A Postscript to Ron Brandt
Powerful Learning

Keynoter Presentation - Winter, 2002
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In June I made a hurried visit to an interesting school in a small town in Minnesota. I was on my way to my grandson’s wedding in Mankato, so I couldn’t take much time, but I had heard a presentation about the school at a conference earlier in the year, so I was delighted to have the chance to see it just by driving 10 or 15 miles out of my way. The school has the picturesque title of New Country School. Sixty years ago I attended a little one-room country school in my home state of Nebraska. New Country is also a one-room school, in some ways like those historic little wooden places of learning but otherwise quite different. For one thing, it’s a modern brick building. For another, it’s a six-year secondary school, for what is usually called grades 7 through 12. Like the original country schools, it’s relatively small, but in this case that means about 150 students. (District 107, the grade school I attended, never had more than a total of 12 students in all 8 grades.) Like my country school, New Country is governed not by a distant board that may oversee dozens of other schools, but directly by a group of parents and local community members. That’s because it’s a charter school. In fact it’s even different from most charter schools, because in this case the teachers also make a lot of decisions about how things are done.

New Country does a lot of things differently from most schools. I mention it this morning because for me it raises questions about whether it is making better use of the research-based knowledge we have about how people learn than most schools are. A few weeks ago I read an intriguing commentary in the newspaper Education Week. The author, a former high school English teacher and principal, now an assistant professor, has been doing research to find out what students remember from their high school experiences. As you might expect, they mostly remember what they did with their friends in student activities. Lynn Hoffman reminds readers of what most high school classrooms are like.

“More often than not,” she says, ““I have observed students, even the many academically able ones, as only peripherally engaged in the learning process, if not sleeping, writing notes or doodling, grooming themselves, whispering with others about anything but the topic at hand, or simply staring into space.”

The interviews she has been conducting show that “Overall, students do not associate academic engagement or performance with anything they describe as meaningful or memorable for them during their high school experience. Academics are described as boring, routine, and necessary primarily for inclusion on transcripts for college.”

Hoffman found a few exceptions, including the “senior project” that some schools require for graduation. She was apparently a yearbook advisor, because she emphasizes working on the yearbook as an especially compelling experience for students. She says students “. . . value their yearbook classes because they produce a real product, they expend extensive out-of-class time and effort that is clearly necessary and expected, and they determine their own day-to-day work activities and manage their own workflow within the parameters of given deadlines.” And she concludes by suggesting that high schools should be restructured to somehow make academic learning more memorable to students.

Hoffman seems to take it for granted that high schools should be restructured. Ten years ago we heard the word “restructure” everywhere, but I don’t hear it very often these days. Now a lot of people, including the U. S. Congress, seem to think we should do a much better job without changing the entrenched traditions we’ve inherited from past generations. It reminds me of what Ted Sizer said in an interview when I asked him about the reforms of the 1980s.

“Those ‘reforms,’” he said, “were like ordering the Model T to drive 60 miles per hour. You can order all you want, but unless you change the vehicle, right down to how the engine's organized, you're not going to get 60 miles per hour. People who made those policies have not understood the necessity of fundamentally reshaping the way schools are run.” The reforms Sizer was talking about, as you know, were such things as merit pay for teachers and stricter graduation requirements for high school students. In my view, most of the reforms being imposed on schools these days won’t be much different.)

I like the idea that regular class work might somehow be more like the projects that students dream up and carry out on their own. It’s pretty obvious that students are generally more interested in sports and school plays and so on than they are in algebra and world history. In my own case, I think the most useful things I learned in high school were from activities like singing in the chorus and editing the school newspaper. In fact, back in 1978 when Gordon Cawelti, who was then the Executive Director, invited me to apply to be editor of publications at ASCD, I sent a tongue-in-cheek letter saying I was sure I was qualified because I had been editor of the Neligh High School Rattler.

