High School, Deconstructed for Agency

Superintendent Jason Van Heukelum, who is featured in the new documentary film, "Multiple Choice," talks about career-and-technical education for all students.

A new documentary film, “Multiple Choice,” was previewed at the ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego recently. The film was produced (i.e. conceived of and funded) by Ted Dintersmith who also created the film and book “What School Could Be.” Dintersmith explained that he had visited schools in every state, and he thought he was done until he visited a high school in Winchester, VA. He was struck by the school’s model of hands-on, career-based learning for all, integrated with academics.

Jason Van Heukeleum is the Superintendent of the school district featured in the film, and I got the opportunity to sit down with Jason for a conversation. He talked about how students have three hours of deconstructed time where they have autonomy over time and space, must meet deadlines, earn required credits (notably English alongside CTE like nursing), and complete passion projects.

In his remarks at the preview, Dintersmith said that what drew him to the school was “career-based learning for all kids, not just those kids.” He said that people who have seen the film understand that it is not just about a high school but “about a community coming together with visionary leaders to pave better futures for the kids in our community in a way that cuts through the political divide that is tearing our country apart.’

Ted Dintersmith speaking about the film at ASU+GSV Summit (photo by Dale Dougherty)

Interview with Jason Van Heukelum

Jason Van Heukelum is the Superintendent of Winchester City Schools district, which serves around 4,236 students in Virginia. At John Handley High School, the district repurposed an abandoned elementary school nearby and with community and industry support, and nearly $4M in private donations, built the Emil and Grace Shihadeh Innovation Center in 2021. The purpose of the Innovation Center was to elevate CTE by making it for all students.

Jason Van Heukelum

Dale: How did you meet Ted Dintersmith?

Jason: Ted Dintersmith heard about us, interestingly, from a sales rep from a furniture company that he has worked with and spoken at their conferences multiple times. Her name is Kelly Sinclair and she outfitted the Innovation Center with furniture and she told Ted to go see it.

At that time, Ted had just finished his 50 state tour where he had gone to every state, looked at schools across the country, and wrote the book, “What School Could Be.” And the way he tells it is, he was sick of going to schools — “yeah, I’ve seen everything. I don’t need to see Winchester.”

But he was compelled to come. He cold-called me. Quite frankly, I really had never heard of him. I said come on a random Tuesday and I’ll walk you around the building. I had no dog and pony show, no anything. We just walked around the building and he was impressed enough to say, wow, this is what I’ve been looking for. That was very complimentary and very kind. Then he came back again, interviewed students, and then finally said, “I want to make a film to amplify what you’re doing here.”

Autonomy and Agency

Dale: What did he see that’s different in your school?

Jason: I think the first thing on any day you walk in is agency.

The students are there for three hours of time. We say that the time is deconstructed, which means they have full autonomy and agency over what they do, but they have to do things they’ve gotta get done. Pardon my French. They’ve gotta get shit done.

They have deadlines and things that they have to produce. So he saw that and then he saw the intentionality of career technical education. For us, we have English classes at the Innovation Center because everyone has to take English every year. So that’s part of the graduation requirement, so why not? In that three hours of time, they’re getting the credits that they need for graduation — an archaic model called the Carnegie Unit. They’re getting a CNA or nursing credit and a English credit.

The other thing they do while they’re there is each semester, they do a passion project that could be completely unrelated to anything they’re doing up there.

So there’s three things that are happening there. Not only do they have agency over time, they have agency over space. So they own the whole campus. It’s a separate building. They could be outside, they could be inside, they could be on their veranda. They’re working with their friends. And the students will tell you that they’re very grateful for us treating them like young adults.

I jokingly say in this country 18 year olds have to raise their hand to go to the bathroom. Just think about that. And then we turn ‘em loose into whatever environment, college, whatever. It’s like they have complete freedom after graduation, but literally the day before graduation they’re asking can I go to the bathroom? It’s insane.

We have grades and we have the traditional metrics of school and you have to pass the class, et cetera. Then from a “behavior point of view,” there’s a fear factor that you’ve given 18-year-olds, or 16-year olds, this freedom, they’re gonna destroy the bathroom, or they’re gonna get in a fight or whatever.

But we found that, when kids feel respected and they have to get things done, and they’re working, they’re standing, they’re walking, they’re working with their hands, they’re doing things, we just don’t have all those problems.

Let’s be clear. Winchester is not a lily-white, rich, suburban school district. We’re 85% free and reduced lunch. Only 30% of my students are white. So 70% students of color, 50% Hispanic, the fifth-largest, English-language-learner population in the state of Virginia. It’s just about an hour and a half west of DC in the Shenandoah Valley.It’s a city in a rural community.

So on paper, many people would say that’s we’re an at-risk school district. Whoa, those kids are challenging.

Development of the Innovation Center

Dale: Where did the impetus for the innovation center come from?

Jason: There was some convergence of really nice things that came together that might not happen in another community.

