The false choices of "What School Could Be"

Ted Dintersmith's new book, What School Could Be, profiles dozens of schools across the United States that are engaging students in rich, real-world learning, and contrasts their experiences with the vast majority of other schools. Dintersmith calls on schools to innovate in ways that closely parallel some of my own frustrations and desires for education in Kentucky and beyond. But unfortunately the vision of What Schools Could Be is wrapped up in a badly overstated diagnosis about what ails us. Dintersmith reinforces dangerous, false choices that all too commonly frame our debates about schooling and mostly obscure, rather than clarify, the path forward.

Dintersmith, an entrepreneur and former representative to the United Nations General Assembly under President Obama, is best known as co-author with Tony Wagner of Most Likely to Succeed and producer of the documentary film by the same name. Last year he was honored by the National Education Association with its Friend of Education Award, the group's highest recognition. What School Could Be extends the themes of Most Likely To Succeed, arguing that students are too often bored, that teachers focus too narrowly on annual test score increases, and that schools are failing to adequately prepare students for the economic and social realities of the 21st century. On all counts, I agree.

To look for alternatives, Dintersmith spent a year traveling to all 50 states, touring schools and conducting hundreds of interviews with students, teachers, parents, and education policy leaders. In every state he found exciting examples of schools taking students to a different place of learning, especially at the high school level, like the Big Picture Learning network of schools which focus on meaningful career preparation, the Albermarle schools in Virginia which are pioneering project-based learning as the focal point of the school experience, and the Eminence Independent Schools here in Kentucky, the state’s first officially recognized District of Innovation.

What unites these examples, according to Dintersmith, are a combination of factors he calls “PEAK principles:”

• Purpose - Student 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.

In addition to these PEAK principles, and the many school profiles he offers to illustrate them, Dintersmith makes some important points about how education in the U.S. has, in the recent past, over-emphasized the idea of college for all students with several detrimental effects, and suggests that popular, misguided policies like “free” college serve to reinforce those problems. In one short but potent chapter, Dintersmith also argues effectively that parents and schools have infantilized adolescence, babying our children in various ways and shielding them from the kinds of challenges and hard problem solving they will actually face in the real world. If nothing else, schooling should at least prepare students to be independent, self-sufficient citizens.

The arguments about college and creating more independent learners are valuable, if perhaps a little dated and argued more effectively elsewhere by other authors. The best part of the book, though, are the profiles of innovative schools, and had Dintersmith let that be his primary focus, What School Could Be would be a useful tool for practicing educators. Unfortunately, Dintersmith tries to make his book about education policy, seeking a bogeyman to blame for why schools aren’t what they could be and making an endless stream of poorly-supported claims and straw man arguments that distract immensely from the book’s usefulness.

Dintersmith wants to force educators and parents into a series of false choices, and framing the problems our schools face in these artificial binaries may actually undermine the long-term effectiveness of the innovations he longs to see enacted.

False Choice #1: Accountability versus Innovation

According to Dintersmith, the number one reason why schools aren’t what they could be is because of standardized testing. Such tests measure only a small portion of what schools seek to accomplish with their students, but because of accountability pressures teachers devote the vast majority of their time to low-level skills that, he claims, get the biggest test score increases, and neglect rich, engaging, real-world learning.

The author is not completely wrong here. The modern era of federally-mandated school accountability (which came into being with 2002’s No Child Left Behind Act) has caused an narrowing of curricular focus and a long-term neglect of the kinds of meaningful, whole school reform efforts that would make a sustainable difference in student achievement. But Dintersmith completely mischaracterizes the purpose of these accountability mechanisms and the long history of morally unacceptable achievement gaps.

