Book Review: What School Could Be (2018)

What are the rules of school, and where do they come from?

In his 2018 travelogue through innovative American education, Ted Dintersmith (producer of the critical documentary on American education Most Likely to Succeed) allows this question to loom large--and by way of contrast, in the background. As he takes the pulse of our nation by visiting 50 states and documenting over 100 schools, he notes the tensions between the drive toward innovation and the 1893 factory model of economic efficiency that still permeates our systems of education.

Overall, the schools that Dintersmith are interesting--they've taken some sort of stance on making learning meaningful by allowing students to drive their learning through real-life questions, community-embedded initiatives, and/or authentic assessments and tasks. In his introduction, he suggests a distillation of sorts in which students thrive--schools in which they learn and develop

• Purpose - Students attack challenges they know to be important, that make their world better.
• Essentials - Students acquire the skill sets and mind-sets needed in an increasingly innovative world.
• Agency - Students own their learning, becoming self-directed, intrinsically motivated adults.
• Knowledge - What students learn is deep and retained, enabling them to create, to make, to teach others. (xvi, 38-39)

(Later, on pages 40-41, Dintersmith offers a vision statement of sorts regarding how school could be different, K-16, with these principles at play.)

These PEAK principles aren't a given in most high schools, Dintersmith notes, as college readiness becomes a competition or ranking of students based on their potential--but in so doing, losing the focus of developing students' potential. 

For Dintersmith (and I happen to agree with him here), college admissions is the elephant in the room (17), as we are preparing students for their college applications more than we are for college (57). Colleges need us to rank order kids, even as we know that we are living in a "uniquely exciting time...we understand how to engage kids...and let them create portfolios of joy" (18). 

And even if we are preparing them for college, Dintersmith levels a greater critique at the greater system: we are preparing our students for bad college pedagogy (large lecture halls, passive leaning) through bad high school pedagogy (67). Ultimately, he's right when he says that nothing would transform K-12 schools faster than a college admissions process that values creative, authentic student work (69). 

Over and again, Dintersmith observes how kids know how to be engaged and focused learners; ironically, as they move towards and through high school, he observes how we recognize and award short-term memory and compliance far more than innovation and project or portfolio keeping. Students who score 4s and 5s on APs, for example, never want to take a course related to the subject again. And students who are "liberated" in a Genius Hour start by googling "what should I be interested in?", as they don't know where to begin in locating their passions. (29) Unfortunately, when we are blindly or uninentionally trying to improve schools, we are really hoping that they not just do things better but really "do obsolete things better" (148).

Overall, Dintersmith is hopeful about the future of education in America--and he feels strongly that we are at a turning and breaking point, too, in shedding the skin of our inherited factory model. Some highlights for me, from his cross-country trip:

• Gone Boarding, a school-wide program that teaches design and building of snowboards through interdisciplinary study (33)
• An Albuquerque school partnering with a regional soccer team as its social media office (57)
• Cleveland schools moving towards mastery-based transcripts (mastery.org) (69)
• Evergreen State College builds inter-disciplinary courses of study that support greater authentic areas of inquiry (76)
• US Naval Academy fosters leadership by having all freshmen write an essay title "Who do I want to be as a senior?" (84)
• When visiting New Orleans, Dintersmith detects "competing agenda", something that he notices throughout his book--that schools are pushing for better test scores as improvement outcomes, but noticing also that there is something fundamentally wrong with our educational priorities. (154)
• Eminence independent schools in Kentucky moved away from test prep and embraced innovation. Test scores dropped, but the district trusted students with their own learning and the ability to identify and solve problems in their own communities. (182)
• Hawaii schools are focusing on next-generation self-assessments (as opposed to assessments) and direct quality (authentic, creative, product) assessments, as opposed to indirect (recall, short-term) assessments. (210)

There are some darker or more problematic tensions at play, too, that Dintersmith notes on his tour: schools that pursue Calculus or even complex math as an end of excellence in itself; schools that award teachers based on their own SAT/ACT scores; schools that hire TFA teachers because they know how to do "conventional school" well.

"Education should prepare children for life. But we have it backward. We prepare children's life for education." (47) If we can walk away from the 8 words "We have to be able to measure it" as an artificial and inauthentic grounds for education (96), then we can start teaching towards a different future. 

So what can or should we do? I agree with John Dewey when he said that "Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the thing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results." (171). Let's not educate people out of their creativity, as the great Ken Robinson has argued (200). Our innovative teachers, not some political experts, are the ones who know that our students can learn anything in a matter of days. As Dintersmith concludes, it's time to let that observation in. (216)