(00:00:00) Let me just give you a few of the Impressions a specific Impressions. I have both to give you a feel of the substance, but also to give you a feel of the (00:00:10) effect (00:00:11) because this room is a room of Educators like myself and I want you to know that the critique I'm making comes from pain. Not from some kind of bomb throwing sarcastic or name-calling kind (00:00:32) of kind of posture (00:00:35) take H grading. We you know, you ask a kid what you see a kid know. What's your name? Susan Smith? What grade are you in ninth grade? It's a second question. You ask it as well as I do. What is what is what is grade mean grade means how when you were born? Do we that's nice. But if we organize our schools on the basis of for the basis of learning on the basis of chronological age, the question is asked you mean all kids were 14 or at the same stage intellectually to deserve the same kind of Academic Program. You said no, of course not (00:01:18) of course (00:01:18) not because all 14 year olds differ because just as they differ physiologically so to they differ intellectually all 14 year olds aren't alike, you know that and I know that from our own children, how do we organize schools on the basis of chronological age? How do we test kids on the basis of age Norms? How do we grade kids? You are honorable and the 11th grade? Because you are 16 pushing 17 just because you are honorable because you have developed intellectually more rapidly than your friend here. And he has something less than honorable merely because through a a mystery as mysterious as the slow physiological development. His intellectual development was slow. So we humiliate the slow developer and swell ahead of the fast developer and it doesn't make sense does it and yet we do it all 11th graders will take us history. Because they are 16 pushing 17 doesn't make sense. take another your schools and my school run on things called periods a period is usually more than 43 minutes and fewer than 59 minutes. And if you don't have six you have seven, but if you're going to toughen up the program you add 1/8, right? How much serious intellectual and imaginative activity do you would and I do in 47 minute Snippets answer not much. Not much at all. How do we ask the kids to use their imaginations and intellects in 47 minutes Snippets? Does it make sense? No, is there any other serious educating institution that uses a device of seven consecutive 47 minutes Snippets? No, you sit through them again. Ladies and gentlemen as I did. And you will realize how enervating they are. It's tough. It's going to Sunday sermon seven in a row five days a week. Does it make sense? No, it doesn't take another. How do you and I organize our school English math? Social studies science? What are those in good schools? They are coherent subjects. Here is an English program. There is a mathematic program. There is a science program as a social studies program. And in the best of schools, these are organized so that there is a series of well, and thoughtfully developed steps through the program. What does the kid do the kid cuts across them French physics whole Mech? Study hall math. No two of these subjects are planned. Enter in an interconnected way. That is the coherence is the coherence for the faculty in the department for the kid total in coherence again, if you don't believe me do (00:04:32) it (00:04:33) sit through a day and watch the difference in standards in expectations. In at watch the gaps in subject matter and then watch the redundancy in subject matter. The results for kids is intellectual chaos. Of course common sense you change the subject every hour on the hour and well, even though well-intentioned people have carefully planned each hour. The sum total for the kid is intellectual chaos and furthermore. (00:05:12) The (00:05:12) teachers in the school neither help students make sense of it all. Nor do the teachers. Model the general education themselves that they insist the students will do the only people in the school who speak French are the French (00:05:29) teachers, (00:05:32) the our teachers can can make fun of math and the Math teachers can make fun of art, but you kid have to master them both. So the kid looks around and says hey French couldn't be important because nobody teaches it but French teachers. And why should I be generally educated when the math teacher can be some kind of Barbarian and every other (00:05:56) subject (00:05:58) kids aren't stupid. They look at us with our talks about general education and they say under their breasts if they're thinking hypocrite. Hurts, don't it hurts? You and I know that no two kids are alike you and I know that the way we teach kids well is to know how they make mistakes. We can give the same group of kids the wrong because they got the wrong answer. We could say it's wrong. It's wrong it's wrong. But unless we know why the youngster made the mistake we can't help that youngster learn. Question how many kids Minds can we get to know well enough to know how each mind makes mistakes? Hundred hundred and twenty hundred and fifty a hundred and seventy-five. Not even close my friend Horace Smith has a hundred and twenty kids if he wants to spend 10 minutes a week only outside of class just 10 lousy minutes a week writing reading and writing on the kids English papers or talking to the kids. That's 20 hours. (00:07:15) A hundred and twenty kids 20 hours (00:07:18) can our Smith do it. No, of course not. How many kids minds are known well enough to know they make mistakes. Not very many. My colleagues find the kids at the top and the kids at the bottom, but that unspecial majority in the middle is unknown the kids who don't cut up enough to be known. Or who don't get straight A's and 55 zon five APS. Or Captain the football team or whatever those kids in the middle the kids that those of you in this room who like I am or was a principal to whom you gave the diploma and you couldn't remember the name those kids. Nobody knows how their minds work. No wonder they're docile because the kids can say this system is set up not to know me. I'm an animus. So why do I take the system (00:08:13) seriously? Hertz (00:08:18) how do you get a diploma you serve (00:08:20) time? (00:08:24) 36,000 (00:08:25) minutes (00:08:26) 32 Carnegie units do we learn at the same rate snow? So the expenditure of time is interesting, but not very helpful right to school our school still driven by the coinage of time. Yep. Does it make sense? (00:08:42) Nope? (00:08:47) The metaphor of schooling we deliver instructional Services. We give kids in education. We expose them to the great Treasures of the West those metaphors square with how you and I learn nope. How do you and I learn by