How to Improve Learning and Education

A High School Junior’s Musing

Source: https://edtrust.org/the-equity-line/essa-planning-process-complete-whats-next/

Before I continue with this article, I will have to clarify what type of education systems and schools I am critiquing. My articles will address the flaws in many United States traditional public schools and the systems behind it. Charter, online, private (all), for-profit, virtual, democratic, magnet, home, unschooling, and alternative schools will not be discussed.

This paper uses definitions from Sir Robinson’s Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education:

“Education means organized programs of learning. Learning is the process of acquiring new knowledge and skills.” [1]

Now, let’s talk about improving education and learning.

The first thing to improve is engagement rates. Without the student’s attention, students can’t learn.

To do that, purpose and relevance from a class to the real world should be explained within a class. Elon Musk, a successful entrepreneur and founder of Tesla and SpaceX, states that,

“…the why of things is extremely important. Our brain is evolved to discard information that it thinks has irrelevance. On one hand, you are being asked to memorize or learn formulas, but you do not know why.” [2]

I find that a major aspect that hinders student learning and engagement rates is the reason why they are learning. When students are put in a class, teachers assume that the students are here because they want to learn the subject at hand. But this isn’t always the case.

Many students don’t know why they are learning Math, English, or Chemistry. They don’t understand the purpose of it all. I mean surely, you hear responses to students saying, “these classes help you excel in college,” but that isn’t enough of an impetus to drive the students to learn well. Many of them are just placed into required classes. In other words, they don’t get it. I find many students mumbling, “I don’t need to know the quadratic formula or why symbolism is important,” and I am sure you do too. This attitude disengages them, and it is our job to fix that.

By giving them a real reason and motivation to learn by saying, “Hey, this class is important because it teaches you the importance of democracy and how our political system works,” or something encouraging, at least helps.

As Sir Robinson, Creativity Expert and Educator, says,

When students are motivated to learn, they naturally acquire the skills they need to get the work done.

To articulate the magnitude of this problem, in a survey conducted in 2007, out of 81,000 students in the Midwest, “60 percent said, ‘I didn’t see the value in the work I was being asked to do.’”[3] In another survey conducted in 2016, almost a decade later, out of 900,000 students across 49 states, “32% of 11th graders said that they were engaged.” [4]

Engagement rates also has an effect on learning because a student’s lack of connection to his or her work results in them resorting to ineffective learning methods such as rote memorization (repetition memorization) which wastes their time and ultimately makes them forget the material.

What is the purpose of the class when the students remember nothing?

And say, had the students remembered what they memorized, what good would it be to them? In 2018, Mr. Orlin, a math teacher, wrote in The Atlantic,

“‘What’s the sine of π/2?’ [he] asked [his] first-ever trigonometry class. ‘One!’ they replied in unison. ‘We learned that last year.’ So [Mr. Orlin] skipped ahead, later to realize that they didn’t really know what ‘sine’ even meant. They’d simply memorized that fact. To them, math wasn’t a process of logical discovery and thoughtful exploration. It was a call-and-response game.” [5]

A problem with decreased engagement and rote memorizing is that students don’t know what to do with this information. They really haven’t learned at all from this process.

For both teachers and students alike, we have to remember that while memorization is the first step in learning, learning never stops there–it goes beyond that. For example, as a child, it is important to memorize the ABC’s, but when they grow up into an intellectual being, we build on the memorized material to create syntax and the foundation of our communication.

Let’s say that we are in a Geometry class, and the teacher presents the formula, πr², the area of a circle. How should students learn this? Currently, many are mindlessly plugging in numbers and memorizing formulas because they don’t really care about learning this subject or understanding what it really means.

It is essential to understand the formula inside out, the history, derivation, and function of it. In order to create this thorough and effective learning process, we should make them passionate about the subject and guide them on learning well as mentioned above. Providing them a full understanding of the concept will enable them to think critically and not just do some low-grade meaningless clerical work.

