Can something as simple as rearranging a school’s schedule have a profound impact on student success? According to an article printed recently in The New York Times, it can.
Some experts think it can, and now some schools are rescheduling recess — sending students out to play before they sit down for lunch. The switch appears to have led to some surprising changes in both cafeteria and classroom.
I won’t regurgitate the content here; it’s worth reading. There are a few cool things going on in this article. First, schools who have shifted recess before lunch have all noticed the same phenomenon: meteoric improvement is possible through relatively small changes to the status quo.
There is another part that I want to draw your attention, however. The article repeatedly mentions how wasted food was cut down, instructional time was added, and student disruptiveness was down. The schools profiled in this article are using data effectively. They’re not just collecting binders and binders of data. These schools came up with a hypothesis, tested their hypothesis, and measured the results. It’s the scientific method.
A lot of schools just collect data for the sake of collecting data—without an actual goal in mind. They believe that storing massive amounts of these records will drive their instruction. Blindly collecting data, is taxing on teachers and administrators and ultimately more likely to overwhelm them. Data are exponentially more effective when their be used for a targeted purpose.
If you read enough news, you’ll eventually come across an opinion piece complaining that what we need is more innovators. For the most part, the author is right. We’re not going to get ourselves out of this mess through more financial wizardry. That’s just smoke and mirrors. We are most likely going to have to create our way out of it.
Are our schools set up to encourage the kind of innovators we’re looking for? There is relatively little correlation between schooling and innovation. Alberta Einstein did poorly in school. Thomas Edison’s teachers considered him to be a “dull student.” Henry Ford once quipped, “You can’t learn in school what the world is going to do next year.” Steve Jobs and Bill Gates both dropped out of college. That being said, Jobs is—more often than not—the defacto dropped name of choice.
School doesn’t encourage you to innovate. It discourages it. For years, our economy depended on workers to follow directions and obey authority. As a result, our schools were set up accordingly. It worked great for about a century and a half following the Industrial Revolution.
The problem is that the nature of our economy has radically shifted. Over the last half-century, factories have been moved overseas. More recently, knowledge work (e.g. programming and accounting) have been following a similar trend. The rest has been either automated or made ubiquitous via the Internet. Anything that doesn’t involve a substantial amount of creativity can be had on the cheap.
I can get a boiler plate contract from LegalZoom. I don’t need to hire a lawyer for such a rudimentary task. Creative lawyers will still be in demand, but mediocre lawyers will lose their bread and butter. As Dan Pink explained in A Whole New Mind and Thomas Friedman in The World is Flat, if it can be outsourced or automated, it will be. Good thing we have an educational system that rewards mediocrity over creativity.
On January 24, Thomas Friedman wrote:
We need to get millions of American kids, not just the geniuses, excited about innovation and entrepreneurship again. We need to make 2010 what Obama should have made 2009: the year of innovation, the year of making our pie bigger, the year of “Start-Up America.”
The best way to counter the Tea Party movement, which is all about stopping things, is with an Innovation Movement, which is all about starting things. Without inventing more new products and services that make people more productive, healthier or entertained — that we can sell around the world — we’ll never be able to afford the health care our people need, let alone pay off our debts.
It’s a noble goal to be sure and I completely agree with Friedman, but it’s all empty rhetoric until we initiate policy changes that integrate creative, twenty-first century thinking into the classroom. Sure, there are incredible teachers strewn across our nation. And yes, there are initiatives in some districts dedicated to training teachers to become incredible. But, it doesn’t scale and it won’t be enough. We must consider the world around us and then take a good, hard look at our educational system and bridge the gulf between our classrooms and the real world. Public schools have the potential to create the innovators and leaders of tomorrow, but only if they change with the times.
