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We are at a hinge moment in the history of our schools. A 120-year-old industrial structure is radically ill-equipped for the challenges posed by the COVID pandemic, much less what has been called the triple pandemic of COVID, racism and economic inequality, and fundamental threats to our democracy. We have been trying to carry on as usual, but it isn’t working. Mental health crises among students are way up, as are disciplinary referrals, and teachers are now fleeing the profession in large numbers. And these are just surface-level symptoms of much deeper underlying problems. Our present situation calls for flexibility, relationship-building, and deep engagement with the broader world, but our school systems are bureaucratic, transactional, and insular. The problem is not the people — teachers are working heroically, and students are persevering under highly adverse circumstances. The problem is that they are working within a structure that is working against them.

There is a better way. After nearly two decades of attempts to standardize schools, education leaders across the United States are coming to recognize the limits of Newtonian command-and-control models of school reform and becoming increasingly aware of the need to embrace a more complex, humane, and diverse future. Movements for equity and social justice have shaken foundational assumptions about the nature of our schools and pushed us to rethink many of our familiar policies and practices. The sciences of learning have become much more interdisciplinary, offering richer portraits of who our students are, how they construct knowledge, and how cultural and social experiences shape their understandings. And, finally, we now have many models that show us what new and better forms of education can look like in practice, as youth development organizations, schools, and districts adopt more forward-looking visions of teaching and learning. No doubt, progress will be patchy, more evolution than revolution. But we can already glimpse what the future of schooling might look like.

Why a new grammar?

In 1994, David Tyack, William Tobin, and Larry Cuban (Tyack & Cuban, 1995) coined the term “the grammar of schooling” to describe the almost invisible architecture that organizes much of what goes on in education. Among these elements are the separation of classes by academic discipline, age-graded classrooms (and the “batch processing” of student cohorts), teaching as transmission, leveling and tracking, and schooling as a mechanism for sorting students by perceived ability. This grammar reinforces the dominant culture, excludes the perspectives of non-dominant groups, and serves as a means of reproducing social inequalities from one generation to the next.

No doubt, progress will be patchy, more evolution than revolution. But we can already glimpse what the future of schooling might look like.

This grammar was designed more for efficiency and control than for learning or liberation. It is congruent with the Taylorist management philosophy emphasizing standardization that also was born at the beginning of the 20th century. The system was grounded in a gendered division of labor — equipped with the latest ideas in organizational management, a small number of male superintendents could oversee a much larger group of (mostly) female teachers, who would handle the lowly work of pedagogy. It also reinforced dominant racial hierarchies, as it asked everyone who was not white and privileged to accommodate themselves to middle-class white norms. Angela Valenzuela (2010), who studied Mexican American students in Texas, described this process as “subtractive schooling,” in that it required students to shed their heritage to participate in school.

If the future of preK-12 education is going to be significantly better than the past, then we need to replace this entrenched grammar of schooling with an approach that values teaching and learning more than control, liberation more than colonization, sustainable approaches more than quick fixes, and human relationships more than bureaucratic rules.

What might be the foundational pillars of a new approach? I suggest three: 1) learners whose agency is respected, whose diversity is embraced, whose selves are deeply known, whose joy is cultivated, and whose holistic growth is the paramount concern; 2) learning that is purposeful, authentic, and connected to the broader human domains of which those learners are part; 3) learning communities that enable deep relationships, cultivate democratic values and dispositions, and model the kind of society and environment we want to create.

For learners: A new social contract

The existing social contract we have with students reflects the early 20th century context in which it was born. Students are conscripted into school from ages 5 to 16. They learn what we say, when we say it. Teachers dispense pre-formulated knowledge and ask questions to which they already know the answers. Students are rewarded for following directions, giving right answers, and not talking back. Students who don’t fit the norm — because they are too slow, too fast, don’t speak the dominant language, or resist teacher authority — are defined as problems to be fixed. And while more advantaged students may experience a kinder and gentler version of this model, the core emphasis on adult authority, pre-determined content, and batch-processing remains in place for them, too.

