As schools wind down and families begin to settle in for the summer, school districts across the United States are deliberating how to allocate the federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER) dollars in the coming year. And while so much of the public school dialogue is understandably about addressing learning loss, we must not lose sight of the unique moment that we’re facing on the heels of the pandemic.
Since March of 2020, we’ve witnessed the harm of a one-size-fits-all approach to school. When the spectrum of school resources is inequitable, and student needs vary wildly, we can see more clearly now than ever before that students aren’t learning the skills needed to succeed in a global, dynamic society and that the current factory model of education perpetuates systemic inequality.
It is imperative that we reframe the notion of “lost learning.” Attempting to get students caught up on the skills that were not transferable prior to the pandemic will only add incredible stress to the educational system, our educators and students. If we lead with the notion of loss, our past inequities will persist and we will miss the opportunity to deeply understand what was learned and what needs to be learned moving forward.
Partner with students
It’s time to truly reinvent public education, and we need to do so in partnership with our students.
For two years, I’ve convened groups of students who argue that we need to reimagine an entirely new school community that promotes mentorship, personalization, competencies, feedback, internships, co-creation, restorative justice, and authentic learning. This kind of school community could become a learning lab for other schools and collaborative teams to visit, learn, reflect, and implement their own ideas.
Students need to engage in meaningful learning experiences and co-design these experiences with their teachers while situating this learning in context to address local and global issues. And they deeply crave opportunities to problem-solve and contribute solutions to some of the world’s most pressing issues. Furthermore, students need to be able to partner with businesses and community organizations to grapple with authentic problems and ensure that their learning experiences will guide them to develop skills that lead to success in the future.
More funding without transformation isn’t the fix needed
Some education experts argue that perhaps an increase in education funding is the way to fix public schools. Yet the fact is that Minnesota has had some of the worst achievement disparities in the country for years, and this problem is deeper and more complex than what a simple increase in funding can fix. School systems stepped up in incredible ways to support our students and families in the midst of the pandemic and continue to face significant deficits in funding. And at the same time, throwing more money into the same dinosaur of a school system without intentional strategies for transformation is not the way out of this pandemic.
[image_caption]Nicole Dimich[/image_caption]
We all benefit when school is an experience that is equitable, inclusive, powerful and engaging for every learner.
Nicole Dimich is an educator, author, innovator, and expert facilitator who has worked with elementary and secondary educators, administrators, and school districts across the globe. Through presentations, training and consultations, she helps power student voices and build on educator strengths to create spaces where all feel possible and empowered. Dimich lives in the Twin Cities with her children and is also the executive director of a nonprofit called Thrive Ed.
WANT TO ADD YOUR VOICE?
If you’re interested in joining the discussion, add your voice to the Comment section below — or consider writing a letter or a longer-form Community Voices commentary. (For more information about Community Voices, see our Submission Guidelines.)
I’m pretty sure this is another Koch Brothers/Walton (Walmart) funded organization, but their website isn’t too clear. This lady is certainly hitting all the points. There were some Thrive charter schools that got shut down for terrible performance and corruption and it seems to be the same group.
There aren’t too many conservative educators who are into “restorative justice” as a disciplinary principle.
Restorative justice is a fiction even for liberal educators who actually teach in public schools. The charter schools that get funded by the Waltons and Kochs can pick and choose their students, so they can pretend they are using restorative justice while just not having the problem kids at their schools.
Pat Terry you are so wrong about Thrive Ed having anything to do with Koch Brothers.Walton organizations that your statements are laughable. Nicole doesn’t need me to defend her but suggesting she has conservative right wing views/intentions is absurd.
Perhaps, this is also our to reinvent the family, extended family and the community, opportunity, it takes more than just a school to educate and raise children. We have this conversation about once a month here.
What should kids know when they leave school?
It seems that when the topic is education, people can’t help writing in vague generalities.
We don’t need a greater focus on job training in school. The demand for any particular kind of job fluctuates from decade to decade, so our schools need to impart solid general knowledge that will make students adaptable to whatever comes up in the future. One-trick ponies whose education (or lack thereof) has been focused on preparation for a particular job will have a hard time if their job becomes obsolete.
The lasts couple of decades have shown how much ignorance of science, history, and world affairs prevails in the population. How can citizens make informed decisions if they think scientists just make up stuff as they go along, believe that the Founding Fathers were “Christians” in the megachurch sense, and can’t tell why the statement that “Democratic policies will turn us into Venezuela or North Korea” is not only false but silly?
