Promising Futures

For class this week, I began with the Promising Futures report on secondary schools. It was incredibly interesting to me, as a high school teacher. I felt like I knew what was best and worst about my school, having been there for a while, participating on every known team there is, and chairing one of our accreditation teams. So, it was a bit surprising to read the report and realize that even some of the elements we are most proud of need revision, and some of the things we are dying to get rid of or have gotten away from are actually recommendations of the report. While working incredibly hard, and thinking very carefully and deeply, and trying nearly every new thing out there, we really haven't come very far at all from the reality of public high schools when Promising Futures was written.

As I began reading, I felt like we had some, but definitely not all, of the core practices recommended in the report. We respect our students (from my perspective - others might disagree, including the students!), have some collaborative teaming, and have professional development plans. However, we are missing many of the other core practices - there is little student voice in what or how they learn material. The students are very unfamiliar with the learning results and standards they are required to master, never mind how our plan for them will help them accomplish this. In fact, when I moved on to the "practices to phase out" section, I was dismayed to see that we still adhere to every single one. That's right - from a master schedule through graduation requirements based on Carnegie Units and the holding tank mentality, we have not begun to phase out any of these identified "worst" practices.

I pondered as I read, what would a school like this even look like? Tackling the first one, getting rid of a master schedule, is mind-boggling to even think about. It came down to an issue of trust for me, but perhaps this is just how I've been feeling lately professionally. The master schedule is there, it seems to me, to keep track of who is doing what when, and ensure that it's all "fair." Each teacher needs to have similar class loads, teaching time, and duty schedules, in order to maintain fairness. However, when it really is examined, the master schedule doesn't take into account what is truly done, and the "fairness" is superficial. Science teachers (a personal favorite of course) have quite a bit of set-up, take-down, and maintenance that are not built into this "fair" schedule, while English and history teachers should have their written work grading requirements taken into account. Math is a critical skills-based class, but there is no extra time devoted to allowing practice with a guide. It must be built into instructional time.

We have flexed and bent in every direction to try and think outside the box, while refusing to get rid of the darn box. If we fail to remove barriers like scheduling, traditional school day and year calendars, lack of student and parent voice, and so on, this feeling of banging our heads against the wall will only continue, because we are not removing the walls in our way. I'd like to be able to envision a Promising Futures school, because at least with an understanding and vision of how it might work, I could begin to initiate some phasing out and introduction of core practices in my own school.