Aside from changing the drive of the students, how things should be taught also ought to be changed. Schools need to acknowledge that disengagement is a problem, but most often, they actually reinforce and promote rote memorizing.

As quoted from the How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School,

“Tests often reinforce memorizing rather than understanding…Many assessments measure only propositional (factual) knowledge and never ask whether students know, where, and why to use that knowledge.” [6]

Furthermore, Dorothy Sayers, a writer from the Classical Education Movement, says,

“[Students] learn everything, except the art of learning. It is as though we had taught the child, mechanically and by the rule of thumb, to play ‘The Harmonious Blacksmith’ upon the piano but had never taught him the scale or how to read the music; so that, having memorized ‘The Harmonious Blacksmith’, he still had not the faintest notion how to proceed from that to tackle ‘The Last Rose of Summer.’” [7]

Allowing them to succeed with rote memorization in school will actually hurt the students in the long term because they have gained nothing.

Another solution that could solve the memorization problem and improve learning is connecting the units within a discipline together.

Quoting once more from How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School,

“Sometimes, however, students can solve sets of practice problems but fail to conditionalize their knowledge because they know which chapter the problems came from and so automatically use this information to decide which concepts and formulas are relevant. Practice problems that are organized into very structured worksheets cause this problem.” [6]

Bringing, perhaps, Geometry into Algebra 2 might help reinforce what the children had learned in the past and its future application, and bringing perhaps concepts from chapter 1 to chapter 13 in Calculus might be useful.

Along with the failure of assessments (more analysis on that in another article) to measure whether the student truly learned or not, the curriculum’s broadness,

“… may prevent effective organization of knowledge because there is not enough time to learn anything in depth.” [6]

Common Core has attempted to fix the “inch wide, mile long” problem by focusing more on certain themes, but the problem still remains in many schools’ curriculum.

To clarify which party is at fault and what Common Core is, the Common Core State Standards Initiative writes,

“Education standards, like Common Core are not a curriculum. Local communities and educators choose their own curriculum, which is a detailed plan for day to day teaching. In other words, the Common Core is what students need to know and be able to do, and curriculum is how students will learn it.” [8]

The curriculum needs to shift away from its heavy emphasis on content and rather what Mr. Hamel, an AP Government Teacher, calls “manage information.” We need the tools to be able to gather, select, and analyze information that we need and to be able to distinguish from what information is valid and isn’t.

Now, you may be thinking this is all the students’ fault for not learning properly or paying attention in class. Maybe you are thinking that these students do not have any sense of self-discipline for learning. But if many students feel like school is meaningless and resort to these methods, there could be an underlying problem.

Although there may not be any clear statistics saying how many students’ rote memorize, this problem is prevalent in every single classroom. It is evident that the issue could be shifted towards the schools: who are the people that care? Who controls these processes? Had the class explained its purpose, had it been that most of the students were engaged, the problem would be on the students, but that is not the case.

The school system as a whole is at fault. As I lay out in my other contentions, we learn of more problems that must be addressed and resolved, so please, do not hastily lay all the blame on the teachers or the schools.

So you might be wondering, “How do we know whether students are learning well or not? How can we measure that?” To determine whether students are learning or not, we must ask a student to explain to us their thought process behind the problem.

The second thing to improve education and learning is to create purposeful classes. In the progressive model of education we are under, the main purpose of classes is to teach subject mastery related to a student’s future job and subject application. In other words, classes are only of “economic relevance.” But, I believe that education has more of a purpose than that.

As I mentioned in my previous article, there are six purposes of education. Currently, there are factors that prevent these purposes from being fulfilled.

The first one is that a majority of students are taking classes that don’t fulfill these purposes. The second one is that classes that fulfill these purposes aren’t available. The third one is that a majority of students are being taught in a way that don’t fulfill these purposes.

Now, I will now explain how these purposes are not being fulfilled.

As you may recall, the first purpose of education is to create socially responsible citizens.

