Hello everyone,
This blog will be going on hiatus indefinitely. Thanks for all your work in changing the way society thinks about school, still lots more work to do!
In gratitude,
Steve
I recently read Doug Merlino’s brilliant book The Hustle, a social history of race and class in Seattle. It’s told through a memoir of the author’s experience on a mixed-race basketball team as a teenager in the 1980s.
One section of the book deals with Merlino’s experience as a student at the Lakeside School, including a discussion of its recent efforts at becoming more diverse. He interviews numerous people of color—recent graduates—who describe the complexity of their experience at the school. One of them now works at an amazing non-profit called Rainier Scholars, which provides structure and support to help promising young students of color as they advance through middle school, high school, and college.
Despite its great work, Rainier Scholars can only do so much. This is what troubles Merlino, who writes,
“At the same time, Rainier Scholars [does not try] to accept and work with every student it can, no matter their test scores. The Rainier Scholars program, instead, enrolls sixty of Seattle’s highest-testing minority students a year and looks to get them into private schools or the advanced tracks of the public schools. The idea is that without the program, the kids may fall behind and never be able to reach their potential. You have to wonder about the next sixty, who barely miss the cut. Or what about all the other kids after that? How many other talented kids lose out because their families lack the means or the background to guide them through the system? What about the students who don’t score high on standardized tests, who aren’t going to go to college? Have we just accepted . . . that a certain number of kids just aren’t going to make it?”
* * *
The tragedy here is not that there isn’t more funding for Rainier Scholars. The tragedy is that we need non-profit organizations to step in and guide kids through “the system.”
What does that say about our schools?
* * *
Sir Ken Robinson, in his awesome book The Element, poses a simple challenge. Instead of creating schools that are defined by the question, “How intelligent are you?” he suggests we flip the question: “How are you intelligent?”
In schools designed to build on kids’ strengths, it’s less likely they’ll need a separate infrastructure just to make it through. And in response to Merlino’s question, “Have we just accepted . . . that a certain number of kids just aren’t going to make it?”—I’m reminded of something a friend said to me recently.
She said, “Can you imagine what it would be like to live in a city in which everyone was dialed into the thing in life that they’re truly passionate about?”
Yes. I can.
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Last week I wrote a couple posts inspired by my reading of Parker Palmer’s book A Hidden Wholeness. I’m still reading it, and last night came across this section:
The authority such a leader needs is not power. Power comes to anyone who controls the tools of coercion, which range from grades to guns. But authority comes only to those who are granted it by others. And what leads us to grant someone authority? The word itself contains a clue: we grant authority to people who we perceive as “authoring” their own words and actions, people who do not speak from a script or behave in preprogrammed ways.
In other words, we grant authority to people we perceive as living undivided lives.
* * *
I received an email earlier this year from a former student, who wrote:
“I am currently a senior [in college], and have been focusing a lot on political economic theory recently . . . and I keep on thinking about your lit and philosophy class. It was really really smart, and I am really grateful to have taken it. I was wondering if you still had the reading list for the class?”
This is not the first time I had been asked this. (It’s a great honor, and these messages always fill me with gratitude and joy.) It was a popular class, one that I completely made up from scratch. When writing the syllabus, I never once considered the state’s Essential Academic Learning Requirements or what a traditional “philosophy” class might include. Instead, I focused on creating a curriculum that inspired me, selecting ideas that had a profound impact on the way I think.
Because I was inspired every day, I was able to facilitate class discussions with energy and enthusiasm. Every class period really mattered to me because every class period was focused on an idea that had changed my life.
Reading Palmer’s book last night gave me another interpretation of what happened in that class. I relied so little on “the tools of coercion”—students had to write three essays over the course of five months, and anyone who took the assignment seriously earned full credit—that the presence of any “power” in our relationship was almost imperceptible.
I didn’t exercise much power over students in that class, but by presenting a curriculum that I had authored myself, I gained a very real authority among them.
* * *
I know it seems efficient to have curriculum writers just send out unit plans to the mass of teachers in a school district. That way, students in different schools are all on the same page, and if one of them transfers to a different school, he can pick right up where he left off in his old school. It can save time and money, and acts as a buffer to soften the impact that bad teachers can have. It all seems logical.
But I think we lose more than we gain. By telling teachers what and how to teach, we take from them their authority in the classroom. Without authority from the students, they have to rely increasingly on exercising power.
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There’s an old saying in the world of private school admissions: “Send us winners and we’ll make winners out of them.”
It’s meant sardonically, and the point is clear: many private schools require prospective students to take an achievement test; often, the students who do best on the achievement test are the ones who are admitted to the school.
Then, the school gets to boast when a high percentage of its students go on to attend an Ivy League college.
Education theorist Martin Haberman says this another way: “The children we teach best are those who need us least.”
* * *
I observed this same phenomenon as a public school teacher, although it wasn’t exactly the same.
But it was maddening, for sure.
I would give an assignment. Some students would do the assignment, and they’d get an A. Others would not do it, and they would get a zero.
The problem with this was that I could predict in advance what the outcome would be. For example, one year I decided to give students a multiple choice, fill-in-the-bubble, scantron test for their final exam. The results were remarkable: they mirrored almost exactly what the students grade had been up to that point. So, if the student’s grade was an 87 percent entering the final exam, her percentage on the final was almost invariably between 85 and 90 percent. It was uncanny.
It made me think: if the outcomes are so predictable, what’s the point of engaging in this ritual? I’m not sure of the point, but I have a pretty good sense of the impact: kids who experience success at school get the joy of more positive feedback; kids who don’t experience success at school get to feel even worse about themselves.
I’ve written before that so I’ve heard many parents tell their kids, “School is a game, just learn to play the game.” While I’m not fond of that particular sentiment, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s true. School is a game. All the kids who are good at school, line up here to receive your “A.” Send me winners and I’ll make winners out of them.
