Innovation still to come
by Robert Harris
At a fundamental level, the enterprise of k-12 public education in the U.S. has much in common with the construction aggregate industry both in its method of production and the outcomes it achieves. In a commercial rock quarry that produces aggregate (the stones used for building material), very large boulders are lifted by huge cranes and other massive earth-moving machinery and dropped into powerful jaw- and cone-crushers to reduce them into various smaller workable sizes and shapes. Once these stones are processed into smaller fragments, they are placed onto conveyors that transport them to a screening apparatus where they are sorted by size, shape and weight.
In the final phase of production, these stones are washed and classified by their physical characteristics for use in different industries. The largest stones are used for making foundations, smaller stones are used for drainage, even smaller ones are used to produce gravel for road construction, and even the last spec of powder does not go to waste as it will be used for making cement.
Like stones in a commercial rock quarry, students who attend today’s k-12 public schools in the U.S. are being crushed by an extraordinarily heavy workload, fragmented by academic and social pressures, and placed on conveyors from one classroom to the next only to be screened and sorted by exams and standardized tests which ultimately pulverize them into the aggregate used to create a stable foundation for our society.
This process is a result of approximately 100 years of continuous improvement. Thousands of years ago, it was the Roman Empire that first developed technology for the mass production of aggregate. They used this technology to build roads and bridges that would lead to opportunities for future commerce and conquest. However, unlike in Roman times, if the current system of education continues to mass produce students like the aggregate mined in a rock quarry, the foundation upon which our society is built will not support the roadways and bridges needed to transport our children to the future world they will live in.
Make no mistake about it, k-12 public schools in the U.S. remain as one of the most effective sorting and screening tools available to mankind for stratifying society. In fact, if you like the way it operates, it’s the best taxpayer dollars can buy. Under the current system, before a child even sets one foot in a classroom, the screening and sorting process begins. Now labeled a student with a unique identification number, the child is systematically assigned to a ‘class’ and ‘grade’ based on his chronological age and the geographic location of his parent’s or guardian’s primary residence.
The child, now a student, is then methodically and, oft times, meticulously screened and tested by nurses, teachers, counselors, and psychologists to assess his physical, social and intellectual readiness to begin his schooling. Given the similarity between schools and the aggregate industry, I am surprised that a geologist is not involved in this process.
In some cases, the preliminary results of this initial screening can pre-determine a child’s entire k-12 learning experience and perhaps his life’s destiny. School systems, as they have existed in the U.S. since the early 20th century, continue to drive uniqueness to sameness. The kindergarten screening process described above is evidence to this effect. And, as much as educators like to talk about the steps they are taking to personalize the learning experience for children through a variety of learning platforms, to the contrary, from the very beginning of a child’s schooling, the mechanisms that underlie k-12 public school systems undermine and run counter to these efforts.
There is yet another interesting similarity (call it a coincidence if you like) between the aggregate construction industry and the k-12 education enterprise. They both result in the production of concrete. The aggregate industry produces material used as the substrate for concrete itself, and the enterprise of k-12 education produces concrete thinking.
Concrete thinking is literal thinking based on the physical world and is focused on facts in the here and now – what’s in front of one’s face. This is not to say that the learning that takes place in today’s U.S. classrooms does not engage students in abstract thinking – of course it does. Students are routinely asked by their teachers to think about things, concepts, ideas, principles that are not physically present and cannot be perceived by the five senses. It is the k-12 enterprise itself that has lost its collective capacity to think about its own future in the abstract.
Essentially, school leaders are forced to fit their thinking into strict compliance models developed by education policy-makers at the state and federal levels in order to fulfill mandates that require them to deliver education services to students more efficiently and effectively. Rather than performing ministerial tasks and functions with greater efficiently, the new k-12 paradigm needs to place innovation, not efficiency, at the center of its mission.
With efficiency instead of innovation operating the conveyors needed to transport the enterprise of education into the future, the k-12 agenda for meeting the needs of 21st learners has been one of inertia and regression, and its strategy reactive rather than one that supports significant progress and meaningful change. And, for all of the glimmers of innovation one can find taking place in classrooms across the country in various permutations of personalized learning, a system designed to process learners like stones in a rock quarry will continue to crush learners rather than empower and elevate them.
To succeed, the entire k-12 enterprise will need to deconstruct and redesign itself in order to meet the seismic technological and economic shifts forecast in the coming Fourth Industrial Revolution. Today, it is not enough to seek continuous and incremental improvements to meet the needs of students in the 21st century. The k-12 enterprise will need to play a significant role in leading the disruption that lies ahead.
If the U.S. is to regain its prominence as a world leader in education, the k-12 enterprise itself must think in the abstract about its future rather than remain stuck in the intellectual cement of its past. Achieving a mind-shift from a ‘here and now’ mentality to one that is future-referenced will require the concerted effort of many thousands of educators from across the country. Using our five senses alone may not be enough to get the job done.
Author
- Department of Education – “What Is Education?” Elevated Thought Students Respond Via the Arts
- The Atlantic – The Deconstruction of the K-12 Teacher
- edCircuit – No More Hand-Me-Down Tech: Developing K-8 Learning Interfaces for Schools
Over the past 20 years, educators in the United States have voiced concerns about adolescents’ lackluster reading, writing, and communication skills. The 
The Shanahans argued that adolescents in secondary classrooms need explicit scaffolding of the ways disciplinary insiders (i.e., professional artists, historians, mathematicians, musicians, engineers and so on) create and communicate content within their respective fields. Disciplinary literacy assumes there are real differences in the ways professionals across fields participate and communicate, and that without initial instruction in those explicit differences, students might flounder in college and the workplace. Importantly, disciplinary literacy work is about more than just “strategy instruction.” The focus is on apprenticing students into the practices used to construct knowledge in disciplines.
