Looking Back, Looking AheadAuthor(s): Anne C. LewisSource: The Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 80, No. 8 (Apr., 1999), pp. 563-564Published by: Phi Delta Kappa InternationalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20439510 .

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A * S A' ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

LOOKING BACK, LOOKING AHEAD

LO OOKING AT THE ubiquitous clocks on classroom walls, many school officials may be wonder

mg whether they will still keep time at the stroke of Y2K. They

are no doubt wondering, too, whether com puterized attendance and payroll data will drop out of sight. The clocks will proba bly run as well as ever - which means that no two in the same building will ever agree.

This matter of keeping time in schools has an interesting dimension when you com pare two recent lists. One looks backward in time to the beginning of the century; the other looks forward, presenting a scenario for education in the 21st century. The lat ter, based on the ideas of the Council of 21, a group made up of leaders from edu cation and business brought together by the American Association of School Ad

ministrators (AASA), is certainly radical by our current standards.

However, it is the former list that might actually be the more radical document, de scribing as it does the major events that have shaped education in this century. Imag ine trying to predict in 1900 what school ing in the United States would become by century's end. It is doubtful that many of these actual events would have been on any list of predictions, proof that it is very dif ficult to account for the unpredictable in forecasts of what society, the world, and the schools will be like.

The "Top 10 Educational Events of the 20th Century" was compiled by Ben Bro dinsky, whose career in educational pub lishing and journalism spanned half of this century. Writing in EdPress News (volume 63, no. 1), Brodinsky lists the GI Bill of Rights as the major event. At first, this may not seem so momentous, but those who witnessed the influx of serious, older students onto the campuses of colleges and universities following World War H would probably agree about the importance of the GI Bill. It changed higher education from an elitist institution into one accessible to all those who would lead the country in the economic expansion of the second half of the century. It gave them a chance to enter professions that they would never have con

sidered without it, and it made college at tendance seem like a natural progression to future generations. According to Bro dinsky, nearly 21 million people have ben efited directly from this federal program.

Desegregation of schools is Brodinsky's pick for the second most important hap pening in the past 100 years. In 1900, one would have needed to envision a very dif ferent society in order to expect this change to happen. Once it did occur, again as a national priority, it challenged both values and law -and the hypocrisy of both- in a struggle that is still going on. Neverthe less, it was inevitable. One cannot imag ine the United States declaring itself a world leader and coping with the rising impor tance of developing countries and, at the same time, maintaining an education sys tem separated by race.

The Brown desegregation decision by the U.S. Supreme Court also laid the ground

work for Brodinsky's third most important 20th-century event, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, most recent ly called the Individuals with Disabilities

Education Act (IDEA). He doesn't men tion it, but the idea that universal educa tion includes all students was also extend ed to other identifiable groups, including ethnic minorities, language minorities, and females. Again, we haven't worked out all the problems yet, but few today would ar gue with the need to provide all children and young people with a good education.

These events had their origins in mid century. But the fourth most important event, now taken for granted in American

education, took place way back at the be ginning of this century. That event was the creation of the American public high school,

which at the beginning of the century en

rolled only 11% of young people. Although the first public high school opened in Bos ton in 1821, according to Brodinsky, pub lic secondary schooling was considered a

waste of money by most policy makers and taxpayers until well into this century. The Industrial Revolution created the need for young people to stay in school longer, and the broadening of secondary schools to in clude vocational education as well as school ing for the elite led to their expansion.

Brodinsky lists federal support for ed ucation as a separate event in this centu ry. But one could also argue that federal investments followed, rather than creat ed, some of the other events he lists. These include the development of standardized testing, a long debate over how to teach reading, and the appearance of comput ers in the classroom. Also on his list are the rise of progressive thought in educa tion, as exemplified by John Dewey, and the rise of teacher unionism.

S O WHAT will schooling that pre pares students for the 21st century look like? A quick scan of the de scriptions in Preparing Schools and

School Systemsfor the 21st Century (Amer ican Association of School Administrators, 1999), by Frank Withrow, with Harvey Long and Gary Marx, leads one to conclude that the list of predictions does not seem to be as jarring as the century of events in ed ucation that we have just come through. Rather, the predictions seem logical ex tensions of what is already familiar.

For example, the Council of 21, whose honorary chair was Sen. John Glenn, re defines "schools" as community centers of learning that serve as digital hubs for 24-hour-a-day, year-round learning. We can see the early evolution of such schools in districts that have innovative technol ogy programs and links to community re sources.

The "teacher" is redefined as the or chestrator of learning for students, one who helps them turn information into knowl

edge, rather than one who is the purveyor of knowledge. Students will have access to unbelievable amounts of information out side of school. In school, they need to learn how to make sense of it. That means, ac

cording to AASA Executive Director Paul Houston, that "teachers must be the bright

ANNE C. LEWIS is a national education policy writer living in the Washington, D.C., area (e-mail: aclewis@crosslink.net).

APRIL 1999 563

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A *fffl oilo e IS'km

The learner in

the 21st century

must come to see

connections

between school and

the real world.

est and best society has to offer; they must be well prepared for what they teach; they

must believe in themselves and their con

tributions to children and society; yet, they must be constantly committed to im proving." That sounds very much like the way that the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future described the finest quality teaching.

The "learner" is also redefined in the report. Rather than accumulating seat time in traditional courses, the learner in the 21 st century must come to see connections between school and the real world, must be highly engaged in learning, must receive instruction tailored to his or her interests and talents, and must be excited about con tinuing to learn outside of school and af ter earning a diploma.

There is nothing much new in these ideas. The stumbling block has been and

will continue to be the lack of creativity or will to change on the part of schools, especially high schools.

The report says that students must be culturally sensitive and "see the world as an extended neighborhood." This goal grows

out of the experience in this country since midcentury, including both the trials of de segregation and the new forms of immigra tion that allow families to retain cultural ties much more easily than before.

More reliance on performance assess ments, on the school as the convening point in a community, on collaborative leadership and govemance - these are other compo nents of the schools we need for the 21st century, says Houston.

Perhaps what most dramatically distin guishes Brodinsky's look at the past from the Council of 2 1's look into the future is the differing premises for schooling at the opposite ends of the 20th century. We would not have come very far as a nation and a society if we had held to the school sys tem that existed at the beginning of this century. We can base a promising view of the next century's schools on the legacy left by this century, a legacy that is a trib ute to the leadership and willingness of our institutions to change. K

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