Chapter 1 – See How Different Classrooms Could Be
Our premise is, over the last half century or more, the education process at work in our nation’s classrooms has grown dysfunctional and impedes rather than supports the work of teachers and students. The evidence of the inefficacy of the existing education process is, we believe, overwhelming and compelling. The purpose of this book is to introduce a new education model designed to transform education in the U.S. in a way that will allow it to work for both our teachers and all children, not just a fortunate few.
The title The Hawkins Model© has been selected because it allows me to retain the rights of authorship. This model will be made available, for free, to any publicly funded or faith-based school or school district willing to put the model to the test in one of its struggling elementary schools, of which there are many. The only revenue I hope to generate will be royalties from this book, after publication, with a great deal of help from each of you.
The book has been written in the first person as it is a personal request from me to you to join me in bringing this vision to life. I ask readers to examine the model, not in search of reasons why it might not work, rather to imagine what it would be like to teach and learn in such an innovative learning environment.
Please note that the first version of The Hawkins Model© was introduced in 2013 in my first book on education.[1] The book was not widely read. Since then, my model has been promoted on Twitter and although I have gained followers, few educators can envision any other way to do what they do. Teachers, who deal most directly with the challenges in American schools, are so immersed in their classrooms they feel the futility of what they are being asked to do but cannot imagine how they could be expected to do more. This work will introduce a complete presentation of the model that will explain how it will produce the outcomes we seek, with as few distractions as possible.
At the outset, I want to make my view of teachers clear. Our nation’s professional teachers are not the reason for the problems in education in the U.S. or why so many of our children struggle to achieve academic success. Teachers are unsung American heroes who deserve our support and admiration for the crucial work they do for our children.
Our teachers are as much victims of our flawed education process as are their students. Let it be known that teachers are the glue that holds a flawed education process together. All the good things that have happened to our students throughout the past several decades are because of the dedicated effort of these professional educators. Teachers can only do what the education process allows them to do, however.
Public education is under attack by the “school choice” movement and until public-school educators take a step back and examine what is happening in our schools, the flow of resources being siphoned out of the coffers of community public schools will continue. While there is nothing inherently wrong with the concept of charter schools they are not performing as well as the community public schools they were established to replace, which we will illustrate later. This should come as no surprise as many if not most charters rely on the same flawed education process this book has been written to replace.
Often, charters rely on less qualified teachers to the same challenging but essential jobs we ask of professionally trained teachers. With respect to the criticisms of unions it is unreasonable to ask any human being to give up their voice and this is what unions do. The problem is not unions, however, rather it is that the relationships between unions and management have become almost universally adversarial. I have personally observed environment where a union and the management of their company worked together for the benefit of the company and its people, as partners. One side taking advantage of the other, in any endeavor, will lead to neither equity nor excellence.
The more crucial with “school choice” is the logistical improbability their promoters will ever be able to create enough charter schools to meet the needs of fifty to sixty million American school children. The operative question is, are we committed to educating only a portion of our nation’s children or do we have an obligation to all, now and into the future?
The longer we allow resources to be drained from community public schools, however, the more difficult it will be for those schools to serve the needs of our nation’s most valuable yet vulnerable assets. Somehow public education must recapture the faith of the American people that it truly is “the pathway to the American Dream”—sadly, a dream that no longer feels real in the hearts and minds of far too many Americans. It is a simple fact that community public schools are the only schools to which all of our nation’s children can be assured access.
We cannot recapture the allegiance of the American people by relying on a structure and process that consistently fails to produce the outcomes our nation requires. What I recommend is that we follow the lead of business and industry, not by letting business leaders run our schools, but rather by introducing shiny new products of significantly greater value to their customers and then market them aggressively. This is how many new products and services capture the imagination of the marketplace—this is how new things go viral.
The Hawkins Model© is, I submit, that shiny new product. I urge educators from all levels and venues to examine our model and then come together to rally the American people around a brand-new idea that will transform education in America.
Ironically, in this scenario, the school choice movement will have fulfilled its purpose. It will have helped push public education to elevate its game by providing the highest possible quality of education to American children and, also, to do so equitably. This will give our nation’s parents a true “school choice.”
