Rethinking Learning; Building Community Capital

by Wendi D. Wilkerson, Ph.D.

Imagine walking into a Texas-sized sunken ‘70s living room that is filled with books, boardgames, and a smattering of white, Hispanic, and Black kids aged 8 to 12. Five lived there, and two more were visiting from next door. This is exactly the sort of space that catches your attention because you love books, you love learning, and you love boardgames. You notice an enormous television and sectional pit group that occupies ⅓ of the space, but none of the kids are sitting there; they are in the reading nook or the boardgame area. After a minute or two, you notice something very strange: two 10-year-olds are playing chess, and two more are arguing over who gets to play the winner and who will just have to read until it’s their turn. Then you notice that the other children are quietly reading Rick Riordan books that you KNOW are beyond the Lexile level for their age groups. All but one of them: he's practicing tying knots for his Boy Scouts badge. You are completely blown away by the sight of kids who’ve historically been underserved and disenfranchised from traditional American educational spaces doing the sorts of things that the rich white parents in your former school district WISH their kids would do–all without prompting. Something truly amazing is happening here, and your first order of business is finding out more about who is responsible for this near-miraculous situation. 

This is the sight that greeted me when I first walked into Johanna’s home a few weeks ago. My brother Larry and I had brought my nephew over to play with her kids for the afternoon. In truth, I’d been curious to meet Johanna for years because I’ve been a teacher for the past 16. My brother and his partner Jason first met Johanna through the foster parent support group that they both used to attend. Due to the conservative influence that has come to dominate fostering in Texas, Larry and Jason felt it was best if they stopped fostering. Not long thereafter, fortunately, they were able to adopt my nephew, N. Then they needed babysitting. Thus began the epic decade-long babysitting arrangement between Larry’s family and Johanna’s. I’ve also noticed that Nate’s academic skills improve the more time he spends at Johanna’s. 

Johanna lives in rural Texas in a sprawling ranch house–that was previously a bed and breakfast–with her husband, adopted son E, and anywhere from four to seven foster children, depending. In addition to being an accomplished 3rd and 4th-grade teacher, Johanna is a mentor foster mother and education advocate. All four of her elementary-aged foster children have learning difficulties related to neurodiversity issues: ADHD, GAD, ASD, dyslexia, etc. When these children first arrived at Johanna’s home, they were very, very below grade level in every subject; some of them could not tell the difference between letters and numbers. What’s amazing is that after two years with Johanna, all of these kids are at or above grade level in both reading AND math. And according to Johanna, this accomplishment happened not only in spite of the pandemic but because of it. Although the pandemic hit every family with school-age children very, very hard, Johanna’s kids thrived. And by Johanna’s kids, I mean both her foster kids AND her 3rd and 4th -grade students. Immediately after I introduced myself, I asked what she’d been doing to make what I witnessed possible. 

As we talked, it became very clear that there were only a handful of things Johanna did--and was allowed to do by her school--that facilitated this incredible learning. First, Johanna’s school allowed her to take a hybrid approach. I LOVE designing digital learning, but I am well aware that digital learning isn’t a good singular approach for younger learners. Younger learners need hands-on activities, especially where writing is involved. Students who don’t learn to write sentences and work math problems on paper aren’t activating all of the brain centers they need to reach in order to integrate their learning on a long-term level. Johanna assigned paper assignment packets as well as short, targeted, game-style digital learning assignments, but all assignments were submitted digitally. The digital exercises were in the Canvas portal, but the kids’ parents took pictures of their daily work and uploaded those to Canvas for Johanna to review. Johanna’s approach blended the convenience of virtual administration with the neuro-cognitive benefits of writing on paper. 

Second, Johanna’s school didn’t treat her like a virtual babysitter who sat on zoom all day hoping that the students would stay with her. For younger learners, a 20-minute Zoom lesson (which was recorded and posted for parents’ later reference) to teach a particular skill is about all they can really pay attention to and still learn anything. (In case you’re wondering, videos for that age group should be 3-4 minutes long. For adult learners, they should be 6 minutes long. As most teachers have since discovered, if you make students watch any longer than that you will lose the learning gains you had made in the first 3-6 minutes.) Instead of doing six individual 20-minute lessons, Johanna’s school allowed her to do one 20-minute afternoon lesson for her 3rd graders and one 20-minute afternoon lesson for her 4th graders each day. Between and after the lessons, Johanna stayed on Zoom to help with homework and answer student or parent questions. In her downtime, she graded assignments.

