As Jal Mehta correctly observes in his essay for Kappan’s Possible Futures series, most of the challenges that face our public schools aren’t of any one person’s making. Nor are they the fault of the people who work in schools today. Rather, they result from design choices made long ago for a different age, leaving us with “the grammar of schooling” that remains with us today. It’s no coincidence that students start kindergarten fascinated by schooling and become bored and disengaged by the time they reach high school; that’s the logical outgrowth of how our school system was built.
It’s a design that succeeded, in some ways and for some students, for decades. In his response, David Labaree notes that the grammar of schooling seeks “to maintain a balance between two compelling concerns: to structure schooling around widely accepted social goals and to do so in a way that is organizationally manageable for school systems, students, and families.”
And from a historical perspective, Labaree is right to say that the grammar of schooling played an important role by allowing for the efficient administration of schools. Sorting students into grades by age, tracking students into fixed groups based on point-in-time checks of ability, and assuming that each group would progress at the same rate were reasonable sacrifices to make in the industrial era, when teacher-delivered content was the dominant method of instruction. It helped turn school into a game with clear rules that could be “more reliably won,” as Labaree writes.
But in today’s knowledge economy — which prizes intellectual capital, and which works best when all individuals build their passions and develop their full human potential — this sorting system no longer suffices. Nor is that system necessary any longer, given that today’s technology allows us to personalize learning in unprecedented ways by enabling schools to reject the old tradeoff between learning and social promotion.
As I argue in my forthcoming book, From Reopen to Reinvent, today’s school system continues to reflect a zero-sum view of the world, in which it’s assumed that resources are scarce and for every winner there must be a loser. The result is that by age 18, with most of their lives still ahead of them, the vast majority of students have already been told that they rank “below” the top, and they‘ve already been labeled as “not good enough” for certain pathways.
That’s devastating not only for individual students but for all of us. Zero-sum thinking causes our schools to overlook, and fail to develop, enormous amounts of talent. Further, outside of public education, this scarcity mindset is fast-becoming an anomaly. In many other fields (and in capitalism itself, when it functions properly), people have come to embrace the benefits of a positive-sum system, which holds that when individuals achieve success, the pie grows larger for all of us. Rather than competing to be the best, and to take all the spoils, individuals can strive to make a unique contribution to the whole — and that, as Todd Rose, author of The End of Average, explains, “translates into much higher life satisfaction” for many more of us.
Competition has its benefits. But when we insist that everybody has to compete for the same prize, and when we insist on ranking and valuing everybody based on a single standard of success, competition becomes destructive. It also leads us to declare prematurely — when the players are still in their teens — that the game is over, and that the winners and losers have already been determined.
We ought to view schooling not as a game to be “won” but as an effort to help individuals thrive and be productive in their own ways. In reality, adult life isn’t a race run on a single track with everybody trying to claw and elbow their way to the front of the pack. And the truth is that while our schools assign so much importance to narrowly defined measures of progress, those scores and rankings turn out to matter far less once we begin our careers and branch out among our various pathways.
To move our schools away from their archaic zero-sum mindset, we should begin by letting go of our rigid age- and time-based system — in which students move on, in lockstep formation, to the next concept, unit, and grade regardless of how hard they’ve worked or how much they’ve learned — to a mastery-based learning model in which time is flexible and learning is non-negotiable.
Such a system will satisfy the demand that, as Labaree puts it, the rules of the game be transparent to all of the players. But it will no longer be a zero-sum game. Although it will be clear what needs to be learned in order to graduate, students will be able to get there through many pathways and on many schedules, based on their changing interests and their developing mastery. Inevitably, some will stumble along the way, and that’s fine because failure is an integral part of the learning process. They can try again, stay at a task, learn from their mistakes, and press on to succeed.
Rather than being forced to compare and sort students, teachers will be expected to value them as individuals and provide them whatever support they need as they move forward along their pathway.
Until schools shift to a positive-sum system, in which the goal is help every student reach mastery — rather than completing a set amount of seat time — it won’t be possible to realize Mehta’s vision of a new social contract that prioritizes every child’s success.
This article is an invited response to “Toward a new grammar of schooling” by Jal Mehta, part of Kappan‘s Reimagining American Education: Possible Futures series, sponsored by the Spencer Foundation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael B. Horn
Michael B. Horn is a senior strategist at Guild Education and a distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation.