Compare of our system of community public schools to a once popular restaurant that is steadily losing market share to a new chain of eateries. Somehow, they must repackage and remarket their menus and atmosphere as the best place to dine. Education leaders and policymakers must pursue the same objective in our community public schools.
The First Step in the Presentation of our New Model
Our biggest challenge is to entice educators, whatever their venue, to be willing to believe a transformation of education is possible. Our professional teachers, administrators, and education policymakers have found it difficult to step outside the context of the traditional education process and their conceptual classrooms, to examine my education model as an integral whole. Many cannot envision how the changes I am recommending can possibly work in their classrooms. “It sounds too good to be true,” many of them say and thus find it easy to dismiss. The most common response from teachers is “I cannot find time to do everything my students need of me, today. How can there possibly be time to do everything your model expects of us?”
I encourage these good people to give me the opportunity to show what we must change to get the outcomes we seek. We remind the reader, innovative solutions, often, can only be found outside the boundaries of conventional wisdom.
Many of you may be familiar with a creative thinking exercise that I refer to as “The Nine Dots.” It is an exercise that has been around for many years and that I used in the many positive leadership seminars I conducted throughout my career. In Appendix I – A Lesson in Exponential Thinking we will illustrate how a solution to the problem represented by the nine dots, and many other challenges such as transforming public education, cannot be found or even envisioned until we step outside the illusory square/box formed by the nine dots.
Our nation’s teachers and administrators are encouraged to make a paradigm leap—also a leap of faith—to open their hearts and minds to a new idea, just as they encourage their students to do. Think about how many aspects of life in America have undergone a transformation in the last few decades. Why would we choose to think a transformation of education is impossible?
We will provide a glimpse of what The Hawkins Model© will look like when implemented in our classrooms but, first, we need to illustrate what needs to be fixed. The best way to accomplish this is to examine what teachers see in their classrooms, daily, as this is the most powerful evidence of the inefficacy of the education process with which teachers and their students must deal.
As you examine this exhibit please do so within the context of the first two of the many assertions and assumptions on which this book is predicated. The first is,
Whenever a process continues to produce unacceptable outcomes no matter how hard people work or how qualified they are, the problem rests with the process itself, and it must be reimagined and reinvented.
The second, is,
It is only when we stop blaming others and choose to accept responsibility for our problems that we begin to acquire the power to solve them.
Other assertions and assumptions that I believe provide the philosophical and logical foundation for this work will be highlighted as they appear above and will be listed in Appendix II – Assertions and Assumptions. These are what I think of as bridges to understanding.
What do Teachers See in their Classrooms, daily?
In addition to being the most compelling evidence of the inefficacy of the American education process, what teachers see in their classrooms provides a blueprint for transformation.
No one can truly understand what goes on in our nation’s classrooms unless they have done their time—having spent time in one. Those who have not spent time in the classroom do not see the dedication and commitment of teachers, nor do they see the frustration these professionals feel when they are swimming against the currents of 21st Century life.
Once we examine this exhibit, we will offer a glimpse of what The Hawkins Model© will look like when implemented in our classrooms.
Teachers know the education process is dysfunctional every time they see the cavernous disparity in the levels of academic preparedness and emotional development of students as they arrive for their first day of kindergarten.
Teachers know the process is inadequate when there is no meaningful strategy to acclimatize these youngsters to what, for many, can be a frightening new world at one of the most vulnerable periods in their young lives. Teachers know they have little opportunity to give students the time and attention these children need, and that developing nurturing relationships with their students, while at or near the top of their priority list, is one of too many priorities with too many students with more needs with which any one teacher can be expected to deal.
When the classroom is filled with anywhere from 25 to 35 students on the first day of school, the expectation is that all students will be instructed according to lesson plans that have been developed pursuant to the academic standards of their state and that have been approved by their principals and superintendents. Teachers know the process is flawed when there is no blueprint or tool in place to assess where each child is best prepared to begin their lifelong learning adventure. The education process, today, is akin to herding a diverse population of students through the entrance of an obstacle course for which the majority of our children are unprepared. Students are neither livestock nor a commodity.
What does each child know and what can they do? Some may be reading, others may or may not know their letters and numbers. Many others may not have learned their colors and may be behind in the development of an array of physical, intellectual, and emotional skills healthy children must acquire. Where should we start our work with them to ensure they are moving forward at the cusp of their learning threshold?
