What you said about 'rotten blueberries'

I got some great feedback from readers intrigued by last Saturday's column, about businessman and education reformer Jamie Vollmer's book, "Schools Cannot Do It Alone".

Vollmer's argument is that we have to change the structure of public K12 school if we can hope to make it relevant again, and that it's going to take community support -- and lots of dialogue -- for that to happen.

His position is that schools are designed to sort students into "thinkers" and "doers" -- an incredibly forward-thinking and useful approach 200 years ago, when public education was born, but increasingly unuseful in today's economy.

What we need now is schools designed to help every student perform to his or her maximum potential. If you doubt that our schools aren't set up to do that, he argues, consider the convention of age-based classes.

Or, to put it another way: "Why is there this assumption that the most important thing kids have in common is how old they are," as one nonprofit asks in this video sent to me by a reader: http://www.wimp.com/educationparadigms/

It's produced by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, and it captures the essence of the (global) problem of education reform (although I'm not sure what I think about their discussion of ADD/ADHD). It's well worth the 12 minutes.

With few exceptions, we plop all 7-, 8-, 9-year-olds, etc., in front of the same material, and expect them to learn it all at the same rate -- a good way to weed out the quickest studies, but not such a smart way to make sure every student learns the material, or stays engaged with it.

Teachers have to contort like a Stretch Armstrong doll just to try to keep all their pupils learning at about the same rate. Even so, it's almost guaranteed that some will be bored out of their gourds, waiting for their classmates to catch up. Others simply never will get the material, because the class has to move on to the next lesson. Why? Why not do it differently -- make learning the determining factor, not time?

Of course, not everyone is excited about the idea of revolutionizing our schools -- one steady reader (and school traditionalist) tried taking me to the woodshed for calling students "rotten blueberries". Which misses the point (and the attribution) entirely: That assembly lines are great for efficiently turning uniform ingredients into a specific product, but our schools aren't dealing with either.

We want schools to take kids as they are (rich, poor, engaged, sleepy, healthy, sick, curious, disinterested -- representing the whole depth and breadth of the human experience) and help them be critical thinkers, engaged citizens, productive workers, healthy adults (you should see Vollmer's list of expectations we have for our schools -- it's exhausting). And we're making them do it within a system better suited to turning a uniform batch of blueberries into delicious blueberry ice cream.

No wonder so many kids think school is stupid. The question is what we're going to do about it.