Author: Alan Jones

Dr. Alan C. Jones

Why Has School Reform Failed?

by Alan Jones

“The hurricane whips up twenty-foot high waves, agitating the surface of the ocean, yet fathoms below the surface fish and plant life go undisturbed by the uproar on the ocean’s surface.”

(School Reform Metaphors: The Pendulum and Hurricane

Larry Cuban (2020)

      In my previous blog, I described the reasons why curricular reform in schools has failed to dislodge the college-bound curricula adopted at the turn of the century. In this blog, I will describe the reasons why comprehensive school reform (CSR) has failed to gain traction in our nation’s schools. The opening quote to this blog is an apt metaphor for the comings and goings of school reform mandates. Each year, a new CSR agitates main office inboxes, but, rarely, if ever, do these yearly reform hurricanes disturb the organizational systems and classroom routines that surround school offices. What follows is a summary of why the deep structure of schooling goes undisturbed by the reform uproar in main offices.

      No Implementing Agents:

      Although all of the proposed comprehensive school reform initiatives have been well researched and do offer sounder methods for teaching and learning, all of these initiatives are composed of theories, ideas, practices, and vocabularies that are foreign to administrators and teachers. For a school reform initiative to disturb established classroom teaching routines, administrators must make sense of, interpret, and provide the organizational infrastructure to accommodate the theories, ideas, practices, and vocabularies of a new school reform mandate. Most administrators, however, view the implementation of a school reform mandate as merely a managerial task—the distribution of materials, scheduling workshops, and recording outcomes of accountability benchmarks. Even if an administrator understands the worth of new approaches to teaching and learning, most lack the prior knowledge and teaching ability to effectively convey the theories, ideas, practices, and vocabularies to their faculty.

      All Reforms are Local

      All comprehensive school reform initiatives take a one-size-fits-all approach. In reality, all districts come from somewhere, with distinct histories and cultures. From the outside looking in, all schools appear to same. Inside faculty lodges, main offices, and classrooms, however, there exist local contexts and unique circumstances that local agents—administrators—must first notice, then frame, interpret, and construct meaning for policy messages. What this process looks like in practice is administrators adopting parts of the policy message, adapting other parts of the policy message, and discarding other parts of the policy message. The outcome of this reauthoring process is a policy message that leaves theories largely intact but has reauthored practices to accommodate the diverse demographics, resources, and challenges of different districts.

      Teacher Prior Beliefs

      For most teachers, schools have worked well for them. They sat quietly, listened to lectures, took notes, completed worksheets, completed daily homework assignments, did well on Friday’s test, and earned top scores. This solid academic track record translated into continued success in college. Governmental or board mandates that run counter to how teachers were taught will interfere with their ability to interpret and implement the reform in ways consistent with the designer’s intent. Fundamental conceptual change requiring restructuring of existing knowledge is extremely difficult. Dramatic changes are rare. Teachers will adapt knowledge or practices to what they already believe or do in the classroom. They will not explore a full understanding of theory or practice, but instead will adopt those parts that make sense to them. The result of this reauthoring process is the misrepresentation of theories and practices in the classroom.

      The Lack of Expertise

      While teachers and administrators often see themselves as experts in their field, many fall short of meeting the three essential criteria that define a true expert:

  1. Experts build a knowledge structure that encompasses more diverse cases and is organized around deeper principles.
  2. Experts see deeper patterns in problem situations.
  3. Experts are less likely to be distracted by similarities that are only superficial—to lose the forest in the trees.

      It should be noted that most administrators are experts at managing a school: buses arrive on time; classrooms are fully staffed with certified teachers; curricular materials have been distributed; budgets are balanced. Most school administrators, however, fail to develop the expertise to achieve the following educational goals written into most school mission statements: Moving beyond test preparation to deep, transferable learning.

  • Creating a culture of curiosity rather than compliance;
  • Modeling adult learning.
  • Training staff to integrate social-emotional learning intentionally;
  • Connecting global issues to local contexts in a practical way;
  • Moving beyond scripted curricula to project-based and inquiry learning;
  • Integrating technology meaningfully rather than as add-ons.

