Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine, In Search of Deeper Learning: the Quest to Remake the American High School (2019)

It's widely acknowledged that American education (and in this I would include everything from elementary schooling through college) is not in good shape: our 15-years olds achieve only middling scores on the triennial PISA tests, which have become the gold standard for comparing high schoolers around the world in terms of their academic skills in reading, math, and science. Since roughly 2012 American students' scores on various standardized tests have plateaued or drifted downward. Even teachers at selective high schools, as I am, are alarmed, even distraught. For this book, the authors spent hundreds of hours over six years observing classes and talking with students, teachers, and administrators in several dozen American high schools. They acknowledge the pervasive problems in American high schools, but have chosen to focus on the bright spots in the hope that these can inspire reformers elsewhere. Their understanding of "deeper learning" involves three components: mastery (of content and skills), identity (by which they mean students' intrinsic motivation to learn), and creativity (the ability to apply knowledge and make a difference in the world). It's a real strength of the book that, although Mehta and Fine favor progressive education, they also investigate other, sometimes very different, approaches: "no excuses" high schools like some charters, International Baccalaureate programs, and traditional comprehensive high schools. All of these approaches get a fair evaluation here, I think. My own pedagogical philosophy, inspired by reaction against the reflexive support for progressive, "child-centered," "project-based" I've encountered for the last 15 years in Brooklyn and also by my reading of E.D. Hirsch, leans more in the direction of knowledge-transmission. But I want to read more. The book does a good job describing the doleful effects of credentialism and what they call "performance orientation" (students performing for the teacher, rather than genuinely wanting to learn - what they call "learning orientation"). There's no shortage of this at my school. The terms are helpful in capturing behaviors I've long observed. One thing that isn't discussed in the book is what I believe is the catastrophic effect of phones and other digital media on attention spans and motivation. Learning orientation is being squeezed to death between credentialism and performance orientation, on the one hand, and digital distractions, on the other.