21st Century Schools

"Why our kids need them, what they look like, how we create them."

A friend of a friend has just today posted an entry on a local Venice-Mar Vista blog, and asked, "Who wants to be the first to post?" I'm not that shy, and so am taking up the gauntlet.

A fine book is Marc Tucker's Surpassing Shanghai, published by Harvard Education Press. Chapter 4's "Singapore: A Journey to the Top, Step by Step", written by Vivien Stewart, asks, "What can be learned from Singapore", and answers, finally,

"Eagerness to learn from other countries and an orientation toward the future matter.  The design of Singapore's education system owes a lot to lessons from other parts of the world. Focused and universal use of educational benchmarking and, more recently, significant funds for research have enabled Singapore to move up the value chain and foster a culture of never standing still. This is a system that recognizes the rapidity of change around the world and that has the capacity and inclination to learn and adapt. Singapore fosters a global outlook for everyone -- teachers, principals, and students, who are expected to have 'global awareness and cross-cultural skills' and to be 'future-ready'" (135).

Leading educational organizations such as the International Baccalaureate and APEC (the ill-named "Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation") have oriented themselves towards our global future, and the ideal 21st century school would serve as the flagship to found a system of schools similarly oriented. I have been working on such a school for years now, and while it has developed through various versions, its essential vision and purpose have remained the same: 

“By synthesizing best practices from around the world and throughout time, and without depending upon selective admissions or extraordinary resources, One World Secondary School’s purpose is to demonstrate a world-class model of education so that diverse students succeed in colleges of their own choosing.”

Learning for the 21st Century

As promised, here is my synthesis of some of the best thinking on 21st century education, as prepared for envisioning the products of the school my trustees and I have been trying to start:

The competences of One World learners

One World learners (OWLs) will prioritize learning to know and learning to do so as to facilitate the innovative, interactive use of tools such as information technology via communication in the English language, thus enabling our students to act autonomously, with a sense of initiative and entrepreneurship, in their 21^st century world, while also gaining the social and civic competences to live together in increasingly heterogeneous groups. Their competences will be demonstrated through superior achievements in the priority academic content areas of English, mathematics, science, and additional languages, as well as in the overarching competence of learning to learn, which will be vitally assisted by the students’ digital competence. Such highly competent individuals should go on to succeed in colleges and careers of their own choosing, and eventually finding good work will be a natural outcome of all that our students will have learned to do; and their competence in cultural awareness and expression should durably support their ability to live together successfully in heterogeneous groups while also supporting their most crucial final outcome, their having learned to be One World learners, with the attributes in the ideal profile that follows.

Since One World Secondary School is interested in becoming an IB school, it is appropriate here also to quote from the “IB learner profile”: “The aim of all IB programmes is to develop internationally minded people who, recognizing their common humanity and shared guardianship of the planet, help to create a better and more peaceful world.”

One World Learners (OWLs) will become

• Disciplined enquirers who have begun mastering the critical thinking- and problem-solving skills and the knowledge necessary to continue to learn within a discipline through enquiry and research. One World students will actively enjoy learning, and their love of learning will be sustained throughout their lives.
• Balanced learners who understand the importance of intellectual, emotional, and physical balance to achieve a good life for themselves and others. In addition, they will study a broad, balanced curriculum, and will analyze, synthesize, and evaluate various ideas derived from the disciplines in a fair, balanced way.
• Caring communicators who convey empathy, compassion, and respect for the needs and feelings of others. One World students will commit themselves to service, and will be able to clearly communicate, orally, in writing, and through modern media, their principled determination to make an ethical contribution to the lives of other people and to the planet as a whole.
• Open-minded initiators who understand their own cultures and histories and are open to those of others. One World students will actively seek out other points of view and, like risk-taking entrepreneurs, will watch for and seize new opportunities, ideas, and strategies for improvement.
• Reflective innovators who develop “right-brain” traits such as curiosity, imagination, and creativity to go with their “left-brain” skills in communication and traditional disciplinary learning. In addition, our students will learn to become reflective on their experience, understanding their own strengths and limitations as they strive towards wisdom.
• Knowledgeable, collaborating leaders who explore great issues, ideas, and concepts, thereby acquiring in-depth knowledge across a broad range of disciplines. They will often acquire necessary information through digital, collaborative enquiry, thereby gaining the computing, ICT, and social skills to responsibly work in teams with networks of people who may come from vastly different cultures and also to use reasoning and persuasion to lead and to learn. 
• Flexible adapters who are ready to change with a changing economy and a changing world. Because they will have become life-long learners, One World graduates will have the self-reliant career skills, productivity, and sense of accountability to deal with our planet’s increasingly complex problems in the 21^st century.