      The Organizational Context of Schooling

      The “egg carton” structure of schools creates an organizational structure that prevents teachers from interacting with their colleagues and undermines opportunities for teachers to test or be exposed to alternative understandings of policy. A true learning organization creates spaces and time for interdisciplinary learning and collaboration. To be sure, schools organized around separate, distinct subjects divided into fixed periods are easy to manage, but serve as a firewall to the very goals schools claim in their mission statements.

      The Educational Deep State

      The world of educational consultants, textbook manufacturers, and professional organizations often claims they are advancing the goals in school mission statements. In practice, however, this deep state of consultants, publishers, and professional organizations reinforces the existing structure of schooling and the “deep state of teaching” rather than challenging the centuries old grammar of schooling.

      Substantive Change is Difficult

      It is one thing to ask a teacher to make minor changes to their classroom teaching practices: swapping one textbook for another, adding tech integration, sending teachers to workshops. It is quite another to ask a teacher to rethink the design of learning itself. Asking a teacher to unlearn the practices associated with teaching isolated subject instruction and master the practices of inquiry-based learning is a cognitive shift that most teachers would be unwilling or unable to make.

      The Fundamental Questions of School Reform

      Although the list of barriers to school reform is formidable, they are not insurmountable. Many of my blogs provide a road map for challenging structures and beliefs, and begin the journey to align daily practice with the values and aspirations written into their mission statements. Before beginning that journey, however, administrators should personally answer for themselves the following fundamental questions of school reform:

  • Why would I do it?
  • What does “it” look like, and which elements, practices, and processes are necessary and sufficient ingredients for “it?”
  • What are the necessary conditions, both inside and outside the schools and in the broader education systems, for “it” to happen?
  • If you did “it”, would it “work?”
  • How do you sustain and continuously improve “it?”

Why Has Curriculum Reform Failed?

by Alan Jones

      For the last two decades, every President in the White House has offered up a school reform initiative. The continual call for school reform is based on the belief that the blame for the low achievement scores of students in this nation lies squarely in schools that are poorly run and poorly staffed. While it is an oversimplification to place the blame for poor student achievement on poor school management, the fact remains that over the last decade, the focus of school reform legislation has been on improving academic standards, enhancing teacher quality and support, and holding schools accountable for student performance.

      What has been missing from the school reform agenda is any talk of the role the school curriculum plays in student achievement. The assumption made by lawmakers, school administrators, and teachers is that the subject-centered curriculum designed around academic course offerings is the gold standard. Over time, schools have expanded their course offerings by introducing electives to enhance student engagement. These additions, however, are just that: additions. They are not intended to subtract subjects from the core curriculum, reorganize course offerings, or rewrite course offerings. The standardized college-bound curriculum authored by the Committee of 10 in 1892 still remains the gold standard.

      Although there have been a number of reports and research studies that have questioned the worth and teachability of the subject-centered college-bound curriculum, it still remains the mainstay of all schools in this nation. The question remains: Why is a curriculum designed in 1892 still in its original form in a nation and world where global economies are demanding habits of thought and occupational skills that no longer align well with the college-bound subject subject-centered curriculum? The following outlines the six major barriers to school curriculum reform:

      Conflicting Goals

      All school mission statements write goals that fall into the following four categories: civic, vocational, cultivating humanity, self self-development. Putting aside the conflicts each goal has with the other goals, the organization of these goals into a coherent approach to teaching and learning is an impossible undertaking. Schools have solved this dilemma by mandating that all students fill their schedules with the sequence of courses from the core curriculum—the 1892 academic college preparatory course offerings—and, if space in a student’s schedule is left open they are free to sprinkle in elective course offerings that nibble around the edges of civic responsibilities, developing personal interests, or examining the human condition.

      Credentialing

      At the turn of the century, a group of reform-minded Superintendents aimed to reform schools by applying principles of efficiency and scientific management. They transformed the personalization of the one-room schoolhouse into an institutional school system whose goal was to standardize course offerings, time allocated for each course offering, and the awarding of credits for completion of each course. For over a century have been more focused on sifting and sorting students within these bureaucratic mazes rather than enhancing learning.

      The 1892 Curriculum Works

      Middle- and upper-class parents feel that the college-bound academic curriculum works for their sons and daughters. Any dramatic changes to the 1892 college-bound curriculum would pose a threat to powerful groups of parents who sent their children to college.

