Learning to Be Free

After five years of No Child Left Behind data trends show that its ambitious goals will not be met by 2014. Several well-respected leaders have been saying publicly that the emperor has no clothes, as did recently resigned San Diego City Schools Superintendent Carl Cohn when he said, “I believe there is a place where no child is left behind, where all children achieve grade-level proficiency and there is no achievement gap. It is called heaven.”

What happens when NCLB falls far short of its goals? Will that create a new opportunity to rethink education completely, or will the policy pendulum just swing a little bit back to the left?

The reality is that schooling is losing out to the street, computer games, online networks, cell phones, and iPods in the competition for student interest and motivation. While charter schools have begun to capture significant enrollment in some urban cities (nearly 20% in Oakland where I live), on the whole, charter schools have not proven themselves demonstrably superior in the aggregate. Meanwhile higher education has become unaffordable even for middle class families, and it has a higher drop out rate than high schools.

Working from the inside to redesign a dysfunctional urban district has convinced me that the current system is obsolete — from the way education is measured and managed to the way it’s governed and financed.

The US system of public education emerged at the beginning of the 20th Century and has changed little since then. Despite incremental improvement over the last fifty years, K-12 education has demonstrated that it cannot meet the current demand for highly proficient, ethical and productive global citizens who can learn rapidly and effectively in the face of the high stakes social, economic and political challenges of the 21st century.

Our education system today was designed to complement a traditional social structure within industrial economy, neither of which exist today, an era of global economies, new technologies and dramatic demographic changes. As scholar and researcher Martin Haberman writes: Schools [and districts] are places organized on the bizarre expectation that groups of children and youth of the same age “learn” at roughly the same rate and in the same ways. Schools organized on the basis of age-grades are an American cultural and historic phenomenon that have not only survived but thrived (1/2 trillion dollars per year, 54 million children in 15,000 districts over four hundred years) and will not be transformed simply because their assumptions reflect neither the realities of student growth and socialization nor any research or theory of human development. Schools reflect what America wants not what America needs.

Many Americans do know that we need something different and we need it now — but there is no consensus on what or how. Unfortunately, our education system is representative of the mostly hierarchical public and private institutions that exist today — entities where the principle of organizational and individual self-interest prevails over the principle of caring for individuals and communities and the people they serve.

I think the world is ready for an evolutionary leap in how humans organize themselves to work for the public good and individual freedom. I think education is a good place to start.

Mario enters kindergarten and within the first few months the school tells his parents he is “behind” and “not on grade level.” Mario comes from a working class family of loving parents with very limited resources. Like many children entering school in the NCLB era, Mario is behind before he starts. What’s wrong with this picture?

In early December several news sources published excerpts from The Family: America’s Smallest School written by Paul E. Barton and Richard J. Coley of Education Testing Service’s Policy Information Center. The report analyzes the family and home experiences and conditions that impact children’s learning. The study identified four factors that strongly affect student achievement and which together “account for about two-thirds of the large differences among states in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) eighth-grade reading scores.” They are: “single parent families, time spent reading to children, time watching TV, and the frequency of school absences.”

One of the report’s main conclusions is that “the resources available at home — books, magazines, newspapers, a home computer, a quiet place to study — can have a lasting influence on a child’s ability to achieve academically.” Perhaps this is revelatory for ETS, but it shouldn’t be news for any family or teacher with struggling learners. And it is a pinhole view of a much larger landscape of challenges.

We keep studying a fact that we already know, but ignore repeatedly: the family and community resources (money, time, people, learning opportunities and daily conditions) to which learners have access outside of school determine much of what is possible for learners in school. This is why Mario, no matter how hard he works, is statistically likely to fall further behind his more privileged peers the longer he stays in school.

Countless studies have affirmed the positive outcomes for children when families involve themselves actively in their children’s education inside and outside of schools. Yet our system — the social contract for education — has not been able to address the changing nature of families and communities, economic opportunities, and generally higher expectations for learning in the world we now live in.

The real resource gap is not so much about what schools don’t have, but what families and children can’t provide or create for themselves because they lack the time, the knowledge, the resources or the community of support. Our education system today was designed to complement a traditional, two-parent family-based social structure within an industrial economy and homogeneous communities, none of which exist today, an era of global economies, new technologies and dramatic demographic changes. Unless we get beyond the four walls of the classroom and realize that education is happening all the time, we will not see clearly what we need to do to address this challenge.

That is why are proposing — as part of a new social contract for education — to reframe equity as addressing the resource gap for families and individual learners.

To learn more this download Podcast 2 from the right column of our home page.

By Steve Jubb

As a former coach, classroom teacher, mentor, father and grandfather with 40 years immersed in teaching and learning from children and youth, I remain frustrated that the education establishment does not better understand the central role of motivation in learning and why it is critical that we carefully cultivate it. Here are just three of the many reasons, from a global perspective to a pragmatic one.