We have been teaching children the same way for so long, teachers have had to learn how to set aside the nagging feeling that marching students, as a class, from one lesson to the next, according to the schedules embedded in academic standards, is too fast for many students and too slow for others. Not being able to keep up or being forced to slow down for their classmates discourages some students and frustrates most.
The professional men and women given the responsibility for a classroom know the education process is ineffectual when there is neither an expectation, strategy, nor process in place to tailor an academic plan to meet the unique needs of their students. Without such a plan how can we guide them from the point at which we find them to where they need to go?
Academic standards provide clear expectations of what it is believed students should be able to accomplish by the end of this first year of school and each year, thereafter, as if it is a realistic expectation for all students.
Policy makers need to understand that teaching kids, in at least one respect, is akin to a golf shot. The farther down the fairway the ball must travel the more exaggerated are the consequences of flaws in the misalignment of the golfer’s body, the speed and arc of the swing, the angle of the face of the clubhead, and the fraction of the micrometers away from the sweet spot on the club face where it struck the ball.
What seem like minute variations in how we apply a teacher’s craft can make an enormous difference as teachers strive to prepare the minds, character, and bodies of our students to move down the fairways of this most crucial thirteen years of a youngster’s life. We leave far too much to chance when we fill classrooms to overflowing, beyond the point where what even our best teachers can do will be enough.
The pressure to keep students gathered along the path set out by academic standards is relentless. After every lesson, teachers know the process is flawed when it is time to move their class along to the next lesson, in any of the subject areas they must cover, fully aware that a portion of their students do not yet comprehend. They know many children in their classroom have not acquired the pre-requisite knowledge, skills, self-discipline, and other character traits they will need to be successful on subsequent material over the 13 years to come.
When there are worksheets to exchange and grade in class, or graded tests and quizzes to return to students, teachers know understanding one’s mistakes is one of the most important keys to learning but, after every lesson and test there are always more mistakes by more students than teachers have time to address.
Our teachers know the process is not structured to focus on success when the purpose of tests and other assignments is more focused on determining the appropriate letter grade to signify how a student’s scores rank among classmates, than it is about learning. Whether they think about it consciously or just know intuitively, it is apparent to many that the education process is structured like a competition in which some students succeed, and others do not. The grades recorded provide incontrovertible evidence that the education process is focused, not on the best each child can do but rather on the best kids can do in the allotted time when measured against the achievement of others.
Teachers know that rather than determining a grade, the appropriate use of quizzes and tests should be to identify what progress the students have made, whether they require more time and attention to gain comprehension of lessons, and on what subject matter to focus. These assessments are the quality systems of education and are designed to tell us whether what we do works; whether kids are prepared to move forward. That we do not use them for this purpose is remarkable and that we take no appropriate corrective action, is mystifying. Why do we care what kids have been unable to learn if we have no intention to remediate?
Teachers know the process is dysfunctional when they reach the midpoint of the second semester and must divert their attention to prepare students for state competency examinations. They know that, for students who have been unable to demonstrate subject matter mastery on a chapter test give immediately after a lesson, no amount of cramming will assure success on state exams given in the spring of their second semester.
Teachers know, at the end of the school year, there are children with whom the teacher has been unable to forge the nurturing relationships those students need. Teachers know that even what relationships they have been able to develop will soon be severed at the end of the year based on decades of tradition of marching to arbitrary cadences. This step represents one instance in a succession of lost opportunities for students.
Teachers are very much aware the process will recommence in the fall when their students from the previous year meet a new teacher whom they, often, will be meeting for the first time. They know this because they are anticipating the same challenge with respect to their own incoming students. It is just one more example where the needs of students are unmet. Only a few of these youngsters will be fortunate to forge the special relationships academic success and emotional growth requires. The needs of these kids are sacrificed by the education process to serve the interests of operational convenience and efficiency, as well as compliance and conformance.
What teachers may not realize is the malaise they feel, at various times in a school year, is the absence of any sense of accomplishment and affirmation for their own efforts. Teachers need to experience success every bit as much as their students and celebrating success provides validation for students and teachers alike. How could any of us deal, daily, with the frustration of not being given the time and resources necessary to complete much of the important work we are given and, therefore, are unable to enjoy the satisfaction that comes from a job well done?