In the first of many straw man arguments, Dintersmith asks on page 7, "Is the purpose of school to develop human potential or to rank it?" Repeatedly he claims that standardized tests exist to “rank potential on inconsequential measures.” But the purpose of educational accountability is not to rank human potential. Far from it; accountability is based on the conviction that all students have potential for far greater levels of learning than our educational system is currently achieving. Though Dintersmith is thoroughly dismissive of the idea, the gaps in learning between students based on race and poverty are undeniable. It is also undeniable that even our white students, and many of the affluent, are not achieving the levels of reading and math proficiency necessary to do the kinds of rich, project-based learning Dintersmith wants them engaged with. Finally, it is also clear that schools can, in fact, make a difference in student learning in spite of these variables. This is why state and federal testing exists: to give parents and the public feedback on how schools are doing in this economic and moral imperative to educate far more students to proficiency than we ever have.

Of course, under federal law states are required to rank schools for the purpose of identifying the bottom 5 percent for supports and interventions. But if Dintersmith has ever visited one of these schools, he’d see that the culture of testing is far from the biggest reason these students and teachers are struggling. Accountability doesn’t tell schools how to fix low performance, but it does shines a light on their issues so the entire community can take responsibility for helping students do better.

The media may have ranked schools in the past, and educators themselves are often fixated on how their schools compare to others, but that’s a function of their own narrow focus, not a problem with or reason to reject accountability altogether. In fact under Senate Bill 1 (2017), by law Kentucky no longer calculates a single, summative, composite score for school performance to prevent the kind of ranking that hides all the meaningful differences within school achievement outcomes. Dintersmith completely ignores how NCLB was reauthorized as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and removed all real sanctions for low test score performance. Teachers may still obsess about test scores, but the accountability system isn’t forcing them to do so.

But Dintersmith seems to think the tests themselves are meaningless, and therefore so are their results. “We don't hesitate to push children to produce higher standardized test scores, despite no evidence that they're correlated to, let alone cause, anything consequential," he writes. While there’s no doubt that standardized assessments have limitations and only capture a portion of the learning we want students to achieve, his claim that they aren’t correlated to anything consequential is grossly overstated. In May of this year Michael Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute offered a helpful summary about what we don’t know about the long-term consequences of improved test scores (a lot) and what we do (enough to reject Dintersmith’s claim that they are worthless).

In a complete contradiction of his argument, Dintersmith suggests that, if students are engaged in the kinds of PEAK learning experiences he finds in his profile schools, then students actually will learn to read and do math proficiently in ways that the tests measure. In describing a Ft. Wayne, Indiana, kindergarten teacher whose students are engaged in project-based learning, Dintersmith says, “His kids are doing fine on reading, which Jared can’t explain definitively.” If that’s the case - that kids will indeed achieve proficiency through PEAK learning - then why be scared of test scores? Why blame them for not innovating? A handful of Kentucky districts right now are piloting a system of performance-based assessments that seek to capture authentic, “PEAK”-like learning experiences, and these assessments will be validated to determine if they measure the same things as traditional, standardized tests. If so, we’ll have some evidence for this claim, and it will demonstrate what I’ve argued my entire career: if teachers engage students in rich learning, the tests will eventually take care of themselves (Dintersmith quotes Kentucky Superintendent Buddy Berry of Eminence Independent making the same assertion).

I don’t put any real stock in an individual student’s test score fluctuations, especially year to year. A whole school’s test score trends tell us more, but only if you are looking across multiple years and grade levels and analyzing them through multiple lenses (proficiency, growth, achievement gaps...as Kentucky’s accountability system does). But for large populations across the state, test scores give us solid information about how we are doing overall. And whatever their limitations in what they don’t tell us, when only 38 percent of Kentucky’s 4th graders are proficient in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, that tells us we can do better. And that’s the whole point of accountability.

It’s very easy for an affluent person whose children may have learned to read at home and who attend a high performing school to say, as Dintersmith does, “If our goal is to close a gap measured by standardized tests, we should give up. These tests reflect the parent's motivation, not the child's.” Telling a low-income parent whose child may be struggling to read and attends a low-performing school that test scores are meaningless, or the parent’s fault, is the height of unchecked privilege.