1. We made a mess of the world and our children will have to do a better job than we did cleaning it up. It will take a lot of people caring enough to do the innovating, problem solving, creative thinking and hard work to turn things around. The messes will get bigger before they get smaller. (Click here to see for yourself.)
2. Many, if not most, of the jobs our children will do in the future haven’t been invented yet. In fact, many will invent their own jobs. (Click here if you didn’t know that. ) How are we preparing them to shape that unpredictable future?
3. We spend billions throwing answers at the heads of students who have asked no questions (or at least not the ones we want to or can answer). A learner’s motivation to learn is the most influential factor in learning efficiency. Yet it is at best an after thought in the public discourse on education policy and spending.

I hear many adults say kids just aren’t motivated to learn in school any more as if it reflected some mutation in their genes or some organic deficiency in their families and communities. But have you ever seen a toddler unmotivated to walk, talk or learn how take all the pots out of your kitchen cabinet? Have you not seen youth bent in rapt concentration over their iPods and iPhones, or networking with their iFriends on Facebook? Now there are some motivated kids!

The problem is that kids just aren’t that motivated to learn in school! Here, click this link and go back for a refresher course. Read my colleague Herb Childress’ “Seventeen Reasons Why Football Is Better Than High School” written a decade ago. (And you won’t ever need to ask me why I played football in high school and college.)

Humans are programmed to learn; it is our evolutionary advantage. Curiosity is innate, located firmly in the physiology of our brain and the hunger for experience that drives human behavior from birth. Learning is what we innately do, and what we do determines whom we become.

As Aristotle is oft quoted to have said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” It follows then that education isn’t only about freedom and curiosity. It is also a process of learning to constraining our natural impulses — learning the rules, procedures and norms that limit freedom but help us be together in the world, and, ironically, help make us more free. As blues guitarist B.B. King said, “The beautiful thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you.”

A learner learns better when he knows how knowledge is created through disciplined inquiry, experimentation and observation. He has to figure out how to live, love and work within interdependent networks. He has know that he can work hard now for something better later. These constraints make the learner more powerful in the end.

As a learner grows older and pursues her perceived interests and passions, navigating the constraints imposed by other people’s interests and passions, the adults responsible for her learning currently tend to err more frequently on the side of the constraints. It is a reaction to scale, complexity and insecurity, I think, and perhaps to the unintended consequences of our historical choices. Consider the national trend in secondary schools to put two or three thousand middle school or high school aged children in a single physical space, for example. Having done that we have little choice but to deal with crowd control issues and the regulation of behavior as a prerequisite to learning rather than learning self regulation as an integral part of securing real value from the teaching and learning exchange.

Or maybe it is precisely because children are our future that we don’t let them lead the way — we focus more on control and conformity than nurturing the unique spirit and individual creativity that every child possesses because that’s much harder and more costly to do. It requires more and different resources (time, energy, relationships, caring) than we currently are willing to commit to children. Maybe our fear of what society is becoming compels us to exert ever greater control over what young people say, do, learn and think — a pretty fruitless approach I think. Whatever the cause, the longer kids stay in school the more boring and ineffective their learning there becomes.

But our children defy us — and they do become what they repeatedly do, as they get older doing it more and more outside the influence of positive adult communities. We’re better off giving them many more opportunities to do repeatedly the things that add value to their communities, themselves and to others. Guiding learners to participate fully in economic, civic, social and (now) global life in the company of adults is the best teacher of constraints and the best way to develop and maintain the motivation to learn. As author James Baldwin wrote, “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”

The voices of children and young people are invisible in the debates about No Child Left Behind and the future of education funding and policy. We adults seem so sure that we have their best interests at heart as we debate the merits of managed instruction, charter schools, vouchers, choice and all manner of piecemeal policies. But we miss the point.

Young people need to learn how by building their own networks of people through the exchange of authentic (mostly non-monetary) value. However, we have confined our children — with all the best of intentions — in a system that defers (until a young person’s mid-twenties) the freedoms and responsibilities of adulthood.

How can we expect our children learn only in schools? Modern schools are more often an environment carefully segregated from the experiences of real life — experiences that teach a person how to become an ethical and competent adult because they get to practice, undertaking the task of creating for others, and receiving in return, value for their work and the products of their creative interests. It is no wonder so many have become so passive within the context of school, and so under prepared for the requirements of adult life in a complex world.

Children are people now. They will help us change the world if we let them and expect them to do it.

“Take care of your family first, but then reach out to your neighbor, your block, your city, your country. Everybody wants change, but they want it to come by way of somebody else… If you wait for the government, you’ll wait a long time.”