I hereby acknowledge intellectual indebtedness to the works of Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel (21st Century Skills), Howard Gardner (Five Minds for the Future), and Tony Wagner (The Global Achievement Gap) in synthesizing the above profile.

 

Some of the Best Thinking on 21st Century Education

International efforts to define the educational needs of the 21^st century have been proceeding for nearly two decades now. As early as 1996, the UNESCO International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century, chaired by former European Commission President Jacques Delors, proposed in Learning: The Treasure Within that, building on the four pillars that are the foundations of education – learning to know, learning to do, learning to live together,  and learning to be – all societies should aim to move towards a necessary Utopia in which none of the talents hidden like buried treasure in every person be left untapped. 

The next year, the OECD’s education ministers recombined the knowledge, skills, and values implicit in the Delors pillars into the concept of competencies, and the OECD has done much work to define and select the competencies “for a successful life and a well-functioning society”, and has used them in designing its PISA (Programme in International Student Assessment) assessments. It has concluded that three categories of competencies are key in the 21^st century: acting autonomously, using tools interactively, and interacting in socially heterogeneous groups. 

The APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation) economies have developed a 21^st century competency framework encompassing APEC’s priority academic content areas: English and other languages, mathematics, science, information and communication technologies, and technical education. 

Finally, the European Union has legislatively defined eight key competences for lifelong learning: communication in the mother tongue, communication in foreign languages, mathematical competence and competences in science and technology, digital competence, learning to learn, social and civic competences, a sense of initiative and entrepreneurship, and cultural awareness and expression.   

I have synthesized these efforts into a description of One World learners’ competences, which I will publish tomorrow. 

A One World System of Schools

I am still working to open a school for my son, and for all like-minded families with children. I currently propose to open, with my colleagues, an upper secondary school, a lyceum (an anglicization of lycee, the nearest extant equivalent to the kind of school we propose), providing education for the 10th-12th grades, in 2015 (it usually takes two years of preparation to open a good school, and although we've been preparing for longer than that, we want to be great). This first one will be an independent school, since I've given up (for now) the idea of finding an American school board with enough courage to back our charter, which is ready to be put into operation and is replicable at currently available public school dollars.

In a One World system of schools, our three-year lyceum would be preceded by a pair of three-year middle schools, a boys' school and a girls' school, which might more plausibly be established as chartered schools; for there is plenty of evidence available (a) that it is in the middle school years when Western students fall significantly behind their peers in east Asia, and (b) it is the premature obsession with the opposite sex during early adolescence that accounts for a good deal of (a). And of course it is unfortunately well known that the early preoccupation with dating and social relationships not only detracts from learning, but also all too often leads to teenage pregnancies and thereby cyclical generations of wrecked lives. Better to keep the boys and girls away from each other in these years; whereas our lyceum and primary school would be coeducational, I advocate single-sex education during the middle school years (which are, for us, grades 7-9; we use the term middle school here because it is an exact translation for these institutions in the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages, which, in relatively reformed and modern versions, constitute the nearest equivalent to a model for us to use during these years).

And the lyceum and middle schools should be preceded by a six-year primary school, for children aged 6-11, of both sexes in the same classrooms. These might ideally be government schools, and their successful establishment is crucial to the democratic state, as is in reality the whole of comprehensive schooling, which should last for nine years, ages 6-15, as it does in Switzerland, which has the best overall school system, as I have argued elsewhere. Our model for primary school is Finland, whose primary schools are not very different from the fine elementary schools here in Irvine, except for the fact that the Finns, like other Europeans, begin learning a second language early, from the first grade onwards, as I would like to see Americans do as well: second language learning from the first grade would be the principal novel (for America) feature of a One World Primary School.