John Handley High School is a very traditional high school with 1,350 kids. Five hundred yards behind the school was an old elementary school. We had built a new elementary school, moved everybody out and this building sat abandoned for five years. During the five years of abandonment, we started casting a vision of elevating CTE.

At the time, CTE programming was literally in the basement of the high school. It was a dark dungeon basically, and it was not a place you would want to send your kids. We really brought the community together, including our city council, which would have to pay for it.

We had our foundation, which is pretty awesome. Our Winchester Education Foundation raised almost $4 million in private donations to help supplement the taxpayer bond to do it. And we had industry involved. We are the fastest growing community in Virginia. So you’ve got a lot of industry moving to the area with the need for skilled workers and it is very top of mind for business partners.

A lot of things came together to make it happen, but through the process we had a choice. We could have created a trade center, which is very common, but what I was committed to not doing was stigmatized CTE. I wanted to elevate it to the point where it’s good for all kids.

I don’t care if you’re going to Harvard to be a doctor or to UVA to be a lawyer. There’s value in working with your hands and kind of messing around and being creative and failing and whatever. That’s when we said this has to be for every child.

Dale: When I hear innovation center, I think of like places that have built them and they’re largely STEM programs.

Jason: Yes.

Dale: And they are not for everybody.

Jason: Let me tell a story about the second year. I was so frustrated with my team because they weren’t executing the vision. I met with the entire faculty and I said, guys, I’m going to rip the name innovation off this building because they wanted to be more traditional. I said, what’s innovative? It’s not innovative to teach carpentry. That’s not innovative. It’s not innovative to teach English.

What’s innovative is the learning model, which is that deconstructed time giving the student agency. That’s what’s innovative. And so if we’re not going to be innovative, I’m going to rip it off the building. It shocked them back into reality because their natural tendency is to chunk it and say, go to carpentry and then you go to English and they’re separate. There’s a bell and kids have to go to this place at this time and they have to sit in this room and they have to raise their hand to go to the bathroom. I said, that is not the kind of innovation we’re talking about.

What’s innovative about Innovation Center? It’s the model. The learning model.

Dale: That’s a really good way of putting it, because usually people think of innovation even at a college level as we’re looking for products to put into the market,

Jason: Yes. On the building, we have the words: Trial, Error, Reflect and Evolve. Literally on the building. And that’s a motto that we use with our students.

Dale: Part of it is to get good enough so that you do lots of trials, make errors and figure out how to get better.

Jason: We should embrace and celebrate errors and failure for the purpose of reflection and feedback. Then I become a better learner. As a student, I learn through that process.

A Spiraling Curriculum

Jason: We started the model five years ago with an academic teacher from every discipline, math, science, English history, and that lasted I think two years. And then my team came to me and said, we think we should go all in on English. I was very skeptical because I thought there would be more of a natural connection point between some of the math and science, quite frankly.

But the truth is, if you look at science curriculum at the state level, there were no connection points in science. It’s like putting a square peg in a round hole. English is much more flexible. It’s a spiraling curriculum. It’s not sequential that math that builds one unit on another. The most important is you have a cadre of teachers that have a commonality in their content and they can work together as a team. And that was a critical decision that when they pitched it to me.

At first, I said: Are you kidding me? Then I said, all right, I trust you. It’s been the best decision we ever made. If you’re an English teacher and you want to have your 25 kids walk in the door every 90 minutes and work on them, you’re not going to like this because of the agency of the students, but the teachers that are there will tell you they absolutely love it. They’re energized.

It’s hard to teach English today too. They did a unit on Wakanda, which is, of course, from Black Panther. They use NotebookLM. We’re using AI a lot and it was the coolest unit I’ve ever seen. The kids were just so all in on it and they got to explore government and got to explore, societal norms and all these things.

I called my English team the “Guardians of Humanity” because the last thing I want to promote and perpetuate is a completely utilitarian view of school where it’s only to prepare kids for jobs that make money and blah, blah, blah.

Yes, I want you to love your work and love your future — welding, carpentry, nursing, whatever. But I also want you to be a thinker and to appreciate the beauty of humanity and question our purpose and question why we’re here on this planet and our interaction among each other in society and community.

The Challenge of Replication

Dale: You get a lot of people to come in and visit the school, and they like the Innovation Center but I bet few of them go back and do what you did — an overhaul of their school. Why is it so hard to replicate successful school models?

Jason: I would say it’s probably multifaceted. So one data point that I use with folks is 95% of educators have never left school. They’ve been in school since they were five-years old. Literally. School worked for them. Their experience in school was — I’m good at school, this is great, I’m gonna be a teacher. We lack imagination, broadly speaking, in the educator force. That’s one. I also say that what gets measured gets done. At the state policy level in the accountability era, we measure reading and math and that’s pretty much it.

But if we’re really honest, that’s the only thing we measure. We sometimes test biology or we’ll test science or history. But we measure reading and math and that’s what gets published in the newspaper and that’s what makes you feel good or not feel good. Or you feel shame. I call it the annual shame cycle.