engagement. When we want to learn something new we plunge into it. We have a chance to go to Mexico after learn Spanish. We don't read some book that tells us how to learn Spanish. We start speaking Spanish. That's how you and I learn. When we get that new Appliance, do we read the instruction manual page 1 to 12 know we plug it in and hope we don't get electrocuted and we start playing with it. That's how you and I learn what do we ask the kids to do read the manual does it make sense? Nope. Do we do (00:09:42) it? Yep. Hertz now I keep coming back (00:09:49) to this point. This is You have to take this seriously. It is it is the way you and I keep school. And the way we have kept School in this country since the 1890s. It is well-intentioned. We are generous good Folk. But we have not thought hard again about what it is about growing up and learning. And until we do we are going to be tinkering with a well-intentioned decent. But profoundly flawed and ineffective system. That's what we learned and some of the veteran teachers and I on this on this High School study found ourselves deeply (00:10:42) grieved. (00:10:45) Because we had as professionals before this moment not asked even fundamental questions. About the keeping of school. We had just assumed that it was okay because it had been that way sure there is something called English even though we can't define it. And the sure they've 60-minute period and you know, maybe we'll have double periods Etc. The basic metaphors of school keeping. We did not challenge. What the Coalition of essential schools is about is nothing more or less than asking those questions again quietly and patiently and without sort of visions of the Apocalypse in Bill Bennett rampant and all that. It is simply a group of folks growing group of folks. Veterans who say we are so confident of our (00:11:48) ability (00:11:51) and our schools are so good that we can take the risk of asking the fundamental questions again, and we can take the risk of changing our schools to match the answers of those to those fundamental questions. Nothing more or less than that. We believe strongly not only from our own experience, but from the careful work of our research and other researchers. That no two good schools are ever alike. And that what really characterizes the electricity which you and I know makeup good schools is unique to any one school as a particular relationship and confrontation between kids and teachers or adults in the building and ideas. That make for that that thing when you go in the you go into a school and you come away from a session or a class and you say wow, you know, and I know that wow is not something created in the factory and implemented it has to do with the engagement of people of personalities of ideas. It is it is the it is the product of something which is very special to that community and to that school. Thus the notion of a better school designed in some laboratory and then implemented by September is nice but won't work. Is the heart of good schooling to say it another way is the human confrontation. Of people some younger and some older and good ideas. Now we say this group of friends. If that is the case. Does that mean that nothing is left? But Anarchy in the answer of course is no what good schools share, we believe our common ideas and what holds the Coalition together as a set of ideas not a set of practices a set of commitments. These ideas are as old as the Hills. To recite them to you. I'll give you a flavor a very short reduce them to one side of one piece of paper deliberately. None of them will surprise you. However you and I will agree if you take these ideas seriously they involve. Ambitious changes in the way you and I teach and the way we keep school, for example. There are only two of these ideas which we in the Coalition unashamedly admit to being ideological and one of these is that the overarching purpose of secondary schooling as intellectual as school is about helping kids to learn to use their minds. Well in everything else is second to that and furthermore in the second place. We argue this applies to all kids without exception. There aren't some of those kids who should learn how to bang dents out of fenders because you know, they wouldn't be interested in the use of the Mind. The etiology is a democracy absolutely depends on thinking folk and that applies without exception to all thinking Folk. And there aren't any of those kids attract off into something else the kid who resists us the bovine kid up against the wall who refuses to let a flicker of Interest across her face is just as much need of our attention as the kiddo when the front row who's climbing over the desk trying to get a 5 on the AP. The others very familiar you and I learn when we engage we must be the workers metaphor. The student is the worker. The teacher is a coach we have to stop talking so much in class. I didn't believe how much I talked until I taped myself. It's awful when you realize that James John good lads research says we teachers more in college that in school high schools bad enough teach 60 or teach 70 to 90 a talk 70 to 90% of the time. Effective no enervating for the kids. You better believe it efficient. No. A curriculum of questions rather than have answers with a student doing the work. As soon as you let the students do the work you find out they don't organize as neatly when I give a lecture on the Civil War. I know I know when 1865 rolls around because I said it when I let the kids when I asked the kids provoke the kids control the kids to do the thinking about the Civil War some of them get it two weeks before the others. Very inconvenient. Furthermore if they move at different rates and if my if my purpose is to is to have them show me they've learned something. When do I know when they graduate? When they're 17 pushing 18 know because some kids will get there when they're 16 and some won't get there till they're 20, and they're all good kids. So but how do you know answer you have to find out? And in the Coalition we've reinvented that 18th and early 19th century American practice called exhibitions where the old Colonial and early National period academies and high schools had the kids exhibit in order to deserve their leaving certificates and they were of different ages and some of the exhibitions were silly. I'm sure but the principal was right the principle being the kid gets the leaving certificate when he earns it not when he merely serves time. Now the exhibition requires that the faculty has to be clear on the substance in the standards of a high school program. Oh my God, we know what a high school program. It is. It's four years of English three years of math two years of social studies. Now, that