At any rate, when I read the article proposing that high schools should be restructured to make regular courses more like working on the yearbook, I thought immediately of the New Country School in Minnesota. Whatever else you can say about it, that school is definitely “restructured.” For example, it doesn’t have a standard curriculum. Instead, students devote all their time to projects they’ve dreamed up individually. They don’t go from class to class every 55 minutes; they each have a workstation, complete with computer, somewhat like the workstations they’re apt to have when they become adults. When they’re not out in the community investigating something, the students are generally at their workstation. Teachers don’t give lectures and tests; they advise and critique, making sure students are using their time reasonably well and that student work is of acceptable quality.

Now, as soon as most of us hear about such a school, we may be intrigued, but we wonder, “Aren’t those kids going to miss a lot of important stuff they really need to know?” And the way we think about that question reflects our philosophy of education. Philosophy? Well, yes, that’s what they called it in Education 101 back in teachers college. Your view of education: your theories, your values. We all have ideas about education, about the schooling process.

Personally, I‘m an advocate of change. Like Ted Sizer, I think the structures and practices we’ve inherited are not very effective and we need to try some new ones. And for most of my career I’ve been a cheerleader for various innovations.

My way of thinking about schooling puts me in the camp that E. D. Hirsch, the University of Virginia English professor, calls educational “romantics.” Other authors of articles I’ve seen recently refer to “ideologues” and “utopians.” People like me are not just unrealistic; we’re to blame: we’re the ones who got schools in trouble with our crazy, unproven ideas. We’re about as popular as liberal politicians.

I must admit that what I said in the book Powerful Learning does sound pretty “romantic” and “utopian” - but I didn’t just make it up. So what I’m wondering this morning is: how valid is what we supposedly know about learning? Is what I wrote really scientific, or is it just my romantic philosophy of education? To what extent, when we talk about schooling, can we say “I know,” or can we only say “I think?” It’s not an easy question to answer. I know what I believe about learning, but frankly I’m not sure what I actually know about it.

My plan this morning is fairly simple and straightforward: I’ll remind you briefly of what the book says, then examine what a few more recent sources have to say and, based on that, I’ll offer a postscript.

[Background: Project from strategic planning. Three main sources - mainly the APA, a booklet published by Scottish Curriculum Council, work of Geoffrey and Renate Caine. Not necessarily principles of learning; instead “conditions.”]

Conditions for Powerful Learning
In general, we can say that people learn well when:
What They Learn
1. What they learn is personally meaningful; they feel a need to learn it.
2. What they learn is challenging and they accept the challenge.
3. What they learn is appropriate for their developmental level.

How They Learn
4. They can learn in their own way and have some degree of choice and control.
5. They use what they already know as they construct new knowledge.
6. They have opportunities for social interaction.
7. They get helpful feedback.
8. They acquire and use strategies.

The Setting in Which They Learn
9. They experience a positive emotional climate.
10. Their environment supports the intended learning.

I said earlier that I think most of what the book says is scientifically accurate but I’ve never known for sure. One reason for that is that I’m really not an authority, in the sense of someone who has personally conducted basic research. I’m a generalist; I’m certainly not a specialist in anything, including human learning.

When I was an editor, my role was to interview the experts and read their writings, and then try to explain things as I understood them. For example, I once produced a 15-minute videotape called Learning About Learning, with excerpts from interviews with three researchers. I went about constructing the program the same way I had done my doctoral dissertation: I typed out all the interviews, went over everything to find the points I thought were especially interesting, cut them out with scissors and laid them out on the floor, moving them around until they made sense to me. Then I wrote a script tying the quotes together. I was quite proud of that script but I wanted it to be as accurate as possible, so I sent it to one of the researchers I had interviewed, asking her to suggest any changes. I was surprised and disappointed when she angrily refused to help. I still don’t know why she was so upset. I guess she thought I had oversimplified and distorted what she and the other experts were saying. That’s what happens, I guess, when you try to use plain language to explain complex ideas.

