What School Could Be: Insights and Inspiration from Teachers across America

by Ted Dintersmith

Absent profound change in our schools, adults will keep piling up on life’s sidelines, jeopardizing the survival of civil society. While not preordained, this is where America is headed. Yet few understand.

Students thrive in environments where they 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. We’ll call these the PEAK principles—purpose, essentials, agency, knowledge. They abound in preschools, kindergartens, and Montessori schools—places where children love school, learn deeply and joyously, and master essential skills.

In the typical American classroom, students are told what to study and when to study it. They cover content, rather than develop anything essential. They’re pushed to jump through hoops and outperform peers, hollowing out any sense of purpose. Even top academic achievers retain little from their coursework. Anti-PEAK.

Today, the purpose of U.S. education is to rank human potential, not develop it. • “College ready” impedes learning and innovation in our K–12 schools. • All students would benefit from considerably more hands-on learning. • We’re trying to close the wrong achievement gap. • We can make education better and more equitable by challenging students with real-world problems. • K–12 schools, done right, would produce graduates better prepared for life than most current college grads. • Educators can transform schools at scale with change models that establish conditions, rather than mandate daily practice.

The presidential campaign revealed a population unable to solve problems collaboratively. A society breaking down as it struggles to analyze critically, to debate thoughtfully, to seek and value truth. A civil society that’s beginning to fracture.

I’m deeply grateful to our teachers. This book is yours. It springs from your creativity. Teachers are often depicted as indifferent, even lazy—like those caricatures in the misguided documentary Waiting for Superman. Well, I’ve been all over the country and have met thousands of teachers chomping at the bit to innovate. This book supports you.

Our children should study what’s important to learn, not what’s easy for you to test. School should develop each child’s unique potential, not rank it for you with high-stakes standardized tests of low-level skills. Please, please, please consider the possibility that our innovative teachers, not data-driven policies, can best lead the way.

There’s a recipe for excelling on these tests. Practice, practice, practice so you answer questions quickly, without thinking. Skip anything unfamiliar, rather than waste time trying to figure it out. Don’t think creatively, since that costs time and points. Perform like a machine. While there’s no evidence that these tests have consequential predictive value or equip students with useful skills, they are widely accepted as the measure of learning, intelligence, and worth. Not exactly uplifting, but the stuff of these tests has become the stuff of our schools.

Together, Bush and Obama made U.S. education the global leader in standardized testing.

“Children need to learn to leverage machine intelligence, not replicate its capacity to perform low-level tasks!

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

Lyons describes AP courses as “mountains of content minutiae—a Manhattan phonebook of trivia.

He cites the work of the Independent Curricular Group or the Fieldston School, which replaced AP Biology with an Advanced Topics program where students collaborate via Skype with biologists around the world.

“We’re in a uniquely exciting time. We understand how to engage kids. We need to give them real-world challenges, have them work with other kids, and provide them with the right kind of adult support. Project-based learning is how people work in the real world. We need to let our kids create portfolios of joy.”