Back to School. Way Back.

As another school year begins, my thoughts are on high schools. Not so much on what should or shouldn’t be taught in AP courses (or whether there should even be AP courses), who should or shouldn’t be allowed to play on particular sports teams, or on whether later start times will actually translate into teens getting more sleep – although all of those are important topics that have accompanied me on my daily walks through the neighborhood.

No, on my mind today is the ongoing effort to make high schools more student-centered: more relevant, more engaging, more focused on preparing students for what comes next – life after high school.

Our tendency these days is to treat March 2020 as the line of demarcation for just about everything important in our lives, including PK-12 education and high schools, separating pre-pandemic life from post-pandemic life – or more accurately, from life in the pandemic era. The current push to transform the high school experience, however, was well underway prior to the pandemic.

States were working with schools to design and implement “personalized pathways” that enabled students to meet state graduation requirements while pursuing a series of courses that would best prepare them for the specific postsecondary career or educational outcome they chose.

Districts and schools were partnering with institutions of higher education to increase opportunities for and access to dual enrollment programs so that students could begin to earn college credit while still in high school. Online courses were making such offerings accessible to many more students.

Seat time and the accumulation of a fixed number of credits would no longer define the high school experience.

The one-size-fits-all high school in which students spend four years accumulating credits via four courses in English, three each mathematics and the lab sciences, plus required courses in U.S. history, world languages, physical education, and perhaps the arts, rounded out by a few courses chosen from a limited selection of electives would be replaced by something more dynamic, flexible, and most importantly, student-centered.

It all sounded great.

And it all sounded strangely familiar.

Back to the Future

As I have described previously, holiday gatherings at my grandparents’ apartment were lively and crowded. With seventeen cousins in my generation, school was always a topic of conversation. Inevitably, our experiences led to the dozen or so aunts and uncles who were our parents sharing stories of their days in the Boston Public Schools in the ‘40s and ‘50s.

My mother and aunt, who attended a comprehensive high school, would describe attending a few classes in the morning before going off to clerical jobs at local factories, businesses, or retail stores. After high school, and my aunt’s stint in the Marines, they both worked as long-distance telephone operators with New England Telephone.

A couple of my uncles reminisced about their experiences at Boston Trade School. One describing how his drafting skills served him well in the army following high school. Another told of his time in Machine Shop. He compared notes with another who attended the Mechanic Arts High School, which eventually became Boston Technical High School, and is currently the John D. O’Bryant School for Mathematics and Science – one of the city’s three exam schools.

There was also talk of the school you were sent to when you just didn’t fit in anywhere else. One or two of my uncles may have spent a little time there over the years.

Among that generation, my father was the lone exception, attending local Catholic schools instead of the BPS. The decision was not by choice, as he was asked to leave kindergarten after biting his teacher. Needing to enroll him somewhere so that she could work, his mother asked the nuns to take him into first grade. At 17, he graduated from Boston College High School, the Catholic college preparatory school located in the heart of the city, although he would be in his early 30s and a high school teacher before attending college.

A review of the BPS annual directory from that era shows that in addition to the schools mentioned above and various neighborhood comprehensive high schools, BPS students might also attend:

• Public Latin School (boys) or Girls’ Latin School, which offered a college preparatory program,
• High School of Commerce,
• Boston Clerical School, or
• The High School of Practical Arts.

The High School of Practical Arts was an all-girls high school focusing, as the name suggests, on “practical” studies for girls of the day. An excerpt describing the mathematics and science department explains what was considered practical in those academic areas:

Through The Looking-Glass

From our vantage point, nearly a century removed, it is easy to dismiss a school for girls whose curriculum was centered around homemaking and managing a household. Although, I do like the clear statements of the purpose for those academic courses that do a pretty good job of answering the question posed in last week’s post.

From a distance, we may also be inclined to view the seemingly student-centered offerings available to my parents’ generation simply as districts and schools sorting students and fitting them into fixed slots to meet employer demand and maintain societal expectations. That view would not be totally off-base.

We may be more hard pressed, however, to recognize that to some extent the same thing is occurring with the personal pathways and dual enrollment offerings being made available and prioritized today.

Can an initiative be both student-centered and society-centered?

Or is the better question can a high school be student-centered without being society-centered?

Can public education ever not be public; that is of, relating to, or affecting all the people or the whole area of a nation or state?

Getting Here from There

Also from our vantage point, nearly a century removed, it is easy to see the economic thread, that invisible string that has always connected high school with perceived societal needs.

An overly simplistic recap of the forces shaping high school expectations from the 1940s to today:

• In the 1940s and ‘50s, a decent standard of living could be attained by students leaving high school with or without a diploma, but with marketable skills in manufacturing and construction-related skills.
• By 1960, Sputnik and advances in technology, increased the demand for students with skills in STEM areas.
• By the 1970s, manufacturing jobs were disappearing, increasing individuals’ need for a college education and society’s need for college-educated workers. Increasing the high school graduation rate, which had hovered around 70% for the past 3 decades became a priority.
• By the 1980s, the nation was at risk, heightening the perceived need for a college education and homogenizing the heterogeneous curriculum that had been a hallmark of comprehensive high schools in the United States.
• By the time homogenization became complete between 2005 and 2010, white collar jobs were disappearing, just as manufacturing jobs had in the 1970s.
• In the 2010s, with a college degree no longer fulfilling its promise of economic security, we redefined college to connect it more closely to jobs, discounting four-year liberal arts programs: college now included any postsecondary training or certification program.
• And as we approached 2020, we completed the circle back to the 1940s by eliminating high school graduation requirements that resembled “college prep for all” while establishing personal pathways and dual enrollment programs to funnel students into existing and high-priority jobs.

A key difference between the 1940s and 2020s, however, is that there are fewer viable slots that ensure economic security in which to funnel students.  We are much less confident that the personal pathways students journey down today will not turn into dead ends when those students are 25, 30, or 35 years old.

The reality that we have been reckoning with for the past decade or so is that we are asking high schools to prepare students for a future that is arguably less well-defined and contains more unknowns than at any time since the first public high school was established in Boston in 1821. So, we lean into concepts like developing lifelong learners, nimble learners, and teaching students to learn how to learn – needing those ideas to be more than platitudes this time around.

I am confident that educators, policymakers, communities, and students can rise to the challenge; however, I have to confess that it would be nice to have a well-defined set of practical arts around which to build a high school curriculum.

Author’s note:

Although I am personally indebted to the Boston Public Schools for my education, I am not attempting in this post to paint the BPS as a paragon of public education. Boston can lay claim to giving the country its first public school, first elementary school, and first public high school. As I was became a student in the mid-1960s, however, BPS was cast as the central villain in Jonathan Kozol’s scathing Death at an Early Age and by the time I graduated in 1977 the city and school system had literally become the national poster child for racism and segregation, Little Rock and Alabama rolled into one. And somewhere between those two chronological and historical extremes, BPS is also credited with being the birthplace of standardized testing in the United States. It is what it is.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay