Changes to K-12 Education in the United States – Students

Living in Texas, I can assure you the feature photo indicates the single greatest item in the decision making process for returning students to school in the midst of a horribly mismanaged pandemic. While that’s horrible, but expected, the real question is what can we do to make the educational experience in the US the best it can be?

I’ve taught at the K-12 level and been instructor for a few undergraduate courses. I have an M.Ed. and currently spend a significant portion of my week writing the literature review for my dissertation to complete my PhD in Learning, Design, and Technology. I’m also someone who barely scraped through high school with a 2.03 GPA and flunked out of college twice before finally finishing my B.S. after 14 years (1993-2007). I feel like I can bring a unique background to the subject while validating much of the research that we ignore in the American education system. I intend to do three posts on this, for now, focusing on students, teachers, and systemic issues in that order. With that said, here are some of my primary thoughts for improving the student experience.

Many consider the Finnish education system to be the elite system in the world. I am among those who feel this way. Many ideas on this list are from their system, but the irony is that their system is largely based on ideas gleaned from research in US universities.

So common is the reliance on U.S. ideas in Finland that some have come to call the Finnish school system a large-scale laboratory of American education innovation.

Finnish Lessons 2.0 – Pasi Sahlberg

I’ll cover the standards movement in the systemic issues post on this topic, but suffice to say standardized testing is the antithesis of authentic learning.

Start Grading Later

Finnish schools used US research to decide that they would not start giving students grades until age 12. On top of that, more than 50% of their students receive “special education” tutoring for skills that may be lagging during their formative years.

Students could still easily start with pre-K and kindergarten learning similar to what they have today. The focus can be on very basic social skills and communication, identifying early strengths and weaknesses. Next, they would move into more advanced academic learning as they sure up weaknesses while honing skills they show a propensity for or interest in. Finally, they begin moving into the middle and high school age range where they have great flexibility in choosing what to learn and what the expected deliverables will be.

Shorter Days & Less Homework

Finnish high school students average around 15 minutes of homework per day and they have no standardized testing. They routinely score in the top 2 across many subjects in voluntary international testing. They also are home earlier in the day than their US counterparts.

Part of this is due to shorter school days. While it may not seem plausible in the US, with our ingrained culture of when school starts and ends, there are options here. For starters, the US is several orders of magnitude safer than it was even 30 years ago. Kids can be home alone and do just fine. Instead of going home early, they can start the day later, something strongly recommended in the research literature due to their natural circadian rhythms, and maybe pick up some basic skills such as making breakfast and lunch for themselves.

Another option could be to free up more time during the school day so that students aren’t constantly on the go as they try and gain some arbitrary number of credits or extracurriculars that colleges value far less than they admit and that don’t predict success in a statistically significant manner. Student free periods, with both student lounges and quiet study spaces, would be a great way to allow them to decompress after studying a subject and then re-energize before their next class. Another option is to:

Bring Back PE & Recess

Get sweaty. Learn to play. Make up your own rules in semi-unstructured settings. Learn to have arguments and work through them. Figure out how to be competitive and a good sport. Develop team building skills. All of this, and more, shouldn’t be relegated to sports after school or on weekends.

Let kids, of all ages, run around and be kids once or twice a day so they can get it out of their system and then get back to work. PE doesn’t need to be the torture session of climbing that stupid rope hanging from the ceiling, but it can be a place where every kid figures out how to improve themselves physically a little bit every day.

Help kids learn, in every situation, how to be anti-fragile.

Create a Variety of Academic & Vocational Tracks

Kids aren’t the same. Some are artists, some are scientists, some are jocks, some are geeks, and some don’t have a clue what they are until they’re 30 (cough *me* cough). It’s okay. It’s okay for them to change their mind a dozen times. It’s okay for them to fail and then try something else. This isn’t about the fictional concept of learning styles, which has been thoroughly debunked by quality research, but about the interests, natural talents, and overall inclinations of students being nurtured instead of squashed.

Horace Mann did many great things for public education in America. He also created the ideas that have led to our current predicament of forcing students to all meet a single, arbitrary standard. To put it simply, his adoration for the Prussian educational model was misguided and eventually crippling to public education in the US.

Once students reach what is now middle school, they could easily take a few non-binding tests and begin to chart out their educational future. They should have the right to change course at any time they wish. We need as many schools training bright young electricians, carpenters, and mechanics as we need physicists, authors, and lawyers. Shop class is at least as valuable as chemistry, and small engine repair is no less difficult than differential equations.

Let our students be just that. Let them explore, not only the ever widening swath of potential careers and hobbies, but who they are and how they approach all of life. Help them to see the value of everything, including each other. Encourage them to try things that might stretch them, even if they fail at it. Do this in part by adding in more variety to our educational opportunities, but also by mixing up the classroom dynamic in a way that is drastically needed.

Loosen Age-Based Cohort Restrictions

Back in 2012, Lisa Nielsen’s fantastic education blog featured a guest post by a mom named Teresa McClosky titled, It’s Wrong to Group Kids by Date of Manufacture. She touches on a few obvious ideas, which I think have some solid merit.

We all remember the 10-year-old girl who was taller than every other kid in school. We all remember the 14-year-old freshman boy who was a foot shorter than everyone that had hit puberty. My personal experience was starting 8th grade as the tallest in my group of friends only to be the shortest by the end of high school and grow less than a quarter inch the rest of my life.

Some kids had the social game figured out from the start. Some knew what they wanted to do from the moment they slid out of the womb. Some were just naturals at everything our current system counts as valuable and never seemed to struggle for a moment. Others had nothing. Most were somewhere in the middle.

I’m an overachiever now, but I didn’t read a book from cover to cover until I was 25. I changed majors 4 times in the midst of my two academic dismissals. My plan out of high school was to spend a year on active duty in the army and then play lacrosse for a major university. My grades weren’t good enough, so the coach there told me to take the workaround route since my SAT score was very high. I didn’t get to do that as my back had been injured as a senior and 15 months after I graduated high school I had major spinal surgery.

My adult life has involved work in youth ministry, fast food, constitutional law, museum security, being a bad guy for police training, and instructional design at two major universities. I’ll likely spend the bulk of my remaining working days somewhere within academia, but I was 30 before I took my first college level education course. None of that was even on my radar when I barely got out of high school and repeatedly failed at everything in college. I can’t help but think that if we had just built our system around the research, like the Finnish have done, things would have gone differently.