We need a different social contract grounded in the idea that children are curious, capable, interested people, whose personhood needs to be respected and whose interests can be stimulated. Such a contract must start with giving students a clear purpose for their learning, moving from what they are learning to why. Purposes come in many shapes, and developing one is a critical starting point for any journey of consequential learning.

Second, this new social contract must give students a considerable amount of choice and agency over their learning. Choice and agency not only support the personal autonomy of the learner but also make it much more likely that learners will find a meaningful purpose in their learning.

Third, we must embrace the diversity of learners. People come in all shapes and sizes, with different interests, goals, strengths, weaknesses, cultural backgrounds, and much more. As Todd Rose (2016) says, there is no such thing as an average human being. We are all “lumpy” in different ways — schools need to respond to these differences rather than seek to suppress them.

And fourth, we must make students feel known, respected, and loved within their communities.

This very different social contract is both desirable and possible. We already have many examples of what it could look like. Montessori schools give even the youngest children considerable choice and agency over their learning; they also use cross-age grouping to create opportunities for peer learning. Reggio Emilia schools combine a stable philosophy with an emergent curriculum, giving teachers flexibility to adapt to the interests of different groups of learners. Clubs, electives, and extracurriculars embody this alternate grammar, enabling students to explore their interests, demonstrate leadership, participate in authentic work, and learn from peers. International Baccalaureate programs move away from multiple-choice tests, giving students some say over what they study and evaluating their work against rubrics that assess disciplinary thinking skills rather than content knowledge. Some private high schools have moved away from Advanced Placement courses and seven-period days in favor of longer blocks, deeper immersive experiences, and more authentic demonstrations of learning. Alternative high schools frequently embrace the social and emotional aspects of schooling, using advisories and other structures to build the relationships needed to keep struggling students engaged. Many youth development programs are places where students are known and deeply cared for, see clear purpose in their activities, and are treated like producers rather than recipients of knowledge. All of these models seek to embrace the new core essentials of purpose, agency, diversity, and community.

Right now, most of these approaches exist in what Sarah Fine and I (2019) have called the “periphery” of schooling, rather than the core. They happen for young children, or after school, or for seniors, or at alternative or private schools. What would it take to move this periphery into the core?

For learning: A new grammar of schooling

To realize this new social contract, we would need schools to adopt a different “grammar.” This grammar needs to be much more flexible, porous, and connected than the current grammar.

These changes would make schooling more aligned with learning. In The Book of Learning and Forgetting, Frank Smith (1998) counterposes two theories of learning: the official one, as enacted in school (go over material, study, test, forget, rinse, repeat) and the unofficial one, as enacted in much of life (stimulate interest, try, fail, try again, get feedback, slowly get better). The latter, apprenticeship-based view of learning is how people learn most consequential things in life: It is how we learn to talk, how we learn most jobs, and how we get better in almost all spheres of human activity.

This apprenticeship theory offers a learner-centered view of motivation: The learner wants to learn how to talk, to cook, to defend a client, or to perform a surgery, and that desire motivates what follows. In addition, there is a clear relationship between parts and wholes — the specific skills being learned and the larger enterprise of which they are part. You practice your pirouettes because you want to be able to dance, you practice your layups because you want to score, you revise your sentences because you want your essay to sing. School, by contrast, has lots of parts with disconnected wholes; the decontextualized nature of learning is a critical reason why so many students are disengaged. One of the biggest goals of remaking the grammar of schooling would be to break down those walls and create more fluid connections between individual subjects and the larger domains of which they are part (For an illustration, see Table 1.)

