They're Not Stupid

"I'm not stupid!"

That comment represents one of the most heart wrenching and memorable conversations of my life.

It's a quote from my son Erick. Erick was adopted, along with his half brother, Mauricio, from Guatemala when he was 8 years old. The boys' arrival expanded the number of children in our family to six. While two of our other children were also adopted, the addition of Mauricio and Erick exposed the woefully inadequate education experience that immigrant students are subjected to in this country.

When Mauricio, then 12, enrolled in the 5th grade English as a second language (ESL) program and Erick enrolled in the 1st grade ESL program, we became aware of an equity gap that was systemic and abusive. We had been assured that the ESL program was academically rigorous and appropriately personalized for the students, who represented nearly a dozen different cultures and languages.

To our dismay, we discovered the contrary to be true. The program was neither personalized nor rigorous. In our first visit to the school, we discovered that Erick was in a classroom in the basement that had been the locker room when I had attended junior high in the same building. More appalling was Mauricio's room, which had been the lumber storage closet for the woodshop when the building was a junior high. The textbooks on display were decades old and had covers and pages missing.

My wife, Pat, and I became very concerned, so I went to the school to observe their classes the next day. Mauricio was in a class with 18 other 4th, 5th, and 6th graders crammed into the former storage closet. They had a dedicated teacher struggling to educate this group of students who were from Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa, and who spoke Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Italian, Korean, and Spanish. Erick's class had a little more space but more students—about 30 in the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grades. At the end of the school day, I had a long conversation with both of those teachers, who were struggling to educate their students in all the core subjects with little support from the building or district administration.

After this discovery, I went through the local channels to address the inequities that I saw. I met with the building principal, who felt that his hands were tied by the district. So, I met with the superintendent, who subsequently asked the district director of special populations to conduct a study of the situation. The study was immediately carried out, and the conclusions were bizarre, to say the least. The report concluded that each of the two classrooms required the addition of two paraprofessionals—one who could speak Portuguese and one who could speak Spanish—so that instruction could be personalized. Because the classroom conditions were so crowded, however, the report concluded that adding the paraprofessionals would increase the noise level in such a confined space, and therefore the final recommendation was to do nothing!

Now incensed, I approached the local school board. Remember, this was my town, and I knew each of the board members personally. They listened politely and refused to change anything to improve the conditions for these students. So, I then filed class action discrimination appeals to both the state and federal offices for civil rights. Miraculous things happened when the district office learned that it was being investigated by the U.S. Department of Education. Books arrived. The paraprofessionals were hired. A new director of special populations, who was committed to doing things differently, was also hired.

The program was changed so that Erick was able to improve his learning and gradually achieve to the point that when he was leaving 6th grade, he was considered a pretty good student. In fact, at the school's graduation banquet for the 6th grade students and their parents, the principal chose to read Erick's essay, "Coming to America." Many parents had tears in their eyes. We were understandably proud of Erick and thought that good things lay ahead for him in his education. Unfortunately, that night turned out to be the high point of Erick's public school education.

We were then—and still are—firm believers in public education. My father, myself, my four siblings, and our five other children had all graduated from the local public high school, and we were certain that Erick would as well. In addition, I was employed at the Rhode Island Department of Education and worked part-time in our town as the boys' high school soccer coach.

Despite our constant advocacy and cajoling, Erick started on a downward spiral when he entered junior high. Things got really bad when he became a high school freshman. He started to run from the school at every opportunity. He was a great athlete, but the carrot of athletic eligibility didn't sufficiently entice him to engage in learning. We were involved in countless school meetings with Erick and his teachers and administrators. At one of those meetings, I tired of the accusation that we weren't doing everything possible to get him to attend school. I declared: "We are doing everything possible to get Erick to come to school. The one thing we can't do is get him to like it here. But you could do that if you tried!" Although making that statement helped me feel good, it didn't do anything to help Erick's situation. These events are so strongly etched in my memory that I still cringe when I hear educators blame parents for students' lack of engagement.

Erick didn't earn very many credits in his first year in high school. As a result, he had to repeat the 9th grade. During this repeat year, I encouraged Erick to look into applying to some private schools that might better address his personality. He refused. So, we had another tough year, and once again he didn't earn enough credits to become a sophomore.

During his third year as a freshman, Erick asked me if he could look into private schools. Needless to say, we were ecstatic for Erick—but certainly disappointed that our community was incapable of providing him with an adequate education. After doing some research, Erick chose Saint Andrews, a small private school in Barrington, Rhode Island, that focused on students who weren't successful in the typical public high school environment.

A month after Erick began at Saint Andrews, he came into our sitting room and made this memorable statement: "I'm not stupid!"

We responded almost in unison, "We know that, Erick."

"I really mean it. I'm not stupid."

"We really mean it. We know that."

"Then why did they make me feel so stupid at the other high school?"

The silence in the room was palpable. Pat and I were speechless. We had not realized the profoundly negative view that resulted from his earlier high school experience.

