The XQ-SuperSchools Premise is Bunk
I get where they’re coming from; I really do.
I might still even end up being part of a winning #rethinkHighSchool team. (I truly hope I am.) And I know of a new box-school model that can use the boost.
But the way the contest is written, it will change damn few schools, for far, far too few kids. As it reads, the XQ challenge excludes innovation that could help most kids. Before placing our hopes in XQ, we might pause and think why this is.
The XQ announcement took everyone’s breath: The AppleTM Fortune (via Laurene Powell Jobs and friends) will transform high school. It will do this with crowdsourcing ideas, Design Thinking approaches, and yes, $10 million dollars to the five winning school designs.
Plus, they have really cool videos and some great marketing design teams behind the contest itself.
Are you excited about that? Or — having soberly thought about it — nearly bored? I’m in between. Maybe you can help.
As I see it, here’s the essence of the Superschool premise:
- We’ll crowdsource five super models of high school; and give each $10 million so that money is no problem.
- <! — Magic will happen — !>
- The other 37,095 high schools will be transformed.
That’s a breathtaking conjecture.
Those of you who have been around education have seen this before. From Montessori, onward. Of late, model schools come from every corner of the realm. 4-point-0 Schools is an incubator of sorts that specializes in this type of support for innovation. There are plenty more. Minus the Apple backing and crowdsourcing, we’ve been down this path. Often.
No one has yet to figure out the <! — Magic will Happen — !>.
We get more model schools, and things do change for some kids. That’s not nothing — I’m among the first to cheer for these schools, and the kids they serve. Among the most successful models, we’d have to count New Tech Network, a project-based school model now serving 170 schools in 28 states.
Yet is it systemic change? Change that will help the 830 high schools in Ohio, most just physically rebuilt in the past decade? Change that will help the kids of a rural Montana school that serves an entire county or more, and whose board is not particularly anxious to jump into some new model? Change that will help the nation’s three million teachers who are already so swamped and overwhelmed and wondering how in the world they can move their students forward? Before 2025? Is it a recipe for keeping up with the amazing pace of change in the world now around us?
If it was — after all these years of ‘new school models’ — would XQ be holding this contest now? After a decade of new school models?
XQ’s premise is that the transformative box-model school lies just around the corner; that adding Apple advertising clout will help us find it; and that, once found, the nation’s 37,000 high schools will rapidly follow.
Fortunately, there is another way to look at rethinking high school.
Ed Jones is the author of the forthcoming book Hacking High School: Making School Work for All Teens. He is bootstrapping A Statewide Laboratory for Student-Driven Learning.
