2. Are we forcing students to fail?

At Redbridge, we don't group students by grade level, we group them by autonomy levels. Autonomy levels are, you can sort of think of like a homeroom grouping system. Students are in autonomy levels based on their work habits or their readiness to be able to drive their own learning. This is the Education Crisis, What It Is and How to Fix It. I'm your host, Tambi Duncan. This series features renowned education expert Dr. Charles Reigluth, author of the book Vision and Action, Reinventing Schools through Personalized Competency-Based Education. Together we examine the crisis in American education, what has caused the crisis, what our schools need to be like to fix the crisis, how to successfully transform to that very different kind of school and what you can do to help your schools to transform. Chapter 2. Are We Forcing Students to Fail? Dr. Reigluth, in chapter 1 of this series, you told us that students learn at different rates, but their progress is based on time rather than on what they actually learn. This is a problem. Exactly. If you look at schools today, you'll see that, more often than not, student progress is based on time rather than on learning. By forcing an entire class of students to move on through their learning journey at the same rate, we're failing students who simply can't learn the material quickly enough. As a result, students who are forced to move on before they fully grasp the material start experiencing gaps in their learning. This makes it more difficult for them to learn related material in the future, because they miss those critical building blocks in the past. It's almost like they're being punished for not being able to learn the material faster. Yes, but it's not just time-based student progress that creates this devastating effect on many of our students. It's also the paradigm of student assessment. Testing. Testing. Educators call it norm-referenced assessment, because each student's performance is compared to the performance of other students, called a norm, rather than being compared to a standard of performance or criterion for mastery. Many teachers grade on a curve, so even if no students mastered the material, the highest performing ones are still given high grades. Time-based student progress pretty well guarantees that many students will not master all the material. I've seen that happen so many times. And that's not all. Student records were also designed for flunking students out. Really? How so? Student cards don't tell us what the student has learned. Like, what does a b-minus in 6th grade English tell you? You have no idea what the student has learned and what they haven't. Grades only tell you how the student compares to other students. That's not helpful for deciding what the student should learn next. And it doesn't help a prospective employer to know what qualifications the student has. In sum, everything about the current system is designed for flunking out learners who need more time. And actually, that was helpful in the industrial age, because most jobs were for manual laborers. And we didn't need to spend a lot of money for them to get higher levels of education. But in the digital age, there are fewer manual labor jobs and more knowledge work jobs. So our sorting focus system hurts those students and their communities. Unfortunately, it also holds back the faster learners. And they get bored waiting for the class to move on, which turns them off to learning and thereby also hurts their communities as well as those faster learners. The sorting focus system served us well during the industrial age, but now it's having devastating effects on our students, their families, their communities, and our country overall. School has been this way for as long as I can remember. How do we get away from dismantling learners who need more time and failing to engage faster learners? Well, I'd like to first describe the alternative, but then give you a couple of examples. So please bear with me. Of course. As I've previously discussed, student progress must be based on learning. This allows faster learners to keep learning instead of waiting around bored to death until the class is ready to move on. Progress based on learning is a boon to society because it allows greater development of the capabilities of our most talented students. And it's a boon to those students because it helps them to reach their potential. But perhaps even more important is the benefits to learners who need more time. They get to experience the joy of mastery. They have a better self-image. They get to develop more skills that will bring greater success in their lives. And society benefits because those students will contribute more in taxes due to their higher incomes. This is not conjecture. Research has proven this to be true. Another important point is that by not accumulating gaps in their learning, slower learners are able to learn related material more quickly. Learning based student progress reduces the differences in rates of learning. Dr. Benjamin Bloom's research proved this several decades ago. So what is needed for a school to change to student progress based on learning rather than time? Well, we have to know when each student has mastered the current material. This means that a student's performance needs to be compared to a standard or criterion for mastery, which, as I mentioned earlier, educators call criterion referenced assessment or simply competency-based assessment. This is a very different paradigm of assessment than comparing a student's performance to the other student's performances. It is based on entirely different psychometrics that I want to get into here because