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By Daniel Lutz, Ph.D.
Director and Lead Consultant, Lutz Globe LLC – Global Leadership of Business and Education
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"The dropout crisis is just the tip of an iceberg. What it doesn't have are all the kids who are in school but being disengaged from it, who don't enjoy it...The reason is not that we're not spending enough money... The trouble is it's all going in the wrong direction." - Sir Ken Robinson
A Necessary Prequel to the Series "Reinventing School"
In the first three articles of this series, I've presented overarching questions to challenge typical school systems, the ways that high school graduation doesn't really do what we'd like it to do, and how the traditional use of school time frames leaves students behind. You might consider the ideas discussed there to be too radical. Perhaps you thought they sound good, but issues such as student discipline, learning accountability, and probable implementation costs simply make them unrealistic.
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Those arguments are correct — under present all-too-common circumstances. And that's why I call this series' iterative exploration a framework for a paradigm shift in public education systems. Here's a step back to explain.
Why Is the Reinvention of Today's Schools So Important?
In previous centuries, one generation taught the next one how to carry forward what the common family has done. Societal continuity was maintained; fundamentals of family roles and groups changed little, even amid changing political realities around them. Communications were slow, on horseback, through the telegraph, even with the advent of the operator-assisted and rotary telephone. In the last couple of decades, the explosion of instant communication and instantly available information has accelerated tool- and society-based transformations at breakneck speed. Massive options, challenges, and volume of decisions people now must make have shuffled lives.
Emerging more intensely in recent years, AI is now engaging everything in our experience in one way or another. Changes in a vast array of life are occurring at a faster pace than ever before, and that pace is increasing at an exponential rate. The point here is that today's children face a future that can only be described with guesses.
Added to this explosive reality, our public school enrollments have become more diverse ethnically, racially, economically, and by gender identity, especially in urban schools. The emphasis on learning traditional sets of information in a post-pandemic social-emotional crisis is a tough one, especially with a broad urgency to "catch up" on what wasn't learned through Covid virtual schooling. Our systems still employ past frameworks and expectations in the way we adults experienced our own K-12 education.
Hiding within these traditional systems are both inequitable structures that deny personalized learning and a lack of purpose learning for a future demanding more resilience. In 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval Noah Harari sums up the problem this way: "The Industrial Revolution has bequeathed us the production-line theory of education...[N]o matter its past achievements, it is now bankrupt. But so far we haven't created a viable alternative."
What Is Traditional?
In this series of articles, I often use the term "traditional." The word, of course, can imply a range of meanings. For these articles, I use it specifically in reference to aspects of systemic education structures that hinder many kids. Those affected include students of color, of other critically important backgrounds of diversity, and simply any student whose learning propensity doesn't fit a middle band of learners for which the system's basic structure was established long ago. The impediments manifest when students' native learning assets can't be engaged as a foundation for developing skills, knowledge, and inspiration for an unfolding present and an unpredictably changing future.
As we get deeper into successive articles on "Reinventing School," I expect increasing resistance to the concepts presented. But I suggest that readers try to suspend "this could never happen" as they delve into this exploration, knowing that we are considering a conceptual framework for a paradigm shift that is equitable and potent for all students. This is a tall task for us as adults because we carry educational assumptions from our childhood. These short articles invite you to put to work your highest creative imagination for something better.
Who Should Engage in This Discussion?
I'm happy to say that there are many organizations and individuals who are already looking deeply into how education for our children must change to meet the transformations we all are faced with. But by and large, these advocates are not leaders of public school districts or vendors serving them. There is a key reason that the paradigm shift you are reading about in this series seems so impossible.
The conversation between districts and their communities is based on the measures of success that have emerged with ferocity and persuasiveness from the advent of No Child Left Behind and the Standards movement. While I don't rail against learning standards themselves, the traditional learning structures inherited from the past have simply been intensified to make standards work and to show whether district schools are successful. Conversations in the community around more equitable frameworks are rare because, once again, the adult community members electing school boards carry the hidden assumptions of those traditional systems from their own past.
Public schools are free, which is necessary for most people and their children. But the hope is that those stakeholders, along with other community members outside school walls, increasingly challenge traditional structural learning assumptions to make way for a new mindset among the school boards they elect. Informed community members thus become the pivotal source for transforming how kids can learn with a new vision for the present and future.
So then, what does "reinventing schools" actually mean? That is what this series is about. You can check out the introductory article here if you haven't seen it yet. Otherwise, you will be able to continue following the series with the upcoming fourth article, focusing on how traditional school architecture can add to the distractions from true personalized and equitable student learning.
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