I’d had a similar experience a few years earlier when a few colleagues and I became aware of a growing interest among researchers and developers in what we came to call the thinking skills movement. Those of you who were readers of Educational Leadership back then may recall that, beginning about 20 years ago, we began having articles and eventually theme issues on the subject of teaching thinking. I had stumbled onto programs for teaching thinking developed in various parts of the world, like Instrumental Enrichment, Philosophy for Children, CORT, and Project Intelligence, later called Odyssey. So I invited a group of interested educators and researchers to a conference at the Wingspread Conference Center in Wisconsin to review a framework a group of us were in the process of devising. We called our framework “Dimensions of Thinking,” because we were trying to incorporate all the various perspectives on thinking we had come across: skills, processes, dispositions - critical thinking, creative thinking, problem solving, and so on. Some here may recall that our model was eventually turned into “Dimensions of Learning,” which we thought was a good way to teach thinking throughout the curriculum.

At any rate, that invitational conference in the summer of 1984 was one of the highpoints of my life. There we were: a small team of practicing educators meeting at an idyllic, superbly comfortable site with the opportunity to talk in small working groups about thinking and learning with a couple of dozen noted authors and researchers. But we were disappointed that most of the experts just didn’t have much to say one way or the other about our draft framework. Edward de Bono, the brilliant English inventor of the CORT thinking program, probably summarized how some of them felt about it. He said, “There are many great cuisines in the world: French, Chinese, Italian - and you seem to be trying to make a great stew out of all of them.”

As I said, I can call these statements knowledge only because other people have told me so, not because I’ve done the research myself. Of course, all of us know something about learning because we’ve all learned, and because we’ve helped others learn. In my case, I spend a lot of time trying to help my 10-year-old grandson, Michael, with his reading and writing. [Attends a very good school in conventional sense. Spelling: pretest, four times, sentences - but “how do you spell __?” I can spell almost anything, but “er” words: heard, return, confirm, were, etc.]

Because of my experience with Michael, I was interested in a research study reported just a couple of weeks ago in an article in Education Week: 2nd graders who got extra lessons in spelling wrote more fluent, better-constructed sentences and texts than children who had spent the same amount of time getting extra lessons in mathematics. “If you have to switch your attention to figuring out how to spell a word, that disrupts your planning process.” - Steve Graham, University of Maryland College Park

Well, yes, it certainly does. But how do you learn to spell those words automatically so that you aren’t disrupted? As any teacher can tell you, it has something to do with experience and something to do with different people’s talents and preferences. Personally I can spell almost anything. I used to think it was a sign of my superior intelligence, but the literature says it’s not. Some people are good at it and some are not. Michael is not. I try to get him to pay attention to how particular words are spelled. He goes through the motions of what his teachers and I ask him to do, but he isn’t particularly interested. I guess that is evidence that people learn well when they’re engaged, but it doesn’t help me much. So the first thing my postscript needs to say is: Powerful Learning may be reasonably accurate, but it’s not enough.

Of course, I knew when I wrote the book that the statements in it were very general. In order to help readers understand what they might mean, I included brief excerpts from articles that had been published in Educational Leadership, excerpts that seemed to me to be particularly good illustrations of each of the conditions. [I cautioned then, and I should probably repeat now, that I didn’t mean to suggest that the 10 conditions could be separated from one another. Instead, the idea is that circumstances that encourage powerful learning are usually a combination of all or most of the 10 conditions, not just one of them.]

So it was obvious that a short little book like Powerful Learning was necessarily very general. And since the book was published, I’ve come across several sources that provide additional information. A particularly interesting source is the dozens of books that have come out in recent years written by noted neuroscientists explaining what they are learning about operation of the human brain. Most of the books I have read have been recommended to me by a good friend, Bob Sylwester, who knows a lot more about this than I do.

