Editor’s Note
“Just give me one thing that I can hold onto,
To believe in this living is just a hard way to go.” —John Prine, “Angel from Montgomery”
As a junior and senior in high school I spent many of my lunch periods in the classroom of my favorite teacher, Mr. Deatherage. An English teacher, he had become a friend and mentor to me, as he had been to one of my older brothers. Outside of class, I knew him as Jim.
Many of our lunchtime discussions revolved around my hatred—the word is not too strong—of high school. Often, I would complain that school was boring and irrelevant. What did it have to do with real life or with what I envisioned my life being after high school? It was all just a game, I would say: Jump through the hoops, go to college, jump through some more hoops, get a job. I wanted something else out of school and out of life.
As we talked, music often played quietly in the background—Janis Joplin’s Kozmic Blues, Otis Redding’s I’ve Been Loving You Too Long, Aretha Franklin’s Drown in My Own Tears, John Prine’s Angel from Montgomery—and Jim would occasionally lean over to spit chewing tobacco into the garbage can. He was a rebel himself, still and forever, and a rare example—it seemed to me at the time—of an adult who had not lost his passion for living or his commitment to his work.
Many times I challenged him—with a teenager’s passion and arrogance—on why he was a teacher, why he took “a vow of poverty,” as he put it, to work inside a “system” that we both agreed was fundamentally broken. His answer was often the same: You don’t change the system from the outside.
Twenty-two years after I sat in Jim’s classroom complaining about the irrelevancy of high school, many people are still sounding that cry.
In a speech at the 2005 National Governors Association’s Education Summit on High Schools, Bill Gates said: “When we looked at the millions of students that our high schools are not preparing for higher education—and we looked at the damaging impact that has on their lives—we came to a painful conclusion: America’s high schools are obsolete.”
Gates went on to offer a scathing view of the secondary school system, noting that only one-third of today’s students “graduate from high school ready for college, work, and citizenship.”
This issue of Northwest Education takes its starting point from a fundamental question raised by Gates and many others: What does a high school diploma mean? Does it mean that a student is—as Gates would have it—ready for college, work, citizenship, and eventually a family-wage job? Does it mean that students have learned to think critically, to work with others, to adapt to change?
Here you will find stories and interviews that explore how those question are being answered—and are raising new questions—in the Northwest and around the country.
As always, we hope that you find stories here that ring true to your experience as educators, parents, and community members. We also hope that in some small way these stories may inspire and inform you in your efforts to change the system, to make it equitable, meaningful, rigorous, and relevant for all students.
As I worked on this issue of the magazine, my mind turned repeatedly to those conversations Jim and I had two decades ago. Had I graduated from high school ready for college, work, and citizenship? I asked myself.
I doubt it, despite the efforts of people like Jim. I did eventually go to college. I jumped through my share of hoops. I took my share of blows, as Jim must have foreseen I would. And although he was a great teacher—in the academic sense—the most valuable lessons I learned from him were not academic. They were things like this: to think for yourself, to always question the status quo, to care deeply enough about something to dedicate your life to it, even if you feel it is fundamentally broken, and to follow your passion in life, no matter what the cost. As John Prine put it, those are things to hold onto.
—Bracken Reed
reedb@nwrel.org