New Era - New Urgency: The Case for Repurposing Education

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_02:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program F. Joseph Merlino and Deborah Pomeroy. Joe is president of the 21st Century Partnership for STEM Education, a nonprofit research and action organization, which we'll talk about today. And Deborah Pomeroy, recently of the 21st Century Partnership for STEM Education, is Professor Emeritus of Science Education at Arcadia University. And we're here today to talk about their new book, New Era, New Urgency, The Case for Repurposing Education.

[00:46] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:49] SPEAKER_02:

Joe and Deborah, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:51] SPEAKER_00:

Thank you, Justin. Nice to be here.

[00:52] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, thank you, Justin. I'm excited to talk about this book because it is both deeply researched and will be quite impressive to anyone in academia, but also very readable for anyone interested in education or anyone involved in education as a practitioner. Talk to us a little bit about why you wrote the book in this way, thinking about the future and thinking about the challenges that we face at the present moment. Why did you go into the history of of education through different eras and through different generations. So a little bit about the organization of the book.

[01:26] SPEAKER_01:

So it was kind of by accident. We had been working on a previous National Science Foundation project in secondary ed to improve science and math in about 200 schools in the greater Philadelphia area. It was about a nine-year project. And at the end, we were commissioned by NSF to write a We began that, we started with what was the one lesson if we could boil our experience down to, and Debra's had 40 years of experience or maybe 50, but I won't date her. And I've had about I don't know, 35, 40 years as a teacher at high school, et cetera. And it was, we found that schools, that teachers did not have a good sense of why they taught what they taught in a way that would point to what it was that they were doing.

[02:17]

Like, why are you teaching biology more than, well, you need it for college? I mean, what is it so that the student would find it relevant and the student would find it persuasive. What's the engagement proposition? And then from the principal standpoint, it's what's your school about? What's that identity of that school? Because that identity informs your culture, both the teacher culture and the student culture.

[02:43]

So If it's a fragmented identity, it's a fragmented culture, and it's hard to get action because people have different, you know, they're siloed and going over in different ways. So we thought about having been in this business for a while. Well, what's the purpose now? And that goes back to the nation at risk back in 1983, which was to you know, get people for, prepare them for a global economy. That was the whole idea. But we questioned, well, was that the only purpose that's been around?

[03:15]

And so we started with the earliest purposes back in 1620. And we started noticing that there was a relationship between the changes that were happening in our country, demographically, technologically, population-wise, et cetera, and the purposes of education. That seemed to be. So the way we told that story was in the terms of a lifetime. So if you think about 80 or 90 years of a person's lifetime, what are the changes that have happened that are really big that are kind of groundbreaking. And so that was the theory that we started with.

[03:54]

And as we just kept writing each lifetime, it turned out there was a lot of change. And that was correlated with the emergence of different purposes. So there couldn't be industrial education unless there was an industrial revolution. So that's the sort of thing. And what we noticed is there have been changes now in the last 40, 45 years from where we were in the 80s, late 70s, and where we are now in terms of a lot of different dimensions to it. And we felt that the curriculum, which is the key here, was not keeping up with, I mean, curriculum as a whole and how the whole curriculum as a philosophy interrelates with the reality of this new era.

[04:45]

So that was the thesis of the book. So that was part one of the book. And we talked about five lifetimes. And we're now at the beginning of a sixth lifetime, which has yet to be defined. So Debra and I are still living in our fifth lifetime of the country. The other thing in part two that we talk about was, as you know, as any principal knows, you've got to deal with the larger social context.

[05:13]

You have to deal with tremendous wealth inequalities. You have to deal with prejudice against immigrants that are coming in because there's so many nationalities there. And there's also bigotry and racism and white supremacy that you have to deal with. And there's also, I'm talking about the public at large, an anti-science, anti-education kind of approach. So that's what we talk about in...

[05:43]

Part two and how that spirit, if you will, of those shadows that corrupt the purposes have existed for a long time. And of course, we see right now those shadows coming full into full view. So as we wrote that, you know, we've been trying to do reform for a long time and we looked at the illusions of reform. And the fourth part was our story of Egypt and our work there.