Personally meaningful, feel a need to learn

“Brain reorganization takes place only when the animal pays attention to the sensory input and to the task. . . . only when the animal is trying to learn or to form a memory. . . . Training rats to do ‘acrobatic’ tasks changed dendrites in their brains. Running on a treadmill did not. . . . active engagement in a task reorganizes the brain, but passive stimulation does not.” [Example: stroke victim relearning use of limb; Michael learning to spell] --- John Bruer, The Myth of the First Three Years
(Memory) “For better or worse, our recollections are largely at the mercy of our elaborations; only those aspects of experience that are targets of elaborative encoding processes have a high likelihood of being remembered subsequently.” — Daniel Schacter, Searching for Memory
Emotions - what to remember and forget, unconscious

“Our emotional system drives our attentional system, which drives learning and memory and everything else. You’re not going to learn something you’re not paying attention to, and you’re not going to attend to something you don’t care about.” — Bob Sylwester, The Brain and Learning

“One extremely important purpose of emotions from an evolutionary perspective is to help us decide what to remember and what to forget.” — Candace Pert, The Molecules of Emotion

“We know that single neurons are components of large, distributed neural ensembles, whose overall patterns of activity encode both external stimuli and the animal’s responses to them. . . . As an example, suppose I meet with someone and have a very unpleasant interaction with that person. . . . My amygdala, in addition to sending signals that affect my bodily state, is also sending signals to the nucleus basalis. The nucleus basalis showers my sensory brain with acetylcholine (including the parts of my brain that register voices and motions), encouraging the patterns of activity now active to become stably linked.” — Leslie Brothers, Friday’s Footprint

What these insights from brain research tell me are:

Emotions are a very important aspect of learning.

The emotional aspect of learning is often mostly unconscious, so the environment is important. But
learning is affected by negative emotional circumstances as well as positive

So condition of positive emotions could possibly be restated to something like: (People learn well when)

They experience unusually strong emotions.

(That certainly doesn’t say it all, but it’s about as well as I can do in just five words.) My main point, though, is that brain research is giving us some helpful additional information about learning. Very little of it is totally new, but it helps us see the physiological basis for what others, including psychologists and philosophers, have noticed about human nature.

Another resource that became available after my book was published was an authoritative report produced in 1999 by the prestigious National Research Council. How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School was written by John Bransford, head of the Learning Technology Center at Vanderbilt University, with Ann Brown and Rodney Cocking. I’m glad to say it generally agrees with what is said in Powerful Learning, but it gives more detail about some points, including some refinements showing that the learning process is a lot more complicated than it might seem.

For example,

“Students are motivated to spend the time needed to learn complex subjects and to solve problems they find interesting. Opportunities to use knowledge to create products and benefits for others are particularly motivating for students.” That passage seems directly in line with what Lynn Hoffman had to say about yearbooks.

Well, maybe. That, of course, is part of the problem: how we educators interpret the knowledge we have. Take, for example, the generalization that, as my book says, “They use what they already know as they construct new knowledge.” Bransford and his co-authors use almost those very words:

“In the most general sense, the contemporary view of learning is that people construct new knowledge and understanding based on what they already know and believe.” But they go on to add a very important qualification:

“A logical extension of (this) view . . . is that teachers need to pay attention to the incomplete understandings, the false beliefs, and the naïve renditions of concepts that learners bring with them.”

So yes, children have to construct new knowledge from what they know, but what they think they already know may be wrong, which makes the teacher’s job much more complex.

Here’s another complication:

“A common misconception . . . is that teachers should never tell students anything directly but, instead, should always allow them to construct knowledge for themselves . . . (but) even listening to a lecture involves active attempts to construct new knowledge.” [ Undoubtedly a lot of confusion concerning “constructivism.” ]

Here’s another example. I wrote, “They get helpful feedback.” That’s correct, of course. As Bransford and his co-authors say,

“Feedback has long been identified as important for successful learning . . . but it should not be regarded as a unidimensional concept. For example, feedback that signals progress in memorizing facts and formulas is different from feedback that signals the state of the students’ understanding. In addition . . . students need feedback about the degree to which they know when, where, and how to use the knowledge they are learning.”

