School Is Good

Tired of rhetoric that we need to tear down the system or reinvent schools or whatever

I've been working on my Spanish skills over the last year. I do a few different things — I use ChatGPT to quiz me on different verb tenses or give me sentences to translate. I listen to podcasts, translating the transcript and then listening to improve my ear. I use a flashcard app to improve my vocabulary. Many of my students speak Spanish so I pick up words and phrases here and there. I’ve enjoyed making progress but it's often hard to sustain my momentum. I'll have a streak where I spend a few minutes each day working on my skills, followed by weeks where I won't do any work.

You know what would help me make better progress? If I had someone who both knew Spanish and had some experience helping beginners like me. They could give me different activities to improve my skills, better activities for my skill level than the ones I choose for myself. They could give me feedback and help me past places where I find myself stuck. They could motivate me and hold me accountable on days when I don't want to put the work in. Of course it would be expensive to hire someone to teach me. It would be more reasonable if I found a bunch of other people around my general skill level, and we could all meet up in a room at the same time to make things more efficient. I don't need help every moment so joining forces seems like a good use of resources. Having the camaraderie of a group would be more motivating than trying to get myself to work on my flashcards alone. There'd be inefficiencies, sure, no learning situation will ever be perfect. The accountability of showing up somewhere for an hour at a time, seeing everyone else working toward the same goal, and having someone to support us would help me make more progress than I would on my own.

You might see where I'm going with this. I more or less just invented teachers and subjects and classrooms and school. Those are pretty great inventions! Some people love to deride the factory model of education or how schools are antiquated or whatever. I think most of that rhetoric is garbage. I'm not saying schools are perfect. There are all sorts of tradeoffs and compromises we make while trying to educate the next generation. Some students who struggle in traditional schools and deserve a different environment. School can be boring. Kids can be cruel. It’s not always sunshine and rainbows. But I think school is the best idea we have. None of the big criticisms people make of education land for me.

• Schools are one-size-fits-all factories that treat students interchangeably? I don’t know of any better way to divide students up into classrooms than by age, and despite incredible advances in technology personalized learning has failed to live up to the hype over and over again.

• Schools teach conformity and turn people into sheep? People who say stuff like that should spend more time in schools. My students are not docile sheep. Sure, we have plenty of rules, but we have to deal with the practicalities of keeping all these kids safe every day.

• Schools are teaching antiquated knowledge in the silos of traditional subjects? Yes, it’s hard to know what our current students will need to know in five or ten years, but a good place to start is the knowledge that has been valuable for hundreds of years. I don’t know a better way of recruiting a few million teachers than having some division of subjects so teachers can master the content they need to teach.

• Schools don’t let students pursue their own interests? Two things. First, how much time have you spent asking kids what they would like to learn if they had the choice? Some have interesting, creative ideas, but many don’t, especially below high school. We lay the foundation — and most high schools have a lot of options for students to pursue and have grown those options or built partnerships with community colleges in recent years to expand students’ horizons.

It’s like that saying about democracy: school is the worst way of doing education that we’ve ever invented, except for all the others. I’m talking about the idea of school here. I realize that the reality often falls short of what we want our schools to be. Schools overreact to safety issues with draconian restrictions on students. Teachers have a bad day and lash out at students. Some teachers become jaded or burnt out and don’t offer the support students deserve. Schools focus too much on test scores because of pressure from above. Special education is too focused on paperwork and not enough on helping special ed students find success. Technology means it can be easier to shove a student on a computer than to actually teach them and make sure they’re learning. All of those and more are serious problems. But the solution to those problems isn’t to reinvent school, it’s to create a place where the best parts of school can function as they’re supposed to.

I recently read Tinkering Toward Utopia, an excellent history of reforms in the school system. The authors describe what they call the “grammar of schooling” — the basic blueprint that we have of what schools look like. Despite a century of ambitious reforms, there’s this gravity that pulls us back toward the same basic model of schools. Even many schools that were at the forefront of well-received reforms of the past have reverted toward the grammar of schooling. I think the reason the grammar of schooling exists is because that basic blueprint works better than anything else we’ve come up with.

Why is this worth writing about? I’ve seen more and more rhetoric that schools are antiquated, broken, and ineffective, and everyone’s solution seems to involve inventing something new. No one wants to say, “hey, school works great when we execute the details well and we aren’t recovering from the disruptions of a pandemic. Let’s not blow everything up, let’s put our effort into supporting teachers with the nitty gritty details of everyday teaching and learning.” That won’t get any applause at the State of the Union or a foundation fundraiser, but that’s what I think schools need. We don’t need radical change. The change we need is to commit to doing all the little things well. Sure, schools will evolve. But the basic components of age-graded classrooms, subjects, and the school day work just fine. Let’s keep that at the core of education. Maybe that is radical, to stop putting time and energy into inventing something new and to try to get better at everyday classroom teaching.