Ask the Kids How to Transform Education

"Any situation in which some men prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence;… to alienate humans from their own decision making is to change them into objects."

— Paulo Freire

Since my book A Room for Learning came out, I have received numerous calls and emails from fellow educators of all kinds. I have heard from graduate students in California; students just out of college; students in college. Veteran teachers in rural South Carolina. Rookie teachers in west Texas. Kindergarten teachers in South Florida. Public school ESL teachers in the Bronx. School disciplinarians patrolling the halls and stopping fights; former eight-grade algebra teachers; teachers of English and economics in suburban high schools in Massachusetts; parents and grandparents; and librarians in the Champlain Valley of Vermont.

All of them are dying to transform education.

They have thought long and hard about education, about what works and what doesn't. They all care about what happens. They are almost all working "within" the system, or at least they have a deep understanding of the system. They are committed to children, education, their communities, and our greater society. These teachers represent, to borrow the phrase most often applied to America's soldiers, the best of our country.

I would even venture to say they these educators are making sacrifices of themselves on behalf of children. Because, without exception, these educators are doing the best work possible in a system that is inhospitable to the art of teaching.

Increasingly, to be a teacher is to be required to be a mere technician; to prepare kids for batteries of tests that, in theory at least, can measure achievement and "fitness for the workforce."

To be a teacher today is to be a pack-mule in a bureaucratic maze; to be held to strict "pacing" schedules which dictate how much time each teacher spends on a topic; to be a pawn in a corporate structure where demands are passed down from Department Chairs, Principals, School Boards, School Commissioners, Governors, and now the Federal Government.

It has come to this: President Obama's Education Secretary Arne Duncan has recently released Race to the Top, the "new" education "initiative," which is, more accurately, a competitive-ized money grab; each state is allocated an amount of dollars, and each school system can submit proposals aimed at proving they deserve some of that state's money.

The money is being granted primarily to those school systems which can best demonstrate, statistically, that their ideas are working. That is to say, the money is granted based on testing results and the accumulation of data. The grantors reserve the right to define the terms for which data support "success," "improvement", and "achievement." Let the race begin!

The guidelines for filling the application as posted in the Federal Register are 34 pages long. It has been estimated that it will take a school system on average 680 hours to complete a full application. The Administration's plan is simply a refinement of the current system. It is small-ball tinkering with the status-quo. It is nothing more than an inducement to encourage rats running in a metal cage to describe how that cage is working and then, if they are lucky, they may get the money to make the old cage into a golden cage.

If it were up to me the last thing I would do to improve my school would be to spend 17 working weeks filling out an application for an unknown someone in another state to read so that he or she might grant me money, with chains attached.

I have a better idea for transforming schools. Call me naive, call me radically innocent, but here it is: ask the kids. Ask them what they want their schools to be like. Then give them the autonomy to change the school. Let them set the standards. Ask the kids how they would like to feel in their schools, and then let them work toward making the school be a place where they can feel freely things that matter to them. I promise you, they will rise to the challenge. Because shaping the environment is far more interesting and meaningful than being passively shaped by it.

It means making schools into human-sized communities. Something larger than a family but smaller than a system. It means listening to the kids. It means looking them in their faces, listening to their voices, understanding their actions, laughing with them, pushing and cajoling them. It means not repressing them, but letting them be free. It means believing in them.

A student can not be known by his or her test result. More to the point, kids feel insulted and demeaned when they know their progress is being measured by a test. They are diminished and wounded—and, ultimately—their growth is retarded when they are not known as human-beings. Because no test, no matter how well intentioned, can show us the beautiful, nuanced thoughts of a student's mind; no test shows us the contours of a student's heart, or the shape of a child's dreams.

My former students, who were marvelously motivated and inspired when they were in our small middle school, tell me that high-school grinds away the "meat on their souls." My former students think that the high-school feels like a joke most of the time; the highlight, if a student is lucky, is one great teacher occasionally brightening the landscape. My former students tell me that they don't love school, because it is not their school. They tell me they don't like walking through the school-doors; that they are enduring; that they can't wait to get out. They tell me they are bored. They are bored because a system based on testing, control, repression, ever increasing homogeneity of instruction, and a balkanized curriculum is, well, boring, if not patently stupid and counteractive to authentic learning.

The school is a system, a deeply flawed one, and the kids know it. The size of the system requires that it be run like a giant business. Business and economies of scale do not foment the environment necessary for something as marvelously rare as open and free interaction between teachers and students. The system is the creation of well-meaning adults who have wrested control from the kids, because the brilliance of children is messy and wild, and there is nothing school administrators fear more than messiness and wildness. But if you kill that wildness, that questing life-spirit yearning for expression, then you kill the brilliance, and then you obliterate the child.

Transforming schools means admitting that rules, protocols, mandates, tests, bureaucracies, and a system predicated on authoritarian and corporate control is an insult to children and damages them in virtually every respect. It means admitting that if you want to change the schools, you have to change the system, a

nd that means letting the kids into the game.

It may be true that out of all the applications for the Race to the Top money that some success may be found out in the vast landscape of the schools of the land. However, a competitive education funding system modeled after corporate innovation strategies will not deeply or lastingly transform the hearts, minds, and souls of children.

Transformation in education happens between a teacher and a student. It happens when two students get to know and respect each other. It happens when the soul and personality of a teacher can enter into the classroom so that the souls of the students will emerge. It happens when teachers are given autonomy over what and how to teach. It happens when students and teachers realize that the "system" or "units" can be discarded for something more important. Transformation happens when a student has a thought or solution of his or her own and finds recognition and value in that discovery. Such transformation is subtle and impossible to measure. But it is the very heart of the educational enterprise.

A former student of mine once wrote me after she was in high school. She said that finally, in April, after a stultifying year of 10th grade, that something interesting had finally happened. Her substitute teacher had stopped the lesson he had been handed and told them about his experiences in Vietnam. And it was not that this girl was a great student of war or fascinated by history; no, she wrote ecstatically, "It was real. He was telling us about him. For a whole hour we had a real conversation."

She told me she then wrote him a page-long letter thanking him for that class.

I am sure that what he told her that day will not be part of the battery of testing that might demonstrate to a Race to the Top application assessor or funding grantor that my former student's school is closing the achievement gap. I don't know if it will prepare her for the workforce. But I would wager that the conversation she had that day will matter to her for the rest of her life.

If we want kids to love going to school, to be excited by what happens there, to believe it is a place for them, then it must me made into their place. That means letting them name it and rename it, form it and re-form it. It means clustering them into rooms where they can talk about what matters to them. It means allowing teachers the time to listen, to let conversations and ideas grow and mutate and expand. It means getting down on the "floor," as a parent might play with a small child, to understand what it means to be a child, not to only ever think of how we must make them grow up to be like us.