      What real schooling looks like

      As a Superintendent commented to me after a proposed interdisciplinary program was opposed by various parent groups: “Well, Al, nice presentation, but you know, everyone has been to third grade.” He meant by this comment that all parents have experienced institutional schooling. And yes, when you gather at reunion parties, the institutional model of schooling—seven periods, subjects, credits, Friday’s test— is disparaged by most. But, all would agree that this is how a school should look, and this is how school should be conducted.

      What real teaching looks like

      Teachers, like their parent counterparts, sat for many hours in desks, lined up in rows, and with a teacher in front of the room transmitting large amounts of facts, methods, and distributing Friday’s test. Most teachers believe that students should be taught like they were taught. So they define curriculum by textbooks, disconnected categories of knowledge, and academic exercises—the ten end-of-the-chapter questions.

      Organizational Convenience

      It is convenient to have a curriculum that focuses on academic subjects, which are aligned with the university discipline. It is convenient to have a differentiated curriculum, which allows teachers to specialize. It is convenient to structure a high school around a core curriculum that simplifies curriculum planning and the documentation of student progress.

      No Cognitive Infrastructure

      All the barriers to school reform are formidable; they are not insurmountable. What has held these barriers in place for over a century is the lack of counter-narratives, vocabularies, and messengers. The narratives and vocabularies now in place revolve around institutional goals and practices—credentialing, standardization, accountability, compartmentalization—rather than creating learning environments that are lively, challenging, and intellectually engaging.

      Although a group of progressive educators at the turn of the century developed narratives and vocabularies that challenged institutional goals and values, the quest for organizational certainty in schooling all but erased these narratives and vocabularies from the educational landscape. The fatal blow, however, to the erasure of progressive vocabularies and narratives from the educational landscape was largely the fault of school administrators unschooled in the theories, ideas, vocabularies, and narratives developed over a century ago by the likes of John Dewey, Maria Montessori, Francis Parker, and William Heard Kilpatrick.

      Even if a school administrator came across these narratives and vocabularies in their administrative training, the managerial tools taught in these courses, along with the institutional systems already in place in their schools, would offer school administrators little opportunity or incentive to pursue progressive approaches to teaching and learning. Without agents willing and able to articulate alternative models of schooling, students brought up in a Google information environment will remain stuck in a Gutenberg era curriculum.

So…if not mission statements or strategic plans, then what???

by Alan Jones

In previous blogs, I argued that school administrators and boards of education should reconsider the practice of writing mission statements and strategic plans. Instead of three retreats with posted notes decorating motel conference room walls, administrators and board members should follow Warren Buffett’s three rules in investing—what he terms, “the value of simplicity.”

      In a recent interview, Warren Buffett offered the three rules he follows in investing—what he termed, “the value of simplicity.” Before Superintendents and Boards adjoin to their weekend conference venues to write out their values and plans for the district they should first consider Buffett’s three simple rules for investing.

      Rule #1: What are the fundamentals of schooling

      In the last decade, school districts have bought into private industry’s love of analyzing huge amounts of data. Districts have purchased all manner of software programs to collect data and employed all manner of administrators specializing in the analysis of data. In Buffett’s view, slicing and dicing data—student demographics, attendance, test scores, disciplinary actions, course enrollment, grades—are informative, but miss the essential question that should be asked of school performance: What are the fundamentals of the schools we are governing and how do these fundamentals effects student learning?

      Instead of spending money and time on gathering and analyzing data, school boards, central office administrators, and building-level administrators should spend a week sitting in classrooms in their districts. What they will find, in the words of educational historians is: “The Grammar of Schooling.” The chart below represents two very different “fundamentals” of schooling. The column on the left lists the goals and practices of the “grammar of schooling.” The column on the right lists the goals and practices that are commonly listed in school mission statements. Administrators exiting the classes that have sat in would find that the fundamentals of schooling present the goals and practices listed in the left column—the grammar of schooling.”