they're pretty technical. Is competency-based assessment being used anywhere? Some of our listeners may have heard of the Khan Academy, spelled K-H-A-N. It's an online learning system in which students practice a skill or apply an understanding until they reach a criterion for mastery, like 10 practice items in a row correct. This practice until perfect approach to assessment means there is no need for tests, which makes learning less stressful for students and, thanks to technology, reduces the burden for teachers. The Khan Academy has had great success and is very widely used, over 20 million learners each month, and they are only one of many similar free online tutoring systems like Coursera, edX, Udemy, Code Academy, and Skillshare. Now this doesn't mean that students should all sit alone at a computer to learn. I'll talk more about that later. What else needs to change besides testing in order to have student progress based on learning? Well, both of those require that specific learning targets or competencies be clearly identified along with standards or criteria for mastery of each target. These learning targets are more detailed lists of what is to be learned than are the state standards. There are usually many learning targets in each state standard. The Khan Academy and the other online tutoring systems have identified such learning targets. Finally, learning based student progress and competency based student assessment require a different kind of student records. The current report card only provides a grade that compares one student with another. It doesn't tell you what the student actually understands and can do. For learning based student progress, we need a record of the specific learning targets that each student has mastered. Such records usually take the form of badges like in Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts. These are sometimes called micro-credentials, and they're very helpful, not only for knowing what the student should learn next, but also for prospective employers to know what the student can do. This is interesting because if students can only progress when they fully absorb the material, that actually does make it easier to compare them to others, which is what employers have to do when choosing who to hire. Now, of course, there's still the matter of soft skills to consider, but I've interviewed and hired many people during my career, and while hiring is more of an art than a science, this kind of specific information would have been extremely helpful in my hiring process. Absolutely. Having a clear understanding of a potential employee's mastery of key concepts and skills can streamline the hiring process and provide a clear baseline for consistent evaluation of job candidates. So the alternative to a system designed to flunk some students out is a system where students move on based on their learning. They're assessed based on clear, definable competencies, their learning targets have been identified, and their records are essentially just lists of the competencies they've mastered. Exactly. These are all features of what is usually called competency-based education or simply CBE. Is this just a dream? Is anybody doing this out in the field? It's actually been a reality in a few places for over a century. Many of our listeners may be familiar with Montessori Schools, founded by Maria Montessori in the early 1900s. They have learning-based student progress, learning targets, competency-based assessment, and competency-based student records. I remember about 25 years ago we considered sending our daughter to a Montessori school, but her father and I felt it was too unstructured and decided not to apply. We just couldn't wrap our heads around the Montessori model. I mean, she's thriving out in the world with a master's degree now, but she was often bored in elementary school, and many times we found ourselves looking for ways to challenge her. Turns out CBE would have been great for her back then. Indeed. While it may seem unstructured compared to the industrial age paradigm, the Montessori system has been criticized that the learning resources are too highly structured, and that the way students are required to use them is also highly prescribed. The system actually has a perfect balance of structure and freedom that builds student initiative and self-direction while accelerating student learning. In fact, if one student needs more structure than another, the Montessori teacher recognizes that and provides more structure, but tries to develop that student's self-direction skills and initiative so they can learn to be successful without being told what to do all the time. Several research studies have been conducted that provide conclusive evidence that students in certified Montessori schools outperform their peers in our industrial age schools. That's so interesting. And it's important to point out that CBE schools, the digital age paradigm, vary a lot more from each other than do schools in the industrial age paradigm. Standardization is a key characteristic of the industrial age, whereas customization is a key characteristic of the digital age, so CBE schools can differ quite a bit from each other. So, can you talk about some other CBE models that are out there? Definitely, whereas Montessori schools are low-tech. Another example of a CBE system is high-tech high, which is a network of public charter schools in California. Now, one can argue whether charter schools are a good thing or a bad thing, but it's undeniable that charter schools have the freedom to transform that schools in a district simply do not have. When a school in a district transforms to the CBE paradigm, it becomes incompatible