“What if high school could morph into a mix of courses that prepare one for life after high school but be more customized to a student’s passions, married to hands-on experiences in their community, and delivered in an online or in-person format that works best for them?”

That’s the spot-on question posed by the head of a Delaware-based foundation in a recent article that caught my attention. The author, Paul Herdman of the Rodel Foundation, went on to ask several more equally probing questions:

“What if students got credit for doing projects with real-life implications? What if every student had a meaningful work-based learning experience before they left high school so they had a better handle on what they do and don’t like? What if every student took and passed at least one online course so that they could be prepared for the inevitable reskilling they will need as the global economy continues to evolve?”

Some of us, Herdman included, have been asking these questions for years. Now, as one of few positive offshoots from the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of singers in our choir is growing exponentially.

Why? Because the major disruption to business-as-usual schooling has given everyone an opportunity to hit pause and study our systems as if they were frozen in amber. And what people are seeing isn’t pretty.

As Herdman points out in his piece: “Even before the pandemic, we knew that the typical high school experience was not quite aligning with the fast-moving world that our young people now inhabit. A Gallup Poll used since 2016 shows that student disengagement grew from 26 percent at 5th grade to 60 percent for kids in high school.”

Disaggregate the data to examine the experiences of students of color and the numbers look far worse. 

There’s no better time than right now to move beyond thinking and into action. Although remote learning isn’t working well for many kids, school districts are learning some hard lessons, through trial and error, about how to improve online education. Let’s take the best practices that emerge and scale them.

Simultaneously, let’s seize the moment and make sure that a typical day in a typical high school no longer consists of six or seven hours trapped in the often suffocating confines of a classroom. Let’s take down the walls that define and constrain schools and open students to experiences the world has to offer.

I’ll leave the last word to Herdman:

“While it may feel overwhelming to think about now, this moment might be our collective moment as a state and a nation, to build on what’s working and to redefine the learning experience of our kids as they transition from adolescence to adulthood in a world that needs them more than ever.”