Post written by Robert Halpern, director of the doctoral program and chair of the research council at the Erikson Institute in Chicago
A recent documentary, "180 Days: A Year Inside an American High School," perfectly captures the lack of imagination of current high school reform efforts in the United States. In this documentary the beleaguered principal and staff of Washington, D.C.'s Metropolitan High School scramble to prepare students for the D.C. CAS, a standardized test on which their individual and collective fates rest. (I will withhold the ending, for those of you who have not yet seen the documentary, directed by Jacquie Jones of the National Black Programming Consortium.)
The documentary is at once poignant, in its portrayal of the complex elements of many young people's lives, and poisoned, full of the school reform language that few of us want to hear anymore—testing, test preparation, proficiency, accountability, AYP, and, of course, failure (school, principal, teacher, student). I came away with a sense that everyone involved—principal, teachers, and students—would like to find a path to deeper engagement, but is boxed in by demands that seem to suck the life out of schooling, indeed out of learning itself. What struck me just as strongly as the destructive qualities of current reform emphases was the missing pieces in the education of young people at this high school.
These missing pieces look nothing like high school as we know it. The historic ingredients of high school have never worked well for sizable numbers of youth and simply reinforcing those ingredients is unlikely to address that problem. But the mismatch problem has another, equally troubling dimension: the disjunction between