OK - so it’s more complicated. And in that brief passage we find three more statements that are also so general that we need a lot more information before we’d really understand them. And how about this:

“Frequent feedback is critical: students need to monitor their learning and actively evaluate their strategies and their current levels of understanding.”

Oh, man. I think that means that some people do a much better job than others of giving themselves feedback. Which is related to one of the other conditions I listed: “They acquire and use strategies.” How People Learn brings up strategies lots of times in connection with other topics. For example, in discussing “metacognitive processes and self-regulatory capabilities,” it mentions - “such strategies as predicting outcomes, planning ahead, apportioning one’s time, etc.”

Now, I know from the research literature that there has been lots of disagreement about exactly how people learn strategies and whether they can be taught directly. Some people, as they mature, become more and more “strategic,” in the sense of knowing what’s going on around them and what to do about it. Some don’t seem to have a clue. Can we change that? That’s really the central question, isn’t it? Even if the conditions I’ve been discussing are accurate descriptions of the way people learn especially well on their own, how do we apply them in schools?

I began this talk by telling about my visit to a small high school that is attempting to establish a learning situation very much in accord with conditions I listed - and apparently succeeding in doing so. But it has done it by flouting many of the expectations that most schools are firmly committed to - expectations that most parents and school boards and legislatures are not about to change.

Saying this may not be very helpful, but I hope it makes the problem a little bit clearer: some aspects of what scientists tell us about learning comes from study of how people naturally learn - and it confirms what we know from our own experience about how people can learn all kinds of things when they really want to, stuff like all the rules about Pokemon characters that my grandchildren learned, and then promptly forgot about, a couple of years ago. Of course we’d love to see kids apply that kind of zest to learning school subject matter, but they often don’t. One answer is to give up insisting they learn it, hoping they will feel a need for it someday and will learn it then. Some forms of progressive education have taken that very course, as the New Country School does to a certain extent today. But most people, including most educators, think that would be going far too far. And because most people want kids to learn a lot of stuff whether they want to or not, we continue to be stuck with the challenge of figuring out how to apply what we know about the natural learning process to the very unnatural circumstances of the classroom.

So I want to mention one more source: an insightful paper published recently by E. D. Hirsch, a man who I often disagree with, but nevertheless a well-informed, capable, and thoughtful person. I probably won’t be able to do his article justice in this brief summary, but he makes some helpful points. The main question Hirsch is dealing with in the article is how best to develop students’ vocabularies. Some people say it should be done explicitly: teach directly the meaning of specific words one-by-one, a few new words every day. Some say implicitly is better; get students to read widely and have broad experience, and they’ll pick up the meaning of words they naturally encounter.

Hirsch begins by arguing that most educational research is not very useful, because circumstances are so different from school to school and classroom to classroom. That’s interesting in itself because of the current push by the Bush administration and the U. S. Congress to require educators to be more research-oriented. Hirsch recommends that rather than trying to make sense of traditional educational research, educators should determine to make “flexible application of deep general principles.”

“The variabilities of classrooms demand a flexible application of deep general principles, not a mechanical application of methods and maxims.”

The examples of “deep general principles” he cites are similar to some of the “conditions” I listed in my book, except that in each case, Hirsch puts a little different spin on them.
For example, meaningfulness, prior knowledge, and attention:

Meaningfulness: “The familiar distinction between ‘rote learning’ and ‘meaningful learning’ is well grounded - if understood liberally. . . since not all learning is inherently meaningful to a child.”

Prior knowledge as a prerequisite to effective learning: “It would be a profound mistake . . . to suppose that skillful thinking can be mastered independently of broad subject-matter knowledge.”

Attention determines learning: “One chief aim of education is to enable the mind to transcend the narrow constraints of working memory by concentrating an immense wealth of individual elements into a single symbol or name that can be attended to all at once.” (“a sufficient vocabulary”)

But then Hirsch brings up a very different, but also very important, general principle:

Rehearsal (repetition) is usually necessary for retention: “How long something will be remembered is typically determined by how often it has been attended to.” (“In the old argument between ‘natural development’ and ‘practice makes perfect,’ it is the latter that has the support of cognitive science.”)

