Fixing Education - #One size does not fit all

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Who gets the most bored and disengaged at school? The very bright and the very concrete.

School can be ok for those in the middle. But if you are intellectually a race horse, then school can become very boring. Boys like my son ended up having fights with the teachers - because he would question them and worse might know more than they did. He was quickly labelled a trouble maker.

Others, who have a very concrete mindset, just can't tune in to all this abstract stuff. It is just not how they experience the world. The teacher is just a source of noise. They get labelled as stupid.

The irony of our one size fits all situation is that it discounts two very talented groups of students - the truly academic and the truly pragmatic and concrete.

So what can be done? What can be done to make learning rich for these two extreme wings of the Bell Curve? The good news is that we have working experiments that we can draw on.

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This is UTS University of Toronto Schools. It is a school in Toronto designed to meet the needs of a very misunderstood and badly served group of kids. The really really bright kids! I had the honour of working there back in the mid 1990's as the Principal was looking at the needs of this group of kids. I interviewed hundreds of them and spent months there. This is what I learned.

Really bright kids are under terrible social pressure at a "normal" school. They are among the least respected of all groups. Many have few peers to relate too. Many hide their gifts. Many are numbed by the pace and the low threshold of the work. Many are isolated and depressed. 

UTS is designed as a haven for such kids. It only takes the very gifted. While it is fee paying, money is never a barrier. They find a way to take any child who has this gift.

What is UTS like for these kids? It is a haven. Everyone is like you. This is the only school I know where the kids break into the school on weekends! We all knew that they did this and we all knew the "open window" that they used - it was an open secret. It was a hot house for all types of learning. At the concert where many bands, groups and orchestras played, a girl would play Chopin as they moved the chairs around as a filler - she would have been the star in any other school. I have never experienced such positive energy in a school.

So what can we do here on PEI? What about setting up such a school at UPEI?

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Would it be so hard to set up a small school at UPEI that is modelled on UTS - where the bright kids can have their own place? Where they can be taught by University profs? Where they can truly fly? 

What then about the concrete thinkers?

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Holland College has run a very successful experiment with this group. At its centre is a "carpentry" class. But it is also a maths class. All the key lessons about maths can be found in carpentry. Like the UTS experience, there is a social aspect to such an approach as well. These are kids who are easily labelled Stupid. They also tend to hide. They also get depressed. They also don't fit. they also can act out. But here they are among their peers.

There is a body of evidence behind this experiment. So the next step may well be to accept that such an approach can be expanded to include more kids and to include more areas of expertise. Mechanics? Really any of the practical fields has the power to explain all to concrete learners.

What about the resources? 

If we had 2 programs - one for the academic and one for the concrete - they leverage existing platforms. For the Academic group, they expand the use of UPEI's physical plant and they expand the use of UPEI's existing teaching staff and the Department of Ed - OISE has very close links to UTS and is just down the road from the school. For the Concrete Group, the do the same for Holland College.

What about the results?

By differentiating like this, we boost these two vital groups. We also free up the centre of the Bell Curve back in the school. For both the extreme wings of the curve create friction for those that find the existing system just fine. All win.

Is there any case for not doing this?

End ONE SIZE FITS ALL in Education

We hear a lot of talk about the importance of educational achievement and the knee-buckling costs of college. What if you could get kids to complete two years of college by the time they finish high school?

That is happening in New York City. I had breakfast a few weeks ago with Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, to talk about Bard High School Early College, a school on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that gives highly motivated students the opportunity to earn both a high school diploma and a two-year associate of arts degree in the four years that are usually devoted to just high school.

When these kids sail into college, they are fully prepared to handle the course loads of sophomores or juniors. Essentially, the students complete their high school education by the end of the 10th grade and spend the 11th and 12th grades mastering a rigorous two-year college curriculum.

The school, a fascinating collaboration between Bard College and the city’s Department of Education, was founded in 2001 as a way of dealing, at least in part, with the systemic failures of the education system. American kids drop out of high school at a rate of one every 26 seconds. And, as Dr. Botstein noted, completion rates at community colleges have been extremely disappointing.

Many bright and talented youngsters are lost along the way. “We seldom capture the imagination and energy of young people until somewhere well along in the college years,” said Dr. Botstein.

A visit to the school is a glimpse into the realm of the possible. I stopped by on a gloomy, rainy morning, and the building’s exterior seemed fully in synch with the weather. But inside you’re quickly caught up in what seems almost the ideal academic atmosphere. In class after class, I was struck by how engaged the students were, and how much they reflected the face of the city.

These were kids who had come to the school (mostly by subway) from every borough and from just about every background imaginable.

The first class I visited was a college-level biology course. The students were deep into the process of dissecting fetal pigs. One of the students, who hopes someday to be a doctor, explained to me how essential it was for the students “to understand the organ systems in mammals.”

In another class, a fiendishly difficult math problem was being worked out. When the class ended without the problem being brought to a satisfactory conclusion, the students groaned as if a movie had been interrupted at the climactic moment. The instructor assured them that “we’ll pick it up right here” the next time the class met.

The Bard High School Early College model has been around long enough and has given a first-rate education to enough students to warrant significant expansion and close study to determine just how far this promising innovation might be able to fly. (A second school, Bard High School Early College Queens, opened in 2008.)

Dr. Botstein would like to see 150 such schools created across the country, which would reach roughly 100,000 students.

President Obama mentioned the Bard school last summer in a speech in which he suggested that more attention should be paid to such “innovative approaches” to education. An application for a grant that would help cover a national expansion of the program has been filed with the United States Department of Education.

When you look at the variety of public schools that have worked well in the U.S. — in cities big and small, and in suburban and rural areas — you wonder why anyone thought it was a good idea to throw a stultifying blanket of standardization over the education of millions of kids of different aptitudes, interests and levels of maturity.

via nytimes.com

As I look at how badly our kids are doing at school - the word Engagement keps coming up. This story tells of how we can introduce more challenge to school.

If Engagement is the mantra for social media - why not school?