Ted’s new book “Aftermath” is really key on understanding math. We have a party when we get 2% improvement on math scores. Just think of the lunacy of that. We went from 60% to 62% and we’re gonna throw down like we just conquered the world. It’s it’s just stupid.

The incentives for school people are not aligned to what the world actually needs. Again, going back to the first point, a lot of teachers, and I’m guilty of this too, I could talk for hours, and I love it when the audience just listens to me talk. I feel pretty good about myself, right? I’m a sage on the stage and a lot of teachers enjoy that. It feeds their ego and their soul. But that’s not learning. And so to shut your mouth and let the kids do is a whole new ball game.

Dale: We have all these standards. Here’s what you teach over here. You say, what are kids learning? What do they understand? A teacher knows that there’s a portion of what they present that’s coming across. But the kid might be throwing it all out, not paying attention at all. And that’s where I think a big shift can occur. The old model was that this is the only time a kid has the opportunity to get this information from a knowledgeable person, like a biology teacher. If they don’t get it now, they can’t get it, ever. Now they can get this information anytime they want. What they need is a reason to learn and apply it now.

Jason: The mile wide and inch deep analogy for our curriculum in the US is hurting us. And Europe and Asia do not do that.

We’re like water skiing across the curriculum; it’s really infuriating.

Dale: And the curriculum can’t adapt to what’s actually happening in the student’s world.

Jason: So many people are successful as adults in spite of school.

Dale: That’s what my experience has been in the maker community. What you do in school is a judgment on how you learn in this environment. Change the environment and you’ll learn differently and you’ll have some confidence.

Jason: I see it with my own child who’s 18 and about to go to college. She is really good at school, really good. Like the best at school. And I’m trying to help her like navigate her future. I say that no one really cares that you’re good at school.

You’ve gotta be a person of ingenuity and creativity.

Dale: And try things that you’re not being asked to do.

Jason: Don’t just perform. It’s not performative.

Dale: Exactly.

Jason: The world doesn’t operate that way.

Career-learning for All

Dale: The thing that stood out from the film, what you had to say afterwards was that lots of schools have CTE programs. And the problem with them is freshmen high school students who aren’t doing well are told to go to carpentry. Or something else. It’s why people said there were civil rights issues in doing that, and schools pulled back on CTE because it was tracking low-achieving students.

Jason: Yes.

Dale: So I think you have this really distinct point of view, which Ted probably saw that you wanted every student in the school to have this deconstructed time and see what they’re doing. Students in there are doing welding. One may become a welder, the other may be a lawyer, as one girl says.

Jason: I think that was a critical decision that we said all, and that’s my primary frustration. Like to harken back to your previous question about other people coming to visit, et cetera. As soon as I get to the all word, people check out and they can’t get there. It’s so important because it takes away the stigma of CTE, the tracking; it elevates the dignity of work and it maintains social cohesion — the equity piece. Otherwise I don’t care how hard you try, you’re gonna track kids. Then you have the have and the have nots. This is a space in our school community, three hours of time in a day that all my kids are just thrown together in a pot and they figure it out.

There’s a moment in the film with our local university president, Dr. Tracy Fitzsimmons, who is president of Shenandoah University Division III, Liberal Arts University. She highlights that just the process of learning something, whatever —it doesn’t matter what it is —gives you this agency and this confidence. It’s what allows you in your adult life to pivot because you will have to. We’ve all had to pivot in our adult life. That is increasingly the expectation that between 22 and 65, you’re going to have a number of pivots in your life. It’s not linear. Very few jobs are linear.

Dale: I read something about owning a skillset. When you lose your job, you can look back and say what is my skillset? What do I have? I have confidence that I can do this, whether it’s carpentry or, in this example, he was using podcasting. I’ve learned how to do something and I just have to figure out where it is needed.

I think that we’re living in a era where skills are more important than credentials.

Jason: We’ve all experienced it in our life.

I call it the IT factor. Others, like why is that principal so awesome? They just have this demeanor, assertiveness, all these intangibles that you can’t quite quantify, but it’s an IT factor that makes them successful.

We saw that visiting San Diego Met, a Big Picture Learning school. Because the students are involved in internships immediately at ninth grade and they’re constantly talking and expressing to adults.

They’re doing that from 14 to 18, and, all of a sudden, by the time they’re 18, they’re like really impressive young people. I tell my daughter, shoulders back, right? You’ve got to present yourself to the world. These kids are doing that from the time they’re 14. They have those experiences.

Adults are constantly asking them what are you doing? What are you working on? So they have to articulate that themselves and going through this process, I think, makes better them humans.

Dale: What do you hope people take away from the film?

Jason: All.

Dale: All. And that’s the hard thing for them.

Jason: And the deconstructed time. The two things I always say it’s like one, it’s gotta be for all. And two, you need a large chunk of time that’s deconstructed that you just let the kids navigate and they fail forward. Teachers are all around them, so there’s plenty of safety nets. You trust them to make wise decisions with their time. And if they don’t, that’s learning too.