I don’t know as much about high school reform as I should, but I am picking up the following ideas.

First, over the next five years or so, high schools will be the topic of the most interesting debates and reforms in all of education. For elementary and middle schools, we have a regime in place, as codified in No Child Left Behind (NCLB). There are frequent statewide tests; scores are disaggregated by race, gender, disability, and language background; and every group must make “adequate yearly progress” on the tests or else schools face penalties. Like it or hate it, this is the status quo for grades 1-8; only adjustments are possible.

The formula embodied in NCLB doesn’t affect high schools nearly as deeply, yet there is widespread agreement that they should be thoroughly reformed. In particular, many people criticize huge, themeless, “shopping mall” high schools that offer long lists of courses and activities (as well as cliques and networks) for a wide variety of students. Kids who enter on a very good track or who have positive support from peers and family may make wise choices about their courses, friends, extracurricular activities, and next steps after graduation. Other students will make bad–or inconsistent and incoherent–choices, and then pay for their own adolescent decisions for the rest of their lives. “Shopping mall” high schools also tend to have reasonably bad discipline, a general atmosphere of alienation, and lots of internal segregation by race, class, and subculture. Often, they occupy suburban-style campuses, set far apart from the adult community of work, family, religion, and politics. (The school where I often work serves a low-income minority population, yet it has an isolated building on a great big lawn.) Even worse, some of these huge schools occupy prison-like urban blocks, secured with gates and bars.

Most developmental pyschologists feel that adolescents need more moral and cultural coherence and guidance than the typical high school provides. Teenagers are not in much danger of being brainwashed by a strong institutional culture; rebellion comes naturally to them. They are in danger of becoming completely alienated and lost in an institution that lacks values and mission.

It’s fine to let students choose among competing schools. Some students will do better in a school oriented toward scientific research, or service-learning, or the great books. But the choice should be carefully made among coherent, purposeful communities, not “a la carte” off a miscellaneous list of courses and other experiences. Perhaps more important, almost all schools should be small, so that no student is overlooked or forgotten.

Thus we see the Gates Foundation and major school districts like New York City investing heavily in small, themed schools, many of which connect academic instruction to internships or community service. High school reform, so conceived, has risks and drawbacks. Students may choose schools in ways that reinforce inequality. For example, children of lawyers and doctors may migrate to the “great books” schools; poor children, to service-learning academies. Some schools will choose foolish ideas for their themes or will implement their ideas poorly. Finally, it takes many small schools to replace a few huge ones. While the small ones are being built (and this will inevitably take years), most students will be left in the old “shopping malls,” which may degenerate further because they will be slated for destruction–and the more motivated students will escape first. Nevertheless, I think high school reform is highly promising, and we need to figure out how to do it right.

Readers of this site know that I often discuss “civic education,” broadly defined–all our efforts to prepare the next generation for democratic self-government. In the narrower (but crucial) domain of formal, pre-college civic education, an important force is the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, which has several million dollars to advocate policy changes at the state and federal level. As of yesterday, the Campaign has established its own blog. The main authors will be members of our steering committee (who are leaders of two dozen relevant organizations), key members of the national staff, and people from the Campaign’s 18 state teams. A graduate student who works for me under the aegis of the National Alliance for Civic Education (NACE) will post news items on the Campaign’s blog almost daily. Of course, anyone can post replies and comments. If civic ed is your thing, please bookmark and contribute.

When students frame, study, and address local problems, they are likely to acquire local knowledge. For example, if a high school class studies a nearby watershed, develops a restoration plan, and presents it to the local government, the students will surely learn more about the watershed itself. I see three ways of assessing such learning.

1) Maybe the only point of education is to develop knowledge, skills, and dispositions that would apply anywhere. Thus students in the imaginary watershed project should understand science better (thus scoring higher on instruments like the NAEP Science Assessment) and also perform better on CIRCLE’s “Indicators of Civic Engagement,” which measures behaviors like voting, following the news, and attending meetings. We might also expect them to stay in school longer and have fewer disciplinary problems.

2) Maybe we should expect students to improve along dimensions that aren’t well measured by existing standardized tests and surveys–but that could be so measured. For example, engagement with local problems over time could increase students’ teamwork skills, capacity for public speaking, etc. These are generalized outcomes that we may not value sufficiently; but we could assess them.

3) Or maybe we should be glad that students have learned about the watershed itself. After all, nowhere is it written that the proper unit of analysis is always the nation. Just as we would like Americans to understand the Bill of Rights, so we might like residents of a county to understand the source of their own water–not because this knowledge will apply elsewhere or lead students to acquire generalized knowledge later on, but because it is valuable in itself.

If the third option holds any appeal, then it raises new questions about standardized tests. Almost by definition, they cannot adequately value local knowledge.

Last night and today, I’m attending a meeting organized by the Coalition for Community Schools. The Coalition has convened representatives of six movements:

service learning: community service combined with academic work and reflection

environmental education: studying environmental science and applying the knowledge to understand local ecosystems

place-based education: studying local communities in order to increase appreciation (as well as knowledge) of disparaged places, such as poor rural areas

civic education, which should include the study of local issues and structures of government

work-based learning, as defined in the School to Work Opportunities Act of 1990, which supports programs that place students in job settings for academic study.

community youth development: which treats young people as assets in community development, and trains and supports them to participate in local organizations and networks.

Each of these movements or philosophies of education treats the local community as a “text” for students to interpret–and, to some degree, “rewrite.” There are many examples and stories of truly exciting results. For example, students in a Texas border school district conducted oral histories of their elderly, immigrant relatives, translated the results into English, and used the resulting English/Spanish narratives as textbooks in their schools. On the other hand, using “community-as-text” is hard and often frustrating work, especially when communities do not embrace the participation of students.

In the end, I think that using the “community as text” is one of several strategies that can bring coherence, purpose, and passion to education. It is not better than an arts focus, a global-cultures focus, a history focus, a tech focus, or various other choices. I do believe, however, that it implies its own set of principles and values, which can be particularly attractive in certain settings. For example, we are motivated to use the community as text in Prince George’s County, MD, because the students are growing up in a fascinating jurisdiction–diverse and rapidly changing–yet people of all ages tend to overlook or discount it as a community. Thus studying the county and disseminating the results is a means of (much needed) community organizing.

Senator Lamar Alexander’s bill S. 504 has now passed both houses of Congress and is on its way to the President.

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