Testing isn’t stopping us from doing the kinds of student-centered learning innovations What School Could Be calls for, and Dintersmith is old enough to know better. So am I. My elementary and secondary school experiences spanned 1976-1989, and I can tell you that, while I had many great teachers, none of us were engaged in the kind of learning Dintersmith describes in his book. There was no school accountability or “college for all” bogeymen in those days, and students were as bored with school as they are today; likely more so. 

But perhaps the world was different then, which brings us to the second false choice Dintersmith promotes.

False Choice #2: Knowledge versus Skill

Like Dintersmith, I want to see more PEAK schools. I want schools to ensure that students have a solid mastery of essential subject knowledge and skill (including those skills that can be measured with a test, like reading and math), and I want them to go beyond that basic body of knowledge to engage in critical thinking and problem solving and to build skills in communication, citizenship, and virtue. Our schools must do both. In fact, you can’t build “essential” skills without a solid base of content knowledge in which and with which to apply those skills. Unfortunately, despite including “K” for “Knowledge” in his “PEAK” principles, Ted Dintersmith thinks knowledge is superfluous.

I have several friends who are true leaders in the implementation of personalized and project-based learning models in Kentucky, devoted and smart educators whose work I deeply admire. When I bring up this concern, they usually try to reassure me that I’m the one succumbing to binary thinking. No one, they tell me, thinks that content no longer matters; they’ll just deliver the content in a different, more authentic, more engaging way. But time and again I hear the advocates of “21st century learning” suggesting, sometimes directly but usually indirectly, that knowledge acquisition and mastery is actually no longer important. And this claim is false.

Dintersmith does it over and over again, presenting a false dichotomy between knowledge and skill:

• Teachers with coaching experience prefer being the "guide on the side" to being the "sage on the stage," (p. 21; a gross overstatement, I might add, even if there was a meaningful difference).
• Kids "don't need to be taught. Given the right challenges and devices, they'll learn" (p. 23; of course, giving them the right challenges is the definition of teaching).
• Speaking of students in a North Dakota school, "Rather than learning how to memorize facts, these kids are learning how to think like historians" (p. 28; as if one doesn’t need to “know facts” to “think like an historian”).
• "Should we require students to read classics and expect fervor to erupt? ... Or, do we seek to foster a love for language through whatever hook works for the child - Harry Potter, slam poetry, Emily Bronte, or rap?" (p. 59; yes, we should force kids to read classics and teach them in such a way that they will fervently respond to the ideas presented there).
• "Should our kids study history facts, or learn to think like a historian? Memorize science definitions, or learn to think like a scientist...Drill on math microtasks, or learn to think like a creative mathematician?" (p. 70)

Again and again Dintersmith presents such options as if they were either/or choices. They are not, and suggesting that facts and microtasks don’t matter in becoming an effective historian, scientist, or mathematician would startle any historian, scientist, or mathematician worthy of the title. We may play school games at pretending to be historians, etc., but if our students aren’t equipped with a solid mastery of knowledge in these domains, their chances of ever actually being one are thoroughly undermined.

I’ve written about the crisis of content knowledge elsewhere, and I would gently direct the reader toward my posts over the last couple of years on the work of E. D. Hirsch, Daisy Christodoulou, and David Didau, who make these arguments much more cogently than I can.

My point is that you don’t have to choose. In fact, if you want to get students to the level of real-world usage of knowledge, you must lay that foundation, and then go beyond the rote memorization of content and into authentic application. And the best approach for this I have encountered yet is not “innovative.” In fact, it’s ancient. The classical approach to education, which emerged in Greek and Roman antiquity and was systematized in the Middle Ages, is called the Trivium, based on the three, stair-stepping realms of grammar (content knowledge), dialectic (logic), and rhetoric (communication). Under this approach, which can be adapted to secular, public school settings as described in Martin Robinson’s compelling book Trivium 21C, students should be immersed in rich, content-specific curriculum in the early grades, and by middle school start to engage in learning experiences that tap into and apply critical thinking and problem solving, and by high school pursue authentic, real world tasks that ask them to communicate and collaborate with others in a variety of ways that demonstrate real independence.