with the rest of the district, and hidden forces work to change it back. I've seen that happen to a lot of exciting schools, like the Saturn School of Tomorrow that President George H.W. Bush praised, but many charter schools don't take advantage of that independence to think outside the box and change their whole paradigm. Their highly successful CBE systems include Summit Public Schools, Alt School, Big Picture Learning Schools, Da Vinci Schools, and many more. In fact, there are probably over a thousand schools nationwide that successfully use CBE. Here's Nikita Katan from the Red Bridge School in San Francisco, California. Nikita, how do you implement personalized student progress in your school versus group-based progress in traditional schools? We have parts of the day that are student-driven times. We have a time of day called deliberate practice that happens daily, and that's when students get to make intentional decisions about what they're practicing, when they're practicing it, and how they're practicing it. The long-term vision is that all of our curriculum would be broken up into essentially Boy Scout badges, and all the skills and concepts in our core curriculum would be associated with a badge that you could work toward earning. And so when a student has been practicing a certain skill for a certain amount of time, they can go to their learning guide or to their math teacher and say, "I've been practicing this. I think I'm ready to demonstrate my proficiency with it." The learning guide or teacher would help them go through a set of steps as an evaluation process to demonstrate a high level of proficiency, and they would say, "You got this. Here's the badge." Or they might say, "Here's some feedback on what you need to continue practicing." You can try again in a couple of weeks once you've had some practice time. We're hoping eventually we'll have some sort of tech tool to support us with this. But students have digital portfolios, so as they earn learning credits, these credits get posted into a digital portfolio that their parents have access to, and so their parents can kind of see as these learning credits pop up and see what the students are demonstrating proficiency with, and it would have the artifact that goes along with that learning credit that shows their proficiency with that skill on that digital portfolio. So it sounds like students move on by continuous progress, rather than moving on by great levels at fixed one-year intervals. Yeah, at Redbridge, we don't group students by grade level. We group them by autonomy levels. Students are in autonomy levels based on their work habits or their readiness to be able to drive their own learning. Students stay in an autonomy level for roughly two years on average. Some may move faster to the next level, some may take a little bit more time. But the important thing is that students have agency over when they feel ready to progress to the next autonomy level, and they go through a self-driven promotion process, where two times in the year they have the opportunity to say to their learning guide, "I think I'm ready for the next level of challenge with ownership over my work," and then the learning guide will work with them to go through a set of steps that would demonstrate their readiness for that next level. In the next level, they might have more ownership over certain parts of their day and more responsibility too that comes along with that. Another really important thing about autonomy levels is that they are decoupled from academics, so students start the day in autonomy levels. They spend certain times of the day in their autonomy-level cohorts, but they go into content groups for reading, writing, and math instruction in their just right level. When you were in school, you might have known that kid who was a great writer but really couldn't turn in their paper on time, so they'd get a bad grade. Not because they had written a bad paper, but because they just weren't organized enough to turn it in on time, and so this way we decouple these things so that they would be in an earlier stage autonomy level, they'd get the support they need in their work habits, and they could still be getting the challenge that they need in their writing group. Recently, we got this email from a parent whose child was telling their friends over the weekend of the playground, "Well, I don't have grade levels, I'm in an autonomy level, and I get to have choices over the work that I do throughout the day," and it feels really natural, I think, to students as much as it does to teachers in this model of doing things. I think students feel a sense of progress continually in all of these different areas, and in some places they get to be leaders for others, and in some places they get to be a follower and learning from others, getting mentored from others, so it ends up feeling really natural to our students. Here's Dee Thomas, Jim Wortman, and Nick Ryan from the Minnesota New Country School. Nick, how do you identify learning targets at your school? We just sort of started with, like, what do we want that perfect senior to look like that's ready to head off into the new world, and then we kind of set some rupert goals around that and just work backwards to a kindergarten or where it is starting from, so I'm looking at things such as, are you willing to take on appropriate risks, you know, that would be a learning target we have for, like, our senior capstone level project. How are you thinking about the risk you take with your project? Those are kind of one of the real-world learning targets that I think we work with a lot. Yeah, we do have some states, we're working with the state standards to make