Since that memorable day, I have pondered this brief conversation often. Why had Erick felt so stupid? I knew the teachers well enough to know that they didn't intend to make him feel that way. What was it about Saint Andrews that made him feel so smart? I came to some unmistakable conclusions.

Saint Andrews was a small school where every student was known and known well. Saint Andrews had a student advisory program where each student met with his or her advisor twice a day—once in the morning before the start of school and once at the end of the day to check in. The advisor spoke with each of Erick's content area teachers every two weeks to see how he was doing and reviewed that progress with Erick, before calling me or Pat to update us. Saint Andrews had a modified block schedule that allowed Erick to engage in hands-on learning activities that gave him a chance to shine. The school required every student to participate in athletics or a club. A teacher in the school coached each team, so the personalization connections extended to the playing field and other activities. For the first time since 6th grade, Erick was given literacy instruction that allowed him to improve his writing skills. None of these things happened for any students at our public high school.

But I am convinced that the teachers and administrators at our school didn't realize the effect that the school organization and culture had on so many students who, like Erick, struggled to learn in a classroom where instruction delivered through lecture was the norm. After two years at Saint Andrews, Erick graduated and was accepted and enrolled in a four-year college. Of the 30 or so children who were in the ESL class with Erick when he started school in the 1st grade, only one other student made it all the way to graduate from high school. I knew most of those kids, and I know that they included many gifted students who, like Erick, were never able to connect their wisdom to their high school's classes.

Problem Areas for High Schools

How could it be that a public high school should create experiences meant to develop individual capability—and yet teach Erick that he was stupid? In research over the last decade, educators have learned to see six areas in which high schools begin to fail their students:

• Depersonalization. Because managing adolescents and young adults in one building is overwhelming, high schools offer few options that appeal to young people with distinctive interests, talents, and aspirations. Yet young people come to high school hoping to forge a unique identity.
• Lack of adult support. High school students spend a great deal more time talking with their friends than with a caring adult who knows them well. Young people follow their peers because they do not see any alternative.
• Unresponsive teaching. Facing more than 100 students each day, teachers use the same plan for all students, even when those students are characterized by vast differences.
• Imperceptible results. Particularly when a student does not earn good grades, the rewards for being in school remain elusive. Students want to see that they are making progress—toward common standards and their own goals.
• Invisibility. Only the most notable students, leaders, and athletes (and troublemakers) earn recognition beyond a small group of friends. Yet high school students crave the recognition of others, even as they dread public exposure.
• Isolation. High schools are designed to protect young people from exploitation by the adult world—at the same time that they aim to prepare students for adult roles. High school students need opportunities to engage the larger community so they can aim their education toward a clear purpose.

These six problem areas organize this book, allowing us to look at personalized learning in several different ways and offering six ways to engage students and prevent any from believing they are stupid.

Turnaround in a Smaller School

Over the past decade, many observers have come to realize that the conditions that Erick faced in our high school are the norm throughout the United States. We are constantly being bombarded with evidence that our high schools are failing. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation keeps reminding us that one-third of our entering 9th graders won't graduate, another one-third will graduate unprepared for the postsecondary experience, and only one-third will graduate from high school prepared for success after graduation. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), through its global surveys, has pointed out that we have gone from having the highest percentage of high school completers in the world to 16th. OECD presents evidence that more and more of the industrialized nations are passing us. And, in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in math for high-school-aged youth, the average U.S. performance was statistically lower than that of 20 of the 30 OECD countries that participated in the PISA and statistically higher than only Portugal, Italy, Greece, Mexico, and Turkey. Further, because of the speed of communications today, jobs that used to require U.S. employees can now be carried out in India or China (OECD, 2006).

How did we get into this mess?

Replacing an American Institution

Many critics believe that the high school is broken and that the people who work in high schools are lazy or incapable. We believe that the high school isn't broken. Rather, it is obsolete. The basic design of our high schools is a century old and no longer appropriate for educating American youth.

In the 1890s, Harvard College, a regional institute of higher education, desired to become a national university. To guide Harvard leaders in how to do this and to ensure that they would be getting students from across the country who were properly prepared to be successful in higher education, the college convened the Carnegie Commission. Yes, we're talking about that Carnegie Commission—the commission that decided that our high school students needed to earn course credits based on seat time. This 19th century concept, which is based solely on educating students who would be able to go on to Harvard, is still the basic organizing structure of our high schools in the 21st century.

The United States in the 1890s was a country whose population felt that an education past the 4th grade was a waste of time for most individuals. It was a country where high school was only for those who needed the connection between elementary school and higher education. It was a country where very few women and at most 5 percent of the young men went to college. That's who our high schools were designed to educate: 5 percent of our young men. The rest of our adolescents were employed in our mills, mines, and farms.

The dedicated educators in this country have been able to make the high school designed to meet the needs of 5 percent of the young men work reasonably well for about one-third of our current students. This adaptation has taken a superhuman effort by our high school educators, but the world has changed dramatically in the past century. The economic imperative for our society is compelling enough. But, when you consider that we are the world's premier democracy, we need to be preparing all students not just to keep our economic engine running, but also to become contributing citizens in an increasingly complex democracy.