Teachers know the system is failing, each new school year, when they must begin anew, striving to develop relationships with too many new students, many of whom are poorly prepared for the work that awaits them and when this is repeated, annually. This defect is most notable when the previous year’s fifth graders arrive in middle school and the previous year’s eighth grade students move on to high school. Far too many students are less prepared for each succeeding transition than they were for the preceding one.
For teachers, awareness of the lack of readiness of their students is highlighted late in the second semester of any given school year, when an administrator asks them whether a student is ready to be passed on to the next grade level. Teachers know the process is flawed when, in the second semester of a student’s senior year, they are asked to find a way to help students, who have made a minimal effort over the course of the previous four years, earn credits so they can graduate with their classmates.
In these situations, which happen far more often than outsiders can imagine, our schools are scrambling to give themselves justification for graduating students, rather than striving to assure their students qualify for graduation and are well-prepared for life after high school. This is one reason graduation rates are the least meaningful measure of success for schools, teachers, and students.
Finally, teachers try not to think about the challenges these young men and women will face when they take possession of what, for many, are meaningless documents when they walk across the stage at graduation.
If only teachers, principals, and, most of all, superintendents, were given an opportunity to see how poorly their graduates will do when they seek admission to and struggle to perform in their college or vocational classrooms; when they report for their first day of work poorly prepared to do the job, assuming they were fortunate to find one for which they were qualified; and, when they struggle to pass the ASVAB to qualify for enlistment in the military—a reality I witnessed weekly during my fourteen years as an ASVAB test administrator. These are things employers and recruiters see, routinely and about which education leaders and policy makers appear to be oblivious.
If educators were to ask, what employers would say, irrespective of venue, is it is not just academic knowledge that is lacking. Many students are equally deficient in their self-discipline; willingness to make an acceptable effort to do a job well; demonstrate a personal commitment to the mission, vision, and values of their organization; and, most of all, accept responsibility for meeting or exceeding the needs of their customer. Many of these new employees have spent a good deal of the previous thirteen years learning how to do just enough to get by.
Why? Because the education process does not support the efforts of teachers as they strive to support the needs of our nation’s diverse population of children.
These are the realities that drive advocates of “school choice.” These are the experiences that lead critics to blame our schools, our teachers, and their unions. These unfair criticisms will continue until the defenders of public education go on the offensive and direct attention to the flaws in the education process that are at the root of the struggles of both students and their teachers. Educators must recognize that our students are doing the same thing we would do if rarely, if ever, we were given the time we require to learn what we need to know to be successful.
The frustration teachers feel, and the burnout that threatens to drive them out of the profession, are consequences of these disillusioning experiences teachers are forced to endure. As discouraged as they may be, teachers who leave their profession do so, knowing in their hearts, they did the best the education process allowed them to do for students who were permitted to learn too many lessons badly and too few well.
Non-teachers reading these words are often thinking, “why don’t teachers say something to someone?” “Why don’t they pound on their desks?”
The answer is that so many of them do, especially in their first few years of teaching. Teachers express their frustrations over the inefficacy of the existing education process every time they meet with their administrators to talk about students whose needs are not being met, or attend union or association meetings, or even when sitting across from a colleague in the faculty break room. How many years does it take before these dedicated professionals give in to the futility of complaining, and relent to the inevitable? Is it one, five, ten, or twenty years?
What our teachers and principals discover, at a point in the early portions of their careers, is the intransigence of the American education process and of its leaders and policy makers. Later we will offer evidence to affirm these assertions from multiple perspectives. Taken as a whole, the evidence of the inefficacy of the education process could not be more compelling.
We will begin with a preview of how The Hawkins Model© is designed to address the issues we have identified and follow that up by sharing what I observed in one middle school classroom in a diverse public school district. This was an opportunity to try a different approach and that led to the reimagination of the education process.
What Will This New Model Look Like and How Will it Work?
The first difference teachers and other educators will see upon examination of The Hawkins Model© is every aspect of our model is constructed around my belief in the primacy of relationships. I believe:
“the value of everything in life is a function of the quality of our relationships with the people in our lives.”
