Anna Lukens Arch 528 11 December 2018 Rethinking K-12 Public Schools Many have argued that education has become the basis for the success of future generations. There is much to question though when across America, education is not equal. This fact has been fought for over a century now and still, adjacent communities have different qualities of education to one another. The goal of this project is an overall understanding of the reasoning as to why these inequalities still exist as well as embracing those inequalities to create a smoother functioning system. This project will look into creating a community wide system to further enhance the K-12 public school learning environment to adapt to the needs of specific students regardless of the economic status of their neighborhood or family. The Problem: It is arrogant to assume any type of similarity between neighboring school districts. Looking to Chicago as an example, there is no way to pretend the differences are not relative to race and societal class and unfortunately, Chicago is not the only location with these problems. In Illinois, double the amount of revenue for public schools comes from local governments than from the state government. (NCES.) This results in the quality of the schools being reflective of the economic status of the local region. Differing schools are not exclusively a poor exercise between communities however, having a variety of quality in education dependent on location is not excusable. Districts will never receive the same finance for their educational departments and
should they, it is unlikely that the finance would be distributed within that district as it would be across all other districts. The urban planning in America right now has school districts that wind through neighborhoods in complicated geometries. People fight to get their district to stretch over them to allow a for a different type of educational environment. These districts lock neighborhoods into specific school systems if students chose to use the public school. Living within these districts, students are generally not allowed to study at any public school, K-12, outside of their own district. This restricts students to the learning style and environment that they grow up in without experiencing a type of diversity that they might receive from neighboring districts. The Goal: One of the main goals of this project is to break out of the trapment of being stuck in a single district. This will hopefully allow for a more diverse experience socially as well as educationally. What are often considered to be rougher districts, also have a reputation of being districts that do not offer as high a standard of education and are regularly located adjacent to a higher class district. “Taken together, testing and tracking conspire to maintain, within the walls of supposedly desegregated schools, the dual educational system that characterized segregation. As a result of inferior educational preparation, minority children enter desegregation with academic achievement levels lagging behind those of their new schoolmates.� (Green, 78.) The districts receiving less funding from their state government can result in a standardized working environment that does not provide the opportune atmosphere for learning. This project instead, offers a much wider spread of districts as a greater whole rather than individual units for students to take advantage of while focusing in on the specific design qualities and necessities for a
successful education. “NCLB (No Child Left Behind) definitively breaks this pattern by presuming that if children are not succeeding in school, responsibility rests with the school - and not the children. But in so doing, it destroys the structure and organization of a publicly funded and ostensibly publicly controlled system of education begun more than a century ago.” (Weiner, 152.) Learning environments individually have remained roughly the same shape and size for the past hundred years. Though steps have been made to create unique learning spaces, the simplicity of a four walled room with desks and a wall of windows remains constant. A variety of studies have been done comparing the standard classroom to prisons. “We are limiting ourselves by continuing to use the "prison" model and by falling back on the old 20th-century formula of teachers passing on rigid and uninspiring knowledge to students with no concern for their different interests or abilities… In the US, many of the same people who designed prisons also designed schools. What comes to mind when you see a long hall of closed doors, that you can't be in without permission, and a bell that tells you when to come in, when to leave, when class starts, when it ends? What does that look like to you?” (Valencia.) Classrooms have remained the same consistent shape and aesthetic for hundreds of years while technology grows around and beyond it. Students learn in vastly different ways than they used to and in vastly different ways from each other and their surrounding learning environment should also reflect that change.
