School is a Waste of Time, Pt. 2
Don't make everyone go. At least not physically.
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If you didn’t read the previous post, here’s a summary: Most people don’t realize this, but students spend less than half of an average class period actually learning. The lion’s share of class time is dedicated to activities meant to control and engage large groups of students, who can sometimes be lazy or rambunctious or not entirely convinced that the poem you’re about to read is worth their time1.
But this isn’t true for all students. In any given class, there is a tiny group of students who do not need “bell ringers” to quickly get them into the classroom and started on the lesson. They do not need questions meant to “activate prior knowledge” — as we say in education — or cute activities designed to pique their interest about whatever poem you’re reading that day. They aren’t the smartest kids in the class, but they can follow directions, move through the lesson at their own pace with minimum support, and mostly get it right. Even if you’re not an educator, you know who I’m talking about. You’d recognize them from your own high school experience. They weren’t total misfits, but they were definitely introverts. They did not eat their lunch in the cafeteria. They did not silently endure the pageantry of high school so much as they ignored it all together. (But they weren’t stuck up about it, like the art kids.) You probably didn’t know their name, and they definitely didn’t know yours. They graduated a year early to no fanfare. They listened to music not even your older brother had heard of and had politics you didn’t know about until college.
Let’s call them the 5%.
And the 5%, despite their independence, can also be anxious. During a normal year, the intense social atmosphere of school and of the classroom itself — the American classroom, in particular, values and rewards extroversion — can unnerve these students. They miss school, their grades drop. They are who Rebecca Solnit had in mind when she wrote “Abolish High School.” Despite the sensational title, Solnit doesn’t actually want to do away with high school, but she does suggest some reasonable reforms, one of which is to “compress the time” teens spend in school by turning schools “into minimalist places in which people only study and learn,” and where “all the elaborate rites of dances and games could take place under other auspices.”
Well, guess what? That’s exactly what we had this past year. Minimalist schools. Monastic classrooms. May as well have started classes with a Tibetan singing bowl. Yes, there were bell-ringers and attention-grabbers, and I’d bet most teachers played more games than they usually would have (“We’ll will take ‘20th Century Genocides’ for $500, Ms. Rosenshine.”), but there just aren’t that many different things you can do on Zoom, so classes were pretty meat and potatoes, all study and learn, no fat. (This should assuage parents who were shocked to find that their kids finished most of their work by noon each day.)
What’s more, the 5% excelled. Yes, most students suffered, poor students way more than others, but for all the talk of learning loss and the innumerable (kind of maudlin) stories of stressed out, screen-fried teens, there were, in fact, positive academic anomalies, a tiny cohort who defied all reason and expectation. I think you didn’t hear about them for the same reason you only quietly admitted you liked not having to go to any Christmas parties last year; it feels wrong to talk about things going well when so much is going wrong. Plus, good news doesn’t sell.
And the 5% prevailed for the exact same reasons everyone else floundered: the leaner lessons, the absence of socializing, the hyper focus on studying and learning. The vast majority of students need those things. A small percentage do not.
So why make these kids go back to school in person?
Last month, states and districts started making announcements about whether they would offer a remote option or not. Los Angeles, Miami, Las Vegas, Houston, San Diego, the entire state of Texas are all offering remote options, but New Jersey, New York City, Illinois, Florida and many other districts have nixed remote learning for next year.
The fact that all districts aren’t including a remote option for some students going forward is a huge disappointment and the decision reveals that in spite of all the hopeful talk about schools not returning to their pre-Covid form, we are still married to old ideas, one of which is seat time, which is the measure of learning based on how much time students spend in a classroom.
Here’s New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio on the esteemed “Morning Joe” back in May: “You can’t have a full recovery without full strength schools, everyone back, sitting in those classrooms, kids learning again.”
And here’s Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers union: “The United States will not be fully back until we are fully back in school.”
None of that is true.
Learning in the United States is measured in credit hours, which are based on something called the Carnegie Unit. One Carnegie Unit -- or credit hour -- is equal to 120 hours. Spread out over a school year, that’s 4-5 classes per week, 45-60 minutes a class. The idea is that if a student sits in a U.S. History class for 120 hours, he or she will learn a sufficient amount of U.S. History for schools to be able to say, “You’ve learned the sufficient amount of U.S. History that we want our students to know. Good job.” This is seat time and almost every single school in the country measures learning by it.
But there are at least two big problems with this model.
The first problem is that it’s old — 1906 — and was created during another era, for a very specific purpose, namely to standardize public education during a time when schools were anything but consistent. America was growing, we were making most of our kids go to school, and we needed all those schools to do basically the same thing, one of them being able to say, “This kid learned a sufficient amount of U.S. History,” among other subjects. And we’ve succeeded, probably beyond our forebear’s wildest dreams. I’m not sure most people realize how miraculous it is that, in a country as big and multicultural and pluralistic as the United States, a 5th grade class in the Bronx, New York is not all that different from a 5th grade class in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
The other major problem with seat-time is obvious: it doesn’t guarantee that students have learned anything about, for example, U.S. History. It only guarantees that they’ve sat in a class for a long enough period of time that they should have learned enough about U.S. History.
And here’s where things get complicated. Some students already know a lot about U.S. History, or love learning about U.S. History, or are quick learners, and so might not need to sit in that class for 120 hours. Maybe they could do it in 80. Other students may know nothing about U.S. History, or struggle to read, or miss a lot of school, and so may need 175 hours to learn U.S. History.
The better way to measure whether a student has learned anything about a subject is to test them on that subject. That model is called mastery- or proficiency-based learning.
It’s stupid that we make every student spend the exact same amount of time on each subject. It goes against everything we know now about how people learn and, now that pandemic has shown us that real learning can happen outside of a building, outside the hours of 8 a.m. and 3 p.m., there’s no reason why we can’t carve out an exception for a small percentage of students who don’t need bell-ringers or Socratic Seminars. Who can and will complete a 55 minute lesson in 30 minutes. Who don’t want to go to high school dances. For whom, as Solnit wrote, ”high school is hell.”
No, it would not require a vast expenditure of resources. Google Classroom is free.
No, it would not stretch teachers thin by requiring a “roomies and Zoomies” model where teachers simultaneously teach in-person and remote students. The 5% can work asynchronously and check in with teachers during office hours.
No, not everyone finds the “collaborative magic” of classrooms, well, magical. This is the Universal Fallacy in Education.
A lot of kids don’t like school but they need to be there. Five percent of students don’t like school and don’t need to be there.
Don’t make them go.
Image: “Kept in School” by George Dunlop Leslie, 1876. From the Tate Collection.
To be fair to everyone under the age of 18, this isn’t entirely different from adults. It’s just that most adults have learned how to feign interest and diligence, whereas most kids are still learning how to bullshit.