 The Grammar of Schooling  Educational Driven Pedagogies
Educational GoalsCover the material  Do the work of the field
Pedagogical Priorities  Breadth  Depth
View of KnowledgeCertain  Uncertain
View of studentsExtrinsically motivated  Creative, curious, and capable
Role of StudentReceiver of knowledge  Creator of knowledge
Role of teacher  Dispenser of knowledgeFacilitator of learning
View of failure  Something to be avoidedCritical to learning
Ethos  ComplianceRigor and Joy

      After the classroom visits, Buffett’s investing model would ask school administrators to take time to learn about the instructional models in their buildings and the impact these models are having on students. Over the last decade, surveys of students’ attitudes towards their schooling experience have expressed a general discontent with the grammar of schooling. If you reduce their comments listed below to one term it would be, “boring.”

  • Monotonous schedules and lack of choice
  • Perceived irrelevance
  • Rote memorization
  • Lack of freedom and autonomy
  • Excessive homework
  • Too much teacher talk

      Rule #2: How are these fundamentals being implemented?

      Now returning to Buffett’s model, he would then ask, “What does the company produce and how does it make money? Translated into school practices, schools are organized around the institutional goals of preparation, acquisition of information, delivery of information, compliance with state standards, accumulation of credits, and scores on standardized tests. The fundamentals of schooling—grades, credits, subjects, tests—the fundamentals that students find boring—are from an administrative standpoint aligned with a school organization that prizes preparation over the expansion of the intellect; acquisition of information over the construction of meaning; delivering of information over facilitating understanding; scores on standardized tests over solutions to authentic problems.

      Rule #3: Are the current goals and organization of schools worth investing in?

      From an administrative standpoint, the answer to the worth of poring money into schooling would be a resounding YES. From the surveys of student experiences and the goals written into school mission statements, the answer would be a resounding NO.

      This divide between the institutional goals listed in district policy and operations manuals and the goals and values listed in school mission statements should be the focus of the discussions at district strategic planning sessions. If conducted honestly and openly, it would become apparent early on in the discussion that the curiosity, interest, optimism, and passion that all parents want their sons and daughters to experience in classrooms is being suppressed by a school organization and practices that value the grammar of schooling over the poetry of schooling.

      To follow through on Buffett’s model, schools, as currently designed would not be a wise investment. And, for investment purposes, the model would stop there. For the stakeholders sitting in weekend retreats, however, they could continue with the model by asking the question: “How could we change the fundamentals of schooling to align with the educational goals and practices we have written into our school mission statements?

      I have written six books on the gaps that exist between the grammar of schooling and schools that develop in children and adolescents the degree of attention, curiosity, interest, optimism, and passion that are promised in their school mission statements. Each book goes into great detail on the what and how of actualizing these values in school classrooms. For school administrations and governing boards to close the gap between the grammar and, what I will term, the poetry of schooling, they should refrain from writing mission statements and strategic plans, and instead, spend the time at the weekend retreat studying the fundamentals of schooling they are sending their sons and daughters to and committing to plans, not a strategic plan, but, a plan listing specific organizational and administrative changes and initiatives that remake our schools into wise investments.

“Mr. Jones, You Make an Excellent Shylock”

by Alan Jones

     In my junior year in high school, I enrolled in a course titled “World Literature.” When I walked into the class on the first day, I expected to be handed a huge tome filled with authors from all regions of the world—Africa, East and South Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and North America/Europe. Although I was certainly no authority on great literature, some authors I expected to read were Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Dickens, Orwell, Austin, and Shakespeare.

      I sat at my desk, inspecting the room. What caught my attention were large posters announcing various Shakespearean plays, a model of a theatre, and the teacher’s name written on the chalkboard, “Miss Steinberg.” What was missing from the class was the treaded book cart.

      The second bell rang, and in walked Miss Steinberg. What struck me about her appearance was the large black horned claws that seemed too large for a petite-framed woman. Her hair, which was pitch black, was pulled back in a bun. She was wearing a well-tailored suit with no jewelry. Miss Steinberg’s appearance and professional manner left me with the impression that this class was all business. Her introductory comments doubled down on my overall impression and left all of us in class wondering what we had gotten ourselves into:

“Good morning, class. My name is Miss Steinberg. Before going into detail on the goals and expectations for this class, I want you to understand that the title of this course, World Literature, is a misnomer. The only world author we will be studying is William Shakespeare. I will not go into my efforts to convince the administration to change the name of the course. But, be that as it may, I wanted to be forthright with you about the works you will be studying. As you have probably noticed, the room has no textbook cart. Our department’s textbook inventory does not have all the works of Shakespeare. So, I will provide paperback versions of Shakespeare’s plays at a minimum cost. Before leaving class, pick up the reading list from the front counter.

