Today, teacher stress and burnout are the “canary in the coal mine”—a warning sign of massive school system failure. Stress and burnout are eroding teachers’ motivation and performance and the quality of their classroom interactions, their relationships with students, and their commitment to the profession. Most concerning is that this burnout crisis is impacting the quality of our children’s education (Carver-Thomas & Darling-Hammond, 2017).
Ms. Cummings expressed her frustration about her salary. “After 15 years of teaching, I’ve seen my salary rise only about 5%. In our state, we understood that the recession of 2008 put pressure on the state budget, but since the economy has recovered, the state never made up our losses. It’s like the state leaders would rather look the other way. We feel angry and abandoned, especially after the state assembly voted raises for themselves but voted down our pay raise.”
Teachers like Ms. Cummings form the backbone of the education workforce. Though the demands of teaching have increased, compensation has not kept up. Not only are teachers paid less than other professionals with the same levels of education, but over the past two decades, teaching salaries also have not kept up with inflation, adding pressure to teachers’ lives as they struggle to make ends meet. The pay and benefits no longer provide a livable wage, especially in large metropolitan areas. The rising costs of a university degree leave teachers with huge student debt. These factors make the teaching profession not only unattractive but also impractical for most. The combination of antiquated systems, lack of institutional support, stressful work environments, and lack of adequate compensation has led education systems to a point of crisis (Allegretto & Mishel, 2018).
At the same time, in the global knowledge economy, a high-quality education is more important than ever. Without educated citizens, modern nations cannot tackle the challenges that are hitting us now and will continue to loom large in our collective futures. However, it has also become more difficult than ever to predict what our young people will need to know and will need to be able to do. Rapid social and technological changes make it virtually impossible to predict what life will be like even a decade from now, putting extreme pressure on parents and schools to quickly adapt to this changing reality. As I make final edits to this book, I am in quarantine working and teaching from home. During a typical year, my students would be looking forward to celebrating their graduation from college. But now they too are stuck at home, far away from friends, no way to share their joy, except virtually. As the year 2020 began, none of us could have imagined how quickly our world would change as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Our school systems were designed during the Industrial Revolution when, for the first time in human history, masses of children needed to be efficiently taught basic skills to facilitate their entry into an industrial workforce. The skills identified as necessary for the twenty-first century job market, such as creativity, systems thinking, perspective taking, abstract reasoning, awareness, empathy, and technological literacy, are difficult to teach in the traditional factory-model classroom. As our culture develops new technologies, the disparity that already exists between urban and rural schools and poorly- and well-resourced schools is growing even wider—COVID-19 laid these disparities bare for all to see as schools had to move instruction online. These rapid changes are creating major challenges for teachers and educational systems. Neoliberal approaches of applying theories of human capital and market-driven improvement have not only failed to improve schools but have also added pressure to teachers by overloading them with unrealistic accountability measures, such as students’ standardized test scores, while at the same time taking away teachers’ autonomy to teach in ways that they know are best for their students (Hursh & Martina, 2016).
Asked to rely on teaching methods that extract knowledge from context so they focus on test items, teachers are finding students passive, disengaged, and struggling to see any relevance between what they are learning and their actual lives. While there have always been small pockets of innovation in the United States, overall this archaic system imposes a nineteenth-century structure onto twenty-first-century teachers and learners, causing extreme stress in both. Our schools are becoming warehouses of untapped potential that is being crushed by an outmoded system. The history of teachers and teaching in the United States provides us with a better understanding of how we came to a place where some of our most valuable human capital is so underappreciated and under-resourced, and how, as a society, we have left education behind.
Dramatic social changes during the middle of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century resulted in huge increases in enrollment in American schools. These increases were the result of compulsory attendance laws, immigration, and mass movements from rural areas to cities as industry grew. These social changes drove the need for more teachers and more centralized administration systems. A whole new system of hierarchy and control emerged: the beginning of our modern district system (Urban et al., 2019).