Automaticity (through rehearsal) is essential to higher skills: “Rehearsal . . . serves to make certain operations non-conscious and automatic.”

You can get a good deal from rehearsal

If it just has the proper dispersal.

You would just be an ass

To do it en masse:

Your remembering would turn out much worsal. -- Ulrich Neisser (quoted by Hirsch)

“Should students be immersed right away in complex situations that simulate real life? . . . answer from cognitive scientists is complex: A teacher needs to engage in both implicit and explicit teaching.”

Application to vocabulary development:

“Implicit . . . is the superior method for vocabulary growth, since word acquisition occurs over a very long period. . . (but) explicity learning a few foundational words is much faster than implicitly learning them.” I wanted to tell you about Hirsch’s article not primarily because of his helpful advice on vocabulary development, but because he puts forth some general principles from cognitive development (several of which sound quite a bit like the conditions I listed in Powerful Learning). But he interprets them a little differently than I would, and then uses them to suggest a very sensible middle-of-the-road position on the perennial question of natural vs. artificial learning that is at the heart of our perpetual arguments over how best to teach reading, math, and, as my example of New Country School shows, most everything else.

OK, that’s useful. So here’s a possible postscript:

Powerful Learning is a fairly accurate description of the conditions under which people generally learn well, but -it’s not enough; there’s more to it. And - the continuing challenge to educators is how to make school learning more like natural learning.

In fact, that’s what John Bransford and his fellow scientists said they were trying to do in the report How People Learn . In the executive summary they said: “We focus especially on learning research that has implications for the design of formal instructional environments, primarily preschools, kindergarten through high schools (K-12), and colleges.”
So maybe we can use this accumulating knowledge to change schools.

I want to close by changing focus for just a moment in order to suggest some related observations. These ideas are very broad, like the generalizations in Powerful Learning, but I find them intriguing, and I hope you may too. They’re based on the proposition that if the generalizations I’ve been discussing are valid, they apply not just to children in school, but to ALL human learning. So:

1. First, they surely apply to my own learning on this very topic. In other words, my own hesitant, unsystematic, partial understanding of the processes of human learning becomes exhibit A of how any person learns about anything. It shows how fragmented, hazy, and incomplete is almost anybody’s knowledge of any obscure, demanding topic.

Interestingly enough, I’ve spent many hours over the last few weeks reviewing materials I’ve read over the years, searching for key points and trying to relate them to other points I found I the literature. Ah hah! What I was learning was personally meaningful; I felt a strong need to learn it because I was going to have to give this speech! Organizing what I wanted to say was indeed a challenge - but I accepted the challenge. And I went about the task in my own way, feeling pretty much in control of how I was doing it.

One thing I really missed was an opportunity to talk things over with colleagues, which would have helped me find out what mistakes I might have been making. That’s why learning is more effective when there’s a degree of social interaction. But I think this may show that I myself was a pretty good illustration of what I was making an effort to understand, partly because, as John Bransford wrote, I wanted to produce a product useful to others

. 2. So that takes care of me, but what about you? If these generalizations are indeed scientifically derived accurate descriptions of how human learning takes place, they must apply to each of you. That means that to the extent I hoped that you would learn from this talk, I needed to think about how well the 10 conditions were met. So how well did I achieve helping you learn? Well, let’s move on.

3. Expanding the circle, these conditions necessarily apply to all professional educators, including the hundreds of thousands of teachers and principals currently in our schools and the young people who are preparing to become teachers. I don’t mean here what these people do when they are teaching others, but how they themselves learn. And if we want them to understand the conditions under which their students will learn best, we need to do it by creating those same conditions for their learning. (This really gets interesting, doesn’t it?)

