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Home > Fall Forum > 2001
Schooling on a Human Scale
Published in the Seattle Times, November 2001
We were surprised the other day to come across these statistics: While today,
in America, there are 90,000 public schools, a hundred years ago we had 350,000
schools. In 1900, the average school served 30-40 students; today, the average
school serves 500-600 students, with thousands of schools housing more than 1500
students.
While there are many demographic trends in our national life that have led
to this shift away from small schools, these statistics bring home to us something
that is easy to forget: the way schools are now is not how they have to be. We
can, instead, create schools on a human scale.
Relationships between and among teachers, students, and parents are at the
core of a powerful, enlivening education. Trusting human relationships may seem
intangible, an impossible thing to plan for. But state and local school policies
– regarding the size of the school, class size, the length of time each teacher
works with any group of students, the amount of time a teacher has to collaborate
with colleagues -- powerfully affect the levels of affection, laughter, safety,
and student achievement at a school. Personalized schools have also successfully
narrowed the achievement gap between poor students and their more affluent peers.
Recognizing this, the Gates Foundation has recently begun supporting 60 large
schools in Washington State to break into smaller schools.
Building schools on a human scale implies something beyond going small. Schools
built on a human scale create curriculum flexible enough to respond to the curiosities
and the particular learning needs of each child. Such a curriculum honors the
academic disciplines and responds to students' interests, to the local context,
and to current events. Kids near the Puget Sound learn about eco-systems through
studying that eco-system; kids in eastern Washington learn about eco-systems through
studying the desert. Kids who love to work with cars learn principles of physics
– and principles of sentence construction – monkeying with cars and
writing about carburetors. Kids who love to read turn on other kids to the joys
of reading.
Schools built on a human scale rethink the segregation of six year-olds with
six year-olds and fifteen year-olds with fifteen year-olds. (As Larry Rosenstock,
head of High Tech High in San Diego, quips about most high schools, "We warehouse
2000 fourteen to eighteen year-olds together, away from adults, and then wonder
why they are so susceptible to peer pressure.") Schools built on a human
scale reach into the community, putting students in touch with others of all ages
from whom they can learn and to whom they can contribute. Schools in Washington's
small school initiative put special emphasis on actively engaging students in
learning beyond the walls of the school.
Whatever and wherever they're learning, students in schools built on a human
scale practice the habits of mind that we cherish in educated people – the
ability to collaborate, to seek out more information, to ask original questions,
to learn from experience, to understand contrasting points of view. Rather than
cramming soon-to-be-forgotten information for tests, students demonstrate their
accomplishments through the real work of their hands, hearts, and minds.
Parents want these kinds of schools for their children -- safe schools, schools
where their children are known well, schools where students gain the skills to
become life-long learners. Despite this, as a country, we are still breaking ground
on new schools built for thousands of kids. We still herd kids together in strict
age-groupings, cut off from other ages and the wider community. We still design
and mandate tests that can have no connection with classrooms enlivened by curiosity
and local context – and that drive these human elements out of the curriculum.
Eighteen hundred members of the Coalition of Essential School's network are
meeting this week in Seattle to share our work, to put our heads together about
how to enact our vision of a different kind of schooling. There are many ways
for the public to take part in creating better schools – advocating for more
personalized schools at school board meetings, letting politicians know that standardized
tests are not the key to school improvement, voting for funding that supports
small schools, volunteering and supporting teachers to find ways to bring their
classrooms more in touch with their surrounding communities.
While the shift towards larger schools has gone on for a century, we have an
opportunity now to reverse the trend, to create schools where teachers know their
students and have time to care for them, where human relationships and academic
achievement go hand in hand. We have the opportunity to create schools which will
graduate eighteen year olds as curious and excited about learning as the kids
who enter kindergarten. We have a chance to build schools on a human scale. Let's
not lose more time.
Hudi Podolsky, Executive Director, CES National
Kathy Simon, Director of Research
Page last updated: May 15, 2002
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