Schools and the Persistence of Failure

I have spent a lifetime in schools–as a student, teacher, administrator, and trustee. I am a weary veteran of the endless wars over what’s to blame for the sorry state of education. As COVID and virtual schooling made even clearer, we need to do a better job. Test scores are lousy; achievement and learning gaps are terrible; classes are too large; bullying, social media, shooter drills, and AI are wreaking havoc; poverty and racism are debilitating; young people are increasingly depressed and suicidal. And the profession is hemorrhaging teachers.

Over the years, educators have tried various strategies to address these and other problems, yet no matter what they try, learning outcomes for the majority of students do not significantly improve. Typically, people blame teachers. Education boards and administrators invest billions in teacher-evaluation systems, but evaluating teachers in our schools makes as much sense as evaluating pilots who fail to fly a plane that is not aerodynamically sound. It’s time to rethink the plane.

The main reason for the persistence of failure of our schools is the mismatch between how people actually learn and how we have designed schools. It doesn’t matter whether schools are charter schools, public schools, or private schools; it doesn’t matter if teachers use lectures or discussions; it doesn’t matter if assessments are based on projects or multiple-choice tests. These debates always miss the point: The fundamental school structures don’t support learning in the majority of students. Schools retain the basic one-size-fits-all design elements that have characterized schools forever. These were created with the best intentions to address what have turned out to be flawed assumptions about how people learn. They require all students to jump through the same hoops:

• graduation requirements based on a fixed number of years studying unrelated core subjects that adults have determined are essential–math, science, English, history, and a second language;
• course loads of five or six subjects taught in blocks that meet x number of times a week for y number of minutes, from early September to mid-June;
• the same topics, assignments, and expectations for everyone taking a particular course;
• an emphasis on memory and retrieval as indicators of learning.

Although there are a few happy exceptions, if you read through the literature of even the most seemingly innovative schools, you eventually encounter some form of the traditional graduation requirements: “an analytic essay on literature, a social studies research paper, an extended or original science experiment, and problem-solving at higher levels of mathematics”–all bases covered: English, history/social studies, science and math.

People who focus on school issues seem strangely unwilling to let go of this traditional model. Rather than studying the insights of neuroscientists whose research suggests a need to rethink and redesign our schools, educators prefer researchers who offer tidy “interventions” for fixing rather than challenging the basic system. There are reasons that so many of these well-intentioned fixes continue to fail. They are focused on the classrooms, not on the structures or traditional assumptions about learning that determine what happens in those classrooms. Important though these interventions are–growth mindsets, grit, memorization strategies, emotional intelligence, etc.—they fail to address the larger structural problems. Educators and, especially, students might benefit more from insights that suggest a need to completely rethink this old model:

• Neuroscientists Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Antonio Damasio (University of Southern California) have studied the role of emotion in learning. They write that people “think in the service of emotional goals.” Immordino-Yang is even blunter: “It is literally neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about things that you don’t care about.” We think and learn about things that matter to us, but schools are set up so that young people learn what matters to adults, what adults have determined should matter or will matter to students. Although the role of school to introduce students to the range of possible study and career options is important and necessary, so is the need for students to experience school as emotionally relevant and meaningful to their life in the present, right now.

Even a casual look will reveal that the emotionally relevant learning centers in schools are the cafeteria, hallways, fields, gyms, and cyberspace–the social hubs of student life. If the classrooms are ever going to compete for deep, emotional engagement, students will need to spend a meaningful chunk of their days pursuing genuine questions and interests that matter to them as part of their curricular programs of study (not as extracurricular fringes). Designing such schools would radically change the traditional model.

L. Todd Rose and the late Kurt W. Fischer (Harvard) are two of many researchers who have helped us understand that all brains are different. Learning involves building and rebuilding webs of interrelated skills that connect different regions of the brain. Although brains have the same basic structures and exhibit developmental similarities, the connections among the various regions of the brain, the trillions of neural networks, are not identical. They are as individual as fingerprints and our DNA. Different combinations of cognitive strengths and weaknesses, different experiences, and different needs result in different neural connections. And these differences determine how people see the world, how they learn, and how they solve problems.

The standardization that schools embrace, reinforced by the myth of the existence of an average brain, tends to assume there is only one way to understand concepts or develop skills, only one solution to a problem, only one path to a meaningful education, when, in fact, there are many. Using Fischer’s lens to examine the fundamental assumptions embodied in school structures, practices, and policies would also result in dramatic changes.

