The Next Great Education Revolution
By Stuart Grauer

Throughout my career in independent schooling, and in the years when I was deep into creating the stories for my most recent book, “The Way to Pancho’s Kitchen”, I discovered and studied something that was a whack on the side of the head: school managers have been measuring almost everything except what matters most.

Enrollment.
Scale.
Program offerings.
Applications.
Yield.
Graduation rates.
College acceptances.
Alumni giving.

It’s the body-count model of educational evaluation! All those numbers matter. But they tell us little about the real life inside a school.

What if schools have been measuring the wrong things?

A New Agenda for Parents & School Choice

When you visit or study a school, college, university, or training program, don't begin by asking:

• How many students are enrolled?
• How many AP courses do you offer?
• How many acres is the campus?
• How many graduates attend prestigious colleges?

Instead you can ask about the real health and functionality of students and teachers:

• How many authentic relationships exist here? (and where’s the evidence?)
• How deeply is this school rooted in its local community (and watershed)?
• How often does learning leave the building?
• How much trust exists between adults and young people? (Yes, we can measure this—and you should demand evidence.)
• How many adults know every student?
• How resilient is this school's human ecosystem? (Yes: it’s measurable, too)
• When surveyed, how many “mentors” does each student claim to have?
• If the principal disappeared for a month or two, would the culture thrive anyway?

These questions tell us what those body counts never can. And they make for amazing stories that reveal how schools and organizations actually live, learn, and care for their people.

Looking back, I realize I've spent thirty years trying to build one thing without quite having the language for it:

relational density—

my “new concept of the year!” … Maybe the ultimate measurement for parents and teachers to study. It’s not simply the number of relationships any student has on campus, but the richness, reciprocity, resilience and connectedness that bind a learning community together. Hundreds of thousands of families are seeking this out now. Great schools and educational evaluation specialists are finding ways of measuring and norming this now (like the Challenge Success and the Panorama Survey).

A school with high relational density is one where people know one another well enough to challenge, support, forgive, mentor, laugh, create, and grow together—in AND across groups. Information travels quickly because trust already exists. New ideas spread because relationships carry them. Students feel seen because someone actually sees them.

In ecology, healthy forests are not judged by the number of trees per acre. They are judged by the vitality of the relationships among roots, fungi, insects, birds, streams, microbes, and soil. Every organism shapes the health of the whole—and is shaped by it. They are regenerative.

We can judge the health of schools and their students and faculties the same way. Relational density is the educational equivalent of biodiversity. A forest with one species is fragile. A school with only transactional relationships (assigned roles, grade levels, resume builders, etc.) is, too.

The next generation of great schools will not be those with the most students. They will be those with the richest web of human relationships.

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