In our education system, many of the student’s classes aren’t aimed to create responsible people. Although there may be some classes such as Biology, Environmental Science, and Government/ Politics where they highlight world problems such as climate change, the ecological crisis, and social issues, they hardly emphasize the importance of fixing it. It is as if we don’t care at all about these issues. In my school, the lack of care can be seen evidently; recycling bins aren’t even in every classroom.

Sure, presenting the problems may seem sufficient for some people, but if we don’t look into fixing these problems, there is no point in telling the students these problems exist.

In school, we are told to pursue our own passions (even schools fail to fulfill that purpose for many), and this attitude blinds us to the bigger picture issues. I can agree that while what a student wants to do is important as he or she is born with their right to self-determination, their duty as a citizen needs to be acknowledged.

Another problem is that many of these classes that talk about environmental issues are optional with the exception of government/politics. Unfortunately, no one can opt of out these problems; it is all ours for us to solve, and everyone needs to know about it. These classes ought to be required because what we do now, the decisions of this generation, will have the most impact on our future children.

To convince our students the importance of social and environmental responsibility, we give them a reason that “appeals to agent benefit.” [9]

That is to say, we tell our students that if they want to reap the benefits of the environment, government, and society, they must continue to preserve and fix these systems that provide them these services and goods.

Quoting from the National Governors Association,

“. . . if the United States is to maintain a strong and responsible democracy and a prosperous and growing economy into the next century, it must be prepared to address and respond to major challenges at home and in the world. A well-educated population is the key to our future. Americans must be prepared to (1) Participate knowledgeably in our democracy and our democratic institutions; and (2) Function effectively in increasingly diverse communities and states and in a rapidly shrinking world. So today a new standard of an educated citizenry is required (one in which) all students must understand and accept the responsibilities and obligations of citizenship.” [10]

Luckily, a few years ago, the AP program brought the Civics Actions project to AP Government and Politics. Like my teacher, Mr. Paccone, I believe that this was a great step to bringing civic action to the classroom, but still, civic duty shouldn’t be a one time project. [11 & 12]

States should adopt Massachusetts’ framework for civics, so students can be exposed to what is expected of them as a citizen. According to Ms. Pitcher, an AP Government teacher, “Massachusetts just re-worked [the] History and Social Studies frameworks for grades K-12…8th graders are now required to study civics, and last year, Massachusetts also passed a bill that required all 8th graders and all high school students (grades 9–12) to develop a civic engagement project.”

The second purpose is to create democratic citizens. In the past few decades, however, we developed a culture avoiding politics and understanding world affairs.

According to Pew Research Center in February,

“At a time when the country’s polarizing politics and public discourse are dividing many Americans, close to half of all U.S. adults acknowledge that they have stopped discussing political and election news with someone…” [13]

Why are we avoiding the political discourse that we founded our country on?

It’s strange that most schools acknowledge the socialization of politics only in 12th grade of high school when government/politics takes place.

By pushing this class off to the end of high school, can the virtues of democracy truly be passed on? It’s seems even absurd that there are tests (e.g. AP tests) for these classes to see if you know “democratic principles and our government.”

We aren’t looking for students just to know the concepts. We want them to apply it and really believe in these ideals.

As retired US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor once said, “We have a complex system of government. You have to teach it to every generation (at every level of instruction).” We want young people to continue to be part of it. We need them more than ever.” [10]

We need to incorporate political pedagogy, which is a form of education that, as Henry Giroux writes in Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education,

“teaches students to take risks, challenge those with power, and encourage them to be reflexive about how power is used in the classroom. Political education proposes that the role of the teacher as public intellectual is not to consolidate authority but to question and interrogate it, and that teachers and students should temper any reverence for authority with a sense of critical awareness and an acute willingness to hold it accountable for its consequences. Moreover, political education foregrounds education not within the imperatives of specialization and professionalization but within a project designed to expand the possibilities of democracy by linking education to modes of political agency that promote critical citizenship and address the ethical imperative to alleviate human suffering.” [14]

Though some might say incorporating this type of education will create,

“self-righteousness and ideological purity that silences students as it enacts “correct” positions. Authority in this perspective rarely opens itself to self-criticism or for that matter to any criticism, especially from students.” [14]

We need to remember that political discussion in the classroom isn’t about which party is better, but rather how our country ought to move forward. We discuss to foster critical thought and the understanding/ application of democratic ideals.