The 21st century certainly presents new economic, social, and cultural challenges to be sure. But the kinds of skills students need to successfully navigate this world are not new or unique. It's the same kind of learning that educated, flexible, effective adults have always needed. The difference is that we need a lot more students than ever - in fact all of them - to master that body of information, skills, and dispositions in the 21st century as the economy no longer has a place for anything less.

Dintersmith’s PEAK learning experiences will help us get there, but not without a firm and expansive base of rich content knowledge which he appears to neglect.

False Choice #3: “Trusting teachers” versus trusting parents

Finally, What School Could Be recycles some of the most worn out rhetoric in the education establishment’s play book to belittle school choice policies, in ways that have nothing to do with school innovation and actually, again, undermine Dintersmith’s long-term goals.

In yet another straw man fallacy, Dintersmith claims there are two approaches to education reform in America (notice how in the dualistic worldview so common to public policy discussions there are always only two options): "One camp pushes for better test scores, with charter schools as the key. The other senses something fundamentally wrong with our education priorities."

As if those who support school choice don’t also share concerns about our education priorities (most do). As if raising test scores were the only reason to support school choice (it’s not). As if school choice proponents believe that charter schools are some magical formula to fix everything wrong with education (they’re not). Dintersmith wants you to believe that if you have a vision for making school different, you should reject policies that would give poor families more options in who educates their kids, which on the face of the argument makes no sense. It’s a false dilemma that thoroughly mischaracterizes the case for choice and actually makes it less likely that innovative schools will emerge.

Dintersmith always seems to be looking for a bad guy. Twice he characterizes school choice supporters as “uber wealthy hedge fund reformers,” a kind of sideways ad hominem attack leading the reader to conclude that school choice is an agenda for the rich and powerful (a particularly striking irony coming from a wealthy venture capitalist like Ted Dintersmith).

Of course, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists don’t need school choice public policies. Like most affluent families, they have the resources to buy homes in the the most desirable school zones or utilize private education. No, school choice exists for the low-income who otherwise have little to no say in where their children attend school.

Perhaps in Dintersmith’s world, greedy hedge fund reformers are there to take advantage of these families through for-profit charters, even though such schools make up only a sliver of the charter sector and are illegal in Kentucky. He makes unsupported claims that charter schools “dodge children likely to test poorly” and, probably accurately, states that some “are fraudulent or abusive” (presumably, just like some traditional public schools?).

In a classic contradiction constantly voiced by the opponents of parental choice in education, Dintersmith, who does not believe test scores are a useful gauge of anything, claims that charter schools do no better on test scores than traditional public schools, and therefore can’t be a good policy. He cites findings from the Stanford University CREDO studies, which as I have detailed at length elsewhere, do indeed find that when you compare all charters against all traditional public schools (TPS), test score differences largely wash out. But what he intentionally neglects is the overwhelming data that vulnerable student populations tend to do quite well in charter settings, especially low-income students of color, who on average outperform their demographically similar peers in TPS. 

The facts are that charter schools serve disproportionately higher percentages of students of poverty and students of color and those students tend to thrive in these settings. That does not mean that every charter school is perfect or that every student will succeed there (they are like TPS in this regard), nor does it mean that introducing choice into a community solves all the educational challenges its students face (a claim never made by any choice supporter I know). And, despite the positive achievement data for at risk students, the main reason for choice is not to raise test scores. It is to increase the likelihood that low-income families can find a school where their children thrive educationally, in all the holistic ways that Ted Dintersmith wants kids to thrive - the same privilege exercised and enjoyed by affluent parents every day.

Dintersmith, however, seems to hold these low-income families and their decision-making in low regard. In words utterly dripping with patronizing condescension, he writes, "We're too confident that parents make informed decisions about school. . . families make mistakes." As an affluent white parent, I never have to hear my peers second guessing the complicated and highly personal educational decisions I make for my children. But somehow Dintersmith feels entitled to make these judgments about poor families of color who, without meaningful school choice policies, have no such decisions to make.