When it comes to five-year old children arriving for their first day of kindergarten there is nothing more essential to their academic and emotional growth and development than close, nurturing, and sustained relationships with their teachers. These children do not just need such relationships with teachers, they hunger for them. They are also quick to give up on them if their teacher(s) are unable to give them the time they need. As I will say often throughout this book, the heart is the portal to a child’s mind.
The quality and depth of the relationships we must provide for students functions as a key to unlock their minds. At this initial stage of the learning process, when students have learned to trust their teachers, they will be willing to follow wherever their teachers strive to take them. Initially, there is little time for anything else and all other priorities must be secondary to cultivating relationships. Once captured relationships function much like inertia and less effort is needed to sustain them. Our students are sufficiently intelligent to understand there are other students demanding the attention of the teacher, but just like learning, some students need more attention than others. When the relationships are secure, a little affirmation is enough to sustain them even when administered in small doses. Even a wink and a smile from across the room may be all that is necessary.
We are striving for the kind of relationships in which teachers become one of people a student will least want to disappoint. Depending on the quality of the child’s relationship with their parents, their teachers may be the people they will least want to disappoint. Attaining this stature, also, is essential to managing peer relationships.
This is equally true for their classmates in first through fifth grades. Healthy, affirming relationships with parents and classmates are also essential but, in the classroom, as we will discuss later, such relationships will flow through our students’ relationships with their teachers.
Restructure and Reorganize Classrooms, Teachers, and Students to Focus on Relationships
We begin by discontinuing the practice, beginning in kindergarten, of placing one teacher in a single classroom with somewhere between 25 to 35 students for a single school year—usually closer to 35. Additionally, under The Hawkins Model© education leaders and policymakers will be asked to abandon the arbitrary practice of severing relationships between teachers and students at the end of every school year—relationships the majority of which are already insufficient. This tradition not only fails to achieve our purpose, but it also sabotages that purpose.
Because these relationships must be enduring, if they are to meet the emotional needs of our children—our nation’s most precious assets—in my model teachers and students will remain together, as a class, from kindergarten until they are ready to move on to what we now refer to as sixth grade.
Decisionmakers will be asked to adopt a new strategy of assigning a team of three teachers to a single classroom with a total of no more than 45 students. Today, there are too few teachers assigned to too many students with more needs to which a single teacher can attend in the time available to them.
Many teachers will be intimidated by the idea of teams but, as we elaborate on their utility and explain their long pattern of success, and of the many advantages teams offer, teachers will learn to value being part of a team.
In a team the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Schools will be given the discretion to modify this plan, after the third year, if the academic challenges these students will face in years four, five, and six (what we now refer to as grades three through five) would be better served with intentional adjustments to teaching teams. Decisionmakers will be encouraged, however, to keep at least one of the original team members with their students to ensure some level of continuity.
The bottom line, if the key to learning is quality relationships, enduring relationships must be the expectation for all students, without exception. If you are a teacher, think about what percentage of your favorite students—the kids with whom you have had the best relationships over the course of your career—were also your best students, academically. This correlation is not a coincidence. Also think about how few of the students with whom you had the best relationships were problem students, behaviorally.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
What teachers learned in college, when studying Abraham Maslow[2], is that until our students’ basic needs have been met there will be little or no interest/motivation with respect to higher level needs. After physiological needs, which have been partially mitigated by the National School Lunch Program, the needs for safety and security, followed by feeling loved and cared about must be our priority. Only when these lower level needs are secured will students be ready to focus on higher level needs.
Teaching to Academic Standards
Although teachers will still be required to teach to academic standards—and in acknowledgment of the millions of children who are not keeping pace and meeting the expectations identified in those standards—we will disregard what we believe to be the arbitrary schedules and timetables embedded in those standards. If we move students along as a class, all with the same expectations, it will be too fast for many kids, and too slow for others. Usually there are many more of the latter than there are of the former. No one wins in such situations.
No longer will we have two semesters to prepare kindergarten students for first grade. We will have twelve semesters to prepare them for middle school. six additional semesters to prepare them for high school, and another eight semesters to prepare them for graduation. As we will say, repeatedly,
“Learning is the only thing that counts and the only thing that should be counted and, once a child learns, how long it took them becomes inconsequential.”