The corollary, of course, is horrifying but no less true. All the kids who aren’t good at school, here’s your list of required classes. Please report to the rooms listed on the right to receive your F.
* * *
Instead of encouraging students to play the game, I’d like to encourage all of us to rewrite the rules of the game. Instead of setting kids up to fail by demanding that they conform to the institution’s definition of success, we can ask them how they define success. We can ask them what they’re interested in. We can ask them what their goals are.
When every kid is pursuing the things that make them special and unique, everyone wins.
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I had a conversation today about PSCS in which the person described our approach to academics as a “risk.”
From the perspective of a parent, who sends her kid off to school each day knowing that we do not have a prescribed academic program, it can feel risky. They’re not going to force my son take a science class! What if he never learns anything about science!
I have a different perspective on risk. To me, sending my child off to a traditional high school knowing that the curriculum was created without my child in mind . . . that feels like a risk.
To send him off to school knowing that the school is trying to meet the needs of 1,600 students and it’s near impossible for my son to get personalized attention . . . that feels like a risk.
To know that, in a traditional high school, my child could go four full years and never have to make a decision that mattered. . . that’s risky.
To have my child attend a high school where the learning process is distorted by the presence of extrinsic motivators like grades . . .
That feels risky.
How do they know my kid is going to be interested in the material if they don’t give him a choice in what he’s learning? How do I know my kid is going to be taken care of when the school operates like a factory assembly line? How is my kid ever going to take control of his education when he never has the chance to make a decision about it?
How will my kid ever learn for the sake of learning when he’s constantly being bribed/threatened with grades?
It’s a different way of looking at what’s risky.
* * *
It’s a strange paradox in American education: we all acknowledge that the traditional model is broken and needs reform, but to move away from the model that we know doesn’t work feels like a risk. It’s this paradox that keeps us locked into the current paradigm.
* * *
I often use agriculture or gardening as a metaphor for a new way of looking at education. The job of the teacher is to make sure the soil is rich, to add water, and to ensure the flower gets plenty of sunlight. In that kind of environment, the gardener doesn’t need to pull the flower out of the ground to make it grow. It grows because that’s what seeds do.
Similarly, when kids are immersed in a safe, nurturing environment and surrounded by talented people of high character who are role models for passion, curiosity, and producing high quality work, teachers don’t need to force kids to learn. They learn because that’s what human beings do.
* * *
If a gardener does try pulling the flower out of the ground to make it grow, some flowers may grow in spite of that. But it’s a risky strategy for making a garden bloom.
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I caught up with a former student, and we reminisced about the old days.
She attended high school in a time when the school had gone through four or five principals in quick succession, each lasting no more than a couple years. The administration had fallen into such disarray that it lacked a certain measure of control over the student body. In the place of administrative control, an extraordinary culture emerged in which students felt ownership of their school.
“I went to college and I’d hear people talk about how much they hated high school,” she said. “I would tell them, ‘I loved high school.’”
The more we talked about this, the more I understood the reason she had such a deep affection for those years. Quite by accident, the school had made a trade: it had given up control, and in exchange it had received inspiration.
In most schools, it’s the opposite: the administration maintains tight control over everything, and the result is a profound lack of spontaneity. Everything is managed, so nothing is inspiring.
* * *
At one point in our conversation, she talked about perhaps her life’s greatest triumph. She performed at Amateur Night the Apollo in New York City. In one of the world’s most famous venues, in an environment in which the audience will boo any performer they feel deserves to get booed, she sang her heart out. She smiles with pride when she says, “I didn’t get booed.”
Some singers will come with a CD and, instead of using the house band, will use recorded music to accompany their voice. The audience will have none of it, of course, and that singer will get booed off the stage. The reason is simple: the audience didn’t come to hear you sing; they came to witness you bearing your soul, sharing your passion, and sharing your art. Nothing less will do.
My former student is a classically trained musician, who has gone on countless auditions for orchestras around the country. Over time, she grew disgusted by the process.
She says, “You have these musicians who are taking beta blockers right before they perform because they know they have to play every single note perfectly, and they’re stressed beyond belief. This is why orchestras are closing down, because they show up and hear the notes but they feel anything. Me, before I perform, I’m listening to James Brown. Because that’s how I want to feel when I’m playing, and that’s how I want the audience to feel.”
* * *
We talked about “Cultural Relations,” a program (that’s since been eliminated) in which the school would rearrange the class schedule for an entire week while students led forums on issues like racism and sexism. The students led the forums. Adults were instructed to sit at their desks and stay out of the way.
The result, of course, was mayhem. It was the same every year, with some of the discussions spiraling out of control, hordes of students skipping out to grab coffee at the local Starbucks, attendance counts hopelessly inaccurate. The administration had lost control of the school.
But when you talk to alumni from that era, many will tell you that Cultural Relations was a life-changing experience. Because amid all the chaos, there were still moments when black kids, white kids, Asian kids, Latino kids, gay and lesbian kids, kids who had been abused, rich kids and poor kids . . . they engaged each other in authentic conversations about their lives and their experiences. These conversations were raw and unfiltered. They were real.
So yeah, some kids skipped out. But I would argue that even those kids learned something much more profound than anything you’ll find in an ordinary textbook. They learned that subjects like racism and sexism are so important that it’s worth stopping your routine and having authentic dialogue. Even if something might go wrong in the process.
It’s those kinds of lessons that change people’s lives. But in order to create the possibility for those lessons to happen, you have to let go. You have to accept the fact that it’s OK if everything isn’t perfect, it’s OK to miss a note once in a while.
Because in the end, the most profound moments of your life are not when everything was perfect, was but when your experience was personal, authentic, and from your heart.
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