She said schools as she experienced them growing up are, in a way, organizationally impaired. The educational structures that we inherited from the 19th Century are not easily adapted to the needs of the 21st century.  There is an unfortunate national trend among legislatures to lean back into sentimentality for the past, enforcing uncomfortable structures on how we’re doing things. The challenges ahead of us on the other side of the millennium  push us away from that sentimental view and challenge our assumptions.

For example: Where we thought of teachers as a reliable source of information, we now live in a world where, as Spady quoted, “anyone can learn anything from anywhere at anytime using field experts that really outstrip the knowledge base of our teaching staff.”  Teachers no longer serve as encyclopedias; instead, their role is much more complex.  Another example:  We all came through a system that sifted the wheat from the chaff  - there were good students and bad students, successful students and failures.

Spady challenged us with an assumption:  “all students can learn; all students have potential.  If we understand that the rate of learning, learning styles, and a surprising range of aptitudes have  traditionally been overlooked, the whole structure is challenged.”  Teachers, teaching styles, school hours, classroom locations and design, curricula, are all challenged to review, adapt,  and evolve. The Schools of the Future effort will be to figure out how we must design better programs and measure success for a new and evolving set of competencies:  the entrepreneurial spirit, emotional intelligence, the ability to integrate, problem-solve, innovate, mediate.

The future is not going to be the same as the past; one of the things I keep saying as a senior citizen is that we simply must find ways to convey to our publics that this is true.  What was good for me back when I was in school, simply is not what today or tomorrow is going to be.

“Total Learning Communities” was one of the things Bill Spady emphasized and which we have bought into, but which I think is very difficult.  They are organized around the future, not the past; total living, not just the school; purposes, not procedures, which is the thing that is going to be daunting; outcome, not time in seats; possibilities, not precedents; learning, not teaching; performance, not curriculum; and competence, not content.  There has been an evolution of school reform, and again I find this disheartening, because at one time we thought we were in the future, and Bill Spady is now telling us that that was the wrong future.  We must not be bound by what was, but think of this as a new era that requires new ways of thinking and organizing. 

1.  Identify learning outcomes first
2.  Educational equity/standards-based education
3. Integrate life skills

For Spady, there were two paradigm shifts.  One was the Coleman report which said “we are never going to have equality of opportunity in this country until we address equality of educational opportunity.”  He became dedicated to outcome-based education, which is what we now call standards-based education.  That means that standards ought to be established for students; that we ought not grade on a curve or compare students, but teach to a standard that all students should be able to achieve. We need to shift our thinking about aptitude; it ought to be the rate of learning rather than the capacity to learn.  All students can learn.  We need to build or organize our schools around that opportunity.

The second paradigm shift came ten years later when he saw a headline that said “Our best students are failing in the high tech industry.”  He thought the problem is that we’re setting outcomes around content but not integrating the life-skills, life roles:  skills such as teamwork and cooperation, thinking and problem-solving.  He said to do that we need to: 1) study trends; 2) note which questions not to ask and which ones to ask.  We shouldn’t be asking which courses, what content, or which version of a paper and pencil test students ought to be taking, how high test scores ought to be, how can we address accountability issues.  We shouldn’t think that we’re being cutting edge when we ask how we can increase program requirements to challenge our gifted students.  The questions we ought to be asking are questions like:

• What major challenges do our students face in the information age?
• What complex performance abilities does this necessitate they develop?
• What challenging learning experiences and environments do they all need?
• Which teaching and learning practices really help all of our students learn well?
• What kind of expanded access to high level learning do we need to create?