The ages and grades we have defined for primary, lower secondary, and upper secondary education, which are first-sixth grades for children aged 6-11, seventh-ninth for students aged 12-14, and the tenth-twelfth grades for students aged 15-17 (with a postgraduate year available to students who might benefit thereby, therefore taking education for some students up to age 19), are the most commonly used in the world, and therefore using them allows us to make maximum use of the experiences of all of the people of our planet as we strive together to raise better people for our world.

Hope and Hopelessness in a Lonely Middle

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending the United Way Education Summit in Los Angeles, courtesy of the generosity of John Lee of Teach Plus, to whom I am indebted. The stars of the show were three "education mayors" (they were billed thus), Antonio Villaraigosa, Rahm Emmanuel, and Cory Booker. Among these, the standout speaker was Mayor Booker, who gave one of the most impassioned and inspiring speeches I've ever heard, spontaneously, from the heart. He spoke of our need for investing in children "of color", which is always code for some kinds of children (black and brown, African-American and Latino) in preference to others. He correctly pointed out that, if we neglect the education of these children, we may well pay a heavy price for that neglect a couple of decades from now, when they will likely constitute the majority of our work force. He and the other mayors spoke of a "new apartheid" in America, where a disappeared middle class will leave behind a group of privileged children and a larger group of children who have been discriminated against, and spoke of the consequence being the equivalent of a permanent recession.

A talented young leader like Cory Booker must give us hope; but an ironic consequence of his passion, and the evident agreement it inspired in his like-minded audience, was a simultaneous sense of hopelessness. I saw at a nearby table Marco Petruzzi, CEO of Green Dot Public Schools, for whom I once worked, which now appears to me to be an organization marginalized compared to five years ago, challenged, in part from caring too much, perhaps, to help the neediest; for having taken on one of the toughest of all jobs, the turnaround of Locke High School, and having succeeded pretty well at it, but not well enough for the media nor for those of us who wanted so much more. Green Dot is finding itself, like Mayor Villaraigosa's Los Angeles, and like other cities, a mecca for the underprivileged that it champions; while Republican districts like the Irvine where I live increasingly turn their backs on the poor, and raise up artificial barriers (such as becoming a "basic aid" school district, maximally withdrawn from California's dysfunctional school funding system) to those poor whom they would keep out behind security-guarded gates if they could. And so these education mayors, through trying perhaps too hard to help those who desperately need it, run the risk of finding themselves steadily abandoned by middle class families in flight, surrounded by hordes of the poor crying out for ever more and without a tax base from which to respond.

And yet what choice do they give those of us who are tempted to reluctantly join that flight? Do the people in these confabs not actually realize how alienating their agreed rhetoric can be to the middle class who struggle and fail to find an aspect of these leaders' visions that can possibly attract children like our own? The visions of these leaders sounded to me not like visions of an education system for all, but a system for only favored minorities, a system that will try to redress past social wrongs by reverse discrimination, ensuring that less deserving youth of the favored colors are granted coveted spots in universities (like UC Berkeley) that we once attended but that our own children are rejected by, no matter how hard they work to earn superior qualifications, because our, possibly adopted, children are not of the favored color and do not tug the heartstrings of politically selected admissions staff so powerfully.

Ronald Reagan said, "I didn't leave the Democratic Party; it left me." I never thought it could come to this; but if these visions are not more encompassing, more and more middle class people are going to flee the public school systems that we have been products of and have worked for, will move into private education, and will end up voting to consistently cut the taxes that support public education systems that we attended but now feel unrepresented in, and shut out of.

A Brief Review of "The One World Schoolhouse" by the Founder of One World School

In the last sentence of his stimulating new book, The One World Schoolhouse, Salman Khan writes of his brilliant creation, "If Khan Academy proves to be even part of the solution to our educational malaise, I will feel proud and privileged to have made a contribution." Khan Academy is part of the solution to our many-faceted educational difficulties both in the United States and around the world.