[06:12] SPEAKER_02:

As I think about my experience as a science teacher and looking at what my school had purchased in the past in terms of lab equipment, we actually had a program in Washington State designed to help clean up science labs of all the hazardous chemicals they had accumulated in unnecessary quantities over the years. And I realized at some point that a lot of the rationale behind science education had been from the 60s and 70s basically to beat the Russians, that that had been kind of a driving purpose in much of science education. And of course, that's not really our focus anymore, but there has been this kind of silent evolution of the purposes of education over a very long period of time, going back hundreds and hundreds of years. And we often don't really stop and acknowledge that or articulate when and why things are changing. But if I understand your premise in the book is that we are at a point now where we do need to think beyond, say, a nation at risk from more than 40 years ago.

[07:09]

We do need to think about how we move forward and what our students need from us at this time, because it is different from what we needed to beat the Russians in the 1960s. And you've worked with a number of school systems around the world to help them do that work of reimagining and redesigning. So take us into that idea of repurposing education, as you say in the subtitle of the book. Deborah, do you want to frame that up for us a little bit, like what repurposing is?

[07:36] SPEAKER_00:

Sure. Sure. Well, as Joe mentioned, that over the years, the purposes of education have really changed and evolved. So the way we look at it is we think about What are the aspirations of a community or a nation in the case of Egypt or a state or a district, whatever? And what are their aspirations for the future? What do they envision and want to become and need to become in order to survive and fulfill their dreams?

[08:14]

And so from those aspirations, then we ask them to think about the purpose of schooling. So if I can start in with like an example of what we did in Egypt, well, first of all, I should say that Egypt was an incredibly traditional school system and it's a national system, which makes change in many ways easier, but also in some ways more difficult. So it very, very test driven with a singular test that determines a student's future basically. And we were given carte blanche to, change, break the mold and change the system. And so the first question that Joe and the first team that went over to Cairo asked was, what do you envision for the future and for these kids, the outcomes of these schools?

[09:08]

And they said they wanted their students to be able to solve the grand challenges of Egypt. Now, that's like climate change and overpopulation and urban congestion and public health and alternative energy. And all you have to do is drive around Cairo a little bit. And these challenges are just very obvious to everybody. And so then from that, we said, okay, what would we need in terms of a curriculum in order to be able to prepare students? to solve the grand challenges.

[09:44]

Not that we expect them to solve them as high schoolers, but we want them to have the foundation in terms of content and habits of mind and skills that would put them on a trajectory to be able to solve those challenges. And so from that, then we developed a curriculum. So when we talk about repurposing, we're talking about you know, a total reorganization of your thinking, your conceptual framework of curriculum. And you start with what do you want to achieve? And then you do a backwards design all the way back from there. Love it.

[10:23] SPEAKER_02:

I hope we can talk more about the Egypt story, but I wanted to bring up a recent kind of repurposing that I feel like maybe did not go as well as we had hoped in the United States. And that was the idea of college for all. I think 10 or 15 years ago, there was a very strong push that schools would send every one of their graduates to college. And here we are years later thinking, actually, maybe that wasn't good. Maybe we missed some opportunities to prepare students for other kinds of careers. Maybe we missed other things that matter.

[10:56]

in our purpose for education. So I know I'm throwing you a bit of a curve ball by bringing that up, but where do you think we went wrong a bit with the college for all push? And then we saw students taking out huge amounts of loans to go to for-profit schools that they didn't graduate from. And, you know, we had this kind of wave crest. What lens would you bring to analyzing that situation?

[11:17] SPEAKER_01:

Well, actually that's chapter 10 of our book. Now we talk about that. So an easy way to think about it is what if there was no college at all? What would then be the purpose of high school? Okay, because you can go sort of ad infinitum, right? This is the preparing for college.

[11:34]

Well, what's college for? So the idea of a purpose, it has three elements. It has what is to be done within the individual. What is the content that you want the individual to know? And thirdly, how does that relate to their moral and social relations? Otherwise, it's not a public school.

[11:53]

It's a private school. Public serves a public purpose. You don't want people running into you head on an automobile because they're drunk drivers or shooting up the place. You want them to function in a democracy. There is a social implication for what that is. So if you just say college and career success, you defer the question of what the purpose of high school should be, which should be relevant to the child in the here and now, or at least by the end of high school.

[12:22]

So that question was never addressed. It was instead kicked down the road. In Egypt, the idea was we would... have an endpoint that was immediately apparent.