sure students are learning those, but I think the major targets that we feel strongly about are those ones that, when you leave this place, are you ready to be successful in the next steps, whatever they are for that student. Dee, can you say more about the rubrics that Nick mentioned? I think last night at the board meeting, they rolled out the rubrics for K-12, and the rubric is amazing. It says, you know, as kids come in and they start, what do they need in seventh grade and then how do they build on that to become a senior? There's also an elementary one, but the things that are in there are, are they appreciative and empathetic? Are they responsible citizens? How do they prove that they're learning? What's the evidence of learning? Reflecting, reflect on what you did, and not every project turns out well, but if you can reflect on what you learned from failing, that's huge. Jim, how do you prove that learning is happening? How do you assess student learning? Yeah, students at the end of a project sit down with three adults to defend that learning. And it's a work in progress. For some students, that's incredibly nerve-wracking at first, but as they go through that, they learn to defend themselves, and that's a skill unto itself, you see the pride grow in them. So if they sit down and have this amazing thing, but they don't actually know what's in it, they need to go back and reflect on that again and do it again so that they understand what the project should be about and what the learning was that took place. We do still use a couple of traditional measures. I mean, we do, you know, for a public school in the state of Minnesota, so students do have to take the MCA test that Minnesota puts out there every spring. So since you participate in that, do we benefit a lot from that or learn a lot about our students from those? No, not at all. We do also use NWA map assessments, so more traditional, like reading and math assessment two times a year, the fall and then the spring. Those are the tools that we use to kind of more accurately assess, you know, what reading level is a student at right now, what strengths or weaknesses in regards to reading do they have. And then we check back in the spring to see did the plan we put in place impact the students reading positively, did they grow, did they not grow. We use a curriculum called Alex Math, which is a individualized self-based math class that our students take from beginning pre-algebra all the way up through high school algebra, geometry. They take assessments in that most of them are taking an assessment once a week. If they don't get them, it's like a read, you know, they don't, it's again a mastery-based program. So if they don't, if they get seven out of 10 topics, they have to redo those three topics still. Well, that sounds great, but do your students miss out on learning how to take tests? Many of our students take advantage of what's called post-secondary enrollment options in Minnesota. They can take college classes beginning in high school. We can't do any of that work for them, but we can offer them test-taking tips during that time. Now we use a system called Head Rush, which allows us to track not only their projects, but how they're doing in the project process through time via rubrics. So when they work on a project, they need to go into the system, document this is how much time I spent on it. This is what I did. This is how it went and just made it easier for them to defend their learning because they can track it more easily and keep their information in that one voice. Or it allows me as an advisor to also have the conversation with them. It looks like maybe you're not paying attention to the biology. Let's make sure you address that. The online programs make things easier. It doesn't ever replace the relationship with an advisor and other staff members. If students are avoiding this type of learning target that they should be more on track with, we can encourage them in a gentle way, like you're not taking on as much of that biology as you should. What do you need help with? At the Redbridge School, students progress through autonomy levels instead of grade levels. Progress isn't tied to age, but instead to readiness and responsibility, which helps students build independence and seek mastery at their own pace. Meanwhile, at Minnesota New Country School, students reflect on their growth and present their work to adults. They also balance state requirements with personalized assessments supported by technology, but always grounded in strong relationships with their advisors. Both school models show us that when students are trusted to take ownership over their learning, they can build self-confidence and develop the skills to navigate our rapidly changing world. Before we end this chapter, listen closely for a special offer. Listeners of this podcast receive 20% off Dr. Rygoot's book, Vision and Action, with the exclusive code VA20 when you order directly from SolutionTree.com. This offer is only available for a limited time. Visit SolutionTree.com to order your copy today. We're so grateful to everyone who supported our GoFundMe campaign, including Roberto Joseph, Fred O'Neill, Sineme Aslan, Jiyeon Lee, and Gilberto Aponte. The campaign is called Help End America's Education Crisis Now, and the links in the show notes. Donate today to help us keep this podcast available to all. Thanks so much to Dr. Rygoot, Nikita Katan from the Redbridge School, and D. Thomas, Jim Wortman, and Nick Ryan from the Minnesota New Country School. That's it for chapter 2 of The Education Crisis, What It Is and How to Fix It. I'm Tembi Duncan, and remember, the future of education is in our hands.