Right now millions of American children are going back to the same old schools. But this summer I saw the future of American education in a middle school in New York's Chinatown: The School of One.
The New York City Public Schools' Middle School (MS) 131 has adopted a bold and radical experiment. "The School of One" is a prototype for our nation's schools in the decades to come. It's a model much more powerful and potentially far-reaching than any other reform, including much-ballyhooed charter schools, to date.
Today's schools are an anachronism. They resemble the assembly lines of the industrial era, when they were conceived. Groups of 25 to 30 children, beginning at age five, are moved through 13 years of schooling, attending 180 days each year, and taking five major subjects daily for lengths of time specified by the Carnegie Foundation in 1910. These schools are time-based -- all children are expected to master the same studies at the same rate over the same period of time. They focus on teaching -- how long students are exposed to instruction, not how much they have learned. They are rooted in the belief that one size fits all -- all students can benefit equally from the same curriculum and methods of instruction.
We have learned much about education since today's schools were created. We know now that what students learn and what they are taught are different, and that learning is what matters. We know that children learn different subjects at different rates, some slower and some faster. We know that children have different learning styles, which make different methods of instruction more or less effective for them. We also know that today's new technologies offer the prospect of individualizing education for each child and gearing instruction to the student's particular learning style and most effective means of instruction.
In the years to come, we will be challenged to rebuild our schools to reflect these realities, largely because our information economy, which focuses on achieving common outcomes rather than seeking common processes, demands it. Our schools will shift their attention from teaching to learning, time-based to outcome-based education, and mass instruction to individualized instruction.
This is what MS 131 and School of One are seeking to do today. The school is piloting the new approach -- the brainchild of New York City Public Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and the schools' Chief Executive for Human Capital, Joel Rose -- in a single seventh-grade summer math course. The program will expand to three schools next spring.
The School of One turns the current model of education on its head, flipping the relationship between teaching and learning. Student learning becomes the focus -- the driver -- of schooling. Specifically, the School of One translates fifth- through seventh-grade math into 77 skill and knowledge areas. Students are assessed on their mastery of each area, and the program is geared to each student's areas of strength and weakness. The goal is for each student to master all 77 skills and body of knowledge.
By tying instruction to each student's most effective learning style, the School of One individualizes student learning. A learning profile is generated for each student based upon prior academic performance, student and parent surveys, and ongoing assessment in the program. Based on the profile, students are assigned to particular methods of instruction -- small- and large-group instruction, peer tutoring, individual tutoring, asynchronous instruction, and independent study. To date, a bank of 1100 lessons in different modalities have been developed.
After 100 years with "time" as the dominant factor in education, the School of One eliminates it as the constant in education. Instead, time becomes variable and students advance by mastery.
Educators benefit, too. They effectively get rid of high-stakes tests for assessments, instead introducing "just-in-time" assessments in each skill and knowledge area. They also do away with the need for students to repeat a grade or entire course, including subject matter they have already mastered.
This approach means tying instructional resources, and dollars, more directly to the approaches that improve each student's performance, rather than throwing costly larger-scale solutions at individual problems. And that, in turn, promises a better return on public investment in education, one that more closely assures each student's readiness for the workforce and avoids the pitfalls of one-size-fits-all expenditures that don't fit all.
For more than a quarter-century, America has been undergoing a school reform movement. So far, charter schools have been the primary advance, but they do not fundamentally change our model of education.
New York City's School of One may turn out to be the single most important experiment conducted in education so far. It is the future.
--it's expensive. This method is tied to much into expert opinion (which IMO would have to be verified) and regulatory practices that would have to be so vaguely defined to allow such powers to move from state to state, county to county even.
--this is a top-down model (that smells suspiciously corporate in ideology), because ultimately we judge the students ability pretty much all the way through.
I think we need to start looking at how to test collective intelligence and collective will. All the individual scoring won't ultimately matter when we deal with problems larger than ourselves. We must consider how a group of us think, from all walks of life, and pool our knowledge to resolve problems that we face. And then how to initiate that into action.
I was always taught to learn a bit more than everyone else....
get great grades...
but don't tell anyone.
I was also taught to appear shy...
it made my childhood very nonconfrontational.
This is especially true in middle school years, no?
Rather, I think the thrusting of children of diverse interests and abilities into a homogenized classroom setting and then holding them to a universal and frequently arbitrary standard has a damping effect on social intelligence for all involved, leading to frustration and resentment among those who adapt poorly and attendant social stress on those who adapt well.
Create an environment in which everyone is succeeding at a nearly optimal pace, and give students the ability to pursue their interests with greater flexibility, and I believe you'll find a much more robust and mature social environment for all involved.
On the other hand, we have had so much ineffective change in schools that I have to be skeptical. Administrators really love words like "modality"
Basic classroom methods work when everyone is pulling together. The best methods fail when no one is sincere.
Here is how you do it, and it really works, even with your own kid:
explain something
demonstrate it
have the kid do it under supervision (classwork)
have the kid do it independently (homework)
have the kid do it when it counts (test)
then
start the new idea with a reference to what he just learned.
But after she missed a whole semester of school, her teacher came to tutor her two or three days a week in the summer in chem and calculus. He wouldn't move on to the next concept until she thoroughly understood each one.
This is not something he could do in the classroom with some students flying through the course and others, like my daughter, having to work very hard and falling behind.
The result of moving on only after she understood was that, when she went to college, she sailed through chemistry and ended up helping fellow students get through the course.
US schools use the spiral approach to teaching math, briefly touching on skills each year, moving to the next skill, and then coming back to those same skills in more depth the following year--year after year. And US school kids do abyssmally in math.
It is so much smarter to allow kids to master each skill or concept before moving on. If it is actually feasible to do this in a school setting, I'm all for it.
Needless to say boredom is ineffective pedagogy. But we bore them. We place them under unnatural light in boxes most of their lives. We pile on ever more homework. Even in the later grades we treat them simutaneously as kindergarten students and minimum security inmates. The language of school is larded with imperatives - 'You must do this or you will fail and end up in streets'. In short, we patronize them, scare them, dull them, and turn out small-minded, scared, angry nervous wrecks. We have gone backwards in education.
But we know this. We've been exposed to it. We have kids in the system. We have intimate knowledge. We are aware that school doesn't prepare students for employment that rewards creativity, team-work, initiative ,and critical thinking. School also does not promote the pursuit of happiness.
Students don't need to know what year America entered World War I. They have Google. The need to understand underlying history and be able to apply that learning to today's world. At least they need to do that if we are to live in anything like a democracy. So what's stopping us?
Of course, that 10:1 student-teacher ratio will have had nothing to do with it.
Does PS 131 get its library back?
PS 131 kids needed help with english more than math. They're down a library and up a computer-based math curriculum.
In short, we're getting a bit ahead of ourselves.
I wish the comprehensive plan were available before my daughter finishes high school...
but it will be the year after...
that is a constant for us...
starting with child tax credit.
A year too late to benefit me...but everything I've 'dreamed' of...
each time.