Convert Time from a Fixed Asset that Constrains to a Variable Asset
To relieve teachers and students of the requirement to utilize time as a fixed asset, parceled out in measured segments, we will convert time to a variable resource, available to teachers and students in whatever quantities each requires. Just as kids learn to walk and talk at a pace dictated by their brains and bodies, kids do not all learn academic subject matter at the same pace or in the same way. This is true, also, for their emotional maturation. Some need more time than others and learning is the only thing that counts whether referring to academic growth or emotional maturation.
Addressing the Disparity in the Academic Preparedness and Emotional Development
We also know the disparity in academic preparedness and emotional development of children arriving for their first day of kindergarten is cavernous. To teach them, effectively, we must have a reasonable level of understanding of what our students know and what they have not yet learned. During the first weeks and months of kindergarten, while teachers focus on the development of nurturing relationships, they are well-positioned to assess their students’ academic preparedness and emotional development, simultaneously. We must ensure a good start for all. These initial weeks can also be utilized to help students get to know one another and feel comfortable as members of the community of their classrooms.
Teachers will utilize their skills and experience, as well as any appropriate instruments of academic and emotional assessment available to them, along with interactions with and observations of our students during play and while they learn the initial lessons we offer. Team members will collaborate to accurately assess each student’s level of academic preparedness and emotional development. We must strive to understand what each child needs to learn to get off to a successful start. That knowledge and understanding gained will be utilized by teachers to tailor an academic and emotional development plan to the unique needs of each student; a plan that is focused on building one successful learning experience on top of another.
Learning is an iterative process in which everything children need to learn is interdependent, integrated, and cumulative. Nothing is learned in isolation. In fact, one of the challenges a teachers faces is to be on a relentless search for evidence of isolation and withdrawal. In classrooms with a single teacher and twenty-five or more students it is easy for kids to hide in the corners and shadows of the classroom.
Instruction and Learning with a Focus on Success
Utilizing academic standards and the tailored academic plans of each individual student as a guide, teachers will prepare and utilize lesson plans to instruct students on subject matter, striving to use their imagination to develop and practice their craft. After the presentation, teachers will use their students’ mistakes on practice assignments, quizzes, and tests as learning opportunities just as they do in their classrooms, today. The problem under the existing education process, and its adherence to a schedule, is that although teachers do their best, there are always more mistakes by more students than teachers have time to address. Mistakes are learning opportunities not to be squandered.
Teachers will not be required to accept less than the best students can do or to push kids on to new lessons before they are ready, which we define as lacking the prerequisite knowledge and skills prior lessons were intended to provide.
When tests and quizzes signal a student has not yet acquired the prerequisite knowledge needed for success in subsequent lessons, teachers will step back and provide additional and alternate forms of instruction, more attention, and more time to practice and learn from their mistakes. When a student appears ready, they will be offered “do-over” opportunities on quizzes and tests, not for the purpose of determining a grade or to evaluate their performance against the achievement of classmates, rather to assess whether they have attained proficiency in subject matter and are ready to move on with appropriate prerequisite knowledge and skills. These are the laboratories in which the art of teaching is practiced.
It is vital to stress that education is an uncertain science and children do not all learn at the same time or pace or in the same way. Teaching truly is an art and craft and teachers will be expected to continually develop and practice their craft, which means familiarizing themselves with as many innovations in pedagogy as possible. Helping teachers keep abreast of innovative approaches and methodologies is a responsibility of leadership. These efforts must be carefully balanced so as not to overwhelm. Teachers must have both the discretion and opportunity to employ approaches that have proven successful in other schools and classrooms. Often, these new approaches have an experiential component and run the gamut from STEM to stern.
In all instances the objective is to help students acquire “proficiency,” which is one of the targeted achievement levels developed by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)[3] which is part of National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)[4] established by the U.S. Department of Education. The NAEP defines proficiency as:
“Having a demonstrated competency over challenging subject matter, including subject matter knowledge, application of such knowledge to real world situations, and analytical skills appropriate to subject matter.”
Essentially proficiency implies having sufficient understanding of subject matter so students can utilize it throughout life, whether on future quizzes and tests, state competency exams given once per year, seeking qualification for enrollment and enjoying success in college or other education programs such as vocational training; qualifying for a job and being able to perform the work expected of them, and demonstrating eligibility for enlistment in the military services, to name the most obvious.
Many states have modeled their assessments after NAEP scale scores and achievement levels.
