U.S. schools are woefully unprepared for the challenges they will face in the 21st century, according to presenters William Spady of Dillon, Colo., and Charles Schwan of Custer, S.D. Instruction methods and understanding of human learning are still based on methods developed more than a century ago and which have not been updated since that time, they said.
Charles Schwan
"We have come billions and billions of miles since 1893 when the Committee of Ten formed the first template for what we today call school," said Spady. "I am absolutely underwhelmed that those structures are still in effect over a hundred years later."
Speaking to a packed room, Spady and Schwan, along with former executive editor of ASCD publications Ron Brandt of Alexandria, Va., and educational specialist Helen Burz of Bingham Farms, Mich., discussed the standards movement, its effect on schools, and the impact the movement is having on the teaching profession.
"When I stepped in last November to fill a temporary position as an elementary school principal, it wasn't long before I found myself asking, ‘What have I done?'" said Burz. "I could not believe the anxiety level, the pain, and the torture that people were experiencing." Burz, who read the children's book Testing Miss Malarkey by Judy Finchler to those in attendance, spoke passionately about the impact that the standards and accountability movements have had on her district. "Miss Malarkey is written in the voice of a very young child," she said. "But it delivers a very powerful message." In one of the more humorous moments in the book, the young narrator notices that on the day of the test there are "more teachers than students in line to visit the school nurse."
Following Burz's delivery, Ron Brandt outlined his concerns about the standards movement. "I think most of us would agree that the standards movement is now the dominant one in most of our lives and that it does have a lot of positive aspects to it," he said. "But while standards themselves may be excellent, they may also be unrealistic, educentric, unfair, and most important, they may limit variation."
Standards can be unrealistic, Brandt said, because they require too much of teachers as a whole. "When Bob Marzano asked a group of teachers to do a rough estimate of how long it would take to learn a set of standards that were presented to them, they said that using a figure of five hours for each benchmark would mean that it would take kids 15,000 hours and another 10 years of schooling to learn them," he said. "It's simply unrealistic to think that kids can possibly learn all that."
In addition, Brandt said, the standards movement is inhibiting because it assumes that every child can be taught the same way. That assumption, he said, reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the learning process. "If there's anything we need in our profession today, it's a wide variety of programs," Brandt said. "There is simply no single school program that is suitable for every student."
Following his address, Brandt turned the session over to William Spady and Charles Schwan, who spoke about the need to change the way schools are viewed if learning methods are to be improved. "School is an archaic vestige of an industrial age that is over," Spady said. "What we call school today was frame-formed, legalized, and institutionalized in 1893. It's based on an assembly-line mentality that assumes that every child is the same because of how old they are and what grade they should be assigned to at that age. We assume that the style should be the same for each one of them, and that in June when they come off the line they will have the same education and results."
That outdated paradigm, Spady argued, reflects a way of thinking that will trouble U.S. schools in the years ahead. "In the early 20th century, we thought ‘smart kids' took courses ending in ‘ology' while ‘dumb kids' took ‘applied' courses," he said. "Our ‘smart kids' are leaving school nowadays without the ability to apply anything that they have learned. If you want to see us pay the price, wait a few more years while all these academically ordained graduates walk out with all their content information, and none of them know how to do anything."
Schools, Spady said, are not preparing students for what they will face in the real world. "There's life after college, and college isn't life, folks," Spady said. "We need to create standards around life-performance things."
Those life-performance things, Schwan told the audience, represent a complete change in how schools and their purposes are viewed. Rather than seeing schools as bureaucratic institutions, Schwan said, schools should learn to operate with a more business-like mentality in order to meet the needs of students. "If we're going to do what Deming did for the Japanese and the United States and get ourselves on the path of continuous improvement, we need to know our product so we can focus on the processes we use," Schwan said. "We've refused to admit that we have a ‘product,' but we do. Our product is the educated learner, and we need to be future-focused if we're going to think strategically for that learner."
One example of how schools continue to think bureaucratically instead of professionally, Schwan said, was when his granddaughter was enrolled in a kindergarten class at a prestigious Colorado school. When his daughter called the school to arrange to watch the two kindergarten teachers instruct their classes, she was told by the secretary—not the principal, whom she had tried to call—that she "could not choose" which teacher she was going to see.
"We need to move from those old paradigms into more flexible ones if we're going to function in the information age, rather than [as] an industrial-age organization," said Schwan. "If we really believe that education is about getting kids ready for life and not just getting them ready for school, we have to change the way we operate."
That change, he and Spady argued, would go a long way toward helping prepare today's students for the demands of tomorrow's world.