What School Could Be by Ted Dintersmith

WHAT SCHOOL COULD BE is a brand new non-fiction book by Ted Dintersmith which he opens with a quote from John Dewey: “If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.”  

Although I did not really care for Most Likely to Succeed which Dintersmith co-wrote with Tony Wagner, his newer title (subtitled “Insights and Inspiration from Teachers across America”) seems a little more grounded in how to prepare students for this innovation era.  That’s because Dintersmith spent the entire 2015-2016 school year traveling to and observing schools in all 50 states.  [As an aside, he provides a map in his prologue and it appears that he visited mainly major metropolitan areas. Not many small towns or rural areas are identified, even though he notes the national proportion of public high school students is roughly 4.5 million urban, 8 million suburban and 3.5 million rural.] He argues that students thrive in environments where they develop the PEAK principles: Purpose – attacking important challenges; Essentials – acquiring innovative skills; Agency – self-directing learning; Knowledge – retaining so as to make, create and teach others. His final section says Americans long for a speech that notes, “We need to understand how our world is being shaped by innovation, automation, and machine intelligence. Low-skilled jobs aren’t going to Mexico, China or immigrants – they’re just plain going away.” Dintersmith asks readers to “consider the possibility that our innovative teachers, not data-driven policies, can best lead the way.”  He also notes that superintendents stress the importance of “the right school board.” 

One section of WHAT SCHOOL COULD BE deals with the Ivory Tower where he opines that the college model is broken and another discusses Social Equity where he bemoans the dire consequences of unequal education. Once again he makes many claims in this text, but offers limited research and evidence to support them (the notes consist of 15 URLs). In addition, I was a little surprised that his final reflections section – meant to include “pragmatic advice about steps a school community can take to transform learning” – highlights “remarkable innovation” in Kentucky and Oklahoma, two states where teacher strikes are currently much in the news.

You can judge for yourself about Dintersmith, his observations, and his conclusion because he will be speaking at New Trier’s Cornog Auditorium on the Northfield Campus (7 Happ Road) on Thursday evening, April 12 at 7:00pm.  More information is available through the FAN (FamilyAction Network) web site.

Mission High by by Kristina Rizga

Mission High was written by Kristina Rizga, from Mother Jones magazine, after the 4 years which she spent embedded in this “underperforming” high school near San Francisco (with 950 mostly poor students from 40 countries). Rizga feels obvious affection and respect for the students and teachers whom she profiles in a series of chapters which are interwoven with facts about school reform history and her analyses. 

Rizga subtitles her book “One School, How Experts Tried to Fail It, and the Students and Teachers Who Made It Triumph” and discusses how her own position regarding school reform evolved as she gained more knowledge from her observations.  That is probably what struck me the most: her almost amazement and awe regarding the hard work that teachers do daily to make school meaningful and relevant for their students. A big part of me wanted to ask, “Why is that a surprise? Why doesn’t everyone know this?”  I remember my own children’s best teachers talking about being awake at night and worrying about class members. And I have been extremely fortunate, over almost 20 years, to see talented, caring teachers making the effort to meet and coach their students, and to customize instruction and assignments. Rizga herself refers to these “largely invisible voices of students and teachers.” Rizga cites her own experiences as well as research from organizations such as The University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research. She purposefully defines educator vocabulary in an effort to make Mission High informative for parents and policy makers, especially in regards to issues faced at an urban high school.

Rizga also studies the use of standardized testing, a topic that many of our students explore in their own research. Think about it: how can the majority of students at any one school be “above average” when average is essentially a midpoint? To penalize schools with high percentages of non-English speakers or to not consider the progress which individual students make over time seems, as Rizga opines, counter-productive. She makes that argument personal when quoting Maria, an undocumented immigrant whose confidence has increased despite poor test scores, saying, “How can my school be flunking when I’m succeeding?”  Mission High offers an “on the ground” perspective for anyone interested in school reform and in learning more about what motivates students to work hard and persevere.