Building Solid Foundations
Our objective with each of our students must be to help them construct a solid academic and emotional foundation on which they can pursue whatever dreams and aspirations they will choose for themselves. Just as a mason assures each brick meets our specifications and is properly laid, teachers must be both expected and allowed to ensure each lesson provides our students with the prerequisite knowledge and skills it was intended to impart. This is not possible unless time is a variable asset.
Teachers and students exist in a reality, today, in which expectations for students and teachers are unrealistic because of the way the existing education process is structured, staffed, tasked, and resourced. What we will be striving for, is to address the greatest irony in the field of education, which is that “learning is fun for kids until they begin school.” It is never fun to be in a situation where success is improbable or impractical. Failing and losing are never fun. On the other hand, experiencing and celebrating success is fun.
How Will We Measure Success
We will measure academic success against two standards. The first is against “proficient,” which is having the ability to use in life what one has learned in school. Although somewhat arbitrary, we are proposing that, as a general practice, a score of eighty-five percent or more on any type of assessment be considered the threshold for successful learning. Additionally, a student’s progress will be measured against each student’s own past performance. What we reject, categorically, is measuring the achievement of students against the success of others.
Rather than recording letter grades we are looking for evidence of success on lessons as well as gradual acceleration of the pace of learning. There are no negative scores. As with every aspect of the practice and development of their craft, teachers will be encouraged to investigate new methods of recognition and documentation of success. They must have not only the freedom to innovate but also the expectation of innovation, which is one of the essential purposes of The Hawkins Model©.
How Can We Afford to Pay for Implementation?
One of the concerns expressed by teachers who are skeptical of the viability of my model is how can we afford the increase in the number of teachers needed to staff our model. Today, finding significant new funding for public schools is problematic, so badly has the faith in community public schools eroded.
Indiana provides a notable example. In part, because of its diminished faith in community public schools, the state is making a significant investment in its “school choice” tuition voucher program. Consider this investment relative to the number of students who will benefit.
On April 27, 2023, The Indiana Capital Chronicle[5] reported the number of students participating in the program is expected to increase to 95,000 by 2025, at a cost of $600 million.
Our question is, if any state’s faith in public schools was reclaimed, “what would be the impact of those same investments in community public schools and their students?”
Indiana’s investment of $600 million could fund the implementation of our model in the K to 2 classrooms in over one thousand elementary schools and would benefit over a quarter of a million students across the state (270 students X 1025 schools).[6]
We will let the readers decide for themselves how the cost-benefit ratio for this latter investment compares to spending that same amount of money to provide tuition subsidies for 95,000 students. Essentially, it is the difference between addressing the symptoms of the problems in public education instead of the root causes revolving around Indiana’s and America’s education process. Given that most charter schools do not perform as well as the community public schools they were intended to replace, one can only wonder how vouchers can be justified.
From a practical perspective, we would not expect any state to do a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree reversal of its policies. What does seem reasonable would be to ask Indiana, or any other state, to carve out a portion of the funds allocated for tuition subsidies to enable a handful of struggling elementary schools to give my model a chance to prove itself.
We have two choices, if we stop to think about it. First, do we make the necessary investment in teachers to prepare our children for the responsibilities of citizenship, or do we spend comparable amounts to support the dependencies of students who leave high school without the skills needed fulfill the responsibilities of citizenship, throughout their life times? It truly is an either/or proposition.
Public education must do what all producers of new commercial products and services do. The people to whom we must appeal are consumers of education. We must give them something new, about which they can be excited. We must also consider that a quality education is our society’s intellectual infrastructure. We will not get to the future toward which we are striving over the rickety bridge that represents education in America, present day. We assert that The Hawkins Model© is that new and exciting product that will solidify the integrity of our society’s intellectual infrastructure.
[1] Hawkins, Mel, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America, Amazon: Createspace and Kindle, 2013
[2] Maslow citation
[3] The Nation’s Report Card | NAEP (ed.gov)
[4] National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Home Page, a part of the U.S. Department of Education and is a non-partisan agency that exists for no other purpose than to monitor the quality of education in the U.S.
[5] Indiana nears universal ‘school choice’ in new budget – Indiana Capital Chronicle (April 27, 2023)
[6] This estimates the average salary for teachers to be $65,000