As the school systems grew, the number of women in the teaching workforce grew in response to the need for more teachers. Women teachers were paid less and were perceived as more compliant to top-down control systems. To justify this feminization process, female teachers were touted as better caregivers: “God seems to have made woman peculiarly suited to guide and develop the infant mind, and it seems… very poor policy to pay a man 20 or 22 dollars a month, for teaching children the ABCs, when a female could do the work more successfully at one third of the price” (Littleton School Committee, Littleton, Massachusetts, 1849, as cited by Hess, 2010, p. 136). This quote epitomizes one of the primary issues underlying the ongoing challenges leading us to the present crisis. The teaching profession, poorly paid and female-dominated, has never been recognized as the important profession it is. This is true in the United States and many other developed nations.
Early school systems were designed to efficiently move students through a standardized learning process to develop basic skills and inculcate values of good citizenship. There was very little science to guide the process, and given the task to scale and the industrial mindset of the time, the factory model made sense. Students were organized into cohorts by age, based on the assumption that learning processes are standard and age-related. Subject areas were siloed into separate and arbitrarily delineated learning periods, and students were passed from one grade to the next, like cars in an assembly line. Most teaching was didactic; most learning was rote.
Over time, a standard curriculum of what to teach and when became the norm. The school day was regulated by the clock and a series of harsh-sounding bells, just like those in the nearby factory. Teachers and students were expected to regulate their activities in alignment with the bells. The year was divided into semesters and the summer was left open so children could help their parents, although at this point there were populations of city children who were no longer involved in agriculture. Learning was structured and graded based on a universal standard that assumed developmental uniformity. Teachers were expected to control students and make them achieve this standard, and students were expected to do whatever the teacher said. Disciple was meted with judgment and punishment. Some students found it easy to fit into this factory system; however, many did not. Those who deviated from the standard, for whatever reason, often failed. Just like Henry Ford’s assembly lines, the educational system was designed to promote uniformity, compliance, and standardization.
If you compare educating children to growing crops, the factory model is like monoculture. The same strain of plant is grown in rows to expedite efficient planting, pruning, and harvesting. The aim is a standardized product—the perfectly shaped red apple, a bright yellow cob of corn, grapes with the perfect taste or sweetness for making wine. The standardized product fits into a factory system for efficient harvesting, processing, packaging, and delivery. Only the perfect or near-perfect products make it to the grocery shelves. Apples that don’t make the grade end up as apple juice or applesauce.
While this system has dramatically increased food production, it is also risky because monoculture farming is susceptible to pests and disease wiping out a whole harvest. When farmers plant the exact same strain across vast acres of farmland, when one plant becomes infected, all the crops are more likely to become infected. For example, in 1970 a blight destroyed corn crops in North America, ruining 15% of the harvest (Bruns, 2017). More than 85% of the corn planted in the United States was of the same variety, making the all the corn planted that year more susceptible to the fungus. In contrast, a biodynamic farm employing permaculture intentionally promotes biodiversity by planting a wide range of crops together and by encouraging animal diversity, which promotes a strong ecosystem of various plants and animals working together and creating a more fertile, thriving land.
I believe that today our school systems need to transition from the monocultural factory system, designed to promote standardization, to a permaculture model that values and promotes all forms of diversity, such as race, culture, behavior, learning, thinking, health, appearance, abilities, perceptions, and gender. It is this vast human diversity that is most needed for solving our problems today. Just as monoculture puts our food supply at risk, our monoculturally-oriented school systems put our survival at risk by pathologizing and rejecting students who do not easily conform to the standards being imposed on them. To build social and cultural resilience, as well as resistance to the various blights that may arise during these challenging times, we need to cultivate human diversity rather than strive for conformity. Let’s examine human strengths and adaptive “superpowers” to see how we can leverage them to transform education to meet twenty-first-century educational needs for an ever more diverse student population.
