Laura McCallum at NPR – recently moved from the Capitol to an Eduation beat – did a series of pieces, “Is High School Obsolete“, that’s trolls some familiar territory.

Every school day, as many as 300,000 Minnesota teenagers stream through the doors of one of more than 450 high schools in the state. These buildings are their gateways to either college or the workforce, and the rest of their lives. Is high school preparing them for the world that awaits?

…If you ask Gov. Tim Pawlenty, his answer would be “No.” He said so in his State of the State address in January. 

“In too many cases, our high school students are bored, checked-out, coasting, not even vaguely aware of their post-high school plans, if they have any, and they are just marking time,” Pawlenty said. 

Pawlenty believes that high schools need to modernize to prepare students for the jobs of tomorrow. He describes high schools as a “one-size-fits-all assembly-line model” trying to educate students in a high-tech world. 

The governor’s remarks are music to my ears.  And Bill Gates is also involved – and says some of the same things I have been pushing: 

Gates goes further than Gov. Pawlenty, wanting to redesign today’s large comprehensive high schools, particularly those in urban areas. 

Gates’ money is building new smaller schools, and dividing big schools into smaller entities within the same building. One wing might focus on technology, another on the arts. Gates believes that high schools with fewer than 600 students are more successful. 

“In those high schools, the goal is that every adult knows every student. So that when you’re walking the halls, they say, ‘Hey, you’re supposed to be over there. Hey, I heard you didn’t turn your homework in, do you need help?'” Gates told the Senate panel. “If you create a smaller social environment, then it really changes the behavior in the high school.” 

This is an idea I’d love to pursue; I actually wish I could have attended the forum on the subject.  McCallum notes something that’s worth further exploration: 

Still, there’s no question that in a school this big, even with all its advantages, some students fall through the cracks.  

Here’s a question I’d like to see more fully explored:  there are students who thrive in the current, one-size-fits-all, factory-model school system.  And the ones that “check out” the worst, are pretty obvious and easy to find; they drop out. 

I’m most concerned for the ones in the middle; the ones who plug it out in the system for 13 years, and don’t drop out, but for whom learning will forever be associated with sitting in long rows in airless rooms, having a pre-assembled curriculum read to them on a schedule that has nothing whatever to do with how they learn.  The ones for whom learning will be turned from a normal human activity, as natural and human as eating and breathing, into a duty, a drudge-like exercise in communal hazing that they’re happy to survive but take not much more away from. 

The piece explores a subject much nearer and dearer to my heart:  

The Gates Foundation is putting money into schools like Avalon School in St. Paul, a charter school with fewer than 150 high school students. Avalon has received two grants from the Gates Foundation totaling $150,000. 

First thing in the morning, Avalon students check in with their advisor. Then they spend their days either working independently on projects, or attending seminars that meet the state’s graduation standards. They have individual workspaces that look like office cubicles. 

Both of my kids have attended Avalon.  For my daughter Bun, it’s been a godsend. 

Even though people who are addicted to the conventional view of what a school is supposed to be often don’t seem to get it: 

And their projects are certainly different. One student is working on a project about Sicilian cooking for his geography graduation standard. Another student did a project on pop art to meet some of the requirements of her U.S. history grad standard. And another did a project on Star Wars for part of his English grad standard.

The topics sound too quirky to be academically rigorous. But that’s why Avalon students get excited about learning, according to Gretchen Sage-Martinson, one of the school’s two program coordinators.  

Sage-Martinson said Avalon students have to meet the same graduation standards that every Minnesota student needs to graduate. That includes four credits of English and language arts, and three credits each of math, science and social studies. The difference is that Avalon students earn those credits through subjects that are intriguing to them. 

This is the part that’s either smoothly intuitive or impossible to explain, depending on your view of what “education” is supposed to be.  If “academic rigor” means ensuring students get a prescribed ration of subjects jammed down their throats on a specified schedule – a ration they’re able to satisfactorily regurgitate on standardized tests – or if it means teaching kids to know how to learn, to take responsibility for learning (as opposed to following the dotted line to the prescribed way stations). 

Sage-Martinson said Avalon doesn’t drill students to do well on standardized tests. Yet with the exception of last year’s math test scores, Avalon students do better than the state average. 

Wonder how that happens? 

 Sage-Martison said Avalon tends to attract intellectual students who’ve struggled to do well in traditional high schools. 

That was certainly the case for senior Ian Weiland. He’s the teenager who did the project on Star Wars. At his old school, Weiland fit the stereotype of the checked-out student. He began high school at a suburban school with about 2,000 students, and he was flunking out. 

“It felt like I was just, like, in a prison,” Weiland said. “I go from one class, you got five minutes to get to each class, and you’d go there and you’d listen to some boring teacher, pretty much reading out of the textbook. And I’d sit there, and I’d just be so unmotivated and I would just not do anything. I’d just sit there, and I’d just fail.” 

While I didn’t have the option of flunking out – Dad was a teacher, after all – I can remember feeling exactly the way Weiland describes. 

The whole series is worth a read.  I’ll probably be going through more of it in coming days. 

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 at 5:19 am and is filed under Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.