[12:34]

And then, of course, they were prepared for college because it was relevant and it was high standards. So higher education is different than college. College is an institution. Higher education is a further learning.

[12:48] SPEAKER_00:

And additionally, it devalues what's going on in high school. You know, if everybody thinks that you have to have a college education and that's the ticket you need for the rest of your life, then the only purpose for high school is to get into college. We subscribe to the idea that high school is ever so much more important than that. And that we know from data that so many people who have college degrees now, young people, are being employed in jobs that don't require a college education. So, you know, it's a waste of time. It's a waste of valuable money.

[13:28]

But it's also really very sad messaging that indicates that there's no value in these kinds of jobs when, in fact, we couldn't operate as a country without these jobs.

[13:42] SPEAKER_01:

And it's also not jobs because there's more to life than a job. That's right. There's interpersonal relations with your spouse or with the others. So, I mean, there's a lot more. Yeah, there's living.

[13:55] SPEAKER_00:

So... If I can go back a little bit to some of our work in Egypt, we really took the lid off of the expectations of our students. Because in this country, we say that the goal of high school is to get into college or maybe college and career success, but whatever that means. But we told these kids that the goal of high school was to prepare them to address the grand challenges of Egypt.

[14:21]

And they started to do that. Through the curriculum, of course, and through really well, carefully crafted projects. These were semester-long capstone projects that they had that tied the entire curriculum together. And these kids got in their crazy heads that maybe they could solve some of the grand challenges of Egypt. And you know what? They have done amazing work.

[14:48]

One of the girls got an honorary doctorate from a German university. Kids have won international prizes. They've had all sorts of awards and honors heaped upon them because they thought they weren't thinking college. They were thinking beyond college. And as a result of that, what they were able to do was just phenomenal. Many deans and professors, both from Egypt and from the U.S., who have seen these kids and seen these kids present the findings of their projects, have said that these kids are doing work that is comparable at the master's level to many university people.

[15:30]

But that's just because we didn't tell them they couldn't do it. We just opened it up for them. So we took the lid off of expectations. And the engagement of the kids was great. And I think You probably deal with this a lot with your principal center, and that is that, you know, many teachers have difficulty engaging their students and kids are sort of turned off because, you know, they have no vested interest in their schooling. But that's not what we see over there with a curriculum that has meaning to them.

[16:05]

as well as to their country.

[16:06] SPEAKER_02:

I love the direct connection to the biggest challenges facing Egyptian society, that these are, you know, what we would call adult problems that are being used to directly inform the high school curriculum, right?

[16:19] SPEAKER_00:

Right. But they're problems that the kids are aware of. You can't, as I say, you can't drive through Cairo without being aware of many of these problems. And that's not unlike some of the challenges we face in this country. You know, there are problems that the adults recognize, but you know what? The kids know it too.

[16:39]

If we talk about food and housing insecurity and violence and AI and the implications of that, these are all things that kids know and these are things that engage the kids and could engage the kids.

[16:53] SPEAKER_01:

And we're not saying to import the Egyptian model, but the process, yes, the process of defining your aspirations for the future, and then your purpose of schooling, which can look different in different locations.

[17:09] SPEAKER_02:

And I was going to say, the book is not just about your work in Egypt, but also in Bosnia and Philadelphia as well.

[17:16] SPEAKER_00:

And then it was, of course, informed by, you know, I taught high school for 19 years and then taught science teacher education. And of course, Joe's had all of his work, especially in reform initiatives and so forth. So You know, it's informed by more than just the work in Egypt.

[17:33] SPEAKER_01:

So let me just talk briefly a minute about Bosnia and then I'll transition to Philly. So just to give you a contrast for Bosnia, you know, they went through this horrible genocidal war in the early 1990s. And about 60 percent of the kids are unemployed and they have terrific political divisions based on geography. And they wanted to find a different way of educating that could overcome these divisions. And so they settled on the idea that we want to prepare students for the knowledge-based economy, KBE. And they had 10 sectors, just like the Egyptians had their grand challenges.

[18:11]

But the idea of knowledge-based economy is that you can work from anywhere. And therefore it overcame the geographical limitations. So we advised a group of university professors and others in the process by which they could define their knowledge-based sectors and then back map what are the topics that you would need to address. For example, what's the science and the knowledge in agriculture that you would need? So therefore, you would be prepared to work in many different sectors. We imported the same process, and that was part of a USAID project as each was a USAID project.