Humans have an incredible ability to adapt to change. In fact, that’s what we’re really good at, what we’ve evolved to do very well. Just look at human history. Our ancestors, a small population of no more than 10,000, began to migrate from East Africa roughly 70,000 years ago, eventually spreading along the southern coast of Asia and to Oceania and then across Europe about 40,000 years ago (Henn et al., 2012). After the last glacial era, north Eurasian populations migrated across the Bering Strait to the Americas about 20,000 years ago. Then 12,000 years ago, northern Eurasia was inhabited, and around 4,000 years ago Arctic Canada and Greenland were reached by the Paleo-Eskimo expansion. Humans inhabited the Polynesian Islands about 2,000 years ago. New Zealand has only been inhabited by humans for about 750 years (Matisoo-Smith, 2017)! Seven and a half billion of us now cover the globe, and our growing population is threatening life on this planet. Consider what it took for us to spread across the entire globe and create the diverse cultures we have today. We are a hardy and creative species. We survive and thrive because we have evolved the ability to cooperate, to defend ourselves, and to invent stuff.
Three primary superpowers give us this edge. We can call them the three Cs: connection, communication, and cognition. Our most primal superpower is human connection: love, sharing positive feelings with one another. Human connection power is the glue that holds us together. Early human communities would have never survived and thrived without love and the bonds of affiliation. Scientists who study altruism argue that affective bonds were required for the next generation to survive (Keltner, 2012). Human infants are extremely underdeveloped. As our ancestors’ bodies evolved to stand upright and our brains grew in size, our hips narrowed, and babies had to come out earlier in their development, while they still fit through the birth canal. This adaptation lead to further adaptations, such as the need to care for and love our babies until they could take care of themselves, which took many years. But prematurity and plasticity gave us another edge: the ability to adapt to whatever environment we were born into. Because human infants’ development was incomplete when they were born, we were able to broaden our horizons and survive under all kinds of conditions, from steamy jungles to the frigid arctic. This parent–child connection superpower extended to other humans, building communities that provided us with the strong bonds we needed to survive. Indeed, the strongest human motive is to belong to a supportive, loving community and to be valued as a contributing member of that community. In this prehistoric world, banishment was the worst punishment because it meant death.
Another human superpower is our advanced ability to communicate through language, music, complex gestures, and refined facial expressions. Through language we can share ideas, plan together, communicate feelings, and create new ways of thinking about the world. Spoken language likely changed our brains in ways we still do not understand. However, given the evolution of the brain, it is likely that language and cognition, the third superpower, evolved together (Berwick & Chomsky, 2016).
Our large brain distinguishes us from the early hominins giving us cognitive abilities not found in any other animal species. We have the capacity to remember the past and imagine a possible future. Building on the memories of past experience, we can create new worlds from our imagination. Eventually, cognitive and language powers together allowed us to create written language, which developed into history and formalized culture, religion, and governments.
Our human superpowers are critical to education. Immature humans require care and preparation to join the ranks of adults in human societies. In modern education systems, we have focused a great deal of attention on language and cognition, but until recently we have ignored the most primal superpower: connection. Indeed, as we will see, this superpower may hold the key to bottom-up school transformation.
Throughout most of human history children learned by observing the adults around them and by playing with their peers. Education was a natural process that took place within small communities to prepare the next generation. Hunter–gatherer children played with miniature hunting and gathering tools. They learned the lore of the land from the adults in their community, which foods are safe to gather and eat and which might make you sick, where certain animals tend to gather and how to approach them unnoticed (Bennett & Reynolds, 2018).
With the advent of agriculture, children learned by helping their parents with chores. They learned how to plant and care for crops and farm animals. Children of craftspeople learned the same way, as apprentices to their parents or other elders. In this way, children refined the knowledge and skills they needed to succeed as an adult in the world. This observational method of learning served the general population until the advent of the industrial revolution.
