discussions over the years about how important it is to have an integrated curriculum. The seven period day, carnegie units, and departmentalization have stood in the way of an integrated curriculum for decades. It’s about time to change them.

There are many more things to be said on this topic that can’t be said in this space. So stay tuned and in future blog posts I’ll expand on the ideas started here. In the meantime, leave me a comment. I’d love to know what you’re thinking.

Take a second and look at the list below. What do each of these have in common?

Cell phones
Smart phones
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Perhaps you said these were all digital. Or that they are all customized and individualized. You may have said these are all things that kids use. Or you may have said these are all things that are used in businesses today as  tools. All of those would have been correct, but they weren’t what I was looking for.

The thing I’ve noticed that they all have in common is that each of these is banned in the vast majority of our schools. Wouldn’t you think that the tools that are used daily in our kids lives, and are also used as business tools, would be utilized equally effectively in our schools?

When I talk to faculties of high schools they are adamant that these items should never be used in school. And in fact, they identified them as huge distractions to student learning. My question to the staff members is, “who is responsible for teaching kids to write multipage research papers?” Typically, several hands go up. Usually they are members of the social studies department, or the English department, or the science department, or a combination of all of these.

But when I asked who was responsible for teaching kids the appropriate use of the items in the list there is  never hand raised. My next question then is which of these would be most often used by our students in the real world, a multipage research paper or the items in the list above? Obviously, the items in the list will be used regularly by most, if not all, of our kids in the real world as students, and adults. They will be used both in their personal life, in their professional lives.

So why do schools refuse to incorporate these items not only asked curriculum content, but also as tools to learn the existing content? What do you think? Leave me a comment below and we’ll talk about it.

You read that right, we are cursed by our core curriculum. Did you know that our core curriculum is over 115 years old? Did you know that it was created to make life easier on universities in 1892 America? Did you know that the president of Harvard University in 1892, Charles Elliott, formed the Committee of 10 to define the high school curriculum?

Take a few minutes and read the final report from the committee of 10 and you’ll be astounded. I put together PowerPoint slides that outline the curriculum designed by the Committee of 10, who completed their work in 1894. I’ve shown the slides often to audiences and asked them what it represents. In Kansas, where I reside, it is often identified as the Regents curriculum. The high school curriculum required of high school students in Kansas to gain admission to the six regents universities. I’ve shown the slides around the country with similar results.

And yes it’s 115 years old. And it needs to be questioned, and changed. Not only is it not appropriate for a student being prepared to be a productive member of the 21st century society, it isn’t even appropriate for preparing a student to go to Harvard University in the 21st century. That’s because the curriculum was designed to prepare kids to go Harvard University in 1894 and Harvard University has changed so dramatically since 1894 that students taking the curriculum now are ill-prepared.

In an age of customization and individualization a curriculum that is 115 years old is boring and irrelevant to the vast majority of our students in high school. When we talk about school reform and school change you never hear a discussion about junking the core curriculum. But that’s exactly a conversation that we should be having.

What’s even worse, in my state of Kansas, the Board of Regents won’t even allow the curriculum to be taught in applied courses, which only adds to its irrelevance for kids. If we were serious about a 21st-century curriculum, our students would be emerged in learning by doing experiences, that are contextually based in the real world. I think that it’s obvious that the younger the student the less likely they are to be able to learn abstract concepts without a real world context for learning. Yet that is exactly what we’re asking them to do. And we wonder why our kids aren’t prepared for the next level of education.

If we didn’t require core curriculum courses, I would be amazed if more than a handful of our kids ever voluntarily took courses in the core curriculum. If our core curriculum teachers had to compete for students like our elective course teachers do, I can assure you the content and instructional strategies would be far different than they are today.

But don’t be confused that I think courses are good. They aren’t. The way we put courses in divided silos only adds to the irrelevance for our kids. The world that our kids will live in is integrated and their learning should be also. And the context of what they learn should be the real world. We’ve allowed the academics in our colleges and universities to dictate what, and how, we teach long enough. Our job is not to please the professors at our universities, but rather to prepare our kids for their future.

So if you have an opinion on this rather controversy stand let me know by leaving a comment below. I look forward to hearing from you.