Adjusted Principles for 21st Century Learning

Last week Chad Aldeman, a reporter for The 74, posted an article titled “12 Truths and No Lies: Guiding Principles for the Future of American Education.” With some opinions added by ABPTL, here’s Part 1 of Aldeman’s article (Part 2 will appear Monday):

“It’s a bleak time in education policy.”

“Student achievement started falling about a decade ago, slowly at first, and then all at once. Then COVID led to dramatic drops in enrollment and attendance and a decline in trust in public schools. This year, with the expiration of federal relief funds, schools will have a lot less money to spend on staff or new programs.”

“With all this in mind, with education foundering and in need of direction, I sketched out a list of 12 guiding principles. Some may seem like obvious truisms, but they haven’t always been reflected in policy or classroom practices in recent years. Others may be more controversial and fly in the face of prevailing trends. But America is overdue for a big national reckoning about the current and future state of its public schools, so here’s my attempt to start that conversation:

1. Education is good, but knowledge is better. More schooling leads to more learning, and people who know more stuff tend to lead more successful, productive lives. That’s good for individuals and good for society. But time in school is merely an input measure, and the outcome – achievement – is what will ultimately matter in a child’s life. That lesson can be multiplied over the broader society. As economist Rick Hanushek put it to me back in 2015, ‘In the long run, the economic well-being of countries depends upon the quality of their workers.’

ABPTL: We need to stop defining learning with places called schools and begin embracing the concept of “public schooling,” which emphasizes our ability to provide public money for schooling, i.e. wherever learning is taking place is “schooling.”

• Teachers are incredibly important. Educators are still the most important in-school factor for student learning, and the best teachers also improve students’ attitudes and behaviors. As a policy matter, schools should hold teachers to high standards and pay them like professionals.

ABPTL: Adult learning leaders are the ones incredibly important. The term “teacher” suggests to most people a person who receives low pay to perform a job that is under-valued and overly criticized by most of the country. Adult learning leaders give us the opportunity to redefine exactly what we need from those who are going to lead our young learners on the pathway to becoming smarter and stronger in their reading, writing, problem-solving, and character development abilities.

• Incentives matter. Students and educators are rational actors and will respond to incentives. When states and school districts – especially those in Democratic-controlled areas – retreat from school and student accountability, that will have consequences in the form of reduced academic effort and lower achievement. Teachers as a group are well-intentioned and mission-oriented, but they naturally tend to flock toward easier jobs with less challenging students. Deliberate policy nudges in the form of extra pay for working high-need schools and hard-to-staff roles can help reverse these normal human tendencies.

ABPTL: It’s possible to pay our newly trained Adult Learning Leaders a six-figure salary, if we start thinking differently about how young learners are assigned to adults according to that young person’s learning plan.

• Testing and high expectations are good. They give people targets to shoot for, hold them accountable for results and provide a tool for diagnosing what needs to improve.

ABPTL: Testing and high expectations are good, but they are only part of the puzzle when it comes to evaluating a young person’s learning. How a young learner succeeds defining, planning, executing, and evaluating their own learning (which should include testing and high expectations) means the difference between a young person who learns how to learn and a young person who sits by passively while a teacher tells them what they need to learn.

• Parents deserve honest, timely information about their child’s performance. The nonprofit group Learning Heroes has found that 90% of parents believe their child is on grade level, while the reality is about half that. This has fed into an urgency gap, where educators warn the public that kids are behind even as they struggle to enroll students in tutoring or summer school or convince students to take those programs seriously.

States have been mostly indifferent to this disconnect. They take months to process and distribute the results of their annual spring tests. Those exams are meant to present parents with the objective reality of their child’s performance, but that check on the system can’t happen given the current delays. In response, Ohio now requires school districts to share results with parents no later than June 30 of each year, and Virginia will soon give parents their child’s results no more than 45 days after the testing window closes. More states should follow Ohio and Virginia’s lead.

ABPTL: In addition to parents receiving test results, which tells families very little about their child’s learning behaviors and outcomes, young learners’ caregivers should play a role in developing a learning plan for each individual learner.

• All children should get a fair opportunity to be educated to the best of their ability. A noble pursuit for ‘equity’ has sometimes meant that schools hold higher-achieving students back. That’s a mistake, and schools would be better off with a clear focus on developing all kids’ talent. Automatic enrollment, in which students qualify for accelerated courses based on their demonstrated performance, is one simple policy that’s starting to spread across the country. Similarly, more places could adopt individual learning plans, as Mississippi did in reading, or what some states do for gifted students.

ABPTL: Too many schools are inherently inequitable when asked to serve all young learners. Instead of using schools as the unit of change when it comes to learning, use the individual learner – through the development of personalized learning plans.

Part 2 of this post appears on Monday. Friday News Roundup tomorrow. Til then. SVB