During these early stages of human cultural development, formal schooling was unnecessary because everything was learned at home, in the fields, or at the workshop. Over time, as more complex cultures evolved, there grew a need for higher learning to manage and transmit culture, laws, and other critical bases of knowledge, such as engineering and medicine, from one generation to the next. In most cases, only the privileged elite had access to this higher education—the young men of the upper classes who first learned at home from tutors and then attended boarding schools and universities.
Each stage of cultural development resulted in ever greater hierarchic structures: classes of people from the ruling elites to the poorest surfs. As city states developed, specialized occupations became a necessity. Rules in the form of laws were established to maintain order. Art and discovery were expensive and dependent on patronage. Love was controlled by rules of marriage and family.
The demand for workers stimulated migration from rural to urban areas. It was around this time that universal education was recognized as important, primarily as a means to prepare citizens of a democracy. Given the huge demands of educating the masses, early school systems were created with the intention of making basic education available to everyone, basic being equivalent to a third-grade education today (e.g., basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, and basic citizenship).
Even though most teachers in early schools were men, the teaching profession never was respected in the United States. Educated men would become teachers temporarily, teaching until they could attend university and find a more acceptable profession. As the need for workers with a basic education grew, the need for education at a massive scale increased. At the time, the factory was the ideal model of production at scale. Thus, early policy makers turned to the factory as a model for building education systems, with subservient women as workers and men as managers (Goldstein, 2015).
This archaic factory model is mostly still in place throughout the United States and other developed countries. In recent years, a more modern business model has been layered on, but both assume uniformity in child development, the teaching process (inputs), and desired student learning outcomes (outputs). Granted, there have been some successful movements to reform this model over the years; however, they have never made it to scale. These movements are like a pendulum swinging back and forth between two polarities: whole language versus phonics, standards-based assessments versus portfolios, open versus closed classrooms, etc. All of these reform movements are simply tweaks, replacing parts in the machine but not changing the nature of the system itself. More recently, the competitive business model has been applied to top-down education reform. Rather than transforming the system, it simply adds competitive pressure to an already broken system. Charter schools, school choice, and school competition were viewed as ways to put free market pressure on schools and teachers and force them to improve. Unfortunately, this approach has been a miserable failure (Ravitch, 2016).
Today our young people spend hours in buildings being asked to engage in activities that seem mostly irrelevant to them. Families with resources have a great advantage because they can purchase homes in desirable neighborhoods with high property tax rates that fund excellent schools. The affluent can send their children to excellent private schools that have the freedom experiment with new ways to teach and learn while children from families with less resources suffer in under-resourced schools bogged down by government regulations and top-heavy bureaucracies. As teachers struggle with this antiquated system, their students are becoming ever more resistant to the compliance that the system requires. Students recognize that the system is broken, and they are no longer willing to go along with it. A new generation of students is beginning to insist we pay attention to what is important to their future. Educators, students, and parents are poised to transform our antiquated system from the inside out. There are so many topics today that ignite kids’ passion and that can form an excellent basis for all kinds of learning. When students are engaged, it can be dramatic. Below I recount some recent, striking examples of students who have great influence, not because I expect all students to have these particular abilities but to present the potential our students hold. Young people have tremendous power when they speak out and organize, and their savvy use of new technologies is amplifying this power.
One example is Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani activist who received the Nobel Prize at age 17, the youngest laureate ever. In opposition to the local Taliban’s banning of education for girls, her family opened a chain of schools in the Swat Valley in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, northwest Pakistan. Inspired by her father’s humanitarian work and role models Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Benazir Bhutto, she, at age 11, began writing a blog for the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) Urdu under a pseudonym, documenting her life under Taliban occupation. Her work became more visible when the New York Times made a documentary about her life (Ellick & Ashraf, 2009). She began giving interviews and was nominated for the International Children’s Peace Prize by activist Desmond Tutu. On October 9, 2012, Yousafzai and two other girls were shot by a Taliban gunman. The assassination attempt was intended to stop her activism, but fortunately she survived. The attempt on her life sparked an international outpouring of support for Yousafzai and her work to extend educational opportunities to women and girls worldwide.