      Miss Steinberg then launched into a description of Elizabethan England. Her dramatic descriptions of royalty, poverty, plagues, and wars that shaped Shakespeare’s worldview placed me in a trance-like state—so trance-like that I did not hear the passing bell go off.

      As we were leaving the class, Mrs. Steinberg informed us that there were openings in other literature classes if we wanted to drop the class. Several students I walked down the hallway with announced they were dropping the class. In the words of one of them: “There is no way I am spending a year reading all of Shakespeare’s plays. Besides, Steinberg is no joke. I can’t afford a C or D on my transcripts.”

      There was no doubt in my mind that Mrs. Steinberg was no joke. I also had reservations about reading all of Shakespeare’s plays. There was something, however, about Mrs. Steinberg’s intellect and obvious love of Shakespeare that compelled me to remain in the class. It turned out that the year I spent journeying with Mrs. Steinberg’s Shakespearean adventure was pivotal in deciding to become a teacher and how teaching should be conducted. It was not so much the particular teaching methodologies employed by Mrs. Steinberg that made each period pass by so quickly. Rather, it was her enthusiasm for questioning the behaviors and motivations of the characters that Shakespeare wrote about.

       I can still hear her call out at the top of her voice: “Mr. Jones, what do we have going on here?” What transpired next was not a literal interpretation of a character’s statement but a series of questions or comments from Miss Steinberg that asked me to grapple with characters coming face to face with their failings or pursuing power at the expense of others. There was no hint in these discussions of connections between Shakespearean themes and the politics of the day. However, I often left class seeing parallels between political figures we studied in history and family dinner conversations.

      Aside from Miss Steinberg’s ability to incite doubt and stimulate the imaginations in adolescent minds, the usual trapping of institutional schooling—grades, quizzes, tests, papers— was never brought up. We were required to keep a journal that recorded our responses to prompts posed by Miss Steinberg or an open-ended question about what we were discussing. We were critiqued on our performance in different activity structures: debates over character motivations, creating modern adaptations, role-playing scenes, and watching film interpretations.

      The critiques, however, were never the usual deficit-based model we all experienced in other classes. Miss Steinberg never made a judgmental statement focusing on what was wrong or lacking. Instead, she had the uncanny ability to focus on what was working for us and how we could augment what was working for us. She also possessed the rare skill of knowing when a particular activity structure was uncomfortable for the class. In these instances, she had a way of moving to a different activity without signaling that an individual or class was in over its head.

      Although I was proud to receive an A in the class, what meant more to me than the A, was a comment made to me when she passed me in the hallway: “Mr. Jones, you make an excellent Shylock.” In addition to being an excellent Shylock, the other educational gift I received in the class, one which I only realized later in life, was being introduced to vocabularies and ways of thinking that allowed me to step away from my parent’s vocabularies and ways of thinking into a self-authoring individual. No, I did not leave the class rebelling against my parents. I did leave that class with a questioning mind. A mind that all school mission statements profess to be a goal, but are rarely practiced in classrooms or school offices.

“The WHY of Schooling”

by Alan Jones

Students are demoralized, bored, and distracted in school, not because of a lack of interesting methods, but both teachers and students lack, a narrative to provide profound meaning to their lessons.

(Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of Schooling)

      In the forty years I have spent in public school administration, the many hours I spent in offices policies, mandates, systems, finances, legal opinions, staffing, and the crisis of the day. I cannot remember ever discussing the educational goals and values written into school mission statements—what I term the why of schooling.

      My prior books on the subject list the following reasons why the occupants of main offices never discuss what kind of public should their school be creating.

  • The occupants of the main offices are consumed with the managerial details of running a school.
  • The occupants of main offices assume that the why of schooling has already been answered by state legislators, school boards, or central offices.
  • The occupants of the main offices see little value in spending time on ivory tower discussions of the way of schooling.
  • The occupants of the main offices lack the academic training to engage in thoughtful discussions over the why of schooling.

