How to TEACH AMERICA in the 21st century
College students are learning the same way they did 200 years ago. To raise leaders of the digital age, we need to rewrite the rule book
THEstudents who I taught for a year at a public school in Dallas, Texas, were required to carry see-through backpacks made from plastic. After 20 kids were caught with “cheese,” the heroin/Tylenol mix, in their sacks, administrators banned opaque bags and sealed up the lockers, too, decorating them instead with paper projects about the moon phases or posters encouraging proper nutrition. Eat seven fruits and vegetables a day. Drink milk. Don’t bring heroin to school.
As a result, my seventh graders lugged their belongings with them all day. They wore jackets, even when it was 95 degrees, because it was easier than carrying them. Some lightened the load, foregoing binders for folders that lost their work. Others gave up entirely, taking nothing to class, not even a pencil.
And yet, these kids, 83 percent of whose family incomes totaled less than $15,171, were due to complete their first year of college this past spring. Eightyeight percent of my former students made it through high school and 100 percent of their graduating class was accepted to college. (“Not all of them are able to go, but we help every student get the applications in,” says Mary Brieske, a counselor at the school, WT White High.)
They are not so unusual. Half of the country’s school kids go to similar high-poverty schools with similar problems, according to the Southern Education Foundation, and yet, despite the obstacles that these and other kids confront in and out of class, they are graduating and heading to college in greater numbers than in years past. Nationally, 83 percent of public-school kids now receive diplomas, according to the Department of Education. Of the kids who do matriculate into college, some may not be exactly ready, but they are moving along the path, or trying to. The trick, now that they have arrived on campus, is twofold, and it is critical: Do everything to keep them there and prepare them for “a world in flux.”
In “The New Education,” Cathy N. Davidson, Director of the CUNY Graduate Center’s Futures Initiative and for 25 years a professor and administrator at Duke University, makes a compelling case for doing just this by drastically transforming what goes on at the university level. If students of all economic, ethnic and academic backgrounds are to succeed in a time when traditional disciplines, careers and societal conditions are not what they used to be, college has to shake itself up, too. Current methods for teaching and measuring students are identical to those Charles Eliot described in the 1800s when he was Harvard’s president (Davidson took her title from one of his essays), and that, she says, gets a big fat F.
Here is what she prescribes: Fund Community Colleges: Please. Morepublic-school kids (half of all USundergraduates) are going to college because they are going to two-year community college, where everyone is accepted. GPAs don’t count, essays don’t count, wealth doesn’t count. The philosophy puts students first: include, remediate, improve, support. It is the ticket to the middle class for many of our neediest and, according to Davidson, most ambitious and productive citizens, including veterans, refugees and parolees. Significantly, community college disrupts the “school-to-prison” pipeline in which law enforcement arrests middle- and high-school students as part of “zero tolerance” behavior policies. Squad cars showed up routinely at the school where I taught, typically when fights broke out. Children were handcuffed and taken away; most often, they did not return. Community colleges have experienced the harshest cutbacks of all institutions of higher education in the country despite historic enrollment and a studentcentered approach, which Davidson says elite colleges should model. “The entire apparatus of the research university is based on weeding out: selectivity at admissions, rankings . . . and the funnel from general education into a major,” Davidson writes. “By contrast, community colleges are designed not only to accept everyone but also to do what they can to help each student reach a goal, whatever the goal. Success is a feature.”
Be Bold, Teach Differently: Public and private colleges and universities nationwide have added programs — often called initiatives, institutes or interdisciplinary experiences — as alternatives to traditional academic structures. The major-in-a-subject construct may not be relevant to a world and job market that merges disciplines, requires new ways of thinking and recreates itself every 16 seconds. Davidson describes the innovative work of professors who have foregone the lecture mode for experiential, research-driven, hands-on learning.
Engage the whole brain, combine the aesthetic and the sensory with the empirical, and ideas abound. Teach from what the student needs, can contribute, can reason out and then he will make his own discoveries. The approach seems so much more meaningful, and obvious, but it takes planning and perseverance. Davidson urges professors everywhere to adopt such strategies, regardless of institutional resistance or potential for budget cuts. Consider Arizona State University, a public research college that has suffered a 50 percent reduction in state support since 2008, yet continues to be “committed to new ideas that bring the arts and the sciences together for palpable, measurable impact.” Graduates are
sought after; booming industries have moved to Phoenix to tap the pool of talent.
Help Students Pay: We can revolutionize the college experience, but if students can’t pay for it, what’s the point? And does all this revolution drive up tuition even more? The average 2016 graduate has about $40,000 in debt. State funding for public institutions has plummeted over decades. Davidson exhausts the pros and cons of assorted cost-saving measures, suggesting an income-based loanrepayment idea developed in Australia. Students pay different tuitions, depending on the earning potential of their future careers. The more lucrative the field, the higher their fees. A graduate can then opt to pay the tuition up-front at a 10 percent discount or borrow it at the full rate under the government’s Higher Education Loan Program. Money is automatically deducted from a student’s income to repay the loan.
Davidson also cheers recent ef- forts in some states to offer free tuition at certain institutions. In New York state, Gov. Cuomo’s $163 million plan begins this fall and provides families earning less than $100,000 per year with zero tuition at CUNY and SUNY schools. Recipients are required to live and work in the state after graduation for the number of years that they were in school.
Ideally, a nation shouldn’t abandon its investment in its youth, Davidson laments. Even attending a state and city-funded institution comes at a price. The cost of a four-year degree from CUNY is $6,530 a year; a twoyear degree, $4,800. SUNY’s annual tuition is $6,670. If we tell kids that education will save them, we shouldn’t make education so costly that it’s impossible for them to be saved.
Value Student Growth,
Not GPA: So much demand is placed on what students already “know” by the time they get to college — how high they scored on the SAT, the ACT, their GPA — that they don’t understand it’s okay not to know, and that this is the reason for going to school in the first place.
Kids enter the classroom at different spots, having had different successes and failures. Teaching should help them build on what they know and learn from what they don’t. Evaluation should measure how far they’ve come, not how much they memorized for the multiple-choice final.
Students taking Anthropology of Aging at Kansas State University live for a semester at the Meadowlark Hills Retirement Community. Their immersion offers an unparalleled opportunity. At the end of the course, instead of entering an exam grade, the professor writes a 12-page letter to the class, describing each student’s contribution to the group’s research.
“The students have grown,” says Davidson, “and they have explored, challenged one another, sometimes, failed, and then succeeded, memorably, all of them, together.”
Make Peace with Technology: People today need to sort, evaluate, verify, analyze and synthesize information. Sometimes, technology helps this effort; sometimes, it doesn’t. Professors, says Davidson, need to think about what students can learn with devices and without them. If technology inspires them to think together, to discuss and shape one another’s ideas, then students will benefit from practicing how best to use it. If it induces passivity, it should be avoided. “Technology should be the starting point for deep, thorough, critical analysis,” according to Davidson. “Videos of famous professors from elite universities . . . will not ‘transform’ higher education except perhaps in an unfortunate way.” The intended goal of all this, which Davidson believes is attainable, is to lead students toward “independent, productive, responsible lives.” Who could argue with that? I’d add that we should lead them there as early as possible. Her principles easily apply to young minds in kindergarten classrooms countrywide. They made sense to my seventh graders, who exceeded all expectations when traditional methods were turned bottom up. But the ideas of “The New Education” rely on federal and state money as well as visionary problem-solving. Our kids — and our world — need us to rise to the challenge.
If we tell kids that education will save them, we shouldn’t make education so costly that it’s impossible for them to be saved.