Hyper-Local Journalism and the Future of High School
Empowering Student Voices in the Digital Age
Critical thinking is the “vaccine” for the information viruses that have hit our nation in a parallel pandemic to the Coronavirus.
Everyone knows that K-12 education is a high leverage opportunity to exercise critical thinking during our formative years. And yet, our average public school can’t seem to pull that lever and offer learning experiences that engage students’ deeper faculties.
Obviously, I’m not talking about critical thinking as an abstraction. Not as a rubric or standardized exam, for example, to impose on our teachers and confine our students’ thinking.
I am talking about complex and real-world learning experiences with a real audience that engage student curiosity. Attending a political event in person and reporting on it, for example, or profiling a community elder, or teaching a scientific concept in a video for younger students. Our high schools have a unique opportunity to apply academic habits to real world engagements by tasking our 11th and 12th graders to be hyper-local journalists.
The newest learning technology in public education is the Common Core State Standards. Top down standardized thinking is the opposite of critical thinking! It’s time to put the folks who write standards and standardized exams out of their current business. Don’t worry, they’ll all have golden parachutes. Meanwhile, their industrial-age regime is hurting our nation’s competitive advantage.
Go With the Flow
People of purpose who want to take meaningful action to improve the health of our nation, having identified education as an opportunity for impact at scale, tend to start at pre-K or 3-K or even at birth. They hope to bring transformation up into the elementary grades and beyond as students grow up. Certainly, it is very important to ensure babies are held and loved from birth to year four. But that is outside of the age range of public education and should remain as such — children deserve to be with their parents, not dropped off at an institutional setting before age four.
As a long-time high school educator with a track record of increasing student outcomes with project-based learning, I would suggest that these efforts are not having the impact they desire because they are swimming upstream. What if the key is to actually start at the other end?
Focus on what happens in 11th and 12th grade and students in all prior grades are immediately impacted. If we can offer an alternative to standardized testing as the measure of ultimate success in the K-12 journey, if we are able to hold schools accountable with higher quality, project-based educational data, we can change the trajectory of student learning from their first day of pre-K.
The education-industrial complex will be forced to optimize for project-based learning rather than teaching to a multiple-choice test. That would represent a massive step forward in the history of education.
Project-Based Outcomes
We certainly need clear expectations and fair evaluations for students to invest sweat equity and reliably earn high quality credits. We also need good data to hold educators paid with tax dollars accountable. Using industrial methods of standardized testing has led to our schools becoming irrelevant—factories that expect our students to act like robots, selecting from a menu of options of regurgitated textbook information. As students disengage and educators lose their passion, high school credit incentives fail to produce reliable results, even when measured with their own exams.
I’m not recommending academic courses that include a “project” at the end like a poster board or presentation. Here is what it would look like:
For Humanities Classes: hyper-local youth journalism in the form of 10-minute podcasts and video segments.
Math/Science: a Khan Academy of explanatory videos for mathematics and hard science where all content is made for students, by students.
By shifting educational data to a project-based media stream, we breathe life back into our classrooms. Can you imagine if high school was a magical time of deep learning and real-world accomplishment? It’s hard for us to even imagine this!
We can replace 11th and 12th grade standardized testing with an app that offers a trusted gold standard of high school credit. With a laser-focus on uploaded student work products to measure success, and by paying educators generously to determine which work to publish for credit, we offer a digital equivalent to the industrial model of multiple-choice tests and cookie cutter essays.
Favorable Conditions
At first students would have an option: take the AP course that ends in an exam or produce monthly podcast or video segments to earn an equivalent credit. By offering an alternative, all those parents who opted out of testing in the elementary grades will likely favor opting out in high school as well, now that there is an alternative to opt into.
Instead of evaluating based on students sitting for one exam on one day at the end of 12 years of education, students in 11th and 12th grade upload a single, highly produced, 10-minute segment per month.
An app offering such gold standard high school credit in exchange for professional quality student media takes advantage of some favorable conditions in the “high school transcript technology” space.*
Consider the following:
1. More and more universities are noticing that the Industrial Era standardized tests are no longer a good source of data correlated to real world outcomes. Offering a gold standard alternative will help them chuck standardized testing. At the same time, more and more parents are opting out of testing in elementary school, adding to the groundswell against these harmful high stakes exams.
2. The high school transcript is meaningless when coming from a low-income public school, especially after this pandemic as state officials have sanctioned the award of credit for nearly no demonstrated learning outcomes. In other words, there is not much competition in the high school transcript technology space.
3. The hyper-local media space is essentially a vacuum waiting to be filled by our high school students.
4. The seeds of remote learning planted during this pandemic will grow. This app allows 9th and 10th grade students to spread out over most of the building in smaller classes while the later grades are on location and even working remote from the community.
5. Project-based learning, despite being an ancient practice, is only being researched formally somewhat recently. Consider this resource which shares some recent data, among other encouraging content. Today, we know how to do PBL and we know that it works. We even know quite a bit from outcomes-based grading on how to fairly evaluate student skills by focusing on student work products.
Three Important Factors for Success
FIRST, this opportunity is magnified if the app is ownerless and open source rather than venture capital backed and for profit. As with Linux and Bitcoin, an ownerless platform drives the network effects required for a new type of high school credit to become dominant before the politicians even notice that all their schools are using this new app. Furthermore, launching a decentralized platform with no corporate headquarters ensures that no centralized authority is monetizing (i.e. exploiting) our young people’s sweat equity. We don’t want to see advertisers paying to capture student attention in our public schools!
