originally published October 19, 2005 in my blog, Schooling ≠ Education. Rethinking schooling? Where do you start? What do you do first? Bring a small group together and ask the question: what is the purpose of education?

So, what to do?

The first thing I would recommend doing is bring together a small group of people in your ‘learning community’ and ask the question: ‘What is the purpose of education?’

Begin the dialog – include more and more people in the dialog (especially young people) and don’t stop the dialog. In the beginning (and for some time) avoid getting lost in the details about the “HOW”. In the beginning just talk about the purpose (the “WHY”).

Engage as many people as possible in the dialog.

And the conversations will not stop with the purpose of education. I’ve already introduced several other questions that should be asked – and I will introduce more as I contribute more to this blog…

originally published October 18, 2005 in my blog Schooling ≠ Education.

We just completed a two day collaborative event with about 100 educators focused on Rethinking the High School Experience. We documented the event a little differently from what we typically do – using blogger.com and flickr.com as the two primary tools.

The major outcome from this event was a focus on a vision that included 9 planks:

• A sense of purpose
• Personalized learning
• A vision for what ‘it’ looks like when it’s done
• Innovative assessment
• Relationships with students
• Broader responsibility
• Connected learning (integrated, interdisciplinary, relevant learning)
• Teacher as facilitator
• Learning Communities

Each of the 19 different school districts made specific plans to work on at least one of these 9 areas in the next 18 months.

NOTE: at this point in the evolution of our facilitation methodology (October 2005) we primarily created a stand-alone website for the client to use after the face-to-face part of the event was complete. This web site text documentation of the major conversations, photographs from the event, visual models created by graphic facilitators and copies of the ‘assignments’ (instructions for each activity – for the part of the ‘problem’ the group was working on along with the outputs intended to be produced).

The choice to use blogger.com and flickr.com was an experiment to see what kind of product those tools could create and whether that would be as good as or better than what we were already doing.

Result: this was the only time we documented an event in this fashion.

originally published in my blog Schooling ≠ Education on July 1, 2005

I just read some information about high school graduation requirements and another article on how states report their graduation rates (this article exposes how the information shared with the public is ‘not what’s actually going on’). 

In the work that I’ve done with schools and educators it was apparent (back in the early 90’s) there was a dropout rate of approximately 30%. At this point in time some educators who are being really honest with themselves are suggesting that that rate is closer to 50-60%. 

And, from the graduation rates combined with the number of high school graduates that attend a 4 year college or university we know high schools are only really reaching about 5 to 10% of it’s students.

Do you know of any business or industry where it’s acceptable to have a 50-60% defect rate? Do you know of any business or industry that could survive one day that has a process that satisfies 5-10% of it’s customers while producing below satisfactory results for the remaining 90-95%? 

What’s going on that the United States of America would allow a process like this to exist when this process directly impacts the lives of several hundred million young people (let alone their families and the communities they live in)? Not just allow a process like this to exist but ‘we’ designed this system and we continue to support it?

I typically give people the benefit of the doubt – that people are good and their intentions are good. So, therefore we might say the education system was designed with good intentions and with ‘peoples’ best interest at heart.

Dr. Deming used to say ‘85% of the problems come from the first 15% of the process.’ Design is a large part of the first 15% of the process. So, we can extrapolate from that, 85% of the problems the education system is experiencing comes from the first 15% of the process (the design).

That alone is a good enough argument for me to look at redesigning public education. There are other reasons as well – which I hope to write about over the weeks and months ahead.

Quick update: My statistics back in 2005 should be taken with a grain of salt (I may have over estimated). In June 2023 the census bureau published a report analyzing school enrollment levels in 2021 (all school ages and grades). The report states: High school dropout rates – defined as the percentage of people (ages 18 to 24) who are not enrolled in school and do not have a high school degree – declined from 12.5% of all 18- to 24-year-olds in 2005 to 5.8% in 2021.

While the report didn’t state a percentage of high school students who enroll in a 4 year university nor who enroll in college of any kind, the report did state enrollments in colleges continue to decline. From the report: College enrollment continued to decline, with 21.1 million students enrolled in 2021, compared to 21.7 million in 2019 and 23.7 million in 2011.

Even if my numbers were wrong in 2005 the statistics in 2021 would suggest there is still a case to consider the redesign of the high school experience.

This was originally posted on June 24, 2005 in my blog Schooling ≠ Education.

We’ve just started a project with the Nebraska Department of Education focused on rethinking the high school experience. I’ve created a web site for them with a number of links related to the topic.

Since the above was posted almost 19 years ago many of the links and ideas are older concepts — but they are still interesting to scan as some are still relevant today (which speaks to the slow or non-existent changes to schooling). Back then, web 2.0 and social networks were ‘new.’ The concept of virtual worlds (metaverse) not yet on the horizon; the iPod was new (and cool); there were no smart phones! And it was before I wrote about the technical forces influences change everywhere – social, mobile, analytics and cloud.

Those forces and more still influence life in all western societies. I’ll need to write about the updates on this topic soon and it would be interesting to see what kind of list of resources I would come up with if I had to create that today.