E2-Flip Your School upside DOWN

 The power structures of schools are well-established. Changing those power structures are essential to any change initiative you undergo, but that doesn’t mean changing these structures is easy. The work required to change is anything but that. But, you can always start with step one – doing something! 

We have national standards and expectations for things like testing, certain components of our curriculum like Title I, special education and civil rights aspects. We get less than 10% of our funding from the federal government, and in the future, probably a lot less, but this funding aspect has many strings that guide what we do. 

Then, we have the MDE, our leader and guide in Minnesota. The influence of MDE has actually varied during my time, but they are responsible for working with our legislators to follow the direction that our legislative leaders have come up with. 

These two entities alone represent an obtrusive force against change. Many of the mandates and expectations from these levels are sometimes impossible to meet, particularly for smaller schools and in less supported areas. For instance, what do you do when you don’t find someone licensed to do this or that? In some cases, we can hardly find a teacher that meets our needs for a given class or a full FTE. 

As we move down the food chain, we also have District requirements that guide us in what we do that are over and above the two above. Even though there is no requirement to have a Band, for instance, it is almost impossible to run a high school without a Band, no matter how good or bad that unit is. If you didn’t, many people would ask, what kind of school is this? You don’t have a Band? or Physical Education? or Health? or Electives? or Recess? or many other things. The truth is that many of these are “soft mandates” that we are not technically required to do, but we do them because that is what we’re expected to do, even beyond federal or state requirements. Of course, we may also want to do these things, too. I’m not saying we should get rid of them, but when doing this work, you have to look at everything differently. 

We even have our self-made requirements that add to this equation. Most schools have some unofficial requirements that are practical for staffing and scheduling such as the combination of 3 or 4 classes in 9th and 10th grade like FACS, Art, PE, Ind Tech, Business, Health or other, that we make everyone take. As far as our schedule, these things work well for Plug-N-Play because we can plan where our students are at, and give our teachers certainty that there will be students for them next year, because you may have 3 or 4 annual fixed classes with 1 or 2 electives. Now, having teachers each year is a good thing. But, what this does to student choice/voice is not always as good. 

We are not even done with the expectations that come from above: inexperienced administrators, lack of energy to change, School Boards, teachers, parents, existing practice, community expectations, etc. can also have an impact on what we do. There are actually so many rules, mandates, expectations and practices to steer around, it’s no wonder that things don’t change as much as we would like. It is far easier to stay status quo than it is to change, and there is actually more support for the status quo, as well. 

The main idea I’ve stated above shows adult-driven and systems-driven high schools. Many educational pundits wonder about how this may look if we just had the student’s best interests in mind. That may seem dreamy or unrealistic. Students mostly know that our high schools are usually not the answer to build their motivations, energy or self-capacity. They don’t look to us as their solution. Similarly, we don’t look to them as OUR solution either. 

In essence, you literally have to flip the power structure of schools on its head to have a realistic chance of changing even a bit. Despite that futile outlook you can make those changes slowly and cautiously, with expertise to make these changes last without the system going into full panic mode. 

To become student-centered is a mental chore. You have to look at everything through the lens of a student; and that is a struggle for adults…with experience…and rules…and mandates…and other adults to deal with. My sense is that you have to do this with the same fidelity you implement a great reading curriculum. To become student-centered means that you have to flip the power structures of a school towards student engagement with a stringent fidelity that starts to guide many actionable decisions. 

PSEO has been one of those massive disrupters in education that we have experienced. Colleges and professors have fought it, high schools and districts have fought it, administrators and teachers have fought it. Yet, over the past forty years, there has been nothing more disruptive to HS Education than PSEO. It has allowed students to opt out of our historic system of high schools, under the precept that PSEO  is more challenging, engaging or meaningful than the high schools they would otherwise have gone to. 

Does PSEO make our education better or more rigorous? It probably does for some and not for others, but its level of disruption is massive to our systems. It has forced high schools to change more than anything over the past forty years comparing HS then to today. Literally half of our juniors and seniors are looking at college credit during their last two years of high school. Students have the autonomy to take classes off-campus, on-campus or online. They earn “credit” at 3x the rate they would for similar attendance in HS. Making this decision gives them freedom and autonomy to break out of the institutions that don’t give them much of the same. 

Curtailing PSEO enrollment with student-centered practices is not a good and just end. I’d argue that the reason the PSEO fire expanded so rapidly is that high school tried to squelch it with handbook policies and practices. Students figured out they had power over those types of curtailing practices, bit by bit, year by year, to the system we have today. Students in most high schools never had the voice and choice to make much difference in the curricular offerings and the future-orientation a high school sustained. Now, they do. 

Related to my last article, though, you do have a choice. If you believe in student-centered schools, you realize that you have to do something… anything…to progress towards bringing about more action in a student’s mind–perhaps this is one primary benefit of student engagement. 

There is virtually no program we could start or run that would have the equal impact of an engaged student mind. Thus, every move we make in this direction advances this quotient by a couple of “points”. The successive interaction of doing so can change a system in 4-5 years. When we look through the lens of a student, we can see some “easy” things to change right away as we proceed to take on the more difficult, “hairy” things that will take persuasion, art and more time. 

Really, what do we have to lose by taking the worst engaging vignettes of a high school education and working to change those in the direction of student engagement? I often wonder why this is so challenging to us. The reality is that our adults number fewer in the system and have a much greater tolerance and ability to change parts of this system. When doing so, the adult reward is equal to greater than the students. There are very few schools or teachers that are willing to change any significant aspect of their practice, even if that means new teaching techniques or curricular offerings. But, if they did…

I once went to the DuFour training on PLC’s and the one biggest example of their training was the empty chair in front of the room representing a single student. What would we do differently for this student if we could? I am pretty sure we would have a personalized learning plan, a desire not to put them in losing situations regularly and a commitment to get them to attend school regularly by choice instead of law.  We would offer them a future-ready curriculum that didn’t treat them as a widget as opposed to a unique human being with different talents, skills, aspirations and interests. We would be student-centered instead of catering to those systems-driven or adult-driven parts of a high school that dominate practice and preclude innovation.