In order for disciplinary literacy (DL) instruction to take-hold and improve student learning, school districts would be wise to think of DL along a K-12 continuum. Below, we offer a Responsive Disciplinary Literacy Teaching Framework for all teachers to use as they design DL instruction. But, we recognize the instruction designed will look different across disciplinary classrooms because 
When the historic Thousand-year Storm subsided, over twenty inches of rainfall had burst local dams, washing away roads, bridges, and homes — including Stephen’s, which he shared with his younger brother and grandparents. Now, a year later, and sitting in Mr. Washington’s eleventh grade earth science class, mere blocks from where fields were washed out, subdivisions went weeks without power, and heroic rescues of stranded neighbors on rooftops occurred, Stephen’s experiential knowledge intersected with local scientific norms for inquiring, testing, and knowing more about the world around him.
For Mr. Washington, using the three teaching practices means bringing intentionality to his planning and teaching. Instead of designing disciplinary literacy inquiry, tasks, texts, and scaffolding regardless of the students in the room, these practices become “best practice” when Mr. Washington uses his knowledge of his students to inform how, when, and why instructional practices are used.
In a summer program targeting English Learners needing support with reading, writing, listening and speaking, we chose to embed literacy interventions in content knowledge. As we met our elementary students, we quickly discovered that they had little-to-no experience with the ocean across the street from their school.
For the rising first graders, their most pressing questions were about bubbles. These young scientists read books about bubbles, sang songs about bubbles growing and popping, learned the parts (e.g., skin, air) and shape of bubbles (e.g., sphere), experimented with bubbles, and asked more questions about bubbles. They created lava lamps (materials included empty water bottles, vegetable oil, water, food coloring, and antacid tablets) to make observations about how bubbles formed and moved in a liquid. Although their conclusions may seem simple (e.g., The color of the food coloring placed in the lava lamp becomes the color of the bubble’s skin), they were totally appropriate and valid conclusions based on observational evidence. Our rising first graders then wisely asked why some bubbles outside our school were yellow in color, resulting in an older group of elementary students investigating the effects of boat pollution on our cove.
At the core of the 
Software vendors pepper administrators’ phones with messages day in and day out trying to make a sale. Having been on the receiving end of incessant vendor calls, there is little unique on the market. Most software does one thing particularly well, but because it is commercialized and not district-specific, it is essentially fitting a round peg into a square hole. Vendors promise to work with your student information system, only to find out integration comes in the form of an SFTP upload to retrofit your data into a form the vendor can consume. Therefore, schools scramble to put something together quickly to fill gaps if there’s anyone knowledgeable enough to take on such an endeavor.
Abre
I developed a module for our Forest Hills district that allows students to register their BYOD devices, interfacing with a different database than that which is installed with Abre. Because the software is open source, you can modify it to make it what you want. Chris and Zach still work for their district, Hamilton City Schools, and Chris develops solutions for his district full time. Hamilton City Schools educates 10,055 students, the 16th largest in Ohio. The software, designed out of need, is currently saving Hamilton City Schools over $120,000.
There are a couple of important takeaways from Abre. First, anyone can take advantage of Abre and through community development, it will only get stronger. There’s a need for better and efficiently-tested software and by developing from the inside out, everyone wins… the district and most importantly, the user. Second, districts may want to consider pooling resources to employ a developer versus buying software from the metaphorical “big box” stores.
Four years ago, I was honored to be the Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator at the US Department of Energy (DOE) in the Office of Renewable Energy. My time at the DOE impressed upon me one STEM lesson greater than any other then or since. The people, the amazing STEM professionals working in renewables and energy efficiency were the real STEM story. The scientific breakthrough in solar efficiency was a process driven by people. I kept thinking to myself as I attended one after another-national meeting on STEM education, or the 3 pillars of NGSS, or STEM as a national security issue, if only we could share the stories of the REAL STEM PROFESSIONALS we could capture the interest of the next generation.
I recall at a meeting with former NASA Administrator and Astronaut Dr. Charles Bolden, I asked “How can we motivate students today the way an entire generation of students was motivated by John F. Kennedy to go to the moon?” His response was both insightful and alarming. He noted that today, NASA does so many different things it is hard to capture their attention in the same moon-shot sort of way. He posited this was a dilemma. I see this as the golden opportunity of STEM in the 21st century. The opportunity to connect almost every student with some aspect of STEM in the modern world that connects to them personally. Not only at NASA and the department of Energy but across all industries, STEM is in high demand. Consider that 27 percent of new agricultural jobs find STEM skills a necessity, according to a 2015 article in US News and World Report.
They say, today’s student may have 10-15 different careers. Knowing this, how do we prepare students for success? I believe that if students recognized in a more profound way the translatability of their STEM interest to diverse fields, recognizing they will change jobs this many times, they will be more motivated than ever to work hard at math and science.
The missing puzzle piece in STEM is for late elementary and middle school educators to find ways to integrate stories of STEM careers into the standards curriculum to increase awareness and interest in these fields before not after students enter high school.