Another democratic purpose is also understanding other cultures. We should know what it means to be American, our values, our government, but also the rest of the world.

The third purpose is to help students flourish in their passions and talents. Students ought to have some more freedom of choice to fulfill that. In my high school, I am forced to have six classes, three of which I dislike because of their irrelevance to my future plans. An example of this is taking a Pre-Calculus course, knowing well that I won’t need this class for my philosophy major.

I should be, instead, taking logic courses or perhaps composition classes. Students should be able to learn what they want to learn because it is more effective and efficient that way. Students tend not to forget material that they are going to use or enjoy, don’t they? It is simple.

Although it could be argued that high school’s purpose is to build the foundations of well rounded students, I truly do not see the relevance of the extent of learning a certain subject.

When am I going to use Algebra 2 in my major or rather… ever?

I find many people saying, “You might use it in the future. Who knows, you could go into the math field.” Exactly, it is a gamble. We don’t know what the students want or will go, and we throw things at them to learn. This works for students that are unsure of what they are passionate about, but this is terrible for students who already have goals of what they want to do.

Before I proceed, I must iterate that I do not advocate for pure specialization. For example, I don’t endorse the idea that mathematics majors should only take mathematics. I am saying a majority of those courses should be math, and that the extent of the classes that aren’t math should not be at a point where it isn’t usable at all.

I believe that at its core, students ought to be required to learn Algebra 1, Health and Physical Education, English Composition, Finance, and Critical Thinking, Government and Politics, Environmental Ethics, and Philosophy. All the other subjects students take should be of their own choosing.

To fulfill this purpose, schools ought to create two types of curricula: one that is diverse and one that is specialized.

For students unsure of what they want to do in their lives, we should offer them a diverse curriculum. For students that do know, they should start specializing at 7-8th grade of the current K-12 system.

First, let’s talk about the curriculum that is diverse. This curriculum will foster relevant 21th-century skills such as critical thinking, observation, composition, and finance. Subjects will include the Humanities, Arts, Languages, Physical Education, Math, English, Sciences, and Life Skills. In this curriculum, we seek to expose the students to the various disciplines.

Second, we must create a curriculum that is specialized. For students who already know what they want, we must provide them the opportunities to specialize and improve their talents. Students will be able to make autonomous decisions about any class they like to take.

Another specialized solution is to create an Emergent Curriculum. Instead of requirements driving the curriculum, it will be the student’s interests that do.

Mr. McFadden, a science teacher, describes the Emergent Curriculum as this:

“If the class wants to go in a certain direction, I have the freedom to follow their interests. If a student asks me a question I don’t know the answer to, that is a good thing. This means I can become “one of the students” — a fellow seeker of knowledge in an atmosphere of excitement, uncertainty and adventure.

…Taking the time to chase down student question in real time makes for a far more invigorating atmosphere than me simply marching through pre-ordained slides.

Students feel ownership of their learning process. They know that their curiosity will be rewarded by my excitement at getting to explore a surprising question (rather than the response: We don’t have time for that, we need to get to the next slide).” [15]

By allowing students to drive the curriculum, the student feel valued and empowered because they feel like they are on the same page with the teachers.

Third, let’s talk about what both curricula ought to have: the Humanities, Arts, and vocational programs with equal status as the academic classes.

