As you point out, every decade has its share of people screaming “nothing works!”

I heard someone talk last week about all of the “drive by shootings” we get in education. The self-proclaimed experts that come to your district for a day (or more) and charge a ridiculous fee for their services. Get everyone thinking and buzzing about new ideas and new jargon. And then their gone… and nothing significant happens as a result of their visit.

The only change that is going to be meaningful, is change that occurs one district, no …, one teacher at a time. One project that takes a classroom teacher, with a task they have to perform on a regular basis (curriculum embedded) and matches that with available, accessible technology (technology embedded) and puts in a context that is meaningful to the students they are teaching (community embedded) is a meaningful change!

A thought for you: Is incremental, evolutionary change (‘one teacher at a time’) sufficient in an exponential, revolutionary time?

That said, I think the majority of us are looking at the structure and the curriculum to see where changes could be made, but the process of making those changes is laborious and extremely frustrating. (ex. try moving a novel from 11th to 9th and see what happens to the English dept.)

I don’t know if we will see major curricular changes in my time, (I have 25-30 yrs left) but we will see structural changes. While in Pittsburgh this past weekend I heard no less than 3 radio ads for different cyber charter schools. Are those schools revolutionary in curriculum and pedagogy? No, the are simply a different delivery of the standard American curriculum.

I think the next decade will be similar to this one. If it involves computers it will be championed by most as “21st Century!” In the end the kids will still graduate, go get a job, and have to forget everything they know in order to assimilate whatever structure/operation their employer requires.

That is why Postman offered values and rhetoric as the core content areas to focus on.

As to schools plodding along and the United States being OK in terms of economic development, I think we will continue to be mediocre without change.

But, I am hugely concerned that, sometime soon, a convergence of external forces will eventually cause us to destroy and reconstruct the system – especially if we just keep on “playing school” while we are, in reality, asleep at the wheel.

The outside world has been dissatisfied with the skills of children since schools started, but as society is polarizing towards haves and have-nots, the strain is increasing. Please do not mistake this as a plea for 21st Century Skills – which amount to nothing more than “the same skills we should have been focusing on 50 years ago”. It is just that I believe dissatisfaction is growing.

School is boring. It was when I was in school, it is today. But, is it possible that that the mean age at which school becomes boring is lower today than it was? This is a catastrophe waiting to happen.

My general sense is that it used to be tolerated that schools did a mediocre job at preparing kids as a whole. Some did well, some did poorly, but it was OK. I think that tolerance is waning at the same time society is becoming more demandingm, at the same time we are seeing students with significantly higher needs.

Throw all of this into the mix with competition, technology-enabled virtual learning opportunities, abysmal school systems in areas of high poverty (I am not blaming the schools, it is a system issue), and strained funding systems, and I think you get a call for overhaul instead of a tweak. We’ve had a 100 years of tweak which has amounted to very little.

So, specifically what is it going to take? It will take a pressure so great that it cracks the shell of resistance to change. After that happens, it is anybody’s guess as to what that means for schools.

We have to examine what we teach as our “what” is a million miles wide, and really a lot of it doesn’t matter. We teach a hidden curriculum as well – and that matters, but so often we don’t acknowledge or operationalize it (kindergarten teachers do).

Essentially flipping the notion of teaching over learning on it’s ear will probably lead us to abandon, to some extent, time and place. Kids today are into a schedule of exposure to what we teach, when we want to teach it, and where we want to provide it. All because we focus on teaching.

But, your final points ring too true for much hope. Changing the system is too big of a task.

Even during my short stint in education (6 years in the classroom and a year in my current position as Instructional Technology Specialist), I see the pattern of “this is what’s wrong” and even some of “this is how everything will be fixed” without real viable solutions, but the bottom line is exactly what Scott says “…the economy chugs along, sometimes up, sometimes down, but mostly up. And the overall well-being of most citizens continues to improve by most historical measures.” In other words, life goes on.

I don’t feel, and don’t think Scott intends this either, that means we just sit back and let things be what they will be, but I do feel it’s exaclty what Dave points out in his response when he says “the only change that is going to be meaningful, is change that occurs one district, no …, one teacher at a time.” We inform and instruct teachers and administrators (and not in “drive-by” professional development) and become part of the solution.

I can honestly say, as an educator who is still young in the field, it is so helpful to me to have information at my finger-tips to help give me “the big picture.” I believe information, the right kind of course, is a part of that solution.

What a great post! Very thought provoking and timely for me, since we are just putting the final touches on a district project that will attempt to “transform” 8-10 of our K-8 classrooms into 21st Century Learning Environments. Our goal is to create curriculum focused, technology rich, project based classrooms that are both rigorous and relevant.

I don’t think I have all of the answers as a district administrator. We are hoping that the teachers and students in our small project can help us better understand the dynamics of this type of change and how it could scale up to a school or even a district.

We are planning a full assessment piece to the project, so hopefully we can get some good documentation. Whether our findings support change or not, we should know more when we are done.

Again, your post is great and I plan to use it with my staff as a discussion article!

You want a new model? Try this one:

We are a K-8 school of 1000 students. 90% of our students are children of color, 75% qualify for Free or Reduced Lunch, 60% are learning English as a second language, and we have a 20% mobility rate. Yet we have never missed a single one of NCLB’s contrived goals and we have gained over 230 points on California’ Academic Performance Index. We are closing the achievement gap. We are keeping our kids healthy and alive. They are challenged and valued and they love coming to school as evidenced by the fact that we rank consistently among the top three schools in our district (of 45 schools) in daily attendance. How? Here are 10 reasons:

1. We are driven by a belief in the capacity of our students to excel, 2. Our organizational mission far exceeds any politician’s prescription for what schools should be doing. 3. We have no teachers’ union. 4. We are fiscally independent… we have our own budget…apx $7.5 million dollars 5. We are our own Board and utilize every penny of our budget to get results 6. We have created extraordinarily efficient systems 7. We invest mightily in our teachers…(and by the way… we scrapped the old union designed evaluation system and replaced it with a value added model that promotes intrinsic motivation while it nurtures instructional expertise.) 8. We integrate technology in how we monitor our at risk students, collect and analyze data, differentiate instruction, provide English language enrichment, bring the world into our classrooms, offer tools to otherwise low income children 9. We are experts in using formative assessments and even better at using data to make on-going adjustments… 10 And we change CONSTANTLY. No stone goes unturned. We might be America’s most agile public school… we will spot a gap, create a solution, then turn on a dime.

Enough alternative solutions? There are dozens more.

We are Mueller Charter School and we call ourselves “El Milagro”…the miracle.