Science education should include a heavy dose of HOW scientists know what they know. You could have history and cultural geography every year from fifth grade through twelfth and not cover everything. Small classes in at least the first four grades should emphasize reading challenging materials for meaning, writing clear, grammatical English, and learning the basic arithmetical functions until they are second nature, with or without a calculator. (When I tutored street kids in Portland in the 1990s, their grasp of the basic skills for literacy and arithmetic was stalled at the fourth or fifth grade level. I asked them why they thought this had happened, and the most common answer was, “There was no one at home to help me with school work, and with forty kids in our class, the teacher didn’t have time to help me, either.”) Instruction in music, arts and crafts, and theater will lay the foundations for enriched leisure time in the future. We should look at the countries that introduce foreign languages in elementary school to see how they manage to produce nations full of bilingual and trilingual people.
There should be a unit like the one I had in fifth grade on how to tell a fact from an opinion and how to find out if someone’s opinion is true or whether that opinion is just a matter of taste or perception. For example: “Vampires aren’t real” is a fact. “That guy over there must be a vampire” is an opinion that can be falsified. “That guy over there looks like a vampire,” is an opinion that can be neither true nor false, because it’s based on one person’s perception.
This kind of education is especially important for students who are not bound for college, because they may be too busy or too caught up in anti-intellectual environments to educate themselves further.
You might say, “That curriculum you’re proposing is like the one they have in the best private schools.”
Exactly. Why shouldn’t every child in America have access to a curriculum equivalent to that in the best private schools? How many geniuses are we losing each year to rundown inner city or rural schools with indifferent and unchallenging curricula?
“Oh, so you’re for school vouchers?” right-wingers ask.
Not at all. There simply aren’t enough private schools to go around, and the track record of charter schools is mixed. Instead, we should commit ourselves as a nation to giving every child the same opportunity to learn, so that a diploma from an inner city high school or a rural high school or a wealthy suburban high school means the same thing.
What a load of nonsense. The problem isn’t curricula. Its not that kids aren’t being challenged. The problem isn’t better teachers in private or suburban schools.
Its poverty. Its kids growing up with poor nutrition, poor or absent childcare, missing or working parents. Moving to one lead-paint ridden apartment after another. Kids whose parents never finished school themselves. Kids already years behind by the time they get to school.
Ms. Dimich and her right-wing billionaire funders want to blame schools. But its not schools. Schools can’t fix this.
When my kid’s elementary school closed for snow days, one of the big concerns was whether kids were going to eat. They gave out free breakfast for everyone in St. Paul schools and kids could get free or reduced lunch. They weren’t going to eat otherwise. That was the reality.
So when you are talking about challenging curricula being the answer, I honestly hope you are kidding.
I’m well aware of the economic and emotional challenges that many schoolchildren face. That’s why we need small class sizes, especially for the early grades.
We also need a better social safety net, both inside and outside the school. Japanese schools provide medical and dental checkups for elementary school children. Many schools in other countries provide not only well-balanced, nutritious meals but healthful mid-morning snacks in their schools.
I’ve written before about a small preschool program that provides children at a low-income housing development with the kind of physical and emotional healing that they need, while at the same time involving and training the parents. What if our nation had spent trillions on programs like this one instead of trying to “fix” unfixable foreign countries?
My comments on curriculum apply to the many middle class students from stable homes who graduate from high school with fine test scores but are ignorant about things they should have learned in elementary school, perhaps because they attended one of those locally controlled schools run by an idiotic school board. (One small town high school in Oregon suffered a budget crisis and dumped all subjects that were not strictly required for entrance to the state universities, but they saved the football team.) I soon learned as a college-level instructor of Japanese that I could not count on my beginning students knowing where Japan is. Actually, I couldn’t assume that the students knew anything. There was no shared body of knowledge, so if I wanted to use an interesting example in my lessons, I had to choose something from contemporary pop culture or sports, because otherwise, most students wouldn’t understand it.
The lack of a shared body of knowledge makes the American public ripe for demagogues and gives an unfair advantage to those who were lucky enough to land in a school district that was interested in creating knowledgeable citizens.
Frankly, I find that some of the critics of public education per se, as opposed to specific public schools, either come off as Philistines (“Don’t teach the students anything that isn’t immediately practical”) or display a poor command of English grammar and punctuation. Other countries, even countries with high percentages of immigrants and unionized teachers, manage to provide equal education everywhere. The U.S. has simply chosen not to.