As Sir Robinson says,

“Human intelligence embraces much more than academic ability… All our lives and futures depend on people mastering a vast range of practical abilities and skills… [Schools] should at least lay the foundations for their development by giving [the Arts and Humanities] the equal status and place they deserve in general education.” [1]

Quoting from the views of Ms. Wolf, professor at King’s College London,

“She sees enormous benefits in vocational education in preparing students to be successful, contributing adults, but believes that this kind of education can flourish only if it is treated with similar but different rigor in school systems that academic programs receive.” [1]

If the school lacks a variety of classes, the school could partner with local colleges (perhaps programs) or provide online learning opportunities. The schools could involve parents and companies to help children experience the various disciplines.

The fourth purpose is to help students prepare for their jobs and the real world. This includes creating entrepreneurial flair, learning about how to earn and manage money, and meeting expectations in the workforce.

In this growing age of artificial intelligence, it is essential to acknowledge that the societal pyramid is shifting.

“In 2013, Frey and Osborne of Oxford University concluded that [out of 702 different kinds of jobs in America], 47% of [these] could be done by machines over a decade or two…Overall, the study finds that 14% of jobs across 32 countries are highly vulnerable, defined as having at least a 70% chance of automation. A further 32% were slightly less imperiled, with a probability between 50% and 70%. At current employment rates, that puts 210 [million] jobs at risk across the 32 countries in the study.” [16 & 17]

People are losing jobs due to automation while new jobs requiring human specialty are becoming more valuable such as the Humanities and the Arts. In school, however, students are being taught various subjects (e.g. Math) that can be easily replaced by automation which is counterproductive. Only are these subjects useful to the students if they were to specialize in the subject and go beyond what they have learned.

Education was created for getting us a job, yet what we learn seems disconnected from the workforce.

“As John Dewey noted long ago: From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in school comes from his inability to utilize the experience he gets outside…. While on the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning in school. That is the isolation of the school — its isolation of life.” [6]

We need to apply the academics to real life like what Ms. Naditz, an acclaimed French teacher, does with her language class.

“What I am doing is simply applying principles that I believe will allow my students to best understand and speak French in a real world setting…I want my students to use French for something other than a grade, and for or with someone other than just me. One way that I have had my students accomplish this goal is by encouraging them to use websites such as FlipGrid and Dotstorming, websites that connect students with peers in France or elsewhere anytime.” [18]

Classes on financial literacy ought to include teaching how to earn money instead of focusing on paying bills. These classes should talk about investments such as stocks, real estates, bonds, retirement programs, and also, good habits for work. Students should be equipped with eloquent writing skills and conduct.

Entrepreneurial classes should encourage students to create their own companies with their own service or product. This should include the management of expenses, pay, taxes, operation plans, future prospects, etc.

Scientific classes could also apply to the real world through projects. For example, Thousand Oaks High School’s Scientific Research class includes a year long science project where students are able to dive in depth, demonstrating professionalism in their analysis, presentation, and research.

The fifth purpose is to help students think for themselves.

They need critical thinking, which is defined by the American Association of Colleges and Universities as,

“a habit of mind characterized by the comprehensive exploration of issues, ideas and artifacts before accepting or formulating an opinion or conclusion.”

Fake news, extreme polarization, irrationality, and fallacies have plagued our society, and our students need the tools and mindset to combat this issue.

They need the prudence to determine if their actions are logical or not, uninfluenced by their emotions and biases. Logic and Philosophy classes discussing fallacies, the analysis of arguments, connotation of words, etc, might help students.

Students also need to know how to manage time. They are constantly bombarded with information from many different areas such as their classes, text messages, public medias, advertisements, and social medias. Students need to filter and assess what information is important.

Many students seem to get stuck in this realm of consuming and procrastination–spending hours on countless useless things for “enjoyment” instead of getting anything done. We need to show them what truly is valuable in life and what really matters.

After all, we don’t want them to waste their life away focusing on the lower pleasures.

The sixth purpose is to help foster students’ virtue (good character traits).

