2002 Education Counseling

March 14, 2002
Remarks by Tom Vander Ark, executive director, Education
 
The school district where I was superintendent has three large high schools.  Each has three counselors with responsibility for approximately 500 students.  Unfortunately, this ratio of 1:500 is not unusual in Washington or nationwide. 
 
On one of my school visits, a high school counselor expressed the folly of having such an important job to do and being spread so thin.  To make matters worse, he explained that he and his colleagues had completed a time study that indicated that counselors spent approximately one third of their time engaged in crisis intervention, one third on administrative duties, and only one third on academic, career, and college counseling.  That's 40 or 50 minutes per year for each student—a small fraction of what most students really need.
 
On the first day of high school, I accompanied my daughter to registration.  We spent 10 minutes with a counselor who gave us a course catalog the size of phone book that laid out hundreds of courses with varying levels of difficulty.  She pointed out the district's graduation requirements and the many ways to satisfy these demands.  She gave us a brochure for an aviation course. Then it was off to arena registration where I had the opportunity to watch the thoughtful way that high school students select classes: "no, my friends said she's really hard; my friends are taking that class; I think I need this one; Jeremy is taking that one..."  We assume that 15 year olds, with little adult contact, have the knowledge, motivation, and perseverance to navigate a complex system toward a desired future state.  It simply isn't true for most young people.  When you add the numerous life challenges that many students are coping with it's little wonder that most students wander through the path of least resistance or drop out, in either case, leaving school unprepared for college, work, or citizenship.
 
The new challenge
As I travel around the state and the nation, it's obvious that we're facing new challenges:
  • Our students are more diverse in every respect: more students of color, more students living in or near poverty, more students living with a single parent or guardian.
  • Our students are growing in a fast paced world of digital content and are less motivated by traditional means.  And while our kids seem to take to new technology naturally, our schools struggle with the new opportunities and challenges of computer technology.
  • And most significant, state standards represent a radical proposition: that all students should leave high school prepared for college, work, and citizenship.

There are few public school districts that are meeting these new challenges, but fortunately, there are hundreds of schools around the country that are helping all students achieve at high levels.  We've learned a great deal about the attributes of good schools in the last decade.

 
What we know about good schools
Each in their own way, good schools combine rigor and relationship.  They expect results in an environment that values respect and responsibility.  Good elementary schools have always embraced this paradox of demanding and caring, maintaining high expectations for all students while recognizing individual gifts and needs. 
 
As our secondary schools have grown in size and complexity, it has become increasingly difficult to maintain this balancing act.  Big comprehensive secondary schools suffer from two fatal flaws: they are big and comprehensive.  They promote anonymity and incoherence: "no one knows me and none of this makes sense to me."
 
Good schools are small.  The evidence is clear, in fact it is overwhelming: small schools improve attendance, achievement, climate, safety, graduation and college attendance rates, staff satisfaction, and parent involvement.  It's no coincidence that the most elite private schools limit their enrollment to 100 students per grade—they have two hundred years of experience to prove that it simply works better.  And the research is clear, size is even more important for disadvantaged students.  Of the great high schools that I've visited in the last three years, the schools that serve disadvantaged students and achieve graduation and college attendance rates of at least 90 percent all have fewer than 400 students
 
Good schools are intentional about building relationships.  In addition to being small, good secondary schools typically deploy five personalization strategies:
  • Houses and teams; small schools are further reduced in size by grouping 80-120 students with teams of 4 or 5 teachers
  • Advocate for each student: every student has an advisor that helps them navigate the system and provides parents with a single point of contact
  • Looping: advisors often stay with groups of students for their school career
  • Individualized instruction: within a narrow rigorous curriculum, there are frequent opportunities for individualized instruction and expression.  Particular strategies may include project-based learning or internships
  • Time and attention: students who need extra time and attention get it on the fly during or after the school day
 
Personalization demands choice.  All of the good schools that we've visited in the last three years are schools of choice, both in-district schools of choice and charter schools.  The free association of parents, students, teachers around a theme, pedagogy, ideology, or otherwise conceived narrative is powerful as a magnet and an integrating core.
 
Implications for counselors
These ideas create a very different vision: one of diverse small, personalized schools of choice.  This clearly implies some important implications for school counselors.  Some of the good schools we've visited have counselors, others don't.  Some have internship coordinators and college counselors.  Many integrate community services.  Nearly all utilize some form of advisory.  Advisors meet with parents, listen to personal problems, discuss current events, map out individual educational plans, ensure that all students develop post high school plans, take college admissions tests, and apply to colleges.  Services traditionally offered by school counselors are distributed across the school staff.  All adults take responsibility for student success. 
 
While there are few small, personalized schools of choice in Washington state, there are many large secondary schools attempting to gain some of the benefits of small schools by creating small learning communities.  They're implementing houses, academies, or schools within a school, almost all with advisories of some sort.  These small learning community strategies imply three new roles for school counselors:
  • Counselors as staff developers: Counselors will need to engage and prepare everyone for advising, surfacing and reshaping teacher attitudes and beliefs about student capabilities, and they will need to plan advisory and support services.
  • Counselors as curriculum developers: Counselors will need to develop, adapt or adopt an advisory curriculum. Advisory components may include personal management, study skills, character development, college and career awareness, or school related thematic elements.
  • Counselors as resource developer: Counselors will need to secure outside mentors, internships, community partners, counseling resources, and agency partnerships.
Challenges of distributed counseling
This notion of distributed counseling is one of the most difficult redesign challenges for large high school staffs.  Three particular barriers are time, skills and attitudes.  With growing graduation requirements, it's difficult to create regular daily time for advisory.  Counseling activities require teachers to develop facility with new content and new teaching strategies.  The greatest challenge is staff attitudes.  Some secondary teachers see themselves as teachers of content more than teachers of students.  For some, taking on advisory roles means assuming a new role, a new identity.
 
High expectations for all students is making teaching a team, rather than an individual, sport.  The need to build powerful sustained relationships with students makes counseling a team, rather than an individual, sport.  Rigor and relationships—it means that we all need to work together in new ways.  The enormous need for counseling means that counselors need to enroll, equip, and inspire teachers to help meet the need by acting as a staff developer, curriculum developer, and a resource developer.
 
Powerful relationships and inspired teaching draw out the gifts that wait within each student.  We hope that every student will utter his or her version of Rilke's prayer, a prayer that captures the essence of counseling:
 
I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.
I want to free what waits within me
so that what no one has dared to wish for
may for once spring clear
without my contriving.
From Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy, Riverhead, 1996