A Metaphor for Change: Moving from a Filter to a Pump...

High School as Filter

Public education started in earnest in our country at the beginning of the 20th century.  Most adolescents in the early 1900's were not in school but were working - either on farms or in factories, as laborers or in the trades.  Once the Industrial Revolution took hold, and with a growing immigrant population, our country exploded in a world of mass production.  As time went on more students began to attend high school taking a vocational track meant to lead to a job upon graduation.  Thus high schools focused on basic literacy and training for the world of work.  Only a select few took an academic track and went to college.  Academic high schools (e.g. Central High School in Philadelphia) that focused on college preparation were separate from mainstream high schools.  Here are a few assumptions that the traditional high school (that many of us attended) were built on.

1. Only a small percentage of students should go to college.  These students took college prep classes and went into professions such as engineering, law, education, medicine and architecture.  
2. Most working class jobs in the trades, manufacturing and business only required a high school diploma.  People who entered these jobs received on-the-job training.
3. Big companies based in mass production such as steel mills or automobile plants provided huge numbers of jobs for individuals entering the labor market.  
4. The ability to do repetitive tasks at a high level of quality (mass production) was the goal.  
5. Being on time, on task and dutiful was more important than being able to collaborate, problem solve or work on group projects. 
6. Most jobs involved working with your hands.  
7. For most of the century, the majority of jobs were held by men.  
8. Jobs involved producing things.  
9. Once you had a job, you could more than likely keep it for life, moving up the ladder in the company.  
10. Many non-academic males who could not make it through high school went to the military which provided structure, order and high school equivalency opportunities.   

Based on these assumptions, schools looked and acted like factories.  And they did a great job of filtering the population into college, homemaking, trades, vocations, military, retail, etc.  

This graph shows the small number of high school students in the United States in the early part of the century.  It also shows a significant growth in the high school population after World War II.  There are three reasons given for this increase - population growth, the change in the needs of our job market and making high school mandatory for all students.  Mandatory attendance in a high school was a pragmatic attempt to create more job opportunities for returning veterans.  

Note that high school graduation in the United States did not go over 50% until the 1960's.  Imagine that for the first half of the 20th century, students did not necessarily need a high school diploma to make a living wage!   

One can see that the percentage of students graduating from high school tripled from 20% to 60% in about 40 years.  An early impetus to push for universal high school education occurred in 1957 with the Soviet flight of Sputnik.  The threat of Soviet superiority provided the United States with a clear signal that they needed to compete globally from an education perspective.  However, It took until 1983 for our country to recognize that universal education and high school completion was a requirement to make a living wage.  In 1983, The Nation at Risk Report, stated 

"History is not kind to idlers. The time is long past when American's destiny was assured  simply by an abundance of natural resources and inexhaustible human enthusiasm, and by our relative isolation from the malignant problems of older civilizations. The world is indeed one global village. We live among determined, well-educated, and strongly motivated competitors. We compete with them for international standing and markets, not only with products but also with the ideas of our laboratories and neighborhood workshops. America's position in the world may once have been reasonably secure with only a few exceptionally well-trained men and women. It is no longer. "

Toward this end, in 1989 the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) declared that everyone should take Algebra.  For the first time in our nation's history, the expectation was that every student receive an academic education.  As one might imagine, this was easier said than done.

Since The Nation at Risk report, the number of students graduating high school that were prepared for college increased from 2% to 29%.  Although this was a substantial increase over 16 years, it meant that as we entered the 21st century,  less than 1/3 of our student population was ready for college.  Clearly, the new information/technology-based economy changed our world so fast that entrenched educational institutions were incapable of keeping up.  

I would suggest that our nation's high schools did not know where to begin to meet the new workforce needs addressed in The Nation At Risk Report (1983), the NCTM Standards (1989) and the SCANS Report (1991).  Remember, in America, school districts are locally managed. There is no centralized way to move to a new model of education aligned with the job market.  So as you would guess, little changed.  It is 2014 and our schools are still acting as a FILTER at a time when we need everyone to obtain academic skills.

High School as a PUMP

If all students need to succeed in high school and move on to post high school training programs, we need a PUMP, not a FILTER.  We need a school system that takes ALL students, provides them with the academic, social, problem solving, technological and communication skills to work in a dynamic new economy.  "Today, the demands on business and workers are different.  Firms must meet world-class standards and so must workers. Employers seek adaptability and the ability to learn and work in teams" (A SCANS Report for America 2000).  The SCANS report  recommended the foundation and competencies all students must have to compete in the new economy.

THE FOUNDATION - competence requires:

Basic Skills - reading, writing, arithmetic and mathematics, speaking, and listening;
Thinking Skills - thinking creatively, making decisions, solving problems, seeing things in the mind's eye, knowing how to learn, and reasoning;
Personal Qualities - individual responsibility, self-esteem, sociability, self-management, and integrity.