Third, Johanna understands the necessity of routine for effective learning, and she knows as well as I do that for neurodiverse learners, this is a rule, not an exception. Like myself, she practices principles of Universal Design for Learning–even if she doesn’t call them that *as such* because “it’s just common sense” to structure learning to accommodate every type of learning from the get-go. This really came into play in how Johanna structured her teaching day. The early part of the day from 8 am to noon was dedicated to supporting her own children in virtual learning. From eight to nine a.m. was reading and writing, from nine to 10 a.m. was math, from 10 to 11 a.m. was science and/or social studies, and from 11 to noon was “P.E.” Noon was lunchtime, and Johanna’s cue to log on to begin her virtual teaching day. After noon, the kids at home were to work on unfinished classwork, read, or go out and play. That part of the day was unstructured. While the math and reading lessons were completed as assigned, Johanna’s husband Daryl–a retired guy who loves kids–would occasionally lead mini-projects based on the kids’ science and social studies assignments by taking the kids to do stuff around the ranch, or  Johanna would have them watch a Discovery Channel documentary on the subject and have them talk about it. Daryl also led the P.E. portion: activities like soccer, dodgeball, swimming, and horse riding were balanced out with clearing the yard, shoveling the stables, brushing down the horses, and cleaning the pool. 

The result of two years of this pandemic-necessitated innovation was markedly improved standardized test scores, better grades in the classes at school, and happier kids overall. What is particularly striking is that Johanna accomplished all of this by innovating an education support structure that privileged the needs of her home learners instead of the demands of human-capital-driven education standards. What I mean by this, of course, is that Johanna kept the routine but pitched the “factory model of education” garbage that public schools use to shape that routine. The factory model is the means by which school realize their efforts to develop students’ human capital.

In a nutshell, the human capital theory of education (HCT) is that the whole point of education is to create productive citizens. Productive citizens participate in their societies by maintaining employment so that they can consume the goods that are produced by that society, thus keeping the economy going. They are educated enough to meaningfully participate in civil society by voting, paying their taxes, and being law-abiding citizens. The overall idea is that if the economy is strong, then the civil society will also be strong, and so education should aim to create citizens who keep jobs, vote, pay taxes, and follow the law. The “factory model of education” involves the structuring of the educational day and all educational tasks in such a way as to habituate learners to adapt to the structured environment of a factory, for instance, or for any other professional setting. Under HCT, American schools use the factory model of education to promote the attitude that the only way to become a good citizen is to develop your personal level of human capital to a high enough degree that you get paid well for your work. 

If any of this line of reasoning applies to you, then you were probably educated under the HCT, and most likely in a factory model setting. I grant you that on its face, HCT seeks to realize worthy and noble goals in order to create and maintain an equitable status quo and a stable society. For families who have the means and resources to get and keep high-paying jobs, HCT necessarily implies receiving a college education. For families who struggle to realize the ultimate goals of HCT because of generational poverty, racist/sexist discrimination, or disenfranchisement due to lack of access to adequate facilities and opportunities, HCT means one must acquire the money for vocational training or some other educational endeavor that leads to professional credentialing. Some of the students from these struggling families are ineligible for community college classes because their academics aren’t strong enough. This is where predatory institutions such as ITT and TCI come in: they offer substandard education at exorbitantly high prices paid for by usurious in-house loan entities to students desperate to participate in our society. For good reason, thousands of Americans are enraged and frustrated by this situation. The skills they worked so hard to get are not enough to get ahead in life because their high-paying jobs don’t cover the insane loan payments they have to make. 

The rage and frustration of these struggling Americans is a large part of America’s currently anti-intellectual-to-the-point-of-surly-resentment stance towards education. The key component to achieving that high-paying job is financially out of reach for an overwhelmingly large percentage of young Americans and their families. This frustration has since generated two parallel developments. First, economically disenfranchised Americans devalue whatever they deem to be “intellectualism” as utter nonsense and completely useless at best, or downright offensive at worst. That their inability to comprehend any of these things was caused by inequitable education access is totally lost on them. The second development is the sharp uptick in polemical rhetoric against college and in favor of careers in the trades. I was a construction worker long before I earned my doctorate, so I have a deep love and appreciation of trades careers. However, the reason trades professionals are paid so highly is that there are so few of them. When the glut of new entry-level trades professionals finally starts hitting the labor market, those high rates of pay will plummet. Unless a young person lives in a state with unionized trades (a mere handful, in blue states) they will be independent contractors who don’t have health insurance. Given how hard the trades can be on the human body, it’s incredibly likely that when they are older, today’s young people will end up paying for more education to re-skill for jobs that don’t wreck your entire spinal column or cost you limbs. Guess what their financial situation is likely to be when they finally have to do that? The same as it had been, due largely to insane medical bills and loan payments. At the end of the day, human capital theory really only works for the wealthier part of society. That’s why it’s a theory. For everyone else, it ends up being an endless treadmill set to sporadic and unpredictable interval training. 

Of late, these frustrations have allowed American politicos to demonize not only the arts and humanities, but severely limit how reading, writing, and social studies should be taught in public schools. Superficially, these issues are being addressed, even if it IS at the cost of strong reading comprehension and writing skills and adequate knowledge of historical cause and effect. On the other hand, they have also prompted high schools to provide low-cost access to career training for those who will struggle to meet their highest potential level of human capital. The entire situation does seem to meet the social needs addressed by human capital theory, however imperfectly.