These proposals simply won’t work. If you can read proficiently by 8th grade, teaching that kid Roman History and Newton is a waster of time.
Also no, the belief that “Democratic policies will turn us into Venezuela or North Korea” isn’t limited to crazies. There are lots of sane people who don’t believe in endless social justice.
So, you believe in endless social injustice? Because that is what your response implies.
Umm no. Opposing endless social justice programs is maybe supporting a few good ones.
Public, Government run schools are failing the country. We have 18 year olds not prepared for the real world of jobs, employment and entrepreneurship. Vouchers IS the answer but Teachers Union too strong to allow competition with a voucher system.
Our society is bedeviled with problems that highly educated adults, successful by all conventional measures, have not figured out how to overcome. And even when people have available tools to help keep themselves healthy and alive, they come up with really poorly thought through reasons for not making good choices. Just consider our response to COVID-19, guns, bigotry and climate change. Quality education allows people to make wise choices and avoid putting themselves and others in harm’s way.
We live in a global society, but how many Americans are able to communicate in a language other that English? So we expect everyone else to speak our language and follow our rules? Frankly, the US is behind many other countries in a wide range of education measures, but when we talk about reinventing education, we don’t start by looking for places that do a much better job and try to understand why they are successful?
Rather than being curious, many Americans are sure they already have all the answers they need. What we need to cultivate, not only in our children, but in adults, is a lust for learning and a desire to find better ways of living. We are way too willing to settle for far less than what we are capable.
We are blessed today in that our knowledge is widely shared and highly accessible. So many questions can be answered by going online and doing a little research, particularly if you are sensitive the basis of the claims you hear. If you have children home for the summer, talk to them about what they are learning in their time away from school. Make it a discussion, recognize what they are learning (praise builds confidence) and model a thirst for learning.
Joel, half of the 18 year olds graduating from Mpls Public Schools are not proficient in reading, writing and math. You expect them to broaden horizons how? Everything you wrote is wonderful, if you have the basics of learning, kids today do not. Sadly, no one goes after the root cause, failing public schools.
So, the part A question is, back in the lets say 20’s, 30’s 40’s, 50’s were results better? My father was able to finish 8th grade before he was sequestered back to the farm for full time work. Seems in those days 8th grade was quite sufficient to be a good farmer!
As has been pointed out above, the MAIN root cause isn’t public schools, it’s the social ills many students face. I’ve been teaching 23 years. I’ve encountered numerous students who are homeless, who have parents addicted to drugs or alcohol, kids whose parents are stuck working second shift and don’t have time for them, kids who are being sexually violated by family members, and so on. Read up on Maslow’s hierarchy; kids who aren’t nourished and sheltered and loved can’t learn.
The second problem, though, IS connected to public schools, and that is that we’ve always used a factory model in which time is a constant and learning is a variable. Teachers are expected to take a group of kids of various skill levels and have them all achieve the same learning in a set amount of time. Kids who don’t get the lesson in that time? There are no resources in place to help them catch up. Soon, they are further and further behind. Smaller class sizes would help. Technology that allows teachers to individualize lessons is beginning to help. Take a look at the “modern classroom” approach that is being promoted around the country now, for example. Learning becomes the constant; time becomes the variable.
This is an insightful comment and since it comes from someone inside the arena, I’ll wager it’s a bit more accurate than some of the armchair quarterbacking upthread. To be certain, our kids have benefited greatly growing up in a form of the modern classroom. Learning to learn and learning to question go much further than learning to the test.
Well, frankly, this kind of mumbo-jumbo about innovation and reinvention is exactly how our education system got so messed up in the first place. There is literally no substance whatsoever in this article, just Ted-Talk platitudes that have little if any basis in educational reality.
Yes, the system is in crises, but that crises has been emerging for decades and the idea that “now” is some special time to innovate is simply facile.
As we’ve discussed in previous comment threads state of the art education systems around the world aren’t built by “innovators” emerging from creative incubators… they are built by professionals who know how people learn. This isn’t a huge mystery, people have been teaching people stuff for thousands of years, and the fact that the human brain is hard wired to learn actually makes learning a far less daunting task than Ted-Talkers realize.
We don’t need to invent or re-invent education, we just need to practice it and stop pretending it doesn’t already exist. We KNOW how to teach… we just don’t it because we’re too busy pretending this is a marketing and consumer relations problem. The last people you want involved in designing education systems would be these jargon jockeys who think their enthusiasm gives them special powers of observation and creativity. Bushwa!