Table 1. From the old grammar of schooling to the new. Purpose Existing grammar of schooling: Assimilate students into the social order New grammar of schooling: Give students agency and purpose; enable them to remake the social order Pedagogical goal Existing grammar of schooling: Assimilate pre-existing knowledge New grammar of schooling: Engage students in using and creating knowledge as producers in a variety of fields and worthy human pursuits Ethos Existing grammar of schooling: Transactional New grammar of schooling: Relational View of knowledge: Existing grammar of schooling: Pre-specified and siloed New grammar of schooling: Constructed, interconnected, and dynamic Boundaries between disciplines Existing grammar of schooling: Strong New grammar of schooling: Permeable Learning modality Existing grammar of schooling: Teaching as transmission New grammar of schooling: Learning through doing; apprenticeship learning Student Choice: Existing grammar of schooling: Limited New grammar of schooling: Open, multiple Time Existing grammar of schooling: Short blocks of fixed length New grammar of schooling: Longer, variable blocks, time for immersive experiences Space Existing grammar of schooling: Individual classrooms New grammar of schooling: Linked spaces, variable spaces Assessment Existing grammar of schooling: Seat time, standardized tests New grammar of schooling: Creation of worthy products in the domain: projects, portfolios, performances, research Groupings of students Existing grammar of schooling: Age-graded cohorts; separation of students by race, class, ability New grammar of schooling: Cross-age learning, integration of students by race, class, ability Equity stance Existing grammar of schooling: Closing gaps on state tests New grammar of schooling: Recognizing, knowing, and loving students and holistically helping them reach their potential Places where students learn Existing grammar of schooling: Schools New grammar of schooling: Various, including schools, community centers, field sites, online Organizational model Existing grammar of schooling: Linear, top-down planning New grammar of schooling: Distributed leadership and emergent change

Relatedly, this new grammar would feature fewer firm boundaries and many more connections. The current grammar is extremely compartmentalized, with students divided into age-graded cohorts, time divided into short blocks, learning divided into subjects, students divided by perceived ability, and schools cordoned off from their communities. A new grammar would bridge these divides, creating connections across subjects, among students, and between schools and the broader world. For example, the Philadelphia Science and Leadership Academy partners with the Franklin Institute, a world-renowned science museum, to have students take “mini-courses” taught by Franklin Institute scholars on a range of scientific topics, as well as use the museum’s enormous resources to do hands-on work in different domains. This makes learning exciting and authentic.

Such a grammar would also be much more flexible. Rather than assuming that everything can be learned in 50-minute periods over a semester, we would fit the time and space to the nature of the learning. Many blocks would be longer to create space for in-depth work. Some courses might be shorter but more immersive — a week for a design sprint, or two weeks for a mock trial featuring real-world attorneys. School would serve as home base, but students could spend time in a variety of other settings. For example, the Illinois Math and Science Academy sends students to college laboratories on Wednesday afternoons, giving them opportunities to work alongside, and gradually become, practicing scientists. Cities such as Pittsburgh have built ecosystems that connect learners with nonprofits, arts organizations, businesses, youth development organizations, and more. In this vision, the use of adults would also become more flexible: While there would continue to be certified teachers, we would take much fuller advantage of the array of adults in our communities who have skills, knowledge, and perspectives to offer to young people. In Cowichan, British Columbia, for example, Indigenous elders are paid as paraprofessionals to help students learn Indigenous knowledge and traditions.

A system with more choice, agency, and flexibility needs an assessment system to match. We may be on our way. After the state-test mania that gripped us during the No Child Left Behind years, there is an increasing awareness that we need a wider variety of ways to assess learning. For instance, a number of colleges, including big state systems like the University of California and high-status privates like Harvard, have moved to make the SAT optional. Assessments should be grounded in the process and performance of work in particular domains and should be used primarily as a tool for inquiry rather than a single summative judgment. Exhibitions allow students to show fellow students, parents, and community stakeholders the value of the work they have been doing in school, and portfolios allow students to curate their work, revise their best pieces, and align the way they are being evaluated with the highest standards in their fields. The Mastery Transcript Consortium allows students to move away from conventional grades and represent their competency levels in various domains in the college admissions process. There is no shortage of possibilities for different forms of assessment; what is needed is the will to subtract existing low-level multiple-choice assessments to make room for these thicker ways of evaluating learning.

This new grammar would also allow for a different and richer perspective on equity. Yes, we should try to equalize academic skills across groups, but we should do so in a way that stimulates students’ interests in learning, gives them increasing levels of choice and agency, and reflects the diversity of cultures and perspectives in the nation and the world. We’ve tried doubling down on the factory model of schooling — double blocks of reading and math, test-and-punish strategies, summer school, remediation — and the record is not pretty. The solution is not more of the same. Further, it is the students who are most disconnected from school, who are least engaged and most disillusioned, who need a different approach — one where they are known, where their background and culture is respected, and, perhaps most important, where they get to do meaningful work on topics that they care about.