Schools should transcend their teaching, in other words, go beyond the subject. Because the K-12 system runs during a student’s childhood and adolescence, it only makes sense to develop the child cognitively and socially.

Schools should nurture a student’s character traits ranging from curiosity to kindness. Schools can do this by teaching students the different ethical theories especially Aristotle’s Virtue Theory.

Third of all, classes should teach properly and for proficiency. (I will explain more of this in another article)

In his 2015 TED Talk, Mr. Khan, creator of Khan Academy, provides an example of what current schools are doing:

“On that test, maybe I get a 75%… Even though we’ve identified the gaps, the whole class will then move on to the next subject. Probably a more advanced subject that’s going to build on those gaps……And that process continues, and you immediately start to realize, how strange this is. I didn’t know 25% of the more foundational thing, and now I’m being pushed to the more advanced thing. And this will continue for months, years, all the way until at some point…I hit a wall. And it’s not because [the class] is fundamentally difficult or because the student isn’t bright. It’s because I’m seeing an equation and they’re dealing with exponents and the 25% that I didn’t know is showing up.” [19]

As Mr. Khan points out, a majority of how classes are taught do not go over material with emphasis nor review it because of how their curriculum is set up and how teachers interact with it. Furthermore, he explains that schools are trying a one size fits all approach where only fast learners’ benefit. This is hurting the students as not everyone learns the same way. Fundamentally, some students would be more auditory, visual, or tech-savvy, etc.

To express the diversity in children’s means of learning and characteristics, Sir Robinson, in his 2013 TED Talk, said,

“ …Human beings are naturally different and diverse. Can I ask you, how many of you have got two children or more? If you’ve got two children or more, I bet you they are completely different from each other. ” [20]

If these subjects are useful, students should learn at a pace and be taught in a way that benefits them. But because how most subjects are taught, students are being left behind with knowledge gaps.

Sal Khan tackles this problem with his “Khan Academy” website which fills in the gaps of the student’s learning and teaches the student at his or her pace with immediate feedback. We need to personalized learning in our classroom.

To emphasize the current impact of this problem since Mr. Khan’s speech was rather hypothetical, “over one-third of incoming [college] freshmen need some form of remediation” meaning that students have to retake high school level courses in college. [21]

What has happened? Clearly many of these students haven’t mastered subjects they have taken.

Schools are failing in their duty to provide them with subject mastery. But it can be fixed by focusing on the students, by giving them the individual attention they need.

At Dayspring Academy Charter School, “a K-12 school with about 200 high school students, [they] [have] deployed a structured dual-enrollment model for eleventh and twelfth grade. [School] guidance [counselors] [help] each student chooses courses, register in partnership with … colleges, and receive required on-campus tutoring and support on Fridays. The high school monitors students’ grades assist them with college-survival skills and helps them weigh career options. Ninety percent of these students [graduated], compared with 78 percent nationally.” [21 & 22]

Schools can certainly do better, and we need more structures like these.

People may say that economically disadvantaged schools are less able to change, but Sir Robinson provides many examples where disadvantaged schools succeeded in teaching students in spite of the lack of funding. In Creative Schools: the Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education, “Back To Basics,” Sir Robinson explains the transformation of Smokey Road Middle School.

“60% of students at Smokey Road qualified as economically disadvantaged. 20% of the surrounding population were living below the poverty line.” Dr. Barron, the principal, transformed the school with a few steps; she made the students go to school, feel safe, and feel valued. [1]

By making the students feel valued and personalizing the teaching, student learning increased. As she said,

“Whatever is important to the students is the most important thing …When we started taking that approach, when kids started seeing that we valued what they valued, they started giving back to us what we valued.” [1]

SOURCES:

