Overview of the book

This book is about how secondary schools can seriously damage the health of young people and can continue to affect them as adults. But it is also about how secondary schooling can be modified to avoid this damage and benefit young people's health and learning.

In human evolution and history, schools are a recent innovation and quite a strange one. If brought back to life, prehistoric hunter-gatherers or even medieval merchants would be amazed and probably baffled by our approach to socialising the young by separating them off from everyday society in special institutions, sorting them into classes by age and putting them under the guidance of a single adult at the front of the class. The historical norm for socialising the young was through participating in society, being attached to social groups mixing the old and the young, and learning through observing, copying and improving on what they saw others doing. Schools have developed gradually over the last couple of centuries, with initially only the European White male gentry going to school to prepare to become gentlemen and various sorts of boss. It was not until the second half of the 20th century that secondary schooling became the norm in Europe and North America, and this is only now becoming the norm across the rest of the world.

The current generation of young people is less mentally healthy than previous generations. Rates of bullying and other forms of violence remain at worrying high levels in the UK and elsewhere. Use of alcohol, tobacco and other substances has seen recent decline in high-income countries, including the UK. However, there is evidence that this is now levelling off and, for some substances, increasing again. Young people's sexual health is improving globally, but in the UK young people report high levels of risk behaviours and adverse sexual health outcomes. Young people, particularly in high-income countries, tend to have poor diets and engage in insufficient physical activity, with increasing rates of obesity.

Schools are not the only cause of these problems, but they do play an important role. Drawing on qualitative research, I have described the ways in which schools can harm young people's health through mechanisms involving educational disengagement, lack of belonging in school community, and fear and anxiety. Statistical evidence from different kinds of study supports the view that schools have an impact on risk behaviours and health outcomes via these mechanisms. The best evidence is from longitudinal studies that track students over time and examine statistical associations between various school-level characteristics and students’ health outcomes or risk behaviours, adjusting for potential confounders. These studies suggest that within education systems, some schools do a better job than others of protecting their students and avoiding the three toxic mechanisms.

Introduction

The pandemic resulted in long school closures worldwide, the duration of which varied between countries, affecting 1.6 billion learners. In England, schools were closed for 17 weeks across two lockdowns. School closures harmed student attainment as well as mental health and wellbeing. Effects were very variable across groups and countries. Harms to wellbeing particularly affected girls, disadvantaged and unsupported students, young children and older adolescents. Harms to attainment particularly affected disadvantaged students, who generally experienced worse online learning.

Post pandemic, schools face big challenges with attendance, behaviour, engagement, mental health and attainment. The interventions discussed in this book should help schools manage these challenges. Schools can use the approaches outlined in previous chapters without waiting for government policies to change.

The interventions described don't need schools to be any less focused on student attainment, and in fact some of the approaches have been shown to boost attainment. But a more supportive policy context would help schools to achieve more dramatic improvements. How should education policy change to support such work and make it easier for schools to disrupt the three toxic mechanisms of educational disengagement, lack of school belonging, and student fear and anxiety?

How policy should not change

I should be clear first of all what I am not calling for. I am not calling for a return to academic selection or for the introduction of different schools for different sorts of student. Comprehensive schools are likely to achieve the best overall results.

Introduction

Just because an intervention is effective in one place or time or with one population does not mean it will be effective elsewhere. There has recently been something of a crisis of replication in the fields of social science, medicine, psychology and economics, where the results of one study are not always confirmed by replications of the study in similar or different settings. However, in the case of school interventions, the evidence seems to suggest that interventions similar to Learning Together, which modify school organisation to promote engagement, belonging and support to benefit student health, have been effective in a very broad range of places, times and populations. Similar interventions have had broadly similar effects in a diverse range of countries, including Australia, India, Uganda and the US.

Interventions that informed Learning Together

Learning Together was strongly informed by the US Aban Aya and the Australian Gatehouse interventions and by the scientists who led the development and testing of these interventions, Brian Flay in the US and George Patton in Australia, both of whom sadly died in recent years.