If we assume that our high schools are broken, then the dedicated educators who populate those schools will feel defensive and resentful of how our society demeans them. They rightly feel besieged from all directions. At the same time, these conscientious individuals are working extremely hard and accomplishing much more than the high school was designed to do.

Fortunately, if we realize that the high school is obsolete, we can validate what our high school educators are doing and work collaboratively with them to design a new high school that works for all of our youth. If we are to be successful in educating all students in a new age, we need to redesign our high school for the new age.

Left Behind by Incremental Improvements

In November 2005, the social policy research organization MDRC conducted a conference in San Diego focused on connecting education research to practice. As the conference wore on, it became increasingly obvious that the researchers who were presenting their reports were acting on the premise that the high school was broken and could be fixed. In that vein, they stressed the need to see incremental improvements in achievement test scores as schools were implementing changes.

As I pondered this often-repeated guidance, I thought about the origins of high schools a century earlier. I thought, "Here I am in San Diego. When high schools were designed, if I had traveled from the East Coast to this conference, it would certainly have taken a weeklong train ride to get here." But, I got here in hours because I could take a plane.

I realized that if we focused on incremental improvements, we would be doing what the railroad companies had done a century before. They might have made the trip incrementally better by increasing passenger comfort. They might have improved fuel efficiency or improved scheduling so that the trains ran on time. However, by focusing on those incremental improvements, the railroad companies lost sight of the changing needs of U.S. society. No matter how many incremental improvements they made, they would never be able to get that train to fly. The railroad companies saw the world from the perspective of a provider of a service that was assumed to be irreplaceable. As a result, they lost sight of the changing needs of their customers—not unlike educators today.

Fortunately, during that same time, the Wright brothers were experimenting with flight. If their investors had required that they measure progress against the same indicators that the railroad companies did, then the airplane would have been relegated to the trash heap. Eventually the airplane could in fact be assessed by the same measures as the railroad—and could far surpass what was possible in long-distance train travel. In fact, the airlines were eventually able to carry passengers farther and faster than anyone had imagined possible. Had we continued to invest only in strategies that showed incremental improvement using the traditional measures of success, we would still be traveling by rail.

Open to Possibilities

In many ways, the situation we face in our high schools is similar to the situation the railroad companies faced. Railroad officials kept their mission narrow. They thought of themselves as being in the railroad business, not in the travel business. They lost sight of what was possible. Rather than investing in the Wright brothers' efforts, they chose to ignore the possibilities. Those who see the high school as broken are displaying the same behavior. Their vision is blinded by their preconceived notions of what a high school should be. They continue to see the high school as an institution with tracks. However, we know that the tracks existing in our schools cannot reach the new mandate of educating all our youth to high standards.

The last panel of the San Diego conference included practitioners who had demonstrated success in changing high schools. They all spoke of how important personalization was to their efforts. Ray Daniels, the recently retired superintendent of the Kansas City School District in Kansas, which has received tremendous accolades for its astounding turnaround of its high schools, cautioned that achievement test data for the district's high schools were stubbornly flat for five years after implementation of major change initiatives. It was year six before the steady upturn in assessment results started to show, and that remarkable increase continued for the next five years. He cautioned that to be successful in the short term, school practitioners needed to pick their indicators carefully. They needed to identify appropriate leading indicators that would eventually show the desired outcomes—and to acknowledge that achievement test scores were more likely lagging or weak indicators.

High Schools That Fly

The stories in this chapter exemplify the confounding mix of complexity and seeming simplicity that our high school educators face. Students and educators are stuck in an institution that remains remarkably durable despite credible evidence that it is unable to meet the new demands of our society. This rigidity has frustrated everyone involved in high schools. Fortunately, many educators have been conscientiously pursuing a new path, resulting in the emergence of high schools that are radically different from current institutions. Simply stated, the new vision of high school is schooling that puts students at the center of their learning. All further changes proceed from that idea.

Perhaps this vision seems too simple, but it is so profoundly different from the current reality that it holds the potential to resolve our current educational dilemma. Although the image of the new high school is simply stated, the change has been extremely difficult to achieve, because it begins to transform all the facets of high schools that stabilize a large organization.

Fortunately, emerging evidence shows the viability of this new vision. A number of schools, districts, states, and national organizations have recognized that student learning should be the center of high school systems. A growing body of evidence points to personalizing high schools as the only hope for the future of our secondary schooling. In MDRC's recently released report on the efficacy of three high school reform models, Janet Quint (2006) identifies benefits from personalization in each model and finds correlating improvements in some leading indicators of success, including higher attendance rates, greater persistence in school, and lower dropout rates.

Personalized high schools engage students in using knowledge to plan and develop their own pathways through school, depending on their talents, interests, aspirations, and general standards for graduation. This book, therefore, explores promising practices that are emerging in high schools across the United States: guiding personalized learning, personal learning plans, personalized teaching, community-based learning, personalized assessment, and rethinking the Carnegie unit. As we discuss these themes, we identify successful practices and offer advice gleaned from initiatives proven in the field.