How should we strategize school change?

A conversation with a Connecticut English teacher guides my thinking on the reasons for and drawbacks of "innovation" in education.

Last year, I often testified (in private) about how thankful I was that the pandemic forced teachers to radically change the way they taught. Since technologies, pedagogies, and curricular design had to change to accommodate online learning, teachers who’ve insisted that they wouldn’t change had to admit that they could. To foster more equitable access to education, to implement approaches like project-based learning, and to make myriad other socially vital and/or research-backed changes in schools, teachers and schools have to consider new practices, and it helps that now everyone knows it’s possible. 

But/and: many teachers become teachers because it’s a stable and pleasurable position, not because they’re always looking to innovate. While I stand by my position that rapid and radical change is a net positive for education, I simultaneously know that it’s a short-sighted and idealistic idea that ignores any empathetic approach to workers’ rights, undervalues the wisdom of tradition, and opens too many doors too soon to ill-advised, costly “innovations” that aren’t necessarily productive (I’ve written about such innovations in the past). In the case of many scrambled pandemic approaches, rapid change can also fracture student learning and mental health. 

It’s easy to speak in broad strokes about innovation in education, and I think that dismantling bold statements (as I’ve just done) is a critical step in designing the future of education that’s opened up in the Covid-19 pandemic.  In my interview with Rebecca Marcus last spring, Rebecca, an English teacher and the founder of Paper Paragon, answered the question “What’s one prediction you have for the future of education?” in a way that’s resonated with me. In her statement, Rebecca broke with traditional “camps” of change vs. tradition, skills vs. content, and so on. Instead, Rebecca said that in the future:

“That the divisions between and among disciplines will start to blur — the lines separating English/History/Language, Math/Science/History. The subjects that we’ve privileged to this point were established hundreds of years ago in American Educational History. We don’t have the same need for committing historical facts to our minds as we do how to cope with all the information that we have. Hopefully we learn to deemphasize what’s no longer serving the world and emphasize skills and subjects that we need to advance.”

I found Rebecca’s phrasing to be extraordinarily logical, to the point that it sounded obvious. In focusing on what does and does not serve the world beyond the classroom, she applied logic of obsolescence that future of work thinkers use, and the crossover makes sense. Many of the same accelerations in time, globalizations, and technology, and many of the same explosions of inequality, discord, and dissatisfaction mirror in the field of education. In American culture, at least, education is really on a continuum with work; teachers refer to assignments as “schoolwork,” and employers - increasingly, as they recognize the need to train existing employees with new skills - lean on worker-education programs, even employing in-house education teams to develop and professional learning programs. Educators talk about a “rapidly changing world” in the same way that business leaders do: as a stimulus for response. 

Even though everyone knows what’s going on in the world and has ideas about how schools should change in response to it, schools don’t change much - which I think gives the impression that educators either don’t know or don’t really care about how poorly students’ experiences prepare them for the tasks they’ll take on in the future. Usually, though, the kinds of changes that respond meaningfully to shifting imperatives in content and structure are taken up by tiny bands of individual teachers or occasionally small schools, usually private or in affluent districts, who have the capacity to respond to those pressures without significantly risking the future opportunities or overall average well-being of their students. As an educator in private schools, I can alter my practice to respond to the changes of the world much more than teachers elsewhere. Even still,  I’m still frustrated at least once each day with the seeming snail’s pace with which I or my colleagues are able to respond to what our students need from us to be successful in the years outside of school. Even when given the opportunity to create interdisciplinary courses, or to design a course around a more skill-based model, as Rebecca suggested (more on this to come) I, ever-eager, still feel constantly hamstrung. At the same time, I acknowledge that the very fact of how far ahead “into the future of education” I’ve been able to run is only widening the gap between my privileged students and the majority in this country. Instead of feeling great about that work, I’m filled with a kind of existential dread about the reality that I should, as a highly-regarded public official told me when I chatted her up on an airplane the other day, probably be working in an underfunded and overcrowded public school instead, if I’m really invested in the future of our kids.

Part of designing education for the world we’re in now, then, means acknowledging that the piecemeal, bold, innovative practices that are especially championed by peers in my generation often accelerate inequality because of rigid public structures that tighten the grip on both the means (what can be taught) and the ends (how it’s assessed) of education. 