COMPETENCIES - effective workers can productively use:

Resources - allocating time, money, materials, space, and staff;
Interpersonal Skills - working on teams, teaching others, serving customers, leading, negotiating, and working well with people from culturally diverse backgrounds;
Information - acquiring and evaluating data, organizing and maintaining files, interpreting and communicating, and using computers to process information;
Systems - understanding social, organizational, and technological systems, monitoring and correcting performance, and designing or improving systems;
Technology - selecting equipment and tools, applying technology to specific tasks, and maintaining and troubleshooting technologies.

So our country is in education limbo.  We have a system that is currently struggling to graduate students with the skills necessary for a 21st century economy.  Unfortunately, it is filtering students out of "the American Dream".  Add to that the problems that exist in the urban core and you now understand the mess we are in.

The federal government attempted to change the education model with the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB).  However, the NCLB concept of high stakes testing in English and Mathematics has shown little or no effect on implementing a model of education aligned with the new economy. In fact, the focus on these tests has skewed education programming away from the competencies suggested in the SCANS report.

Recent reports from the American College Testing service (post NCLB) suggest that over the last five years, there has been little or no growth in the number of students who are college-ready upon graduation.

We are in a crisis.  As an educator in the year 2000, I was in a crisis.

Let me tell you a personal anecdote that typified the struggle that was going on at the time. In 2000 I was working in the Pittsburgh Public Schools as the Coordinator of Instructional Technology.  We were having a very hard time getting the District to move toward a high school model that was aligned with the new economy.  We implemented a pilot Microsoft Certification program in a local high school in an attempt to provide industry certification for the students.  This particular school was struggling and had a large student population that lived in poverty.  In the first year of the program, we found that many of the most challenged students gravitated to this program.  In a short 7 month period, one business education teacher had his students earn over 175 Microsoft Office certifications.  And these certifications were earned by the most challenging and needy students.

In an attempt to expand the pilot both internally in the school and to other schools in Pittsburgh, we made a proposal to the principal and the district Director of Vocational Education.  We would supply computers, training and support for this program at no cost to the district through a state Link to Learn grant.  We told the principal and director that they could take all the credit for the program.  It would be run out of their departments.  We were turned down.

"Some of our teachers are too old to learn this new technology... we need to wait till they retire."

"It is not your job to tell the Voc Ed department how we should run our program."

Can you imagine?  A successful program that empowered at-risk high school students and provided them with industry standard certifications.  Yet issues of change, power and turf all took precedence to the needs of the children.   My colleague and I were astonished.  After 25 years in public education, we realized that the system, the bureaucracy was broken; it had lost its ability to evolve, to meet the needs of its students, to align itself with a new world.

We decided to design a high school for the 21st century and approached a local foundation. Believe it or not, they agreed to provide a grant for a planning year and the start up of the school.  During the planning year we approached the Superintendent, Asst. Superintendent, a local high school and the union to partner on the project.  They all turned us away.  Who did we think we were trying to develop a new model for high schools?  Clearly, we had stepped out of line.  At any other time or place, we would have been stymied.  But in 1997 Pennsylvania adopted a charter school law that was created to allow for new models of public education.

In 2002, we co-founded a model charter high school in Pittsburgh PA.  City Charter High School was designed from the ground up to act as a pump for ALL students. The SCANS report drove the mission of the school.  The school works with over 600 students from the urban core - 65% live in poverty, 14% have special needs, 75% from single parent families, 59% students of color, 6% homeless.  Over 95% of the students graduate, 85% go to college, all have at least 4 Microsoft certifications, all complete a 130 hour internship at a local company and the success rate for those students who attend college is over 20% higher than the national average.

After 25 years as a math teacher, supervisor and coordinator, it was a sad day in my life when I left the Pittsburgh School District in order to develop a conceptually new high school.  I tell this anecdote for two reasons.  The first is to demonstrate the quagmire our current educational institutions are in. The second to suggest that there exist successful models for quality schools both in Pittsburgh and the United States.

We know how quality 21st century high schools look.  We understand the pedagogy, the curriculum, the structure, the culture necessary to prepare our students for the new economy.  My next few blog posts will present this new model of education.  These new ideas are based on 12 years of proof of concept at both City High and quality high schools around the nation.  

The problem is not what should we do... the problem is how do we get school districts to do it.  How do we change the culture?  How do we get schools to act as a pump for all students?

* The background for this post and for the development of City Charter High School, is based on the SCANS report.  WHAT WORK REQUIRES OF SCHOOLS: A SCANS REPORT FOR AMERICA 2000, THE SECRETARY'S COMMISSION ON ACHIEVING NECESSARY SKILLS, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF LABOR, JUNE 1991