What do the conservative former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, her liberal predecessor Arne Duncan, and the professor who taught my first pedagogy course in graduate school all have in common? Within recent memory, they’ve all said that schools haven’t changed in more than a century. The American K–12 system, the popular narrative goes, was designed long ago based on a factory model: grouping students by age, departmentalizing subjects, and ringing bells between precisely timed class periods.
On some counts, this story is accurate. Shortly before World War II, my grandparents attended high schools structured this way, and a decade from now, my children presumably will, too. In terms of content, both my father and I were assigned Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Crucible, all of which remain among the top ten books taught in grades 6–12 today. And the typical Algebra I-Geometry-Algebra II sequence dates to the mid-twentieth century. For better or for worse, much has stayed the same in American high schools.
Yet, as others have noted, much else has changed in our schools, even in the two decades since I graduated (what’s up, class of ‘05!). Certainly, there’s widespread anxiety over some of the big changes, like learning loss, smartphones, and AI—and with good reason. But what about the mundane stuff that doesn’t make headlines? A recent New York Times op-ed explored how our world so often shifts in ways that we barely notice at the time. Has change also quietly crept into schools in ways that haven’t seemed worthy of contemporaneous remark?
Brace yourself. Millennial nostalgia ahead.
I’ll start with the most mundane of all, the quintessential school backdrop of yesteryear: the humble locker. In fifth grade, I received with pride my first locker assignment—a true coming-of-age moment—and I think enough time has passed that I can safely share that my sixth-grade locker code was the unforgettable 0-10-20. And the location of one’s locker was a thing! High or low? Which hallway? Whose was near yours? What notes would you slide inside your friends’ lockers? And of course, how would you decorate your own? Indeed, the ubiquitous locker appeared in representations of high school from Gen X’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) to my contemporaries’ Mean Girls (2004).
In 2025, alas, the hallway locker is almost no more. There’s less need, as students have exchanged three-ring binders and brown bag-covered textbooks for Chromebooks, and that’s coupled with greater concern about lockers’ implications for school safety. Individual backpacks must contain the entirety of the few physical materials that students still carry. The demise of the locker may bring more order in the hallways, but I wonder, too, whether it also might mean the dissolution of a “third place” within schools, a space where—again, for better or for bitter—students don’t interact as they once did.
Another near-obsolete space for forced socialization: the group project. Yes, to the dismay of overachievers everywhere, group projects still exist. But twenty years ago, we had to meet in person to tackle the offending assignment. Sometimes we convened at someone’s house to assemble a shoebox diorama or prepare an American history presentation. Other times we just met at the school library. Either way, it was sure to be awkward! Nonetheless, you were compelled to agree upon a meeting time and place, and then to speak face to face with someone with whom you might have otherwise never made eye contact.
Today, however, group projects are often done asynchronously. During class, kids divvy up tasks. Then, both in and out of class, each completes his or her portion using Google Docs, Google Slides, and a host of other digital tools that allow for simultaneous remote collaboration. And if groupmates need to check in with one another outside school hours, a quick text or email will usually suffice. No direct conversation required.
This greater flexibility may be more equitable. And the group member who didn’t pull their own weight twenty years ago would still be the group member who doesn’t pull their own weight today, so we’re breaking even there. Still, today’s setup invites even more procrastination (why not add your slides at 2:00 a.m.?), and it certainly requires less actual interaction.
Yet the decline of face-to-face communication between students hasn’t translated into less communication overall, which brings me to my third mundanity: family-school communications. In ye olde twenty-aughts, the extent of my parents’ school correspondence was as follows. They received my quarterly report card, and at least one of them dutifully attended back-to-school night each year. Additionally, a few teachers gave us sheets to track our own averages, and we earned points if we got a parent’s or guardian’s signature each week. Precisely once, my mother initiated contact with a teacher, when I was struggling in pre-calc; she promptly declared the teacher unhelpful and found me a tutor. That concluded the parent-school interaction.
In theory, my parents could have called or emailed my teachers at other times, but they didn’t. Their level of engagement was standard among families where kids weren’t having noteworthy academic or behavioral issues. (And a couple of my editors would like to point out that email wasn’t even an option when they were in school.)
But much of the above will sound utterly quaint to high schoolers today. Why track your grade average on a piece of paper when your school’s online grading platform already contains that information? Why would your teacher need a signature when your parent or guardian is already subjected to an endless stream of notifications about your activities and grades, updated in real time? Managing all the data input and electronic communication requires additional labor from teachers—having recently taught high school, I am well aware—but the ease and frequency of information-sharing is an overall good. More timely knowledge about a child’s difficulties can equip families to address them sooner, and family involvement can improve achievement, attendance, and other outcomes.
American schools have evolved in myriad other ways, too, both mundane and not. What I wonder, though, is how some of these gradual changes in everyday communication have come to shape school communities; schools, families, and students have more access to information but less face-to-face engagement. What are the benefits and drawbacks of this shift? What does it mean, if anything, for high schools as socializing agents and cultivators of civil society? Or maybe that’s too ambitious a question for such mundane changes. I’ll mull that over with some colleagues—via email, obviously.
