AV #211 and #212 - Introduction - Less is more

An aphorism for our time: less is more

Introduction to the next two newsletters

“Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs,

the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.”

Milton Friedman

Less is more. An idea that is—or should be—“lying around.” We would do well to seize it.

At this moment, for K-12 public education, no three words seem as relevant. Or, maybe, as helpful.

Less is more was one of ten principles that guided the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES). [i] A foundation grant to the Colorado Department of Education (CDE) supported this effort in the early 1990’s. I followed the work in six Colorado high schools that, along with over 1,000 schools around the country, committed to redesigning their structures based on these ten “essential” principles.[ii]

Why did “less is more” became so central to CES?[iii] In the mid-1980s, A Study of High Schools led to several books that captured lessons learned and proposed reforms.[iv] In Horace’s Compromise, The Dilemma of the American High School, Theodore R. Sizer devoted chapter 4, “Knowledge: Less is More,” to this theme.[v] The title of a second work, The Shopping Mall High School, speaks for itself. Our comprehensive high schools, the authors concluded, had lost a clear sense of purpose.[vi] Trying to be all things to all people. Quantity over quality. Coverage over depth.

Here in June of 2020 we are told to “brace for pain”: big cuts ahead for K-12 schools and classrooms. I appreciate that less will be less, in all too many ways. But no one can believe that every dollar funding K-12 public education is spent wisely. This crisis should ask us to think hard about what is most essential. If this leads us to make better choices, we might discover that less can be more.

I will build my next two newsletters around this idea. Another View will speak of the curriculum. I realize this subject has little broad interest, so feel free to ignore them. But I do hope this one larger idea—less is more—enters the K-12 discussion. It reduces our fear; it speaks to what we can do.

Economic forecasts put some in panic-mode. We see it in the business community: “Today every occupant of every C-suite is trying to figure out what they’re willing to throw overboard as the economic storm spawned by the epidemic is swamping their ships.”[vii]

We see it in education circles too: “With states now collectively projecting spending cuts in the coming years in the range of $500 billion, administrators in these districts will be forced to dismantle their central enterprise of teaching and learning. Their choices will be stark.”[viii]

Throw overboard? Dismantle? How about—refocus? Or—reflect on our mission, be humble, and prioritize? “It has been a dramatic time,” Peggy Noonan wrote recently.[ix] “We have stopped and thought about our lives and our society’s arrangements…. We’ve rethought not only what is ‘essential’ but who is important. All this will change you as a nation… We are getting pared down. We’re paring ourselves down….” She praised the unadorned ways of the Amish, evoked our “pioneer genes,” and then concluded: “America is about to become a plainer place. Maybe a deeper one, too. Maybe that’s good.”

Less is more. If true, all of us in the K-12 world need to ask: What is essential?

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[i] Less is more: depth over coverage:
The school’s goals should be simple: that each student master a limited number of essential skills and areas of knowledge. While these skills and areas will, to varying degrees, reflect the traditional academic disciplines, the program’s design should be shaped by the intellectual and imaginative powers and competencies that the students need, rather than by “subjects” as conventionally defined. The aphorism “less is more” should dominate: curricular decisions should be guided by the aim of thorough student mastery and achievement rather than by an effort to merely cover content.    

           https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2018/01/02/whatever-happened-to-the-coalition-of-essential-schools/

[ii] Those six Colorado high schools: Horizon High School (Adams 12), Skyview High School (Mapleton), Pueblo County High, Fort Lupton High, Pagosa Springs High, and Roaring Fork High.

[iii] From Horace, the Coalition of Essential Schools newsletter, by Kathleen Cushman

Less Is More: The Secret of Being Essential

Cutting things out of the overcrowded curriculum presents our only chance for getting students to go deeper, think harder, push past complacency to the habits of mind Essential schools hold dear. But what goes and what stays? And who decides?

PRETTY MUCH EVERYBODY agrees: “Less Is More” is the toughest of the Coalition’s Nine Common Principles to explain and to live by. What does it mean? … Does it advise teachers to spend less time on some things and more on others? If so, what goes and what increases—and what effect do those changes have on student achievement?

