A
21st Century Student Article of Vision
Achievement alone is the proper standard for 21st century education.
By Denis P. Doyle / L.A. Times
Originally posted April
26, 2004
Denis P. Doyle was a member of the National
Commission on Time and Learning. He is vice chairman of a company that makes
Web-based products to advance education reform.
Supporters and opponents of social promotion are fighting last century’s war.
Grouping students by age and advancing them in lock step is an artifact of the
agrarian calendar and factory
model of schooling that emerged in the late 19th century. That it is still
with us is a commentary on just how conservative schooling is. If the school
clock and calendar once made sense, they no longer do.
Precisely.
I made the same point in this
article on social promotion:
Yes, we all know that social promotion is more for the benefit of teachers
than students. Who wants to fight with parents? Who wants to hold a student
back? Social promotion is an example of system needs trumping student needs.
Schools that educate The 21st Century Student don’t have to worry about which
grade to put students in. Every student always works at the level appropriate
to his or her knowledge and skills. Socially, every student remains with his
or her own cohort, though academically students may span several cohorts
simultaneously.
See, also, UTAH
BOARD PROPOSES THAT STUDENT ADVANCEMENT BE BASED ON COMPETENCY RATHER THAN SEAT
TIME.
It is time to rethink the organization we call school, and with it the very idea
of social promotion. (As onetime teachers union head Al Shanker said, if "a
quarter of the products don’t work when they reach the end of the assembly line,
and a quarter fall off before they get there, it’s time for a new
metaphor.")
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As every parent and teacher knows, children’s developmental trajectories vary
widely, and the notion of grouping children by age is a convention without
meaning. Indeed, in the example of social promotion is it actively harmful.
The child who is held back feels diminished and unsuccessful, but the child
promoted beyond his ability is sure to be more frustrated than ever. Both sides
of the social promotion debate are losers because they take for granted the
antique process of age grouping.
As it is, a full chronological year separates the youngest from the oldest
student in each grade, and the developmental difference is often much greater.
Nothing is more frustrating to both teachers and students than trying to bridge
a huge achievement gap within a single classroom.
The solution is genuinely performance-based instructional grouping, a format
that schools must master in the 21st century. In performance-based schools,
students would be held to high academic standards and would work to achieve them
for as long — or as little time — as it took. Indeed, that is the de facto
model in high school and college. A student takes Spanish 1 until it’s mastered,
then moves on to Spanish 2.
At a more humdrum but no less important level is how most of us master lifetime
sports like golf, skiing, tennis and running. We work at it till we get it, and
age is only the roughest proxy for achievement. In my last ski-school class,
ages ranged from 24 to 63.
In 1993, Pat Graham, former Harvard Graduate School of Education dean, told the
National Commission on Time and Learning that for more than a century "time
was the constant, learning the variable; in the future we must hold learning
high and constant and make time the flexible variable." It is time to make
this vision a reality.
The elementary schools of Beaufort, S.C., are an example of successful multi-age
grouping at work; there, students are held to the same high standards, but
instruction is organized by achievement level.
Holding a child back at the end of a grade is painful if the school experience
is defined in terms of age grouping; if it is defined in terms of performance
measures, students can blend social groups across academic lines, just as older
and younger siblings do.
The opportunity and the challenge lie in finding ways to permit tracking student
performance in real time.
Unlike end-of-course tests, real-time tracking would allow the teacher to
intervene when the intervention can work, and the student to learn before
falling dangerously behind.
There is no more certain evidence than the social promotion debate that we are
still prisoners of time. Breaking out of that prison is the promise of
performance-based schools.
Denis
gets most of this right. What he isn’t saying, and maybe doesn’t see, is that
grouping students by performance-based instructional grouping is still grouping.
It still suffers from the fallacy of trying to advance students together in
lock-step. Mostly, Denis is simply proposing to reduce the variability of
learning levels and learning rates within classrooms. While that would be an
improvement, it simply isn’t adequate for giving every student the opportunity
to make the most of his/her time in school. We have to convert to individualized,
computer-aided instruction for the courses and students where it makes
sense.