To Save Our Schools, Trust Young People

(Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath)

For most of the past three decades, we have gotten education wrong for students. I say that as a former teacher, district leader, and voice for education reform. Even as a few data points, like graduation rates, have edged in a positive direction, there is low faith in our public schools and few of us feel that we are doing an excellent job preparing students for the future. I think we can sum up where we went wrong very simply: We put too much faith in adults and the systems they assert will solve our nation’s education challenges and too little faith in students, what they tell us they want, and what they believe will prepare them for the future.

So let me start by sharing a bit about some of the high school-age young people whom I have crossed paths with recently in my work with the Center for Rising Generations at the Aspen Institute.

Lucia is a young woman of Chinese descent who lives in New York in a multi-generational community. She recognized that within her community the older generations needed help with technology—setting up cell phones, fixing minor computer problems—and that young people had a hunger to learn more about their heritage and culture. To help address both problems, Lucia started an organization to bridge the generations and provide opportunities for each to learn from the other.

Taylor is a high school student in rural Maine. Even before the most recent sports betting scandals hit the news, Taylor noticed that his teenage friends were spending a lot of time on gambling websites. Knowing that constant gambling was a poor match for the developing teen brain, Taylor started an organization to help build community amongst young men to help them avoid the dangers of gambling.

Just this year, Detroit high school students at the Henry Ford High School recognized that even as young people are more networked than ever through technology, they feel a significant sense of disconnection. To help address this in their community, they developed Disconnect to Reconnect, a program to help students connect with their peers, in-person, without technology. These high school students have planned in-person convenings for their peers at a local park and an overnight lock-in at their school with games and activities, and they have plans to expand these opportunities to deepen connections.

Here is what is striking about each of these examples: They are student-led, focused on challenges that adults may not have identified, and support solutions that are unique to students’ interests. A deeper dive into each project would also show that they are inter-disciplinary, collaborative, and focused on outcomes. These are excellent examples of what happens when we trust students, and they are not unusual.

In fact, we find that among every group of young people, when you provide them the opportunity to craft a solution to problems, they surprise and amaze us. At the Center for Rising Generations, we have had similar experiences with incarcerated youth, with young people with special needs, with recent immigrants, and with every other demographic group.

Young people have done more than enough to earn our trust. I can’t necessarily say the same for policy makers. I believe the education story of the past 25 years is that we have demonstrated a distinct lack of creativity in trying to improve schools, and that we put faith in economic and management systems that have never produced results for all students.

Kent McGuire and Matt Wilka do an impressive and thoughtful job of reminding us of the history of education in our country. It is enlightening to recall how the purpose of schooling and the approach we take to schools has evolved over time. The idea that kept echoing in my head as I thought about their article is that one big thing had changed significantly, and one big thing had not changed at all.

What Has Changed—and What Has Not

The big thing that has changed is that we do not know what to teach our children any more. During the era of job training and apprenticeships, we knew what to teach our children. During the era of Sputnik, we knew what to teach our children. During the era of education reform, we still believed we knew what fundamental skills were going to be important for young people, and we strove to build structures to ensure they got those skills.

Today only about a quarter of people at a national level have faith in public schools. We can, of course, blame that figure on systematic efforts to undermine confidence in public sector institutions, our country’s inability to articulate a clear role for education during the COVID-19 crisis, or a long history of stagnant outcomes of many of our schools. I think that, as educators, we should also look within for the cause of this dissatisfaction.

I don’t think we know what our schools should teach anymore. And it is hard to inspire confidence in our schools when we are, at best, wishy-washy about what schools should teach. In 1995, Steve Jobs said that everyone should learn to code. That may have been sage advice at the time and in fact may still be an idea with merit given the structured, linear thinking that coding can inspire. In the age of AI, however, it no longer feels like the transformational approach that it was a few decades ago. Today’s policy makers continue to strive to figure out what the thing that everyone should learn is. Maybe we should have dedicated AI time. Maybe we should do more to measure durable (or soft, or relational) skills. Or maybe there is going to be something brand new in a few short years that some of us will think needs to fit into the curriculum. So the big thing that has changed is we no longer have a clear idea of what to teach.

The big thing that hasn’t changed is that we still adhere to a very traditional structure for schools—teachers, classes, tests, schedules, tracks, and a clear delineation between what happens during school, after school, and outside of school.

From the most traditional public schools to most of the most innovative charter and independent schools, what I see when I visit schools is a very traditional approach. Perhaps the most detrimental aspect of this structure is that it places all the decision-making power in the hands of the adults—those same adults who are struggling to figure out what schools should be teaching.

As I talk to policy makers and thought leaders, I mostly find myself in conversations that wouldn’t have been new had they happened 20 years ago. They believe charter schools—few of which deliver truly innovative educational approaches and even fewer of which are held accountable for outcomes—will deliver results. Or they believe that market forces, through vouchers or similar arrangements, will produce the results that were promised to us from failed SES programming and previous voucher experiments. Millions of dollars have gone into reimagining high schools. I do not doubt the good intentions behind those efforts, and I share their frustration that we have not produced sufficient results.