The Proposal: The call for a new development and style for a alternative type of learning environment cannot be entirely adapted by a singular school. The project suggestion is to open the district boundaries allowing students to take advantage of the different physical environments beyond their own district. Just this simple act of abandoning the district boundaries will instantly result in a higher diversity amongst a schools student population as the school will instead be comprised of the nearest students, not the most similar students based on social and economic class of their family or neighborhood. Because a distribution of wealth will not be equal amongst neighboring districts, the financial amount will dictate the specifics each individual school will allow. Instead of separate districts, communities will be responsible for providing a school that reflects their economic class. Communities with a higher economic class or receive a higher financial allowance from the local government would provide a public school that provides the highest quality of a learning environment for a specific subject. Communities of a lower economic class or perhaps do not receive as much funding will provide the same school, but one that is tailored to a different subject. Each community will have one school and the surrounding schools will all vary in specific subjects. This project proposes an entirely new schooling system because it spans the whole of an urban area. These new schools will be located based on areas of high population density. Each individual school will be responsible for one, specific subject. Having that responsibility, that school is required to provide the best learning environment that best meets the needs of the students for that subject. The five subjects that will be represented in the schools are athletics,
mathematics, science, language, and social studies. The subject that the school is mandated to host will depend on the economic status of the community. The subjects that the specific schools host will vary between communities. As communities are spread out now, often times a higher class community will be directly adjacent to a far lower class community. The higher class communities will be the hosts of the subjects that demand a larger amount of space to create the opportune learning environment for that subject. Subjects that could potentially demand a higher amount of learning space would be athletics, demanding a significantly greater space to teach physical education than mathematics would, as well as science that often use multiple rooms worth of laboratory space. This will allow for the majority of resources to be focused on maintaining the highest quality of education for a specific subject. This then lends itself to the opening of a vast number of configurations. “This awareness of the physical comfort of learners brings us to the issue of ergonomic furniture. Ergonomic seating has been well researched in the workplace and there have been some studies in schools.� (Woolner, 37.) Understanding the opportune learning environment for a student will also suggest creating a plethora of environments for each type of student. Communities are each required to provide a school to the highest quality that their financial status will allow. Due to the close proximity in a variety of different social classes, the spacing of different subjects will not be a problem. The variety of social classes in communities will allow for all of the different subjects to be represented within close proximity. The opportunity of these schools allows for more than one school of a particular subject to be within striking distance of a particular student. If a particular radius was drawn around the home of each student, each subject school will fit within that radius potentially with some room for extra
schools. The furthest stretch of a radius from one student to a math school will also be the furthest stretch for another student from another direction. This creates a web of connections between students that is far greater than that of the boundaries of a solitary district. Though the goal is to create a school that can offer the best form of education and learning environment it can for a particular subject, each school would still offer the other four subjects at a standardized level. This allows students to tailor their education to their own strengths and weaknesses. The main subject the school supports will be the dominant space and focus of the school but the other subjects will be represented. While a math building will offer a wider range and higher placement in the subject, the other subjects will operate at a lower, more standardized rate to accompany a students learning. This is not to say that the language department at a science focused school is offering an inferior type of education. Instead, that language department at the science focused school offers the developmental level of language that students could opt to work on while studying science. Each school will also be equipped with particular electives as well offering students activities for after school. Because the opportune environment for each subject reflects on the subject itself, there will be a wide variety of design opportunities to create these spaces. Athletics, by far, will take up the greatest amount of physical space resulting in these going in the higher class communities. Science will be the second largest in physical space to athletics. Different laboratories and types of equipment are utilized in the sciences taught in K-12 schools resulting in a large amount of a wide variety of spaces. Languages, math and the social sciences would be the smaller, mandatory spaces, but still create design opportunities for the spaces. So much reading happens within the language subjects, the physical design of the space can offer a wider variety of seating or
