New Jersey to Outsource High School Teaching to Students

Because of looming budget cuts and potential drastic state-wide teacher layoffs, school districts are looking for ways to continue providing students with an education while watching the bottom line. Some districts are trying to think creatively and ensure their students are not shortchanged by potential staffing changes. If teachers are laid off, class sizes will grow, leading to a more difficult learning environment, especially for less-abled learners. One New Jersey district, however, has come up with an inventive way to overcome these obstacles.

[caption id="attachment_698" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Schools can't even afford real black for the blackboard.""][/caption]

Johnsonian High School sits atop a hill, surrounded by lush meadows. From the outside, it looks like any other high school. Upon entering, it soon becomes clear it is much different than any high school you’ve ever seen. In classroom C-395, the students are working in small groups, engaged in their activity, yet a teacher is nowhere to be found.

The high school is experimenting with a new form of cooperative learning. Generally, cooperative learning means that students work in groups to help each other learn new information, with a teacher’s guidance. Johnsonian Superintendent John Johnie thought that the approach could be streamlined further: “If students are helping each other learn, is the teacher really involved? Can’t we find some more cost-effective way of allowing students to help each other learn? I wrestled with those questions for several minutes, and then found a better way.”

Johnie’s idea was to go even further than any educational researcher had dared and eliminate the teacher from the classroom altogether. Instead of paying a teacher a yearly salary, students are paid based on how well they do on their tests. A student, who asked to remain anonymous, said, “The administrators providing the tests have no clue about literature, math, science, whatever. They just give us tests they found on the internet. It takes us about three minutes to find the test using our iPhones, and then someone outside the camera’s view shouts out the answers to the rest of the class. I want to be a student forever.”

The camera mentioned by the student is the school’s attempt to re-create the effect a teacher has on student behavior. According to Johnie, studies have shown that merely having someone in the room prevents 75% of student misbehavior. When asked to what studies he was referring, Johnie said, “You know, studies. Those scientific ones.” The high school has installed cameras built into cardboard cutouts of Adolf Hitler, which are mounted in the front of the classroom, replacing the whiteboard. “Who’s going to misbehave when Hitler’s watching you?” said Johnie. “Misbehavior from our Jewish students dropped dramatically, and it’s down among all groups.”

These cameras are monitored by the only remaining adults in the school, who observe all the classrooms from a fortified command center, formerly the school’s office. After a rough start, in which students attempted to break into the command center and take over control of the school, they gave up. According to the administrator on duty, “The first few days were a bit tough, you’d be surprised at how creative students can be when they really want to get in somewhere, but I haven’t had to release the tear gas into the hallways in quite some time.”

The literature classroom we observed spent the period hard at work. Students were engaged in their group activities. One group was exploring the exploitation of the female body in modern adult internet videos. These students successfully divided up the tasks necessary to conduct a full analysis of the subject. One student brought in print examples of the body’s exploitation that he said he pirated from a local convenience store. Another student utilized technology, installing a key logger program onto his father’s computer, allowing him to obtain passwords for popular adult internet sites. The group spent most of the period observing videos relating to their issue, and was “on-task” for the entire class.

The class’s other group, consisting of every female student, spent the period alternating between a comparative study of the last year’s “Cosmopolitan” sex tips articles and a group discussion on how disgusting boys are. Their conclusion to the first activity is that the magazine prints the same articles each month, but changes a few words. One of the boys suggested they close the class by having a representative from each group model in pairs what they learned, but the girls declined.