Co-Creating With Young People

One of the young people with whom I work a lot—a young person who grew up in a multi-generational household—frequently reminds me that the very best solutions come when you marry the imagination of young people with the wisdom of those with more experience. It seems to me that the future of schooling is exactly the kind of problem we should solve this way.

Co-creating solutions with young people does not happen by itself. It also is not driven by market forces or measured by traditional accountability metrics. To do this work, we are going to have to be brave and we, the policy makers who have made decisions about education since the days of the one-room schoolhouse, are going to have to share power and decision-making with the students who are closest to the schools.

When I was the Chancellor of DC Public Schools, I began to do a little work in co-creating with our students. The work that we did with our students is some of the work that I am most proud of, and one of the regrets I have about my tenure as district leader was that I didn’t start earlier and do more.

There are innumerable examples of how we engaged young people, from the creation of our student cabinet to the student satisfaction survey that drove many of our decisions, but I want to focus on two specific decisions that I made because students told me it was the right thing to do. First, during the first-ever DCPS student budget hearing, at which I gathered students from every high school to provide input on our district budget, one of the clearest messages I got is that we needed to equalize opportunity for advanced coursework across our high schools. In our many years of budget hearings with adults, we never heard the message that more of our students needed more rigorous courses, but that was what our students told us. So we did it. We vastly expanded AP coursework in our high schools and participation rates as well as passing rates went up.

I also heard from students that they wanted more opportunities to learn outside of school, to see the world, and to experience cultural exchange. So we made that happen too. We created opportunities for middle and high school students to travel to Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America during their spring breaks. We paid for travel, including luggage and passports when students needed help, and we created a rewarding, enriching experience for all of our students.

Now imagine what would happen if we engaged students in a conversation about what their schools should look like, how they should be prepared for the future, and how their time should be structured. I honestly don’t know what they would come up with (though I’ll share some guesses in a minute), but I am confident it would not be vouchers, savings accounts, and school data reports.

There is an added advantage implicit in this approach. We, the policy makers, the ones who bring wisdom to the co-creation table, will also be modeling the value of engaging across lines of difference. Perhaps if we show the value of engaging a wide range of students including high-achievers, neurodivergent students, disengaged young people, and students with a variety of ideological perspectives, we can instill the value of designing with those who don’t agree with us in the young people with whom we work.

The responsibility that we hold is to show that co-creation is an approach that produces results that serve our shared goals better. Consider the things you can do right away. Create a student cabinet or a youth advisory committee and listen to them. Conduct a survey of students and share the results and your reaction publicly. Hire young people and give them significant responsibility (and support!). Bring a young person with you to share your speaking engagements and invite a young person to co-author with you. Hold a youth panel at your event (and prepare the young people to be effective participants). Include a young person on your hiring committee and your board. In short, consider all the various levers of power that you hold and demonstrate how much more effective you can be when you share that power.

More broadly, I believe that as leaders, can we do four things to tap into the imagination of young people and to begin the process of co-creation with students.

1. First and most importantly, we should ask students what they want and trust in their answers. Ask students how they want to spend their school days. Ask students what they think they will need to be prepared for the future. Ask students what part of their day is a good use of time and what parts are not. Ask students when they enjoy learning and when they believe they are growing the most. Of course, not every student idea will be a winner, but then not every adult idea is a winner either—yet we still let adults make decisions.
2. Second, just as important, do not greet every student response with an explanation about why the state mandate, teacher contract, school facility, transportation policy, or schedule makes their idea impossible. If we want to unleash our imaginations, we need to remove the constraints that have kept us teaching the same way for 100 years. Winston Churchill once said, “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.” The same is now true for our education structures—buildings, laws, policies. We first shaped them to support our vision for education and now we are letting the constraints those structures create shape our education.
3. Third, don’t assume that it can’t be done. Why couldn’t every high school student spend much of their junior and senior year engaging in apprenticeships? Why couldn’t we do student exchange programs so young people could experience new cultures? Why couldn’t we set up internships that allow students to study the topics that interest them most at a deep level? Why couldn’t students set up schedules that allow them to pursue their art, music, or sports passion while attending their local high school? Somewhere in the country there are private schools that do all these things and more. Our public schools could do them too.
4. Finally, as we co-create with students my expectation is that we will learn that there are many more partners who want to work with us: colleges and universities, non-profits, private sector employers, community organizations. We will need their trust as well as their support. They all have knowledge and resources that we do not have, and many of them are eager to work with the public schools.

I do not think we know what the purpose of education is going to be in five, 10, or 25 years. We have not shown ourselves to be great predictors of the future nor have we shown ourselves to be excellent policy makers in the present. Efforts to shoehorn political agendas of any stripe and economic models ill-suited to producing results for young people are not promising approaches. I have strong faith that the solution to creating schools that are flexible and responsive enough to react to changing needs is to deepen our trust in our ability to create imaginative solutions with young people. Not only will it be effective, it will also be joyful work.

Read more stories by Kaya Henderson.