Research suggests a need to rethink the cornerstone of schooling: most educators still assume that telling, teaching, and learning are synonyms (“I taught them this last semester.”  “They learned this last week.”  “I keep telling them this.”).  They aren’t synonyms. Learning isn’t the result of “putting” what we have been told into memory boxes–so that we “have” it. Rather than recall and recitation, learning involves building new neural connections that constantly fall apart and need to be rebuilt. Learning addition means creating neural paths for addition. This process is hard work that requires considerable effort from the learner. Teachers can’t do this work for students. Rather than factories for installing facts in students, we need to create environments that support students as they work to build new skills and conceptual understanding.

Why maintain a system and structures that reflect faulty notions of learning and brain function? Why cling to notions of “normal” and learning disabled? Why recreate essentially the same school with different names–public, private, charter, independent, magnet–and then waste time debating the merits of each when, in fact, the fundamental problem is replicated in each?

Educators are only part of the problem. The other part is media coverage of education issues. Media articles and discussions of education endlessly rehash the same tired issues, often reducing them to simplistic debates between false dichotomies: either national standards or local control; either charter schools or traditional public schools; either more testing or less testing; either closing down failing schools or giving them more money. Frequently, the focus is a single issue: poverty, higher standards, teacher accountability, unions, longer school years, and days. All of these issues are complex, important, and interconnected, and they need to be discussed in the context of how children learn.

Despite the insights from neuroscientists who study how people learn, the various media fail to include their voices in discussions on how to improve learning. I recall an On Point (NPR) debate between Diane Ravitch and Jessica Levin about public versus for-profit schools. There was a moment when the perspective of neuroscientists might have moved the debate in some interesting new directions. It came when Ravitch and Levin seemed to agree: “Charter schools don’t get different results from public schools.”  “All three sectors,” said Ravitch (voucher, charter, public), “get the same [poor] results on tests.”

Here was an opportunity to probe more deeply into the reason for these identical results, to move the debate in a new direction, to consider that perhaps we are dealing with a more fundamental and complex problem than whether schools are public or private. Perhaps our assumptions about how kids learn–the assumptions on which the practice, structures, and policies of all schools rest–are incompatible with how the brain learns.

Over the years, I have listened to and read many other debaters arrive at similar moments when the perspective of neuroscientists would have provided more depth and breadth to the topic: There was the discussion of the merits of retaining or eliminating honors courses, and the participants couldn’t be certain that either choice would significantly change student learning. That one would have benefited from exploring the importance of the students’ emotional engagement in their studies. Discussions of the “performance gap” between girls and boys would have been broadened by research that found that we could improve the learning of both girls and boys if we redesign our schools. The “performance gap” between Black boys and white boys would have benefited from a study on thinking and brain development that showed that healthy brain development that supports deep learning, moral development, and identity formation had “no correlation with the teens’ IQs . . . or with their family’s financial means or parents’ education levels. Nor did they differ by gender or ethnic group.” And as we now debate the uses of AI in education, where are the voices of the affective neuroscientists? AI algorithms are being designed for the traditional school model and not being designed with any real input from those whose work challenges the traditional assumptions about how people learn.

Why do the media remain ignorant of or deaf to the voices of researchers who might help educators, parents and (perhaps even) politicians move toward more productive, successful school designs? Motivation, funding, accountability, standards, assessments, teacher quality, instructional methods, drop-out rates, parental support, poverty and racism present daunting problems, and we will continue to fail to solve them until we consider them in the context of the biology and psychology of learning–especially when the insights from these fields support what many teachers have already discovered, on their own, from their experiences in classrooms with students. The brain and traditional school design are incompatible. If the media and educators want meaningful discussion about school reform, they need to expand their perspective.

Change can be both terrifying and expensive. So can continuing to dump billions of dollars into essentially futile tinkering with a system that demands a fundamental overhaul. A more effective system will contain a variety of paths to diplomas to meet the variety of needs of learners. Self-directed programs of study will likely work for many more students, not all students; a few students may find success in improved versions of the traditional model, just as they do now; and others will learn in models we haven’t yet imagined.

The keys are to involve neuroscientists who are exploring the sciences of learning and to consider not just differentiated instruction but differentiated schools, differentiated curricula, differentiated schedules, and differentiated graduation requirements. Perhaps teachers need different qualifications–more interdisciplinary skills and experiences, not to mention different training. But certainly, the conversation about improving schools needs to move beyond tired either/or debates: less testing or more testing, more facts or more skills, more STEM or more arts, more money for public schools or more vouchers–either this failure or that failure.