[18:49]

And by the way, This is done with the Minister of Education as a test case of model schools. We've been there for 12 years. We have like 20-some schools. They're using that to inform the rest of Egypt. So these were models that they're...

[19:06]

In the case of Philly, we had a small grant from a local foundation to use the same process of having an aspirational vision for the region and then the purposes. And we didn't say it should be a grand challenge or a knowledge-based account. We just left it open to them to see what they would say. And it was a cross section. We had 70 organizations. And basically what it came down to is they saw the fundamental vision as how do you live in a very diverse society and still maintain unity and purpose?

[19:39]

How do you navigate the complex social economics and legal systems that we have here in this country? And how do we have sustainability for ourselves personally so we don't get killed and also locally and globally? So that was their vision. And we did not get a chance to actually implement that from a curricular standpoint, because we needed money to do that and we needed permission to do that. But if we did, Debra would take over and design a whole curriculum based on diversity and unity, whether it's biological diversity and what's the underlying unifying themes of biology, like evolution, chemistry. So that's how you do it.

[20:17] SPEAKER_00:

Literature or history or... Any other kind of diversity, language, linguistic, music, art?

[20:23] SPEAKER_01:

Neurodiversity, personality diversities, so that a student could accept themselves. Oh, you mean I'm acknowledged as being diverse and that's okay? And so you start to see the particularity of people and yet their common humanity. That's what their vision was.

[20:43] SPEAKER_02:

I wonder if we could talk a little bit about determining those purposes of education, because in the work that you did in Egypt and in Bosnia, there were some kind of decisions that had been made, or there was a clear kind of historical situation that needed to be dealt with. And as I think about education in the United States, I'm not sure we have a coherent national vision for what education needs to be, a coherent understanding of what problems we face. And indeed, we seem to have quite a few disputes and fierce debates about exactly what challenges America is facing and therefore what the purposes of education should be. So as you think about American society and having seen some of the culture wars, the math culture wars, the reading wars, you know, we have kind of a history of division in the very purposes of education and the very definition of the problems that we're trying to solve.

[21:40]

What has your experience throughout all of these projects taught you about how to think about those divisions? We don't even agree on what problem we're trying to solve here in the United States.

[21:50] SPEAKER_00:

So we agree that What we have done in Egypt and in Bosnia-Herzegovina, for instance, cannot be brought wholesale into the United States. It can't be replicated. We often have people ask us, well, can we do that here? And this book is really our answer to that. And we believe very firmly that, yes, it can be done here, but it's more complicated. It's different.

[22:16]

And it's different because we don't have a national system of education. So at best, we have the state systems, but in reality, those are districts where the locus of control is really more at the district level. And then we have the tremendous differences between extremely rural and heavily urban areas. So we don't expect it to be the same purposes. These conversations about how we get this process started, it starts with conversations that involve all sectors of the community. And we're talking parents, maybe some kids, professors, business people in the social services and so forth, who represent different aspects of diversity within a community.

[23:02]

And then to start to ask what their aspirations are. Now, we have a hunch that, in fact, there's probably more unity than there is diversity in people's aspirations for the future. That's our hunch. But that doesn't mean that it's all going to look the same. Because a purpose-driven education in a very rural community would look different than a purpose-driven education in an urban community, even if the purpose were the same. Because it's going to be related to the context of the community, which makes it real and relevant to the student.

[23:39]

But the process, the process can be the same. The product may be different. And even if there are aspects of the product that are the same, it still will look different from community to community.

[23:53] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And that was really one of the key purposes of writing the book was to be a kind of touchstone, a reference point that people could read and then sort of understand the big picture and how you kind of can go about it. These need to be facilitated conversations, but we feel that very strongly it can be done and it can be done at different levels, you know, at the local level, at the medium-sized level, and then at the national level. But it can't be imposed.

[24:19] SPEAKER_00:

One thing I want to say, Justin, is that in Egypt, the mandate was to provide an internationally competitive and standard experience for these students. So the curriculum actually does align with U.S. standards, NGES and so forth, and other international standards of education, but it doesn't look the same. It's not organized the same way. So you can have curricula that look very, very different, but that are still meeting standards.