Merely because the maxim is so catchy, people are apt to use “Less Is More” to serve whatever purposes they like, including as a deliberately misleading attack on Essential School ideas. In fact, however, the second of Theodore Sizer’s founding precepts is among the most closely reasoned and intellectually rigorous of the nine-and by far the most difficult and demanding to put into practice. It asks schools to limit and simplify their goals, so every student might master a limited number of essential skills and areas of knowledge, rather than race to cover broader content in conventionally defined “subjects.” And it asks them to redesign their academic offerings so they will center more around “the intellectual and imaginative powers and competencies students need.”

Simple as it seems, when teachers put it into practice “Less Is More” affects virtually every aspect of schooling, from curriculum to pedagogy, from teachers’ tasks to student schedules. Those Essential schools that have taken it most seriously describe dramatic changes-in school structure, in political and educational discourse, and in the levels of student achievement-since they have taken on this Common Principle.

    Horace, by Kathleen Cushman, 4/11/1995. http://essentialschools.org/horace-issues/less-is-more-the-secret-of-being-essential/

[iv] A Study of High Schools - a five-year inquiry into secondary-school education, sponsored by the National Association of Secondary School Principals and the Commission on Educational Issues of the National Association of Independent Schools. Produced three reports: Horace’s Compromise (Sizer); The Shopping Mall High School (Powell, Farrar, and Cohen, 1985); and The Last Little Citadel: American High Schools Since 1940 (Hempel, 1986).  

     https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2018/01/02/whatever-happened-to-the-coalition-of-essential-schools/

[v] From Horace’s Compromise -The Dilemma of the American High School, by Theodore R. Sizer (1984)

Chapter 4 - Knowledge: Less is More

On “the choice of subject matter in high schools.”

    “… First, if students have yet to meet fundamental standards of literacy, numeracy, and civic understanding, their programs should focus exclusively on these. Some critics will argue that the school must go beyond these subjects to hold the interest of the pupils. However, doing so would be a disserve to the students; a fourteen-year-old who is semiliterate is an adolescent in need of intensive, focused attention. Furthermore, most typical high school subjects require these fundamentals as preconditions. To say that reading, ciphering, and learning about practical government are somehow beneath a young teenager is absurd, an evasion by people who cannot see the importance of adapting the curriculum and the school to the student, rather than the reverse. The common practice of handing an eight-hundred-page world history textbook to tenth graders like Dennis, who can barely read at all, is as cruel as it is wasteful.” (p. 110)

[vi] From “Reforming the 'Shopping Mall' High School,” Education Week (1985)

    But American school people have been singularly unable to think of an educational purpose that they should not embrace. As a result, they never have made much effort to figure out what high schools could do well, what high schools should do, and how they could best do it. Secondary educators have tried to solve the problem of competing purposes by accepting all of them, and by building an institution that would accommodate the result.

    Unfortunately, the flip side of the belief that all directions are correct is the belief that no direction is incorrect--which is a sort of intellectual bankruptcy. Those who work in secondary education have little sense of an agenda for studies. There is only a long list of subjects that may be studied, a longer list of courses that may be taken, and a list of requirements for graduation. But there is no answer to the query: Why these and not others? Approaching things this way has made it easy to avoid arguments and decisions about purpose, both of which can be troublesome--especially in our divided and contentious society.

    But this approach has made it easy for schools to accept many assignments that they could not do well, and it has made nearly any sort of work from students and teachers acceptable, as long as it caused no trouble. High schools seem unlikely to make marked improvement, especially for the many students and teachers now drifting around the malls, until there is a much clearer sense of what is most important to teach and learn, and why, and how it can best be done.

  Arthur G. Powell, Eleanor Farrar, & David K. Cohen, https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/1985/10/02/06240028.h05.html

[vii] John D. Stoll, “Sustainability Is First Thing to Go,” The Wall Street Journal, May 2-3, 2020. 

[viii] Daarel Burnette II, “School Districts Are on the Brink,” Education Week, May 13, 2020.

[ix] Peggy Noonan, “A Plainer People in a Plainer Time,” The Wall Street Journal, May 23-24, 2020.