In truth, if we want to see more of the kinds of PEAK schools described in What School Could Be, we actually need more parental choice. Part of the reason schools don’t innovate is that they operate a one-size-fits-all monopoly for the vast majority of families. Schools lack the kind of client feedback loops and consumer choice that drive innovation in every other sector of the economy, including for public sector goods like health care, where we still dignify Medicare and Medicaid patients with the capacity to make their own provider choices. Teachers feel compelled to deliver standardized instruction in an assembly line fashion, not simply because the state tests students that way, but because when a school has to be all things to all families, that's what's efficient. By giving low- and middle-income families the kinds of choices affluent parents enjoy, more schools can actually try innovative approaches and specialize in curricular and instructional programs in a way that can demonstrate sustained parental demand and support.

Dintersmith makes much of how we need to “trust teachers.” But trust them to do what, exactly? Presumably to do what Ted Dintersmith wants them to do, because otherwise he offers no mechanism of accountability for what happens in school. Giving parents more choices provides an immediate and powerful kind of school accountability on deliverables that doesn’t require test scores and actually frees up teachers to try new things. When you refuse to trust parents in making such decisions, in reality the alternative is not trusting teachers. It’s trusting politicians and educational bureaucrats who oversee and distribute educational resources and make the most important decisions. And there is no evidence that these people will acquiesce to Ted Dintersmith’s vision of schooling, or that doing so will deliver what parents really want for their children, regardless of whatever other accountability mechanisms may or may not exist.

We don’t have to choose between trusting parents and trusting teachers to have PEAK schools. We certainly don’t have to place all our trust in politicians and bureaucrats. By empowering parents through school choice we actually better empower teachers to do meaningful innovation.

Supporting schools in what they could really be

I’ve devoted a lot of space to criticizing What School Could Be, mostly because I actually sympathize with its core vision, and I appreciate the examples of innovative schools it provides. Education does indeed need to reflect the PEAK principles of purpose, essential skills, agency, and knowledge.

But by presenting this vision in a package of shallow, false choices, What School Could Be reinforces some of the worst elements of current public discourse, seeking to identify and demonize “enemies” and strip away policies that don’t threaten what Ted Dintersmith wants, but are actually essential to his agenda. In these ways, for a book that aspires to be so forward-looking, What School Could Be seems rooted in the past, with its fixation on a testing regime that no longer has to dominate our thinking in this post-ESSA era, a college-for-all mentality that, at least in Kentucky, has been replaced with a rich emphasis on multiple post-secondary pathways, and an anti-parental empowerment attitude that reflects the most calcified elements of the educational establishment.

Educators and parents should read What School Could Be for innovation ideas and examples. But they should reject the many false choices that surround those examples, and keep insisting on education improvements that increase knowledge-based student learning (including in measurable ways, but also in the more complex and nuanced kinds of learning that can’t be captured in a test) and embrace the kinds of meaningful policy reforms that would unleash greater creative autonomy and innovative possibilities for parents and local educators.

Usual disclaimer: Ideas expressed on this website are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of anyone else affiliated with Western Kentucky University (where I am professor of educational administration, leadership, and research) or the Kentucky Board of Education (where I serve as a member and chair of the Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment Committee).

Related posts:

• The New Era of Education has arrived
• What education accountability can (and cannot) do, Part I
• What education accountability can (and cannot) do, Part II
• What I see in low-performing schools
• Yes, kids need to know about the American Revolution
• If caring is king, content is queen
• Why Knowledge Matters: The Most Important Education Book of 2016
• Why Knowledge Matters, Part II
• Seven Myths About Education
• What if everything you knew about education was wrong?
• A classical education reading list
• A School Choice Primer, Parts I, II, and III
• Kentucky charter school basics
• Charter schools and the profit question
• Why the education establishment feels so threatened by school choice
• Urgency and humility: A conservative philosophy of education reform