[24:56] SPEAKER_02:

I'm thinking about the opportunity that individual districts have and, you know, in terms of international comparisons, it is a bit of a problem. in some ways that we don't have a national system of education the way most countries do, that we have over 14,000 individual school districts. But that also means 14,000 potential places where there's autonomy to do some of these things. And I want to correct something I said earlier, where I said there's no kind of nationally agreed upon purpose for public education. I don't know what I was thinking when I said that, because I grew up in Texas and football is clearly the purpose of...

[25:30]

public education you know having a football team that can beat the next town over so let's consider a school district that maybe has been football driven for a very long time or you know if maybe that's an oversimplification you know perhaps football has been the best we have as a unifying purpose Thinking about our students who maybe we're realizing don't all need to go to college, but all need to find healthy paths to success in adulthood. Thinking about what resources are available to us locally. And my wife does a lot of work on project-based learning and helping people connect the learning to the place. whether that's Bermuda or Honduras or El Salvador or Texas or Washington, or figuring out what challenges and resources and opportunities are available in the local community. So for, say, a system leader or a school board member who is picking up your book in a community that maybe has football as its highest purpose, if we look at where our priorities seem to be, what are some of your hopes for what they will do with the book?

[26:35] SPEAKER_01:

So if I was a facilitator of a group of superintendent and their cabinet, for example, or we had a group of teachers or whatever, I would start and we've done this before. We would start by saying, imagine there's no football and imagine there's no college. Now, what do you want your community to look like? And what? do you want your graduates of your school to have in terms of their knowledge, their sense in themselves, and their sense of their relationship to other people from a moral and social standpoint? That sort of clears the deck.

[27:12]

And it's going to take them several hours of discussion to even wrap their head around that idea. So that's where I would start. And I'll give you a short example of that. So part of our Egypt, we had a second $25 million project from USAID to do teacher preparation. And we designed a new teacher preparation system for five universities, 180 new courses. And we started at Cal Poly and CSU Fresno.

[27:39]

And we had a group of people and we said, we want you to imagine a new teacher preparation program, but imagine there's no courses. What? No courses? Now it took them three hours, but eventually they wrap their head around that possibility. And after two days, they came up with a program. Now, there were courses in the end, but it freed them up from the old stereotypes and framework to imagine something new.

[28:08]

And so that's what I would do in a Texas superintendency is to say, forget about college for now. Because if you do something that's really interesting and rigorous and higher education, because most of college is about habits of mind and behavior, as well as having a clear reason for going to college. And then you can learn. So if you do that, you will get to college if you want to go to college, but not necessarily. Have high school and have middle school be sufficient unto itself.

[28:41] SPEAKER_00:

I think the idea of reimagining is probably the biggest idea and really coming to grips with with the fact that we have to reimagine, we have to reconceptualize that what we're doing is, we just can't do more of it or even better. It has to be different. And I'm going to date myself now. I know I started teaching in high school in the 70s. And even then, a group of us, my friends and I were thinking about how could we reimagine the curriculum so that we could integrate science and language arts and math and social studies. And we didn't achieve it.

[29:22]

Unfortunately, we had a little grant to get us started, but no further support. But even just thinking about that and having those initial conversations was just so important for us as teachers, because we began to think outside of our boxes and we began to think that things could be different. So, for instance, you know, we have the layer cake approach in our science and math, you know, and we totally in Egypt, we fortunately we don't have that constraint. But, you know, I don't believe it would be difficult at all in our country to get rid of that layer cake approach in science and math. I think it can be done. I mean, I taught for 20 years.

[30:06]

I taught long enough to know that, yeah, you can work with teachers, other teachers in your disciplines and figure out ways, even at a micro level, to collaborate together so that learning is more meaningful for the kids.

[30:20] SPEAKER_02:

You're talking about interdisciplinary courses.

[30:22] SPEAKER_00:

Yes, exactly. And how we can use each other's courses to help our kids understand the concepts much more deeply and fully.

[30:31] SPEAKER_01:

But it's easier to do if there's a purpose to the school.

[30:35] SPEAKER_00:

It is.

[30:35] SPEAKER_02:

So the book is New Era, New Urgency, The Case for Repurposing Education. Deborah and Joe, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure.

[30:44] SPEAKER_00:

Thank you for the opportunity.

[30:46] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.