lounging areas for students to physically do what they need to to create the best learning environment for themselves. How this system will work will depend on the student. This system gives the responsibility of education to the student. The goal of this is to create a higher interest in learning by the student as he/she would get to choose the classes that best fit any particular need for each subject. Each day, the student can choose which school to attend to fit the education level that he/she thrives at. The specific subject of the school will have a focus on providing the highest level of learning experience that can be obtained for that subject. That focused subject will have a variety of working and learning spaces within the building to adapt to the differing learning needs amongst the student population. Those specific learning spaces will afford manipulation by the students in order to optimize their own learning. “Learning can take place anywhere. Educators are aware that learners are not empty vessels, but come to school with understandings derived from their wider lives. Unexpected informal learning can take place in all sorts of apparently unlikely situations. So does the detail of the physical surroundings provided by schools in fact matter? This simplistic phrasing hides the sense that most people have, and which I think can be rationally justified, that the physical environment does make a difference.� (Woolner, 1.) The students are held responsible for their own education. Each day, every student will select where he/she wants to study for the following day through an app or an online portal. Students can pick for themselves, what subject they want to learn on that particular day which will reflect on the school they choose to attend. Throughout the semester, each student will be
held accountable for fulfilling a certain number of credits for each of the five subjects, but where they choose to fulfill their credits is up to them. This will result in a certain level of comfort and individuality for the students as they can expand on the subjects they are comfortable with and continue working on the subjects they are not as strong in with students at the same level of understanding. One potential problem with this system could be reflected in the organization of it. The app that the students would use to select their desired school for the day will track the credits that they have already obtained and those that still need to be fulfilled. This app will also pinpoint within the communities which student is going where the next day creating a map for that day of the most efficient bus route. That GPS map can then be followed by the bus drivers across neighborhoods to bring certain neighborhoods of students to a number of different schools. Another skepticism of organization would be the changing curriculum of the subjects. How this would work would be, each week would demand a particular number of credits of each subject. At the end of the week, the credits must be met as well as particular goals for each subject. The curriculum would be the same across the whole web of schools for the basic level subjects with higher goals set for the subject the student chooses to focus on. After multiple weeks of use, common paths will occur as students start to follow more defined schedules. These paths can be studied to see what common factors there are between neighborhoods of students and the schools they choose to study at. This web of schools opens up a much larger student body and the different communities offer a wide diversity of students. A social characteristic that could be largely manipulated is friend groups. Students will not be seeing the same class every day resulting in an ever changing
student body. There will be a larger population of friends to choose from but those friends will be seen less often. It is possible for students to alter their own schedules to meet those of their friends, but that will result in a group of students who are comfortable in their academic level together. This can in turn result in a type of stigmergy as the actions of one student will directly affect those of another student. As a Complex Adaptive System: This system works as a complex adaptive system. This becomes a bottom-up organized system as the creation of it and the ability for it to stay alive comes from the students using the system everyday to plan out their academic schedules. The agents are the schools and the students that are the elements within the urban setting. The degrees of freedom are reliant on the students. The various degrees of freedom stem from the multiple schools that each student can choose from as well as the multitude of type of learning environments that each of the schools offers for each subject. What adjoins these agents are the students working collectively to make this one, overall functioning system. With the students choosing a variety of different schools and obtaining the required credits, the whole process flourishes to create a working system if all the parts are equally involved and held responsible for doing so. The adaptation of the system comes from students choosing a different school each day to enhance their education. This can also be seen as a force of energy or the demand that drives the system. Adaptation is encouraged through the variety of credits the students must obtain each week. If at a science focused school, a student can receive a majority of science credits for the day while receiving added credits for other subjects that the school offers but does not focus on.
As students accel in their subjects, an incentive is to move on to a school with the highest facilities for that subject. Though this system would take quite a bit of time to understand and develop, communities of an urban fabric would be able to install this system to further their equality in education and diversity amongst their students. This project allows for each community to provide one piece of a whole no matter their economic status. Providing different schools with key subjects to focus on will help students focus in on their strengths while continuously building on the other subjects. By adapting the school as a whole as well as the individual learning environments, this project will further enhance the K-12 public school education.
Citations Green, Robert L. Metropolitan Desegregation. 1985. Print NCES, National Center for Educational Statistics. U.S. Department of Education. “Revenues and Expenditures for Public Elementary and Secondary School District.” 01 January 2015. https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2014/2014303.pdf Web. Valencia, Nicolas. Arch Daily. “The Same People Who Design Prisons Also Design Schools.” 18 November 2018. https://www.archdaily.com/905379/the-same-people-who-designed-prisons-also-designe d-schools?fbclid=IwAR1J-SRdRg2JZUhq-CLB3zejh3oURTlGgCpUfCTQ7bN9TC9iLN fGRZoWGL0 Web. Weiner, Lois. The Future of Our Schools. “Teachers Union and Social Justice.” 2012. Print. Woolner, Pamela. The Design of Learning Spaces. “Future Schools.” 2010. Print.