In Iowa, a “Billy Madison Project” Yields a Different Way to do School

A great flood reveals a new path . . .

Fifteen years ago, amidst a historic deluge, the waters of the Cedar River rose to heights of more than thirty feet – flooding ten square miles of the city, causing one of the largest natural disasters in U.S. history, and devastating the century-old downtown of Cedar Rapids.

Today, however – in a building that had once filled with more than ten feet of water – the Cedar Falls Chamber of Commerce and a diverse cross section of the town’s teenagers are working and learning alongside one another. And the distance between those two points provides a window into how all communities might start to reimagine their own antediluvian infrastructures.

“After the flood happened in 2008,” explained longtime resident and educator Trace Pickering, “our entire downtown was gone. It was overwhelming. But it also gave our community an opportunity to reimagine itself. Cedar Rapids was a dying agricultural rust belt town, trying to figure out what the next one hundred years was going to look like. The water was an opportunity to think anew.”

Challenged by a local leader to propose a way forward, Pickering offered an unlikely suggestion: “a Billy Madison project,” patterned after the 1995 Adam Sandler movie in which a grown man is forced to return to school.

The idea was simple: ask sixty community leaders to fan across the city’s public schools, follow in the footsteps of its youngest citizens, and report back on what they saw. 

Fifty-nine said yes. What they found, Pickering says, “were kids with dead eyes. Kids not engaged. And kids who knew that school was a game – and the game was rigged.”

“There’s just this huge disconnect between what we know is best for kids, and what we actually do in school,” added Dennis Becker, a fellow educator and participant in the project. “If you ask people directly, ‘What do people need to know, do, and embody to be a successful citizen today,’ you’ll get this beautiful list: self-directed, collaborative, adaptable, resilient, discerning. But then if you look at what most education reformers are advocating for, it’s things like lengthening the school day, or strengthening standards, or firing teachers, or busting unions. And Trace and I were like, literally none of those things will produce what you just said you wanted.”

So the Billy Madison team used its findings to design a prospective high school that would actually produce what its participants said they wanted to see: 

Let kids pursue their passions. Give them real work to do.  And get them out of the school building, and in the community. 

Passion. Projects. People.

To their surprise, the school district took them up on their offer. And in 2013, Iowa BIG was born – not as a stand-alone school, but, as Pickering puts it, an “80% school – the sort of place where a student can attend their traditional high school in the morning, and then they can come here in the afternoon to immerse themselves in a real project of their own choosing.”

Zoey Sackett, a seventeen-year-old senior with large eyes and a graceful stance, remembers hearing about it from an older friend and thinking it would be cool. Then COVID hit – and with it, a deeper realization. “I feel like the game of school got exposed during COVID,” she explained, “like it was always only about getting that grade instead of actually learning something.”

One epiphany led to another. “Growing up, I've always heard what I'm supposed to do in life, whether that's from my family or just teachers or people around me saying, "Oh, you'd fit great in this job," or "You would do this," and it's always about what that end career is. And to me, I feel like I’ve always known on some level that’s wrong – that it's about the journey to get there, I guess. But I never really knew what my interests were, or deep down what I was really passionate about.” 

Then she arrived at Iowa BIG, where the only question she was greeted with was the only one that mattered: of all the possible projects to which you could dedicate time and effort, what project must you pursue?”

“I've been dancing since I was three,” Zoey told me. “When I was younger, it was just more of a thing that was for fun. But once I hit middle school and started going through these changes with life, it was just somewhere that I could go. And it was my therapy. When I was mad or happy or sad, I could go there and just dance it out. I want other people to be able to experience that and understand that the aura of hip hop culture is not a bad thing. You know, it's actually good. It's beautiful.”

So Sackett designed a project in which she would organize a community-wide event – a block party – complete with music, dancing, food, and celebration. And as the date of her community event nears, Sackett says, “the chance to have these experiences, and create these events, has really taught me who I am and what I want to do with my life.” 

For Pickering, the future of learning must make the experience of students like Zoey the norm and not the exception. “We see Iowa BIG as a way to bring to life possibilities for the community that they want but don’t yet see. And although now we get requests from across the country for our curriculum, what we always tell people is that our community is our curriculum. And everything we do starts with saying yes.

“Our job is to be accelerants of young people’s ideas, and their interests, and to help widen their aperture of understanding and interest along the way.”