For learning communities: A new social commitment

Schools are not just places where students learn knowledge and skills; they are also places where they develop values, dispositions, and ways of relating to one another. Every decision we make in schools implicitly or explicitly communicates a set of values. Right now, while we talk as if schools are places where students learn to think critically, collaborate, communicate, and so forth, in practice what they are learning is that schools are places that value individual advancement through grades and tests. We need to develop different kinds of communities, organized around different values, if schools are going to become the kinds of places we need them to become.

Every decision we make in schools implicitly or explicitly communicates a set of values.

And what do we need them to become? The world is not in a good place right now. Our day-to-day existence and our long-term survival are threatened by climate change; infectious disease; economic and racial inequality; and, most of all, our inability to work together as local, national, and global communities to constructively address our problems. As the scholar George Counts (1932) argued during the societal upheaval of the Great Depression, some moments call upon us to challenge our fundamental assumptions about the purposes of education — rather, than expecting our schools to prepare students to fit the social order, we should ask our schools to remake that order. We find ourselves in a similar moment today.

To remake the social order will take a commitment to stewardship — that is, a commitment to take care of something important with which we have been entrusted. In so many ways, we are failing at stewardship today. We are not taking care of our environment, our democracy, or our fellow humans during a pandemic. But we must not only restore what has been lost, but also move forward in ways that build a more equitable, humane, and sustainable world than the one we have inherited.

Schools can help foster this ethic in ways large and small. For example, a school that features authentic, collaborative work more than competition for grades is better suited to supporting these values. When students work with peers, as co-apprentices in a field of interest, they learn implicit lessons about the benefits of mutual help and care, rather than the cutthroat pursuit of individual advancement. Such a commitment is visible in a school like Latitude High in Oakland, California, which treats the Bay Area as its extended classroom, sending students out to investigate social issues like housing affordability and homelessness, and to record a podcast, Oaklore, that describes what they learn. Projects like this bridge the boundaries between schools and their surrounding communities, and they position students as a team of learners and, potentially, change-makers. When schools take seriously the concerns of students, involve them in decision making, and help them understand differing perspectives, they are modeling the democratic virtues that our world so sorely needs.

Schools are not just where we communicate academic content; they are where we raise our young people. Our current grammar of schooling inhibits much of what we want for those young people. Why not create a new structure that is consistent with our highest aspirations?

 

Note: This series is supported, in part, by the Spencer Foundation.

 

References

Counts, G. (1932). Dare the schools build a new social order? John Day Company.

Mehta, J. & Fine, S. (2019). In search of deeper learning: The quest to remake the American high school. Harvard University Press.

Rose, T. (2016). The end of average. Harper Collins.

Smith, F. (1998). The book of learning and forgetting. Teachers College Press.

Tyack, D.B. & Cuban, L. (1984, 1995). Tinkering toward utopia: A century of public school reform. Harvard University Press.

Valenzuela, A. (2010). Subtractive schooling: U.S.-Mexican youth and the politics of caring. Suny Press.


This article appears in the February 2022 issue of Kappan, Vol. 103, No. 5, pp. 54-57.


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We are moving into a post-reform era in American education. If the future of preK-12 education is going to be significantly different than the past, we need to replace the current grammar and structure of schooling with approaches that value expanded conceptions of teaching and learning, authentic student engagement, sustainable approaches and human relationships. Join us for a conversation exploring the opportunities and challenges of this shift with Gwynn Hughes of The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang of University of Southern California, Dr. Jal Mehta of Harvard Graduate School of Education and Saskia Levy Thompson of Carnegie Corporation of Newy York; moderated by Dr. Joshua Starr of PDK International.

About the video series: The Spencer Foundation has teamed up with Phi Delta Kappan to publish a series of thought pieces about the kinds of schools and learning opportunities it may be possible to create in the coming decades. Grantmakers for Education is organizing a series of conversations for its members around the themes being explored and implications for grantmaking. Join funders, researchers, educators, students and advocates in exploring what may be possible.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Jal Mehta

JAL MEHTA is a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His most recent book, with Sarah Fine, is In Search of Deeper Learning: The Quest to Remake the American High School .