School Reform Transcends Budget Woes

Hard times and tight budgets may have slowed education reform, but they haven’t stopped it.

The movement that was launched in the mid-’80s has forced educators everywhere to fundamentally reassess what they were teaching, and how.

That reassessment continues today. Money is scarce, but that hasn’t stopped people from thinking about how to do things better. And so it is that a grand and intriguing vision for California public high schools has taken shape in a recent report from the California Department of Education.

“Second to None: A Vision of the New California High School” proposes specific improvements to be made in six areas: curriculum, teaching methods, assessment of students’ learning, teacher and staff roles, school organization, and support services for students with special needs.

The area that affects students and parents most directly is curriculum--specifically, the course of study that each student in grades nine through 12 will take.

Everyone would still study traditional “solids,” including English, math, science, and history/social studies, but the sequence would be organized, taught and studied differently.

For starters, the courses would be more rigorous.

They also would be taught with a more interdisciplinary approach. For example, math and science might be presented as a single block by a team containing a teacher from each subject. Such an arrangement would help students see connections and patterns across subjects.

Interdisciplinary courses could connect not only academic subjects, but also an academic with a vocational subject--geometry and carpentry, for example.

The nature of learning activities would change too. What students do in each course would be much more project-oriented. Assignments would demonstrate real-world uses of what is being learned.

There would be more encouragement to put qualified students into honors courses, especially students from backgrounds that are historically underrepresented in advanced classes.

In addition, all students would be encouraged to apply to a four-year college or university.

Putting students into clusters or small groups would become standard practice, and teachers would work in small teams too. A typical team may consist of teachers of math, English and science, for example.

Teaming up allows teachers to share their expertise and successful techniques, and to intertwine their subjects. It also lets them rearrange a day’s schedule for field trips, experiments, presentations and other endeavors that don’t fit neatly into 50-minute segments.

One benefit of clustering teachers and students this way would be a deepened rapport among all involved. The students feel that they’re known and belong. That does wonders for attendance, among other things.

Community members would also be encouraged to join these clusters, acting as mentors and as real-world connections to the specific area of study.

The most interesting part of the “Second to None” vision is, I think, the proposition that each high school student choose a major in his or her last two years, just as college students must.

Eleventh- and 12th-graders would continue studying solids, but they would also focus on an area of special interest. Some program majors would be career-oriented (health, computer science and engineering, for example), others might be more academic in nature.

In some cases, an entire school could focus on a specific field, in much the way that magnet schools do now.

A school might offer any number of program majors, and students could cross school and even district boundaries to attend the programs they like.

With so many options, it would be easy for a child to get confused about which to pursue. That’s why each student would work with parents and staff to develop a specific plan in ninth grade.

Naturally the plan would be flexible, since young people are known for quickly changing their life goals (in ninth grade I wanted to be a nun; in 10th, a bomber pilot). Accordingly, the staff would meet often with students to recognize and compensate for changes in their goals and interests.

Some people must wonder, as I did, who will pay for these changes.

According to the report, most of the needed money will come from “investment--both a better use of current funding and additional funding.” More than likely, that means funding from private donors, businesses, and special state bills and grants.

Realistically, unless the economy improves in a way that frees significantly more money for public education, many of the things that cost money will have to wait.

But some of the biggest and most crucial changes--forming clusters, trying new teaching and assessment methods, forming partnerships with businesses--can be done for almost nothing.

In fact, many of California’s public high schools, of which there are about 800, are already implementing significant portions of the “Second to None” changes.