      Without a compelling narrative to inspire a reason for schooling the occupants of main offices are unable to develop a meaningful response to the following problems of schooling:

      Problem #1: Coherent Response to the Five Fundamental Questions of Schooling

      The force behind creating an engaging learning environment is a coherent response to the following six fundamental questions of learning:

  1. What are the goals of schooling?
  2. How do children learn?
  3. What knowledge is of most worth?
  4. How should knowledge be organized?
  5. How should we assess what students understand?
  6. HOW SHOULD WE TEACH?

      All of these answers to these fundamental questions depend upon what goals of schooling main offices and classrooms are pursuing. Over the years schools have pursued the following goals:

  1. To educate (what is the meaning of life?)
  2. To emancipate (who am I?)
  3. To join (How do I effectively participate in a democratic community?)
  4. To prepare (What do I want to become?)
  5. To socialize (How should I behave?)

      While school mission statements tend to emphasize goals 1, 2, and 3—critical thinking— most school curricula and school organizations are designed to train and follow orders. A school curricular and school organization dominated by credits, seat time, grades, and subjects, responds to the fundamental questions of schooling far differently than a school curricular and school organization designed to develop: agency; a sense of belongingness; an interest; and a critical thinker.

      Problem #2: The Problem of Mandates

      Every school year occupants of main offices enter their offices with their in-boxes filled with new policies, directives, or mandates that governmental or administrative bodies expect their administrative teams to implement. Most of these mandates involve routine changes to school curricula or school organizations. Some, however, are controversial and draw occupants of main offices into philosophical questions. Take, for example, recent trends in curricular mandates asking schools to emphasize and implement materials specifically designed to advance the concept of multiculturalism.

      On the face of it, curricular materials designed to foster the acceptance of different cultures in society and the active support of these cultures by both majority and minority groups would appear to be a value worth embracing. On the other hand, public schools from their inception have favored the goal of cultural pluralism in which multiple ethnic groups can coexist and maintain their unique cultural identities while participating fully in the dominant society.

      The problem with such a mandate is which curriculum should a school pursue:

A multicultural curriculum is designed to focus on recognizing and celebrating diverse cultures within a society or should a school pursue a cultural pluralistic curriculum emphasizing the coexistence and interaction of different cultures? This distinction may appear to be splitting hairs, but, at a board meeting, parents may question either approach, and, in the process, raise philosophical questions over assimilation versus integration, loss of identity, educational disparities, and social integration. With such issues, the managerial what’s and how’s of board meetings quickly turn to the whys of schooling.

      Problem #3: The Problem of Contradictions

      Although rarely articulated in school meeting venues—faculty meetings, parent open houses, board meetings—there are contradictions between what schools profess in their mission statements and the realities of school policies and classroom practices. The most glaring example is the educational value most frequently mentioned in school mission statements—critical thinking. While this value is most often announced from auditorium stages, the goals they list—agency, interests, questioning—disappear in main offices and classrooms pursuing institutional goals and values—standardization, accounting, compliance.

      Problem #4: The Problem of Relevance: Connecting the Dots

      W. Edwards Deming, the father of TQM, emphasized the distinction between information and knowledge. In Deming’s view, information is not knowledge. Knowledge, according to Deming, is the ability to predict future outcomes and understand the past, requiring a theory or framework for analysis. Information, on the other hand, is simple data without the context or theory to make it meaningful.

      In school classrooms, the pedagogical methods teachers employ treat information as if it were knowledge. In the words of Thomas Gradgrind, the teacher in Dickens’s novel Hard Times: “Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them.”

      When students question the relevance of the facts they are required to memorize, the common teacher response to these questions is to assure students that they will need these facts later in the course or some distant future—a future that never seems to materialize. The large amounts of information that are transmitted in daily lesson plans and in textbooks align well with classroom-based testing instruments. However, facts alone align poorly with real-world applications that require, in Deming’s words, a theory or framework for analysis or simply put, are shaped by the relationships we have and the situations we are in.