SECOND, as mentioned above, the key to making this work is to design incentives such that each stakeholder (student, teacher, administrator, university, parent) finds great value in using this app on a day-to-day basis. Focusing on incentives will drive adoption and thus sustain the impact of this app.
FINALLY, the platform must be designed to be anti-biased in outcomes, lest we continue to help the rich at the expense of the humble. To achieve this, outcomes are monitored to ensure the media being approved on the platform is as diverse as the broad population of any geographic area.
A new measure of student learning is thus curated by highly paid credit experts associated with specific credit streams. Using a committee system of three graders per upload, grading is normalized by a community of educators. A student’s simple ability to earn an approved credit through three revisions with feedback represents the primary data stream. The secondary stream is the videos and podcasts themselves. These will be researched and revised and relevant to the local community. See my prior article: Industrial Standardization; Digital Normalization for a more in depth discussion of academic data, then and now.
Run the Numbers
Each individual month in 11th and 12th grades, students schedule one credit to attempt by browsing available approved credits on this app. One course per month. A deep dive with three revisions before the final upload provides a chance to apply the academic skills developed in 9th and 10th grades.
If students earn 1 academic credit per month between October 1 and May 31 (leaving September and June for other activities), that equals 8 credits per year. Each credit represents 180 hours of learning (4.5 weeks x 40hrs/week = 180 hours remote/independent). Multiply that by the two years of 11th and 12th grade and you end up with 16 such credits. This is actually 152% more credits than New York State currently awards for two years of secondary school attendance.
Note that physical education is not included in these credits since personal health requires ongoing practice — students will have to engage in physical activity and mindfulness alongside the monthly academic projects. The total number of credits is even higher than estimated above given that these credits are included in state transcripts but counted separately in this approach.
Don’t get me wrong — practice and training are required before students can head into the field to report on local issues independently. They must get over the frustration of multiple revisions, learn how to capture and edit digital media, be introduced to mindfulness, earn the trust of parents and administrators who will approve what amounts to an open-ended field trip pass for their final two years.
By 11th grade students will have had to demonstrate academic skills which can be articulated with traditional methods like standards, rubrics and online evaluations. As a result, it may turn out that 9th and 10th grade academies do not change much at all. They maintain the current bell schedule formation with each period focused on certifying students for a distinct set of related skills. Since fewer staff are needed to serve the upper grades, these Freshman and Sophomore students enjoy smaller class sizes and more space in the building during these two years of training.
tl;dr
We cannot execute the type of transformation that is required in our public schools from within the existing education-industrial complex (of which I myself represent a top level participant). This must happen to us in the education-industrial complex the way Uber happened to the Taxi industry. There will be challenges in the transition, but if we don’t make a drastic change to the depth of student inquiry and frequency of critical thought, the negative externalities of leaving things as they are will be catastrophic for our nation.
Can you imagine if, all of a sudden, 11th and 12th grade reporters are hosting presidential debates and using the skills they learned as young historians and scientists up through grade 10 to inquire into the wellbeing of their local communities? These videos and podcasts will not be like current social media in that they will require a month per upload of sweat equity equivalent to 180 hours of community service. The required revisions in the course of the month and the generous pay for the objective credit experts who approve segments for publication maintain each credit stream’s quality. Not to mention that no matter what school a student attends, they will have access to these gold standard credits.
Conclusion
There are so many community-based organizations I know of today who are already doing this work. These are the project-based educators who have been in our schools for many years. These pioneers will spend time on the app earning $180/hr to boost their income instead of having to leave the classroom as administrators or consultants to increase their pay.
High school administrators, like myself, will be able to select which open-source credits to approve for use in their school and then the teachers and students will have access to all the curricular materials necessary to produce a 10-minute media segment with multiple revisions over the course of a calendar month. By allowing for competition among the credit studios that design these credits, issues like cheating are addressed since the credits with the best solutions will gain the trust of universities. Not to mention that it’s just harder to cheat on a project-based approach that requires ongoing participation over the course of an entire month rather than a single seating at the end of a twelve year journey.
Universities, instead of looking at an AP exam score or even a college essay will be able to click on any credit to see the uploaded media behind that credit as a way of getting to know a student. Furthermore, they will be able to mine the rich dataset on the app to identify students who are earning these gold standard credits in communities that may face socio-economic hurdles. They will have the opportunity to proactively offer admissions to such top performing students rather than waiting for these students to pay a fee to apply to their institution.
Parents will also be able view their students’ media to get to know them, academically, not to mention that they will be able to compare the media coming out of any given school, district, or even classroom.
I can go on with all the myriad of positive outcomes from such a system which shifts our focus from standardization to project-based learning. The time is now to make this happen, but it will take a tremendous initial investment among teen-led organizations to successfully build and launch this app by and for the students. In order to avoid Silicon-Valley-style funding and control, our angel investors must be students who invest their time and talents rather than wealthy white people who throw money at education to feel better about the questionable practices that earned them that money in the first place.
If you would like to be part of this growing community, please follow the hs.credit LinkedIn page to receive periodic updates on our progress.
#PassionForLearning #AcademicCapital
*A blueprint is available at https://hs.credit as well as in my recent audio/book.
