Close your eyes and imagine "high school." Having tried this out face to face with various audiences, I'm willing to bet that even though you come from diverse groups and from different parts of the country, the overwhelming majority of you imagined the same school.
You imagined a big building with long halls off of which open rows of identical classrooms that hold 20-40 students. The classrooms have chairs arranged in rows facing the blackboard in front of which is a teacher. The day you imagined is seven hours long and is divided into periods of 40-50 minutes that correspond to different subjects like English or math. You imagined the same courses in the same sequence and mostly the same kinds of texts and tests. You saw yourself moving as a group at designated times to meet five to seven individual teachers a day, one per period or subject, five days a week at the same time and place for a semester or a year. You imagined either "good" or "bad" teachers, but in either case you saw them doing the same thing: putting aims on the blackboard, lecturing, overseeing your recitations, discussion and seatwork and assigning and returning your homework. The list could go on ...
If you all more or less imagined the same high school, it's because even though we have more than 15,000 school districts and no national system of education, our high schools were and are astonishingly similar, except for major and consequential differences in wealth and student-body composition. (Close your eyes and image "elementary school," and the results of that exercise would be more varied but still uncannily similar.) One result of almost 200 years of experience with the same kind of schools is that we now believe that that's the way schools are supposed to be. And, if schools and students are doing badly, we think that they are not "real" schools or students and try to change them to make them more "real."
To test this proposition, let's try another exercise. Most of the public either hated school or didn't do well or both. Yet ask people from this group what school should be like, and you'll probably hear a description of the one they went to with some minor improvements. Ask those who did well in school what school should be like and they'll give you the same description, which is no surprise since it worked for them. Ask anyone from either group why schools are failing, and you'll hear it's because schools aren't what they used to be, they're not "real" schools any more.
Is this true? "The American High School: A Universal Drama and Disparate Experience," an extraordinary paper by Mary Haywood Metz of the National Center on Effective Secondary Schools at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, suggests that it isn't true: our schools still are like "real" schools - and are failing because of it.
Metz and her colleagues studied eight "typical" high schools in high, middle and low socioeconomic communities in midwestern metropolitan areas. Six of the schools were public, two Catholic. The schools differed in a number of ways, largely on the basis of wealth and what goes with it. But in their formal structure, routine and procedures, they were so much alike that "it seemed that the schools were following a common script." The outcomes, however, were very different. The poorest school, a minority school, had the poorest results -- despite the toughest course requirements in its district, high expectations and a faculty and administration who matched the race of students. But most of the schools weren't doing well with their students, except those (generally wealthy) who already had good skills and were competing to get into competitive colleges.
Despite the fact that most students weren't learning well and were alienated from school and most teachers were frustrated, Metz found "no evidence that any of the communities wanted or expected schools to depart from the basic common script." As Metz comments, "If one looks at students' learning simply as a technical problem, it is quite remarkable to see situations where a technical process ( or the social structure which frames it) is clearly not effective on a massive scale, but no one in the organization thinks of trying alternative technical or structural approaches. Should a profitmaking company have such difficulties it would soon be out of business unless it changed its procedures."
Why, then, do teachers and others not rethink Real Schools? Metz says, "A large reason is that ... teachers are hemmed in by state laws, district directives, and college admissions pressures -- as well as societal expectations -- all of which presumed or required that they follow the common script." Not surprisingly, since the people who influence education policy are usually persons who were successful in Real School, they generally see it as a good pattern for all students. But, Metz adds, poor and minority communities also strongly embrace Real School as the pathe to success and resist departure from it as an effort to block that path.
The major problem with our schools, then, is not that they departed from the common script of Real School. It is that they - and the policymakers and communities around them -- refuse to depart from the script. But if that script -- the structure and routine of schools -- is the problem, then the reform movement will fail because it's only asking for "tighter direction of the common script and for fuller documentation of outcomes." You can't change the outcomes of schooling without changing schooling.
The story of Real School and its persistence is not a counsel of despair. It is a lesson about the necessity of school restructuring and the dangers facing those who attempt it in earnest. It is a lesson to civic, business and community leaders whose devotion to the common script of Real School is forcing schools to do more of the same old thing that worked for the few but not for the majority. (Businesses will soon face the problem of Real School themselves, for most of the education and training they offer employees is based on Real School.) The story of Real School is a lesson to us all: it's time to become realistic.