Last week, the Obama Administration announced the offer of $375 million to support what it calls “Next Generation” high schools in an effort to improve graduation rates and career and college readiness (with a distinct emphasis on STEM as the be-all, end-all solution).

I am not anti-STEM, but I do not believe that preparing students for STEM careers ought to be the sole valued purpose for school redesign. As I read the press releases and fact sheets, I also see repeated references to innovation. Paired in the right sentence, “high school redesign” and “innovation” are truly exciting. However, if the word “innovation” is intended to mean “more STEM,” then I don’t think we’re heading down the right path. Adding more science and math is not a bad thing, but it certainly doesn’t amount to innovative redesign. If we are going to truly redesign what high school looks like, we need to do more than revise the course catalog or offer more internships in the community (also a major theme in the redesign literature released last week, also not a bad thing, but also not really a realistic “innovation” for all communities and all students).

Ultimately, adopting new standards, offering new classes or internships, layering on teacher accountability measures, or mandating exit assessments will not broadly result in school reform until we address the one resource that no school reform movement has meaningfully addressed: time.

By this I do not mean adding more time to the day or even the school year. I mean that we need to utterly rehaul how we structure the time both teachers and students spend at school. And by how we structure time I also mean whether we structure time.

The typical high school applies a regimen through which students are passed each day: 55 minutes of English, 55 minutes of math, and so on, with content neatly compartmentalized and as many as six or more distinctly different foci which a student must shift attention to and from among in a given day. In all our talk about how schools are failing to prepare students for life beyond high school, the prospect of changing what the school day looks like has only taken hold in a small segment of (typically affluent or externally supplementally funded) public schools. If we turn an honest eye on the typical public high school, we’re going to see a tremendous amount of impermanent of decontextualized learning. Kids learn for the assessment, show what is learned, and then move on (checking the appropriate box to indicate completion).

In a recent Washington Post “Answer Sheet” column curated by Valerie Strauss and written by venture capitalist Ted Dintersmith, the author describes an experiment conducted at one of America’s supposed “best schools,” Lawrenceville, a boarding school in New Jersey:

After summer vacation, returning students retook the final exams they had completed in June for their science courses. Actually, they retook simplified versions of these exams, after faculty removed low-level “forgettable” questions. The results were stunning. The average grade in June was a B+ (87 percent). When the simplified test was taken in September, the average grade plummeted to an F (58 percent). Not one student retained mastery of all key concepts they appear to have learned in June. The obvious question: if what was “learned” vanishes so quickly, was anything learned in the first place? (Source)

Clearly, this quickfade is what the concept of “enduring understandings” strives to address: what should students learn that they will take with them when the minutiae and the Google-ables dissolve away? In a school model where a bell literally tells a student to leave English behind and change gears for math, we should not be surprised that new learning is so quickly abandoned by students. That is precisely what we train them to do every single day…at the ringing of a bell, no less. Pavlovian conditioning writ large.

Thus, when we rigidly structure time, the learning we impart is literally designed to be decontextualized and impermanent.

There is tremendous risk associated with turning control of time over to teachers and students. Think of all the teachers in high schools who default to direct instruction or rigidly regimented activities when students are permitted to work during class. Turning the control of time over to students, and to teachers for that matter, brings with it the fear that this time may be squandered or misused. An out-of-control class is used as justification for “just lecturing and keeping them in their seats,”just as an errant employee is used as justification for blanket policies that seek to mandate and control teacher time. Both situations suffocate the innovation that is most needed for schools to improve.

What is the solution? Aside from a complete, ground-up redesign (likely impossible given the institutional inertia of public schools), there are changes within the system which I think could have power:

1. Change what a high school teacher’s time looks like. Prioritize collaboration, preparation, assessment, and lesson design to occur during the work day. If I’m dreaming, I’d even call for 50/50 time allocation: 50% of a teacher’s time is student contact, 50% is the other mountain of work involved with designing and implementing quality instruction with students. Further, do not link that teacher preparation and collaboration time to forms, reporting, or check-off-ables. Empower teachers to be collaborative learning designers and the accountability will be in the observation of the students in their charge.
2. For high school students, create interdisciplinary experiences that overflow traditional content boundaries. Call it Project Based Learning. Call it Content Integration. Regardless of what it is called, the premise that content and skills are synthesized across currently-isolated silos of think-work is the key. To make this happen, we have to rethink how teachers do their work (see item #1 above). And a big caveat: Even though I talk above about kids moving from one silo to another at the ringing of the bell, the bell is not the problem. Eliminating “bells” is not a solution… but one more example of a simple attempt at solving a complex problem.
3. Rethink accountability. One of the most successful assessments I designed (back when I taught 10th grade English) was as simple as this: I handed my students the list of standards and they had to compile a portfolio work that demonstrated their proficiency at each standard. They had to defend their work, their reasoning, and their progress. Granted, this only worked in June because we had been doing that same thinking all year through formative experiences; we’d deconstructed the standards, explicitly connected them to the work we were doing, and explored success criteria for performance of each standard. The accountability shift, though, put the burden of proof on the kids…and they were candid and accurate in their evaluation of their own skills with regard to the standards. Importantly, this open-ended design permitted diverse means by which students might demonstrate their accomplishment of standards rather than me as teacher fishing for the one way that matched a narrow assessment design. If teachers are given more time in their work day to collaboratively design and assess this kind of performance (again, see #1 above), the impulse toward scantronable, lower-cognitive-demand and narrowly-focused standardized tests will be easier to avoid.

In short: current school reforms are reforming the wrong things. New standards or new tests, new teacher “accountability” systems or new instructional frameworks, new curricula or new edtech toys: None of these are not the answer. Perhaps the thing that has remained the same despite all these changes is the thing we need to finally give attention to.