A Time for Change: The Reinvention of the American High School

One Superintendent's View of High School Redesign

by Chuck Breiner, Superintendent, Howell Public Schools

The traditional public high school in America is under national scrutiny. With legions of high school students leaving school before graduation, and with mounting data demonstrating poor preparation for successful completion of college, comprehensive high schools and the adults who work in them are under pressure to reinvent themselves.

What worked for our grandparents, parents, or even baby boomers, no longer works for students today. The world is a very different place and requires different solutions. Fortunately, our nation’s educators and policy makers appear genuinely interested in reconstructing high school philosophy and practice. In an America that is bent on achieving “intellectual nirvana” under No Child Left Behind, we must not only assure each child graduates but gains the necessary reading and mathematical skills needed in the 21st Century.

How might we part ways with high schools of the past? How can we, as educators and parents, forge a new frontier of meaningful learning experiences for our children? What should we retain from history and what should we change? Some suggestions follow.

Create a World Where Students Are Our Central Concern

A new vision and set of beliefs should be the first priorities. We must imagine and define a high school world in which students are our central concern. All of our practices must aim toward supporting a welcoming, nurturing, expectant environment for each student.

Build Relationships With Students

Adults must work to break down barriers that discourage them from knowing students well. Numerous barriers exist within current school systems that prohibit effective relationship building between students and the adults with whom they work. We must choose to overcome impersonalization. Our middle schools, public school academies, and innovative high schools show us good examples of teaming, advisor systems, mentoring, smaller learning communities, schools within schools, magnet programs, and other approaches that represent opportunities for knowing and valuing ALL students by name, by interest, by learning style, and by their plans for the future.

Teach Essential Knowledge, Make It Relevant and Meaningful

High school curriculum must capture essential knowledge, skills, and values for student success. Teachers must examine and embrace new and different types of teaching methods that allow students to demonstrate their mastery of learning essential curriculum. Teachers must connect key learning benchmarks to real-world learning experiences that are relevant and meaningful. All adults who work with students must pay more attention to musical, kinesthetic, hands-on, experience-based, visual, auditory, mathematical, and verbal ways of teaching and learning. Students must become aware of how they learn best and equip themselves with the strategies they will need to be successful in future learning experiences. Most importantly, teachers must be highly qualified and aware of different learning styles.

Base Educational Assessments on Demonstration and Mastery

Specific rigorous expectations are under development for each of the high school core required credits. Rubrics for shaping and assessing the course work that is worthy of credit should become a central concern of teachers. Given the multiple learning styles and abilities of students, assessment must transcend the paper and pencil tests that currently dominate classrooms. By placing learning in contexts of rigorous application, students—and their parents—will come to better understand why students are learning what they are learning and commit themselves to content mastery. Students must be taught that only when they perform and demonstrate convincingly and thoroughly for their teachers will they earn mastery and be awarded credit.

Schools should explore the rich and numerous ways students learn and should assess based on the many ways students can apply this learning. In one Michigan system, more than one-half of 1,600 surveyed secondary students said they favored hands-on learning as their preferred learning style. One thing to ask might be, just how much of the current high school curriculum reflects such hands-on (or applied) learning contexts? Project-based learning, problem-based learning, virtual and distance learning, early college learning, advanced placement study, independent study, home schooling, experience-based learning (including apprenticeships and internships), field trips and travel, and testing out options are among the tools that are available to us in shaping teaching and learning and awarding credit.

Think About the Typical School Day In New Ways

Time is an important facet of high school. Time has yet to be recognized fully for its value in meeting student needs. Well-documented research exists about teenagers and sleep. Currently high school start times work against most adolescents’ internal clocks. High schools, especially for 17- and 18-year olds, might evolve to model a college schedule. Teachers and students could meet at varying times throughout the day. A more flexible arrangement, as well, could help the nearly 75 percent of students who hold jobs during their high school years. In addition to a flexible school day, under certain circumstances, summers and weekends may be unique occasions for concentrated learning experiences.

Promote Community Connections

Most high schools today have distant connections to their communities and struggle with keeping parents involved. Future high schools must initiate interactions, celebrate relationships, and collaborate with their surrounding communities. All of us who practice in schools should reflect, continuously, upon the places where learning can and does take place in the lives of our students outside of high school walls. Communities, both near and far, are filled with learning opportunities. Educators should look for reasons and ways to affirm learning in varied community contexts where people with expertise work with school personnel to fashion learning experiences and opportunities for students.

By inviting Chamber of Commerce representatives and school-business partners into our schools, we can establish rich opportunities for on-site cooperative education and internships. Schools can supply space to businesses at a reasonable cost, provided these businesses are open to working with students.

Forge Relationships With Institutions of Higher Education

Increasing numbers of school systems are forging deep and rich relationships with junior colleges, colleges, and universities. Possibilities might include joint charters; sharing high school facilities, programs, and staff; and college-level coursework. If our state truly wants to nourish possibilities for greater college success for growing numbers of students, exposing students to an early “taste” of college learning and practical awareness about the rigorous intellectual curriculum demands of college can enhance the quality of high school experiences and stimulate motivation to pursue further learning.
As we struggle to reinvent public high schools, the dialogue of change must continue to ask critical questions: Where are we now? How are we doing? What does our data tell us? Where does data suggest we go? How far is the journey? How do we get to where we want to go?

For more information, contact: Chuck Breiner, Superintendent, Howell Public Schools, 411 N. Highlander Way, Howell, MI 48843-1021, (517)548-6200, breinerc@howellschools.com.

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