Mr. Khan writes most affectingly, perhaps, in his depictions of the struggles of the poor in south Asia and elsewhere to provide their children with an education that will allow them to escape the cycle of poverty in which they find themselves. Being the son of immigrants from Bangladesh, he has first-hand experience of these realities, which I witnessed for myself when I took my family on a journey to east Africa in 1999. At that time, an extra year of schooling for a primary school child in Tanzania could cost parents several months of their wages. We need an organized way of reaching the hundreds of millions of people in a similar plight, and the Khan Academy just might be the best way to do it, for now at least, as Mr. Khan details in the chapter "Serving the Underserved", in the eponymous Part 4 of his work.

In 2007 I began active planning of an international school for everyone whose legal name remains One World School. Although originally (and still) intended for anyone who wanted to attend, my experiences and knowledge of the Third World led me to believe that, in fact, our school model was only of relevance to the countries of the OECD and a few others at a similar state of development; and my reading of Charles Murray, especially his Real Education, and my experiences with the conversion of Locke High School from failing traditional publicly managed dropout factory to improved but still underachieving college-prep academy under the management of Green Dot Public Schools led me to a more realistic estimate that 50 percent, or perhaps a little more, of our students in the United States should be college-bound. In that case, what are we to do with the rest?

Mr. Khan has considered these problems also, and written thoughtfully about them. By page 160 it was clear to me that "One World" has to mean more than the OECD; and in the Part 4 chapter "The Future of Credentials", he proposes a sensible post-secondary alternative for the 99% + who will be unable to attend MIT or Harvard but who still want to work in fulfilling careers without being held hostage to College Board debt payment demands.

The Khan Academy, which my seventh grade son used very successfully last summer (and no, he's not behind; he now may be the top-ranked mathematics student in the school named by the Orange County Register as the best in our county last year), is at least immediately useful for distance, summer, and elective learning in the sciences (including obviously mathematics), most clearly for adults and for middle school students; its vision and aspiration, to provide "a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere", is more than that; it's inspiring. We can only wish him and his colleagues the best of success, and I hope to contact him shortly, since his interests and mine dovetail and complement one another quite thoroughly. 

The "High School Diploma" Has Outlived its Usefulness

Last night I was researching the international acceptability of various certificates called, in British English, "group awards". These are qualifications, like the French baccalaureat, that signal both the completion of secondary school and the admission to higher education. I was researching what are in general some of the strongest universities to be found in the world outside of the United States: I looked at the entrance requirements and policies for the University of Cambridge, ETH Zurich, and McGill University, for example. While looking at the admissions requirements for the National University of Singapore, I was struck by something: after seeing the assessment of that leading university, one of the tops in Asia and in the first rank of the world, of entrance qualifications such as A levels, the IB, the Abitur, and so on, I saw listed, under "Other Qualifications", the "American High School Diploma". This wasn't surprising, but its classification with its neighbours was: the American high school diploma is classed, in this educationally leading country, with qualifications from the third world countries of Bangladesh, the Philippines, Myanmar, Thailand, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and West Africa!

This Singaporean assessment of our graduates may be a bit extreme, but the truth is, as one compares the various admissions policies of different countries and universities around the world, one sees that in no developed part of the world outside of North America is our high school diploma regarded as adequate preparation for university. The Common Core effort is an ongoing attempt to ameliorate this problem; but because it attempts to simultaneously address preparation for careers with preparation for college, and because it only focuses on the basic skills developed by the usual two subjects, English and mathematics (although a third, general science, is on the way), it has essentially no chance of bringing about much of a difference in closing this gap in secondary leaving standards between those American high school graduates achieve and those in much of the developed world, especially Europe.

The high school diploma, like the culture of our comprehensive high schools in general, is a residual artefact from the 20th century high school movement, a successful effort to raise our educational attainment until we were first in the world by the middle of the 20th century. It served its purpose: our high school graduation rate rose from less than 10 percent near the start of that century to around 70 percent a half century later. But we haven't changed our approach to secondary education since then, and our approach is now badly out of date.

We need something better, if we want to regain the leadership in education that we long enjoyed.