Actor Edward James Olmos (1947- )

In my family we read National Geographic. We’ve been subscribers for at least three decades. As a child I was deeply attracted to the incredible photos and stories of places I could hardly imagine existed. A yellow bus would take me and my elementary school mates to the library every other week. My first stop was the magazine rack, where I eagerly awaited each new yellow trimmed issue.

I drove by my school again this summer. Edison Elementary has become Nia Educational Charter School. Everything changes.

With that in mind I picked up the most recent National Geographic and read Bill McKibben’s article on carbon dioxide emissions and its effect on global temperatures. I was fascinated by the math and the creative way he used data to help the reader think about possible courses of action. It connected to something that is core to our proposal— the idea that the future is uncertain in part because we can influence it.

In his graph he showed the effects of various CO2 reduction strategies, and the consequences of doing nothing. I imagined that one could portray the gap between what we learn and do now with what we’ll need to know and do in the future to successfully mitigate the consequeces of CO2 emissions.

In conclusion McKibben writes:

In the end, global warming presents the greatest test we humans have yet faced. Are we ready to change, in dramatic and prolonged ways, in order to offer a workable future to subsequent generations and diverse forms of life? If we are, new technologies and new habits offer some promise. But only if we move quickly and decisively–and with a maturity we’ve rarely shown as a society or a species. It’s our coming-of-age moment, and there are no certainties or guarantees. Only a window of possibility, closing fast but still ajar enough to let in some hope.

http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/2007-10/carbon-crisis/carbon-crisis.html

I wonder how many things we can substitute for “global warming” in that paragraph and still have it ring true?

One of the key questions that we keep hearing from you and others concerns learner autonomy in the social and institutional architecture we are proposing. Parents especially often feel young people have too much autonomy already–they want to know what will guide or constrain an autonomous learner’s choices.

It is interesting that the idea of learner autonomy triggers so much attention while the other constraining principles we have proposed are rarely questioned. So, without writing a master’s thesis on the subject, let me see if I can clarify what we are proposing.

Think of an accomplished adult we know — lets call her Sara. She lives within a network of relationships with people, communities and institutions that she has created for herself. She has a job, a college degree perhaps—she likes hiking and camping, hip hop dance, and spoken word concerts. She has people that she loves and cares about, people that care about her in return. She volunteers as a mentor of a young girl, Carina, who is 11 and struggling in school.

Sara’s only contractual commitment is the only one that pays her money: her job. In every case, other her choices are guided by her goals and her pursuit of value (or meaning, which is another expression of value). Her commitments are voluntary. Her network has a structure that gives her power and access to what she needs–in her case it is a robust network that gives her a lot of choices and opportunities.

What constrains Sara’s choices and guides her behavior? In order to get what she needs or wants, Sara offers value in exchange for the value she receives — value of one kind or another. For example, mentoring Carina satisfies her deeply felt desire to make the world better somehow. Carina gets a powerful role model and advocate (and trips to interesting places) in exchange. Their interactions over time are shaped by these exchanges, creating a powerful relationship–it persists over time and can be accessed as needed. More importantly, the expectations that these two have of one another constrain the choices they make.

When Sara is invited to a party she declines because she has already committed to take Carina to a local dance event. Sara has a relationship with Carina’s teachers and her parents. When Carina thinks about skipping school with friends now, her strong bond with Sara–and the specter of Sara’s disappointment and the other people it would impact (transparency)—gives her strong motivation to make a different choice (internal accountability).

Before there were schools most children participated communities of value and practice to learn and develop. Apprenticeship was the dominant learning paradigm in most communities — learning a trade or how to be an adult by participating in multi-generational communities with rights of passage connected to demonstrations of the learner’s ability to produce value for others and take up the rights and responsibilities of a full community member. When we speak of the learner’s network, think of it as another way to describe a child’s nascent community. Now apply the design principles:

1. AUTONOMY increases the power of the learner
2. OPENNESS increases access to resources available
3. INTERNAL ACCOUNTABILITY increases the significance and impact of relationships
4. REAL-WORLD RELEVANCE authentically connects the learner to the real world
5. TRANSPARENCY allows learners to see available resources and evaluate potential exchanges with better information
6. CHOICE allows the learner to select resources aligned to her purpose and learning style

Think about how these principles together shape what a learner might chose or not chose to do with their autonomy.

So what guides or constrains the learner’s autonomy? You know the answer: the same things that guide or constrain yours, with one caveat: children need to be treated as apprentices who need appropriate challenges and supports as they become adults.

I think the most radical thing we are proposing is a new social structure for learning, and ultimately, new approaches to building learning communities that are interconnected and sustainable into adulthood.

Now its your turn–what would your vision be of these design principles in action? What do you believe would or should constrain learner autonomy?