1. Robinson, Ken, and Lou Aronica. Creative Schools: the Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education. Penguin Books, 2016.
2. Musk, Elon, director. Elon Musk Attacks The Education System. 4 Aug. 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVHPHNegJNc.
3. Bryner, Jeanna. “Most Students Bored at School.” LiveScience, Purch, 28 Feb. 2007, https://www.livescience.com/1308-students-bored-school.html.
4. Calderon, Valerie J. “How to Keep Kids Excited About School.” Gallup.com, Gallup, 4 Oct. 2018,https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/211886/keep-kids-excited-school.aspx.
5. Orlin, Ben. “When Memorization Gets in the Way of Learning.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 12 June 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/09/when-memorization-gets-in-the-way-of-learning/279425/.
6. Bransford, John D. How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. National Acad. Press, 2004.
7. Sayers, Dorothy L. The Lost Tools of Learning. GLH Publishing, 2017.
8. “Frequently Asked Questions.” Frequently Asked Questions | Common Core State Standards Initiative, www.corestandards.org/about-the-standards/frequently-asked-questions/.\
9. Sandler, Ronald. “Introduction: Environmental Virtue Ethics.” Virtue Ethics, virtueethicsinfocentre.blogspot.com/2008/11/introduction-environmental-virtue.html.
10. Paccone, Peter. “An Interview with Jose Flores.” Medium, Medium, 27 Jan. 2017, medium.com/@ppaccone/an-interview-with-jose-flores-7d17bdcb12a3.
11. Paccone, Peter. “Open Letter to David Coleman — the President of College Board.” Medium, Medium, 1 July 2018, medium.com/@ppaccone/open-letter-to-david-coleman-the-president-of-college-board-5f649dbf1190.
12. Paccone, Peter. “The APGov Applied Civics Project Requirement.” Medium, Medium, 18 Oct. 2019, medium.com/@ppaccone/open-letter-to-all-future-apgov-students-fcc4c71eda7d.
13. Jurkowitz, Mark, and Amy Mitchell. “Almost Half of Americans Have Stopped Talking Politics with Someone.” Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project, 4 Mar. 2020, www.journalism.org/2020/02/05/a-sore-subject-almost-half-of-americans-have-stopped-talking-politics-with-someone/.
14. Giroux, Henry A. Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education. Haymarket Books, 2013.
15. McFadden, Tom. “A Cure for the Common Lecture: Improvisation and Student-Led Inspiration.” KQED, 12 Jan. 2017, ww2.kqed.org/education/2017/01/12/a-cure-for-the-common-lecture-improvisation-and-student-led-inspiration/.
16. Gonser, Sarah, and The Hechinger Report. “Students Are Being Prepared for Jobs That No Longer Exist. Here’s How That Could Change.” NBCNews.com, NBCUniversal News Group, 12 Apr. 2018, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/students-are-being-prepared-jobs-no-longer-exist-here-s-n865096.
17. “A Study Finds Nearly Half of Jobs Are Vulnerable to Automation.” The Economist, The Economist Newspaper, 24 Apr. 2018, https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/04/24/a-study-finds-nearly-half-of-jobs-are-vulnerable-to-automation.
18. Paccone, Peter. “An Interview with Nicole Naditz.” Medium, Medium, 27 Feb. 2017, medium.com/@ppaccone/timing-57ca8f860401.
19. Khan, Sal. “Let’s Teach for Mastery — Not Test Scores.” TED, https://www.ted.com/talks/sal_khan_let_s_teach_for_mastery_not_test_scores?language=en.
20. Robinson, Ken. “How to Escape Education’s Death Valley.” TED, https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_how_to_escape_education_s_death_valley.
21. Legg, John, and Travis Pillow. “Make High School Relevant Again.” The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, 7Mar. 2018, https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/make-high-school-relevant-again
22. Solochek, Jeffrey. “Dayspring Academy — Pasco County’s Oldest Charter School — Prepares to Grow.” Tampa Bay Times, Tampa Bay Times, 5 Aug. 2019, https://www.tampabay.com/blogs/gradebook/2019/04/03/dayspring-academy-pasco-countys-oldest-charter-school-prepares-to-grow/.