The ‘Factory School’ Should be Retired

Polls indicate that improving education is the No. 1 issue among California voters. In response, the two leading gubernatorial candidates eagerly push their school-reform proposals. Experts promote their own ideas about how to augment student achievement, including ending social promotion, which is now California law.

Still, something is missing in the debate. High performance expectations are not controversial, since most people support them. Vouchers, once rejected by California voters, are controversial, but the public seems ready to reconsider them in the face of falling student performance. Yet, even if the whole range of existing proposals were enacted, the problem with California’s schools would not be solved: Although student performance, on average, may improve, graduates will not have learned the skills necessary to get a job in a high-tech, postindustrial society.

What’s needed is a plan to design one or more 21st-century schools capable of producing both academic excellence and performance equity. Then, the challenge would be to transform California’s existing “factory schools,” public and private, into 21st-century schools.

The factory school was designed to meet the education needs of the old industrial society, in which most jobs were unskilled and semiskilled and less than 10% of high school graduates went to college. It divided students up and assigned them to one of three tracks--college prep, business or industrial--on the basis of who learned first and fastest.

The factory school is chiefly characterized by a seven-period day; self-contained, same-age classes; teacher-directed lessons; a 40-week, textbook-driven learning pace; a one-size-fits-all, time-limited instructional approach; and final grades. As such, it does not incorporate a major principle of learning: Children do not acquire skills and concepts at the same rate, and learning these skills and concepts often requires different types of instruction and practice time. The factory school, by accepting and advancing students with underdeveloped skills and concepts, produces underachievement.

Students begin failing in the early grades when they do not become proficient readers. This has profound consequences, because after the second grade, reading skill becomes a major determinant of student success.

Still, the factory-school system worked quite well when assessed by the needs it once served. By mid-century, it produced the world’s best-educated work force. But it was designed to turn out only a limited number of highly skilled graduates. Consequently, as more and more students went on to college, the number of entering freshmen with weak reading and writing skills and inadequately developed academic concepts rose. Today, more than one-half of high school graduates who attend college are inadequately prepared for the tasks ahead.

What skills do students need to acquire in order to function in the postindustrial society? How would the 21st-century school accomplish this goal?

Life and work in the emerging age of global technology requires that virtually every student become a proficient observer, listener, reader, writer and speaker. They should be able to find, categorize and analyze data; establish and use evaluation criteria; design and manage projects; be effective team players; and skillfully use computers for a variety of purposes. Mastery of these skills produces higher-achieving students. Thus, the skills required for life and work are the same as the skills required to achieve higher school performance.

How would a 21st-century school promote the acquisition of these capabilities?

First, it would be open 12 hours a day, six days a week, throughout the calendar year. Most students would attend 200 or more days of school (compared with 180 today). Children would be welcomed with whatever language, skill and conceptual facility they bring with them. School would start for children at age 3 and continue until the student completes, usually by age 17, a program that exceeds, in scope and depth, the existing college-preparation curriculum.

Second, faculty would work as a team. A multiaged group of children would be assigned, for an extended number of years, to a team of a dozen or more teachers who would be jointly responsible for their success, academic achievement, emotional health and character development. A key element of the 21st-century school is a partnership with each child. As each child grows and develops, acquiring new skills and capabilities, he or she can become responsible for managing his or her own project-based education and working, independently, with other children.

The school curriculum would specify the skills, concepts, academic content, personal traits and application capabilities each student must acquire and master to graduate. There would be no age-based grades.

Thus, the hallmarks of the 21st-century school would be: faculty working as a team, rather than individually, with students; faculty, not teacher, development of instructional programs; and lessons geared to a child’s individual skill and concept level rather than to some arbitrary norm used in textbooks.

It is indeed a long step from the factory school to the 21st-century school. Yet, it is a step that California desperately needs to take if its schools are going to graduate students capable of working and living in a postindustrial society. Achievement of universal student mastery, not acceptance of underachieving students, should be the goal of education.*