I want to move through Rebecca’s statement, because the logic and nuance that she provides can and should lead thought leaders interested in working within education in with both familiar simplicity and rare nuance. Take the first sentence, in which she states that “the subjects we’ve privileged to this point were established hundreds of years ago.” “Hundreds” is hyperbolic, as English and Science as discrete disciplines were more of a one-hundred-years-ago kind of development, and Language as standard has a fascinating locally-specific history, based on the ethnic makeup and immigration history of a given school district (I love the chapter in Robert Caro’s The Path to Power in which Caro outlines the linguistic breakdown of Lyndon Johnson’s childhood school in the Texas Hill Country). The blurring of disciplinary lines is relevant especially for anyone looking at tertiary education as harbinger of what’s to come at the secondary level. “Interdisciplinary” is a buzzword that’s already passé in secondary education circles, but conceptually it’s actually been relevant across the history of education and only experienced a brief period of irrelevance. Standards-based curricula really open the door to teach students skills and concepts in interdisciplinary classes that more closely mirror, say, college courses or future careers. They also scare some mid-career teachers, because they threaten expertise and require on-the-job training that’s relegated to off-the-job, unpaid hours. 

I agree, with an asterisk, to Rebecca’s statement that committing historical facts to memory isn’t a healthy or even rational way to manage information. It is important to consider, as Rebecca does, the simple reality that a comparison between the body of knowledge covered in school and the body of knowledge now accessible to anyone with an internet connection is comical. Again, think logically: we don’t live in a world in which a family can buy a set of Worldbook encyclopedias, like the already-out-of-date 1996 edition my family had growing up, and tell their children that they represent the fundamental building blocks that will form the basis for their lives. Kids don’t really buy it either. Here’s my asterisk, though: memorization is a valuable skill, though, it’s just a less universally important one than the disproportionate weight education traditionally places on it would suggest. There are responses to this problem already. Choice-based assessment, game-based assessment, project-based learning: all of these practices have swallowed up much of the space formerly taken up by the now-more-obsolete skill of memorization -- more so in private, select charter, and wealthy public schools than elsewhere. 

I also agree, with an asterisk, with the other slice of the memorization question, embedded in Rebecca’s statement, which is the idea that committing to memory a certain set of facts or information in subjects like History or English is a moot point with the internet. Yes, and: that statement only applies in certain disciplines and, I would argue, certain grade levels. Foundational skills in Math, Science, and Languages are inarguably important to commit to memory, and this article in The Atlantic really prompted me to recognize that the same can be true for English and History, especially through the middle grades. My own bias to believe that there’s no central content that students must learn in my English class comes from tertiary education and academia’s thought on the literary canon. I hold firm to the idea that students don’t need to read a certain set of texts to “pass” life anymore: you can go to a party and dazzle your company without knowing the plot The Odyssey or The Catcher in the Rye. But I can see the way that middle-grades reading and cultural background gives absolutely disproportionate access to a text like Jane Eyre when it comes up in the curriculum. It’s actually desirable to have a diversity of experiences and knowledge sets in the classroom (and in any room), so that we can all sit down, roll up our sleeves, and get to work - but we do need to make sure that everyone’s had to commit something to memory, so that all students have both knowledge and skills to bring to the discussion. By the secondary years, it’s important that students leave with a strong content base in addition to a strong skill base. Maybe it doesn’t matter as much what that content is, or maybe it should flow across content areas etc., but it does matter that students have one. (This pursuit of strong knowledge bases from practical to theoretical concepts is, to me, the biggest argument to redefine disciplines, because a comprehensive knowledge base about, say, energy, or United States History, or Economics, requires mastery of constellations of facts and ideas and theoretical frameworks that span outside of a single discipline). 

I don’t think that Rebecca’s statement argues that we need to just focus on skills, and I also think that she’s not arguing that we simply need to update the skills and content that we teach. Rather, it’s much more nuanced than that: we need to reconsider the borders we’re setting up between the two and consider how they work in relation to one another. Which ones do all students needs, and which ones can they choose? Where can they find those skills and that knowledge, and do we have the infrastructure set up for them to access those skills and knowledge in logical forms that transfer clearly to the world for which they’re intended?

What I like about Rebecca’s final sentence is that she talks about learning “to deemphasize what’s no longer serving the world and emphasize skills and subjects that we need to advance.” As I’ve seen in the public comments made on my own Opinion pieces, educators are often as quick to misunderstand critical thinking as polarization as anyone in any field. It would be easy to put Rebecca’s statement into a “content versus skills” framework and suggest that she wants to prioritize skills and do away with disciplines that separate and categorize content. She’s not asking for a wild revolution here, though, but rather a rethinking process that while still hard, does not ask teachers to completely expel former ways in favor of new ones. It’s a refreshingly logical, balanced, jargon-exclusive framework to approach the field of Education’s response to imperatives for change.