Special Features

 

Interview with Linda Darling-Hammond

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

For the NBR special series "Work In Progress," NBR Washington Bureau Chief Darren Gersh spoke with Professor Linda Darling-Hammond at Stanford University. What follows is a transcript of their entire conversation; an edited version appeared in the broadcast report.

Darren Gersh:
We visited Hillsdale High School in San Mateo to take a closer look at one reform effort. What was the old Hillsdale High School like?

Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond

Linda Darling-Hammond:
Hillsdale HS was like any sort of suburban comprehensive high school. It had different tracks for different kids, doing different kinds of work. Kids went around from one teacher to another. Teachers had 150 different kids at a time. There was no particular coherence in the program that kids experienced. And they were learning what was in the book, do the questions at the end of the chapter – sort of a typical high school education.

Gersh:
It sounds like these High Schools were designed for the economy of the time. How much thought went into the design of these high schools?

Darling-Hammond:
The factory model high school as we now call it was designed in about 1910 or 1920. The idea of that comprehensive high school was to cream off about 5% of the kids for specialized knowledge work. They would go off to college and fill the very small number of jobs that required that kind of thinking. The rest of the kids were supposed to be prepared for the farm, the factory, the mills – for you know, fairly rote kinds of learning. And over time vocational programs were put in place and other kinds of general programs.

The notion of these schools was that they were to select and sort kids, decide who was going to go where in the economy. Most of the work was not going to be thinking work. And we were going to crank them out on this assembly line process.

Gersh:
And it was pretty straight forward that that’s what these schools were supposed to do?

Darling-Hammond:
That’s how high schools in America were designed. That was their job and what’s happened of course is that the economy has changed, the society has changed, but for most schools, the structure of the organization that was designed almost 100 years ago has not yet changed.

Gersh:
What’s wrong with that old model?

Hillsdale High School student Freddy Garcia works at a computer.

Darling-Hammond:
The old model has a lot of problems for us today. Number one it doesn’t graduate enough kids. We’re only graduating about 75% of the kids in this country. And it graduates very few prepared for knowledge work. For the kinds of things our society now demands.

So you might get 25% of the kids who actually go on to college, succeed in college and graduate with a degree with the technical skills we know require. It’s segregative. That is, quite often you have a much more diverse population of students who are in different tracks in the comprehensive high school and quite often those are color coded. There’s quite a cast system that gets reinforced in the traditional model high school. So the quality of the work is not what we need, the graduation rates are not responsive to what our economy now needs and we’re not really creating integrative institutions

Gersh:
How has Hillsdale High School changed?

Darling-Hammond:
Hillsdale is kind of a prototype, if you will, of how a suburban high school has changed. Number one, the population of Hillsdale has changed in recent years, so it is now more than half students of color, with a wider economic range of students. Number two, the school took on the challenge or getting more kids to graduate with higher levels of knowledge and learning by really redesigning their work.

First, they started by inculcating a lot of project-based learning where kids really have to tackle a big problem, find resources and information. Synthesize information, write about it, actually conduct and evaluate products and so on, so that they’re ready for what they’re going to have to do in the workplace.

They then decided to re-organize the school. So they have created small learning communities within which kids can be very well known by a team of teachers who plan together what the curriculum for those kids is going to be. That means that their ability to keep kids in school is going up, their attendance is going up. Kids feel well known. The work that they’re getting is more challenging. They have put all of the kids in a curriculum that will lead towards the opportunity to go to college. Big change from the olden days.

Gersh:
Are you saying the new high school has to adapt to the new economy?

Darling-Hammond:
When you think about what the new high school has to do and what the new economy demands, it needs to produce, number one, a lot more successful graduates, it has to have more of them. Two, they need to be able to think creatively, they need to be skilled in mathematics, technology and the sciences, they need to be able to research novel problems, come up with solutions.

They are not going to be in a factory where somebody is going to tell them what to do, and they’re going to have to just take orders and be compliant and have low levels of skills. They are going to be in high tech companies in Silicon Valley having to use technology, use their minds, create new products, be highly literate, be highly mathematically literate and those challenges are what a school like Hillsdale is now taking on.

Gersh:
Are we successful at that as a nation?

Darling-Hammond:
As a nation, we are not successful at that. It is a very interesting phenomenon right now, but most other countries that we would think of as peers or competitors are graduating from high school 95, 97, 99% of their population. We’re graduating only about 75%. Furthermore their levels of performance are much higher than ours and they’re much more equal than ours. So we rank 28th out of 40 countries in the world in mathematics right now. Somewhere around 20th in reading. And our outcomes are highly unequal as well. We have a bigger range.

Gersh:
How widespread are reform efforts. How many Hillsdale high schools are there?

Darling Hammond:
There’s a real press for high school reform out there. High schools are the most unsuccessful part of our educational system. I would say that probably 10% of the high schools are involved in making the kinds of changes we’re talking about here.

Gersh:
How will this new generation of kids who are coming through high school now change our workplace?

Student Freddy Garcia works with teacher/advisor Marty Kongsle at Hillsdale High School in San Mateo

Darling-Hammond:
The new cohort of kids, if they’ve had reasonable education, and just lived in the society with some access to resources – this batch of kids is going to technologize the workplace. They come in very comfortable with new technologies – if they’ve had access to that kind of opportunity. It’s a much more diverse group of individuals coming through. So we’re going to have a very different corporate and business and non-profit sector face. We’re going to have a much larger portion of the kids coming out of school now from Latin America, Southeast Asia. It’s going to be a very diverse workforce.

There is a huge dilemma we’ve created with the inequality in our public school system, because some schools in urban areas are not getting the resources they need and kids are coming out with very low levels of skills. It’s probably the most unequally educated cohort of kids since 1940.

What we are producing is a hugely bimodal population, so there are mobility gains only for people who have at least a college education. But we’re only getting about 25% of a cohort through a college education to a degree. So on average, this may be the first generation that on average does not outpace their parents in terms of their ability to move through the society and take across the board better jobs at better pay at the other end.