      THE FINAL PROBLEM: Student Discipline

      The problem that dogs school organizations is how to work with students who do not conform to the norms of institutional schooling. School administrators address this ongoing problem with institutional responses: discipline codes; parent conferences; suspensions; detentions; time-out rooms; and demerits. In the last decade, schools have moved from looking upon student discipline as a matter of poor parenting or biological proclivities of different age groups to a variety of explanations for student misbehavior: attention-seeking, learning difficulties, unmet emotional needs, lack of social skills, power struggles, problems at home, medical issues.

      While all of these explanations are reasonable as far as they go. What they all ignore is the inconvenient truth of institutional schooling: schools are boring. In John Goodlad’s seminal study of classroom practices in thirteen high schools throughout the country, he describes what a boring classroom looks like in practice:

 [I saw] the teacher explaining or lecturing to the total class or a single student, occasionally asking questions requiring factual answers; the teacher, when not lecturing, observing or monitoring students working individually at their desks; students listening or appearing to listen to the teacher and occasionally responding to the teacher’s questions; students working individually at their desks on reading or writing assignments; and all with little emotion, from interpersonal warmth to expressions of hostility.

(Goodlad, A Place Called School)

      If students are not engaged in what is occurring in the classroom they become disruptive. Changing the inconvenient truth of schooling asks school administrators to “self-author” a narrative composed of three parts:

      PART I: Schools are boring

      Openly admitting to the reality that the design of the school organization and the organization of curriculum align well with institutional goals, but, fall short of creating a learning environment that would fully engage children and adolescents. Included in Part I of the narrative are specific organizational and instructional strategies administrators and teachers will pursue to address one or more of the problems of schooling listed above.

      Part II:  What does an engaging learning environment look like?

      Throughout this narrative school administrators must describe what teachers and students are doing in a learning environment where students are socially, emotionally, and intellectually engaged. There are many descriptors for engaging learning environments. The answers to Elliot Eisner’s list of questions listed below could serve as a template for designing a school organization that places the goal of creating engaging learning environments ahead of the enforcement of institutional goals.

      Part III: The HOW of creating engaging learning environments:

      Once the why and what of engaging learning environments has been established, the final paragraph in the narrative would describe specific changes to the school organization and curricular design that would develop engaging learning environments. Listed below are the four areas in a school organization that would signal a change in what goals and values classrooms would be pursuing:

  • The budget
  • The curriculum
  • The master schedule
  • The training regime—professional development

WHAT IS A GOOD SCHOOL: EISNER

(Eisner, E. W. (January 01, 2001). FEATURES – What Does It Mean to Say a School Is Doing Well?

 Phi Delta Kappan, 82, 5, 367)

1.            WHAT KINDS OF PROBLEMS AND ACTIVITIES DO STUDENTS ENGAGE IN?

2.            WHAT IS THE INTELLECTUAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE IDEAS THAT THEY ENCOUNTER?

3.            ARE STUDENTS INTRODUCED TO MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES?

4.            WHAT CONNECTIONS ARE STUDENTS HELPED TO MAKE BETWEEN WHAT THEY STUDY IN CLASS AND THE WORLD OUTSIDE OF SCHOOL?

5.            WHAT OPPORTUNITIES DO YOUNGSTERS HAVE TO BECOME LITERATE IN THE USE OF DIFFERENT REPRESENTATIONS FORMS (i.e. various symbol systems that give humans meaning)?

6.            WHAT OPPORTUNITIES DO STUDENTS HAVE TO FORMULATE THEIR PURPOSES AND DESIGN WAYS TO ACHIEVE THEM?

7.            WHAT OPPORTUNITIES TO STUDENTS HAVE TO WORK COOPERATIVELY TO ADDRESS PROBLEMS THAT THEY BELIEVE TO BE IMPORTANT?

8.            DO STUDENTS HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY TO SERVE THE COMMUNITY IN WAYS THAT ARE NOT LIMITED TO THEIR INTERESTS?

9.            TO WHAT EXTENT ARE STUDENTS ALLOWED TO WORK IN DEPTH IN DOMAINS THAT ARE RELATED TO THEIR APTITUDES?

10.          DO STUDENTS PARTICIPATE IN THE ASSESSMENT OF THEIR WORK?

11.          DO WHAT EXTENT ARE STUDENTS GENUINELY ENGAGED IN WHAT THEY DO IN SCHOOL?