Brian is a seventh-grader at the public charter middle school that I run in Detroit. A year ago, he exhibited the look and behavior of the majority of kids in the city who don't make it to the 12th grade. He learned little and acted out a lot.
Then, last fall, his teacher discovered that Brian has a talent for mathematics. She quickly enrolled him in a Saturday math program run by Wayne State University. Brian became the star of the math program. At graduation he presented, without notes, a mathematical proof worthy of "A Beautiful
Mind." Now he talks about someday winning a college scholarship.
What made the uncovering of Brian's skills possible were his school's small class size and a new one-student-at-a-time approach. This model allows each teacher to shepherd a small group of students -- no more than 15 -- throughout their high school careers. The problem is that even after two decades of urban school reform efforts, Brian's school is the exception, not the rule. That's why only 4,600 students are enrolled as seniors in the Detroit public school system from a freshman class that began with 15,000 students four years ago.
The root of the problem appears to lie in a misguided attempt during the past 20 years to reform middle schools and high schools that are saddled with one-size-fits-all learning strategies, large class size, student anonymity, and lack of meaningful student connections to adults in school and in the outside world. This well-meaning undertaking resembles Detroit's initial response to the Japanese auto invasion of the late 1970s. As it became clear to the Big Three that Toyota and Honda were building better cars, the first understandable reaction in Detroit was to reform the old Henry Ford mass production system that had served the U.S. industry so well. Yet within a couple of years Chrysler was bankrupt, Ford was on the verge of bankruptcy, and General Motors was living off stored fat. Each firm soon abandoned its efforts to reform its obsolete mass production system. Instead, they sought to replace it with a new, more flexible worker-managed system as the price of survival.
It is long past time for urban education leaders to abandon their efforts to make mass standardized middle and high schools work better. Instead they should opt for new, smaller, more personalized schools designed to keep kids in class and to prepare them for post-secondary studies.
Today's urban schools are like mass-production factories of the Industrial Age. They usually offer only one learning approach: acquiring skills and information through a textbook while sitting quietly at a desk. Yet this is the preferred learning style of no more than 20 percent of the population. This model offers the same material, on the same day, in the same way to each child of similar age regardless of the student's skill level, learning style, maturity, and interests. That is why the mainstays of school reform -- more testing, teacher training, longer school days, smaller class size -- have had so little effect.
Community expectations that every student be able to read, write, and employ mathematics to certain measurable standards by the end of high school are reasonable and necessary. However, the notion that all kids will achieve these levels at the same time and in the same way results in a forced learning march that breeds failure and dropouts.
Fortunately, a number of urban public high schools have been testing replacement models with encouraging results -- graduating 90 percent of their urban students from high school and sending 90 percent or more of these graduates on to college. While differing in a multitude of ways, these schools possess three common innovative features:
Each student is provided an enduring one-to-one relationship with an adult in the school. This ensures that there is always a competent, caring teacher who knows the student well enough to supervise and support him or her.
Schools are kept small to eliminate anonymity and prevent teens from slipping through the cracks. School size ranges from 120 to 400 students.
Learning is individualized. Skills to be mastered are specified and measured. But the path to competence is personalized through the use of projects and internships in the real world that take into account the individual student's passions and preferred learning styles.
Is this the only promising replacement model for our failing urban high schools? Certainly not. But schools with a one-student-at-a-time philosophy provide evidence that a goal of 90 percent graduation and 90 percent college enrollment for urban kids is attainable even as it is out of reach of the current traditional factory-school model.
