Time to rethink school

Dr. Tommy Bice’s favorite word is “imagine.” 

When the state superintendent of Alabama addressed the Greater Shelby Chamber of Commerce, he asked them to do just that. 

“Imagine if we created a learning environment where learning is the constant and time is the variable, knowing the disruption it will cause,” Bice said. 

He went on to describe a fifth grade-class that had transformed its classroom into a cityscape with detours, a one-way road and winding streets. The students were creating code to program the robots they built to traverse the cityscape. 

This might sound like a high-tech private school with advanced technology, but the school was in a system with 80 percent poverty in rural Mobile County. 

“What I realized was if we will expect it of our children and stick behind these higher standards that require them to think, make mistakes and learn from those mistakes, that is what happens,” Bice said. 

According to Bice, he never could have witnessed something like this in a fifth-grade class if the standard of education hadn’t changed when he became superintendent two and a half years ago. 

When the education department looked into the main problems with education in Alabama, Bice said they found the biggest one was they spent a decade preparing kids to take a test rather than teaching them how to think.  

“We are at this new point,” Bice said. “We have adopted new standards, we have done away with all of our old assessments that didn’t mean anything, and we have come up with a new accountability system that looks at multiple criteria not just a test score.” 

A big part of that had to do with putting the graduation test to sleep and focusing on the 72 percent graduation rate for the entire state of Alabama in 2012. That number was higher than it ever had been in Alabama, but for Bice it wasn’t acceptable.  

Bice decided he would work to improve the graduation rate to 90 percent by 2020, and the rate has already increased by 7 percent in two years, bringing Alabama’s graduation rate to 80 percent. 

The state had shared with its 136 superintendents the goal and then asked them to come up with as many innovative, creative ideas of how to get more kids to graduate. 

 “It’s amazing what can be done if we will rethink the way we do school,” Bice said.