Greta Thunberg is a young Swedish activist. At age 15 she began protesting outside the Swedish parliament to bring attention to the urgency of the climate change crisis. She initiated the school strike for climate movement that has been growing around the world since the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP24) in December 2018. During the spring and fall of 2019, millions of students in hundreds of countries around the world joined her in striking and protesting. That spring three deputies of the Norwegian parliament nominated Thunberg, age 16, for the Nobel Peace Prize, and she was featured on the cover of Time magazine. To top it off, Time made her “person of the year” in 2019, the youngest ever, naming her a “next generation leader.” Her impact has been described as the “Greta Thunberg effect,” now perceived by OPEC (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) as the greatest threat to the fossil fuel industry. Greta was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, which she claims is her superpower because it gives her the capacity to view climate crisis in stark terms (Rourke, 2019).
On February 14, 2018, a gunman killed seventeen students and staff members and injured seventeen others at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. While the community mourned, many of the students felt compelled do something to prevent the continued threats to students in schools across the United States. Twenty students founded Never Again MSD, a gun control advocacy group. Two of the students, David Hogg and Emma González, have had a particularly strong impact. On February 17, 2018 Emma gave a speech against gun violence that went viral, proclaiming “We call B.S.” on the inaction by NRA-funded politicians. Subsequently, González has continued to be an outspoken activist on gun control, making high profile media appearances and helping organize the March for Our Lives. Speaking at the demonstration, González led six minutes of silence for the victims of the Parkland massacre, which, she explained, was the length of the shooting spree. David Hogg, too, became a gun control advocate and an activist against gun violence. In conjunction with his gun control advocacy, he has helped lead several high-profile protests, marches, and boycotts. He and his sister Lauren wrote #NeverAgain: A New Generation Draws the Line (Hogg & Hogg, 2018), a New York Times bestseller. He also initiated a successful voter registration drive, getting tens of thousands of new young voters to the polls in 2018.
While young people are showing strength and courage to speak out during these difficult times, it will take all of us, all generations working together, to solve our problems. As Hogg so clearly stated in an interview with the Washington Post:
One question I always ask groups of people when I’m speaking somewhere to people older than me is, “Raise your hand if you think this generation is going to save the country.” And they all raise their hand. And I look around, and they all feel good about themselves. Like, yeah, we did a good job raising this generation. And then I say, “You’re wrong.” It’s not going to be this generation that saves America. It has to be all of our generations working together in combination with the fury and energy and vigor of the youth and the wisdom of older generations. The trail has been blazed before, but it’s very overgrown. We have to come back and figure out where that path is, and not make that same mistake again so other generations don’t make it when they come back down this path (Ottesen, 2019).
This chapter provided a brief overview of how our education system evolved, and it begins to consider how the educational system might further evolve to meet our current needs. I once believed that education transformation had to come from the top down. But now I’m certain that with empowerment and will, this transformational process can and must begin in individual classrooms, schools, and districts with individual, empowered educators, students, and parents leading the way. But before this can happen, we need to build the capacity to transform this archaic and oppressive system from the inside out. Chapters 2 and 3 present the matrix of stressors that are the source of teachers’ burnout and the personal strengths that teachers need to elevate their profession to the status that is required for twenty-first-century education.
But before we move on, a caveat: I want to stress that I do not see teachers as the only responsible parties in this transformational process. I do not wish us to shoulder the whole load. Society has been burdening teachers with this for most of our history, and I do not wish to add to it. That said, as a result of economic and social factors that this book will highlight, teachers today are uniquely positioned to claim the power to engage students and parents to transform the system. I say “claim” rather than “reclaim” because we never had this power in the first place. While we have been saddled with the responsibility, we have had little power to determine how we engage our students to promote learning. Now, this must change. The burnout crisis provides an opportunity for us to turn around our educational systems so we can do the job we love: supporting our students’ learning and development.