But why must that come at the expense of the very skills one needs to be an informed voter, aware community member, and engaged citizen? Well, that’s because HCT isn’t really about generating civically engaged citizens with the means and ideas to improve their lives and communities. It’s about creating an enormous class of employed consumers who participate in society by buying stuff and whose civic behaviors maintain THAT status quo. Because the people can’t parse historical causes for the effects they experience and cannot predict likely effects based on the historical data and present circumstances, these people will always lack the means to question the status quo. Because they lack adequate writing and reading comprehension skills, they have no way to meaningfully critique the social forces that keep giving them a raw deal or communicate those critiques in writing or public speaking. 

Very clearly, we need to rethink the role HCT plays in our–or ANY–education system. Unfortunately, the existing and current critique of HCT by educators and activists tends to be polemical and parsed in political language that readers don’t understand and may find alarming. I don’t care to delve into my own polemic on the subject at this time. Having barely survived a year of teaching during the time of COVID, I’m not interested in counter-theorizing HCT right now. No, I don’t like HTC or the factory model tactics that dispense education in accord with it. HCT seems to me like it is a great way to create a population of serfs without the knowledge or agency to improve their lot, who are totally at the mercy of the economically powerful in their communities. I hate that, but I also know that more theory won’t solve that. What I’m interested in is how to empower people in their communities to make education work for them, and in a way that materially improves the well-being of their communities as a whole. 

As it turns out, there is an educational model that’s been around for a while now, is quietly gaining ground in the U.S., and has ideas I can use: the community schools model (CSM). CSM envisions the school facility as a community hub that provides space for third parties to provide “wraparound services” such as English language acquisition, adult literacy, social services, arts education, etc. CSM schools forge strategic partnerships across their communities that serve to create a socioeconomically equitable learning environment for all learners that supports their families in helping these students achieve their goals.

Community schools build both human capital in the students and social capital in the surrounding communities. The educational curriculum includes career training along with more traditional academic subjects. The school day is flexible enough to allow students to go off-campus for learning, apprenticeships, internships, and actual jobs (because a lot of them are helping support their families). In schools where the arts and humanities have been stripped to the bone, there is space for NGOs and other third parties to provide those opportunities to students, and the school day is flexible enough to allow for students to participate in them. By balancing out the efforts to build human capital with an equal effort to build social capital, CSM schools are building a citizenry that can, in fact, get higher-paying jobs straightaway OR complete college degrees, but that has enough education in critical thinking (humanities) and problem-solving (science and math) that they can push back against being turned into a population of Wal-Mart or Amazon serfs. 

For those who are dubious about whether the work and money involved in creating and maintaining community schools will provide a worthwhile ROI, I’ll discuss the 2 least controversial and most innocuous-seeming wraparound services a community school can provide: adult English language classes and adult literacy classes. 

As summer reading program directors can tell you, the single biggest determining factor of whether a student’s reading level slides during the summer or not is whether their parents are readers who exhibit reading behavior and encourage reading at home. Kids who see their parents read, whose parents can help them read and encourage them to do so, don’t experience the "summer slide," and some of them gain. Like Johanna’s kids. This principle is not limited to the summer. In households where English is not the primary language or where both parents work two jobs, students are pretty much on their own to develop their reading and language skills. Having a grandparent, parent, uncle, aunt, or much older sibling around learning the same things will have an incredibly positive impact on a student’s becoming a strong reader. Like Johanna’s kids. 

When students see adults at home actually reading and (maybe even talking about) books, magazines, newspapers, or articles on Reddit, that NORMALIZES reading as a grown-up activity that is worthwhile and has value for them. If a kid never sees that at home, not even John Keating–formerly of Welton Academy–is going to convince them of that. Trust me when I tell you that no English teacher can make up for what a student isn’t learning at home. But an English teacher can BUILD upon what a student is learning at home to make even better readers, writers, and thinkers. THAT is the only improvement in human capital I am interested in. 

In the poorest rural and urban communities, adults don’t really read books, magazines, or newspapers at home. They’re too tired from working two jobs, or they don’t know how to read very well, or they don’t know English–often it’s all of the above. At most, they do what a lot of us do: scroll through their phones till dinner and then again till bedtime. Maybe they’re reading. Maybe it’s all Tik Tok, social media, and YouTube. And that’s IF they have internet or phone service at home. 

 But what if these parents, grandparents, siblings, and aunts or uncles have a place where literacy and language classes are freely available to them, where other social services they need can also be accessed, and where their children spend much of their time? Research tells us that they are much more likely to start learning English or start improving their reading. If you want a stronger community, make the factory model-inscribed school day a lot more flexible, provide the resources that people need to succeed in life, and stop fixating on the development of human capital. Build up your community!

      When I see Johanna’s home full of astounding readers who are comfortable with math, what I see is a microcosm of what a community school could provide to many more people if only we’d shift our priorities a bit. We will likely never be rid of human-capital thinking, and we are unlikely to do away with the factory model entirely. What we can do is change our vision of what schools should be and expand our ideas about who they should serve. The community schools model does that, and in a way that will dovetail with our existing educational infrastructure. We need to be doing more of it, and California is doing exactly that. For once, I’d really like the rest of the country to put aside their incendiary partisan nonsense and follow suit ASAP.  Build. Your. Communities.