The article below first appeared in the Bulletin of the National Alliance of State Science and Mathematics Coalitions in 2005. It has been reprinted with permission in other education publications since that time.
The Case for “Catastrophic” Change
Jim McMurtray, 2005
In the coming decades our nation will face the greatest challenge in its history. The remarkable success of our democracy and our capitalist economy has become the model for the rest of the world. And the rest of the world has adopted this model… and they have improved on it.
In the global economy we all live by Lee Iococa’s famous idiom, “Lead, follow or get out of the way.” If we are to maintain a position of leadership in the world we must change our behavior. We must think differently. Corporations (and nations) that can do this will prevail. Those locked into tradition and bound to long-established patterns will not. Adaptation is necessary for survival in the biological world and it is no less a requirement in the world economy.
Popular books such as Richard Foster’s Creative Destruction and Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat have spoken to the new economic environment in which we now find ourselves. The rest of the world is rapidly catching up with us. We could lose our preeminence. Nowhere is this more visible than in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Our education system is producing fewer engineers, scientists and mathematicians than we need. Even if these numbers were much higher we would still be falling further behind.
In sheer numbers, the populations of India and China dwarf our own. These nations already produce many times our numbers of highly trained technical professionals. Heroic attempts to recruit more students to the technical fields have produced less than adequate results. We simply do not produce the technical workers that our economy demands and a growing number of other countries do. There are reasons for this.
Systems are perfectly designed and operated to produce the results they get. Our education system does not produce a high percentage of scientifically, technologically and mathematically literate citizens because it is not designed to. It is in fact designed (or rather it has evolved) to produce quite the opposite result.
At a time when we urgently need a more technically literate populace, we continue to employ a system that works against that end. Our system, in its normal operation, energetically and effectively removes a large percentage of students from the pipeline to advanced science, mathematics and technology content. They are identified as having a low potential for success in these areas. Our system makes this distinction at an alarmingly early stage in their development.
Science and mathematics courses have become the “gate keepers.” Our system “filters” students. For science and mathematics the pipe rapidly narrows. Those who do not demonstrate early acquisition of mathematics and science content, for whatever reason, are effectively “screened out” and they will find it increasingly difficult to reenter the stream.
At a time when all students need to learn more and learn it faster, we still use a system that at its very heart restricts and limits learning to a sequence of “grade levels” aligned closely to chronological age and with grade stratified assessments. Regulation of the content to what is called “grade appropriateness” unavoidably places limits on how far and how quickly students advance through the content.
Decades of education reform have left this basic structure essentially unchanged. We have re-surfaced rather than re-formed our schools. The “form” itself is the same as it has been for many decades. Form follows function but function also follows form. We would not expect a machine designed to stamp out hubcaps, to stamp out razor blades instead by simply admonishing it to change.
Research in education and the psychology of learning have unarguably improved teaching and learning, but we have ignored one of the most fundamental implications of that research; that students should advance through the content itself and not through a curriculum aligned with age. The K-12 or P-16 structure of our schools is not adaptive to the world we live in and it is time now to get rid of it.
It is astonishing to me that there are revered experts in education who will vigorously defend the K-12 sequential structure of our school curriculum. They can offer no foundation in the research for that defense. More often they will acknowledge that the system is horribly flawed but will protest that changing it now would be too disruptive. To that we should ask the question, disruptive of what?
Why do we have kindergarten and 12 grades? Why not 23 grades or 6 or 117? There is no reason. It just evolved that way and without design or purpose. Twelve grades is not a universal constant like the speed of light. The Ten Commandments are completely silent on the subject of academic structure, scope, and sequence. Neither does the US Constitution address the issue.
Opponents of ungraded schools habitually and predictably attack them by citing studies which measure progress by the same tests as those applied to traditional schools. Those assessments measure progress up to a grade level; to an age-grade norm. Students in any setting will test at grade level or below, thereby “proving” that students in non-traditional schools do “no better” than those in traditional schools.
Today in the United States, in Japan and in other parts of the world, there are rapidly developing alternatives to traditional grade structured schools. And why should this be so? There is little money to be made in such enterprises. Clearly it is a response to a deficit of the current structure.
One example is credit system schools. In these schools there are no grade levels. Advancement is by accumulation of credits. Credit is earned as content mastery is demonstrated. Movement through the curriculum then is tied neither to age nor grade. Students advance at non-uniform rates in the different content areas. The number of applicants for credit-system high schools is rising rapidly in Japan because of demonstrated superiority in preparation for university study.
While they are widely scattered in the U.S., and still few in number, content structured schools outperform traditional schools because that is what they are designed to do. In areas where these alternatives have been used with under-performing students, the results are very promising. Of course there are many variables. Skilled teachers will get the best possible results from any system. In a content structured school however, student advancement is measured against the content standards rather than against age-grade norms — in other words, by the standards of the real world.
Look at a typical class of third graders and you will see more differences than similarities. They are generally all about the age of eight, but they are of many different sizes and shapes. Harder to see are marked differences in developmental age, family circumstance, nutritional health, and sensory acuity. They are never homogeneous. We would hardly expect them to be equal in athletic ability or musical talent but we will nonetheless require them to move as a single organism in nine months through the same third grade curriculum across all content areas. We will not allow individual advancement beyond that boundary and we will deny more advanced content to those who do not move in lock step with the group.