The Aban Ayayouth project, led by Brian Flay, involved changes to the school environment coupled with social skills lessons. It was evaluated in Chicago middle schools serving largely Black, highly disadvantaged students. The intervention aimed to reduce risk behaviours by ‘rebuilding the village’ to enhance students’ sense of belonging and community and increase social support. It was strongly informed by theories suggesting that enhancing relationships and cultural pride could reduce aggression, substance use and other risk behaviours. Aban Aya involved a standardised process of institutional change.

Introduction

This chapter first describes the limitations of observational studies. Then it covers some theories that can help us understand the impact of schools on young people. The Learning Together intervention is described, and evaluation of programme delivery and impacts is discussed.

The limitations of observational studies

Chapter 3 described evidence of statistical associations between, on the one hand, various measures of school-level characteristics and, on the other, various risk behaviours and health outcomes among the students attending these schools. The best of these studies used longitudinal designs tracking students over time so that it was clear that the school-level characteristics in question were present before, and therefore could plausibly be a cause of, the student risk behaviour or health outcome. These studies also tried to adjust statistically for possible ‘confounding’ factors that could provide alternative explanations for why students in certain schools engaged in more risk behaviours or had worse health outcomes. These confounders might be characteristics of the students who attended the schools, their families or the neighbourhoods where they lived. Such studies provide quite plausible evidence that schools might influence their students’ involvement in risk behaviours and health outcomes.

However, these studies are still quite limited in what they can tell us about school effects and the three toxic mechanisms. Some of the studies were cross-sectional, and with these it is hard to know whether the school-level factor in question is the cause or the consequence of the risk behaviour or health outcome.

In this chapter I return to a primary goal of the book previously stated in Chapter 1 – developing theories about the data that are consistent, credible, and formatted in such a way that they might be operationalized and tested through quantitative research. Rather than generate my own theories about the data, this chapter theorizes that there are evidence-based connections to be drawn between CUNY instructors’ values (thinking) and their use of classroom management strategies (action). I parse out themes from the previous four chapters onto two figures used to depict Model O-I and Model O-II learning systems. This analysis illustrates how the interview data indicate CUNY instructors experience elements of both Model O-I and Model O-II systems in the behavioral worlds they share on this campus.

This chapter builds from two frameworks (presented in Chapter 1) that action scientists use to explain how individuals’ theories-in-use shape their action strategies, which in turn yields important consequences for their behavioral worlds and learning processes within an organization. I explore how faculty participants at a high-performing MSI expressed Model I and Model II values as “value expressions,” and discuss how common elements in those expressions can have both positive and negative consequences for instructors’ learning about and from cultural differences between themselves and their students.

This chapter builds upon the foundation established in Chapter 1 to explore how urban teachers learn to assign and share culturally accepted meanings about their students’ cultures and the communities they belong to outside the classroom. It does so through a review of evidence in the literature reviewed of basic underlying assumptions, espoused values, and observable artifacts related to teacher thinking about students’ cultures as evidenced in the literature reviewed.

This chapter discusses dimensions of the master program frameworks associated with Model I and Model II theories-in-use that link Model I and Model II governing values to the actions they inform, as well as implications of those actions for an individual’s learning experiences and effectiveness. This chapter discusses how these Model I value expressions were coded and analyzed as precursors to negative consequences for teacher effectiveness at learning across student–teacher cultural differences. In later sections I discuss how Model II value expressions were analyzed as facilitators of the instructors’ effectiveness at learning across cultural differences.

This chapter explores consequences of the traditional and culturally responsive classroom management strategies reviewed in Chapter 11 from an action science perspective in depth. In the action science literature, action strategies that individuals use from the Model I perspective seek to: (1) design and manage the environment so that the actor is in control, (2) own and control tasks, (3) unilaterally protect themselves, and (4) unilaterally protect others from being hurt (i.e., upset, offended). Individual action strategies used from the Model II perspective seek to: (a) design situations in which they can experience high personal causation, (b) jointly control tasks, (c) understand protection of self as a joint, growth-oriented enterprise, and (d) bilaterally protect others. In this chapter, I substantiate these associations in the data by exploring how traditional and culturally responsive classroom management strategies are behavioral expressions of Model I and Model II values respectively – with corresponding consequences for CUNY instructors’ learning effectively across student–teacher cultural differences.