4. Taking this one big final step, I’ll contend that these same generalizations about learning apply to parents, business people, politicians - all the people we would like to have understand the learning process so that they will support the kinds of schools we envision. With that in mind, I want you to hear an interesting story in which a businessman tells about something he learned. As you listen, please think about how this story matches - and maybe how it doesn’t - the conditions for learning well:

March 6, 2002 The Blueberry Story By Jamie Robert Vollmer Education Week

'If I ran my business the way you people operate your schools, I wouldn't be in business very long!" I stood before an auditorium filled with outraged teachers who were becoming angrier by the minute. My speech had entirely consumed their precious 90 minutes of in- service training. Their initial icy glares had turned to restless agitation. You could cut the hostility with a knife. I represented a group of business people dedicated to improving public schools. I was an executive at an ice cream company that became famous in the middle-1980s when People Magazine chose its blueberry flavor as the "Best Ice Cream in America."I was convinced of two things. First, public schools needed to change; they were archaic selecting and sorting mechanisms designed for the Industrial Age and out of step with the needs of our emerging "knowledge society." Second, educators were a major part of the problem: They resisted change, hunkered down in their feathered nests, protected by tenure and shielded by a bureaucratic monopoly. They needed to look to business. We knew how to produce quality. Zero defects! Total Quality Management! Continuous improvement! In retrospect, the speech was perfectly balanced—equal parts ignorance and arrogance.As soon as I finished, a woman's hand shot up. She appeared polite, pleasant. She was, in fact, a razor-edged, veteran high school English teacher who had been waiting to unload.She began quietly, "We are told, sir, that you manage a company that makes good ice cream."I smugly replied, "Best ice cream in America, ma'am.""How nice," she said. "Is it rich and smooth?""Sixteen percent butterfat," I crowed."Premium ingredients?" she inquired."Super-premium! Nothing but triple-A." I was on a roll. I never saw the next line coming."Mr. Vollmer," she said, leaning forward with a wicked eyebrow raised to the sky, "when you are standing on your receiving dock and you see an inferior shipment of blueberries arrive, what do you do?"In the silence of that room, I could hear the trap snap. I was dead meat, but I wasn't going to lie."I send them back.""That's right!" she barked, "and we can never send back our blueberries. We take them big, small, rich, poor, gifted, exceptional, abused, frightened, confident, homeless, rude, and brilliant. We take them with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, junior rheumatoid arthritis, and English as their second language. We take them all. Every one. And that, Mr. Vollmer, is why it's not a business. It's school."In an explosion, all 290 teachers, principals, bus drivers, aides, custodians, and secretaries jumped to their feet and yelled, "Yeah! Blueberries! Blueberries!" And so began my long transformation.Since then, I have visited hundreds of schools. I have learned that a school is not a business. Schools are unable to control the quality of their raw material, they are dependent upon the vagaries of politics for a reliable revenue stream, and they are constantly mauled by a howling horde of disparate, competing customer groups that would send the best CEO screaming into the night.None of this negates the need for change. We must change what, when, and how we teach to give all children maximum opportunity to thrive in a postindustrial society. But educators cannot do this alone; these changes can occur only with the understanding, trust, permission, and active support of the surrounding community. For the most important thing I have learned is that schools reflect the attitudes, beliefs, and health of the communities they serve, and therefore, to improve public education means more than changing our schools, it means changing America.

Jamie Robert Vollmer, a former business executive and attorney, is now a keynote presenter and consultant who works to increase community support for public schools. He lives in Fairfield, Iowa, and can be reached by e-mail at jamie@jamievollmer.com .

I’d certainly like to have more people have the experience Jamie Vollmer says he had, and I know you’d like to see more people respond the way he did. So I’ll leave you with a question: Can the new science of learning help our whole society understand and support more powerful learning? It’s a question I’m not prepared to answer this morning, although I hope so. And maybe E. D. Hirsch has given us a clue for how to think about it. As you’ll recall, he said that because circumstances differ, we need “flexible application of deep general principles” - like the ones I’ve been talking about and the ones he listed in his article. Of course we’ll probably continue to disagree - pretty strongly sometimes - about what those principles actually mean for practice - but that’s OK; that’s what democracy is all about.