won't do what does the kid have to do in order to deserve our respect and how will we know it what he does it? That's a tough problem a really tough problem and when you push it as I tried as a high school principal without success and as more successful schools are doing in the Coalition what happens is a breaking down of long-held lines between subjects and a conversation about standards, which would be fundamental in any good (00:18:50) school. (00:18:55) Take another kids differ no teacher and us in a coalition school ever be responsible for more than 80 students. And in many schools The Faculty said has to be fewer than that because of the needs of the kids furthermore the Coalition schools, except we're going to do that with the existing budget plus or minus no more than 10% That means the compromises have to be made within the existing structure with a priority of personalization before any other as unless, you know the kids you can't teach them anything. So get those numbers down it is done as you know those of you and in the middle schools will know if I teach English and social studies to 80 kids. I only have 80 rather than if I teach only social studies I have to teach a hundred and sixty. You take that simple idea and play with it into teaming and even within existing Senior High School Staffing patterns. You can bring those numbers. down No free lunch. It means simplifying and focusing the curriculum. It means having people teach in teams, which means I have to suffer the indignity of having my bad teaching watched by a colleague. It means all those things. But it can be done. We believe that schools must be thoughtful communities that the culture of the school must be thoughtful that is clear. Thinking is has a place in the hallway as much as in physics class. That means that schools must be very (00:20:40) self-conscious (00:20:42) about modeling the very thoughtful behavior that it expects in academic and non-academic Realms sounds easy tough to do as you know that we're times as a high school principal I said do it because I said, so there are a few times that you do that when your when your grandson is about to reach into the either the stove okay, but they're very few times where you can you can properly defend that at least I could properly defend that as the principal of a senior high school. So these ideas very very familiar enough. They're all common sense. As I say with the exception of a couple of ideological ones and one having to do with Finance, which is merely a statement of reality and what the what the school friends I and in the Coalition are engaged in is an attempt in an orderly thoughtful way to switch their schools from what they are doing to something which they believe is better this better school being unique to that setting and the Coalition is nothing more and nothing less than the conversation among these people engaged in this happy (00:21:56) struggle. (00:21:57) Coalition is a conversation of a group of friends who agree on some important things. There are now depending on how you count between 55 and a hundred schools in the coalition. We learned that these schools as they move and as the simplification which is almost always necessary proceeds. That you run into State and District regulations and into Union contract problems. The latter have been a limited problem is in many of the communities the tough even the toughest Union communities. The leadership in many cases is come from the union. It is State and District regulation which appears to be they'll wait. In fact, it has not been the tougher obstacle. So to address this at the initiation of a number of the governor's including Governor perpich during his term as chairman of the education Commission of the states the Coalition based at Brown allied with ECS, which is this education policy Center set up in the 1960s by the governor's based in Denver. And in Six States now there is a commitment from the governor and the state legislature to move this rethinking which leads to new redesigned forward on a broad front not having it just at the school but to include the district in the state so that regulations Regulatory and policy matters are in fact redesigned just as the faculty redesigns, it's cool. And so there is the conversation now has broadened too many more folks from district and state level and to folks from interested citizens groups outside of the schools from organizations such as the Urban League to organizations such as the Business Roundtable. and the conversation proceeds there are probably a dozen Coalition schools the early ones which have been able to follow through on their ideas to some extent and now long enough. So they have some kids who have been exposed to this still incomplete a change and the difference is between those kids and others like him are striking. That is it's amazing. How kids don't drop out when they are known. It is amazing how much harder they work when they're engaged when they see a question rather than the necessity of memorizing. Somebody else's answer again. Nothing mysterious about it. It is amazing how much more sense kids can make of the world when the subjects coming at them are carefully related before being presented? It's encouraging. It's exceedingly difficult work. It's exceedingly difficult work for all of us myself included my own teaching. I'm still teaching it involves changing deeply ingrained habits, and it means giving up things which we did well. I fancy myself a good lecturer. I like to get up and tell them the truth and I like them to believe it's the (00:25:31) truth (00:25:34) and the glaze crosses the eyeball of the brown freshman when you do that on warm afternoons for an hour and a half. And it meant changing that it meant giving up things. I enjoy doing. Terribly terribly hard to do. It is terribly hard to sit down. If you are in the social sciences and I am as I am and say, what is it the kid can do at the end of this course the kid can do at the end of this course not just parrot back to me, but what the kid can do as a result of the course. Usually I said the course ends because we got to the Bush election. That's no longer enough. Exceedingly hard and as some of you may have seen the article long article in US News and world report about a month ago describing the Coalition schools and picking up this point of the agony of giving up. Ideas, which are so much a part of our professional lives that we never even (00:26:41) questioned them. (00:26:43) It's exceedingly difficult work. The heartening part is when there is the Breakthrough. When kids are different and even though it is difficult, it's those moments which this growing group of friends around the country and joy, and as they enjoy it we do too.