Nearly everyone who talks about school reform these days agrees that "restructuring" is the way to go. What do people mean by restructuring? Well, that depends on who's using the word. Many are simply talking about polishing up the old system: getting teachers and students to work a little longer, harder and smarter.
Maybe that sounds reasonable, but the comments of Jack Bowsher, former director of education at IBM, indicate that this approach won't work: Suppose, Bowsher says, we discovered that 25% of our computers were falling off the assembly line before they even reached the end. And suppose 90% of the ones that did reach the end of the line didn't work 80% of the time. The last thing in the world we'd do would be to have that same old assembly line run another month a year or another hour a day.
This is true of schools, too. More of the same isn't going to solve the problems we are having in educating our students. More of the same is not restructuring.
Turning Points, the new report from the Carnegie Corporation's Council on Adolescent Development, goes beyond the traditional, mechanical notions of reform. It questions our basic ideas about educating children between the ages of I0 and 15, and it suggests how we can remake -- restructure is the correct word here our middle and junior high schools.
Most young adolescents, the report points out, attend schools that are large and impersonal - they are like factories, really. Kids pass from class to class and teacher to teacher, as many as five or six a day, so it's hard to form a close or trusting relationship with any adult. Adolescents are active but the way they're supposed to learn is passive. Most of them, good and bad students alike, find school boring.
Turning Points suggests turning these factory schools into learning communities, first, by breaking the schools into smaller units - schools-within-schools - and then by breaking students up into smaller groups that would be taught by teams of teachers. The teachers would be free to plan and schedule for their group. If a group needed - or wanted - extra time for science projects, or if it became obvious that Spanish conversation went better in two-hour blocks than in 45-minute ones, that kind of flexibility would be possible. Ideally, the teachers would remain with their group throughout the time the kids were at the school.
That's not a complicated change, but it's restructuring. And it immediately shifts the focus of schools from controlling adolescents to connecting them to learning.
To most adults, adolescence looks more like a disease than a stage oflife kids are passing through. Adolescents sometimes reveal traces of the sweet little children their parents fondly remember. More often, they are hostile, bored, loud and even violent. Schools are generally set up to control these tendencies. Kids are expected to sit in rows, facing the front of the room, refrain from talking to one another and listen to the teacher talk.
But as anybody who has ever taught in junior high knows, our methods of keeping order often fail. In fact, they sometimes make things worse.
Turning Points suggests that instead of trying to keep the lid on adolescents' energy, schools capitalize on it. For example, instead of preventing kids from talking to one another, why not use their talk constructively through cooperative learning - the kind of team approach that allows students to work together in small, mixed-ability groups?
Cooperative learning is another good example of restructuring because it adjusts the school to take advantage of the way the kids are instead of trying to squeeze the kids to fit the school. And it makes use of something teachers see everyday: The kids who are angry and bored in school are totally different outside class. If we go out on the playground, we see them getting together in gangs or teams to accomplish something, for better or worse. The things they do might even be pretty boring in and of themselves. Think about a baseball game, for example. Catching or throwing a ball, hitting it or running - all the pieces are boring. But when you have a team and you want to win, you put the pieces together and the game becomes fascinating.
It's the same with these kids. And schools need to make things happen in class that happen naturally when kids are cooperating and competing outside of class. Schools need to tap this engagement and energy. Instead, we make kids sit still all day. We separate them from friends. We tell them they can't talk to the kid at the next desk or pass notes; they have to listen to adults talk all day and do their work on their own. Then we're surprised when they resist our efforts to do what's "best" for them - and we are unable to prevail against their indifference and hostility.
Turning Points understands how schools and young adolescents work - and how they often work against each other. Turning Points also understands that restructuring doesn't mean more of the same. It's about changing our middle and junior high schools - all our schools - into places where kids want to and can learn.