A system which limits advancement in the content areas to that which has been determined statistically to be appropriate to a particular age or grade level imposes a significant handicap on our children. Further, it will not be enough for our country to simply do “as well” as other nations. Because we compete with the much larger populations, we must in fact do better.
We understand that our students must learn much more and that they must learn it much faster just to keep up. We understand that technical and mathematical literacy are vital to our society, our economy and our culture. We understand that the solutions we have tried over and over have failed consistently. We must resolve to do something that is really different. We can and we must develop systems that measure actual progress within the content rather than against statistical norms or grade levels.
If we are to compete successfully in the world economy, then clearly we must pick up the pace. We must allow students to move to more advanced content as quickly as they can individually acquire it. The artificial and arbitrary limits placed on students by traditional grade levels are deterrent to progress. For our best students, this system limits and confines advancement. For the struggling student, it is a slippery slope that has produced a dropout rate that is unacceptable for an advanced society. There is a Zen aphorism that goes, “The path is the obstacle.” In the case of our education system, the path is more than just an obstacle. This path takes us where we do not wish to go.
There are many variations on content structured schools. It is not so much a “movement” as it is a natural reaction to the changing environment. We need to advance all students in each content area as far and as fast they can go. We have an obligation to teach them what we have learned. We certainly do not need a system that filters children out of science and mathematics or sorts some of them into the shrinking fields of unskilled labor or second-class citizenship.
Even for students disinclined to pursue a career in science or mathematics, there are basic minimal requirements of technical literacy that define informed citizenship. There are no longer great numbers of jobs requiring no knowledge or understanding of science and mathematics. Basic understanding of critical issues relating to the environment, to energy and to personal health all underscore the importance of an informed electorate.
This topic invariably brings up the following question. What about competition? Is it not a good thing for students to compete academically with others? Why yes it is. So why don’t we try that? What we have currently is a pitifully artificial sort of competition. When you leave school and for the rest of your life you will compete with people older and younger than you are. Only in a traditional K-12 school are students are measured solely against others of their age. That is hardly to be considered realistic competition in any context.
The traditional classroom with its single teacher standing before 20 to 30 students has become an American icon. We have developed an almost sacred reverence for this model. This is the way it was when we were in school and we are reluctant to let it go. But let it go we will. The current teacher pipeline does not contain the qualified teachers we will need to maintain the traditional model. This deficit is most critical in science and mathematics. The notion that we will be able to correct this deficit is open to serious question. We are compelled to consider a fundamental redesign. We must make better use of teachers’ skill and time.
By continuing to patch, refine and repair the P-16 structure of our present system, we manage only to keep it doing what it does. What it does is filter, sort, and remove large numbers of students from the science and mathematics stream, while restricting and regulating academic development to one-size-fits-all grade levels. That is all it can do really. Its behavior is a fundamental function of its architecture.
We are told that we have only to fine-tune the present system, and it will work. I don’t think so. It is just built wrong for the time we live in. Like astrology, it has complexity and a bizarre internal logic. The validity of grade levels it seems is predicated purely on the existence of those grade levels. “If we don’t have grade levels, then how will we know if the students are performing at or below grade level? You won’t of course. And please tell me if you can exactly why was it that you needed to know that?
In business, successful practices are picked up and replicated. We should be able to expect that the same thing would happen in education. Designs that perform better will be emulated. A design that is adaptive to its environment will survive and maladaptive systems won’t. How quickly we transition to more effective systems will say a lot about us.
These comments are not an indictment of American Public education. Private schools are for the most part, structured in precisely the same manner. They have the same fundamental flaw. Neither can our problems be laid at the feet of American teachers. The passion and dedication of these professionals are the main reasons that our system does no more damage than it does. Teaching is one of the nobler callings of the human species, but teachers fight the system at their peril. To suggest that there is nothing wrong ignores the obvious.
I have been in the education business for a lifetime. I have heard all the arguments against fundamental changes in the way we structure, fund, manage and measure the schools that teach our children. Some will agree that the system works against our interests, but argue that there is nothing we can do. They cannot imagine significant change without chaos and catastrophe.
To this we must ask, catastrophic to what? To the system? Well, good! It needs to be disrupted. To the student? How would it be catastrophic to them? Will students stop learning without the motivation of those traditional grades to progress through? Will they stop trying to master content because they are not being measured against the norms for their age? Where is the evidence that supports that conclusion?
In the game of golf there are two methods of scoring. In match play, every hole is played as a separate contest. The party with the lower score wins that hole. In stroke play, players count the number of shots taken for the whole round to calculate the total score, and the player with the lowest score is the winner. If we ultimately measure the outcome of our education system by what students know and are able to do when they graduate, then why should it be so important to us that they progress at the same rate in the third grade?
If even small changes are considered disruptive and dangerous then where is the great risk in radical change? Under the circumstances we face, radical change may be the conservative and responsible course of action. Many of the traditions of American education are worth preserving. Worth preserving also is the American tradition of boldness in response to a challenge. The stakes have never been higher and we already know the results of inaction.
