“American writers have tended to see themselves as outcasts and isolates, prophets crying in the wilderness. So they have been, as a rule: American Jeremiahs, simultaneously lamenting a declension and celebrating a national dream.” Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (1978)
“These schools, these students, are the fool’s gold of America’s education system. They’re museum artifacts in the innovation era, the context that will define the adult lives of these children.” Ted Dintersmith, What Schools Could Be (2018)
After keeping their education reform movie Most Likely to Succeed (2015) largely inaccessible to the public for three years, Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith have now released it on iTunes for people to buy or rent. Reflecting on the public viewings of the film in his latest book, Ted Dintersmith says that he takes a walk during the community screenings (previously the only way you could watch it), and returns for the last 5 minute “final blow-you-away stretch”. At this moment, Ken Robinson appears with a truth-bomb, an “irrefutable fact”: “education is a complex human system. It’s about people.” Instead of an industrial metaphor for education (and it’s unclear to whom this metaphor belongs), Robinson says we need an organic one: “the plant grows itself if you create the right conditions”.
And what are ‘the right conditions’ that we see at the end of the movie? As Robinson talks about the problems with standardization, we watch a student at High Tech High work on fitting gears together in a project that culminates with him placing his gears into the larger mechanism built by the class. After studying how civilizations change, his teacher tells the students they must represent their understanding through laser-cutting a gear system. While the film highlights how project based learning benefits the two leaders of different groups, the frustrated group-mates literally disappear in the final scenes. We are told that 4 weeks have passed since exhibition night, and that one of the group leaders has continued working over the summer to get his gear to work and fit (yet the film shows the student and his teacher wearing the same outfit in each shot). Finally, he snaps his mechanical gear into the larger mosaic, ironically contradicting Robinson’s plea for a new organic metaphor.
The film features another project in which students read a play by Euripides, the teacher splits the students into two groups by gender, and then tells them to re-stage the play in modern Pakistan. While High Tech High is supposed to serve as a model of what schools could be, as it is presented in the film directed by Greg Whiteley, it arguably replicates some of the most problematic parts of schooling: students have no meaningful choice, the assessments are inauthentic (why make gears to represent an argument?), and the film focuses on only a select few who are ‘most likely to succeed’. While High Tech High is often presented as having a strong record for getting kids into college (ironically, Dintersmith argues against the drive to make a college an increasingly essential part of education), an important analysis finds that the causal impact of attending High Tech High isn’t what it at first seems.
While Most Likely to Succeed focuses on just one school, in What Schools Could Be, Dintersmith charts his year-long journey across the U.S. school system. In his visits to 200 schools, he “found sparks of learning that are so, so promising but reach only a sliver of our kids.” Dintersmith, a former venture capitalist who writes passionately about trusting teachers (though not enough to give them tenure), positions himself in contrast to other billionaire reformers when he rejects “our core assumption”: “that, in a fair world, kids with lower numbers should be tossed into the reject pile.” That’s refreshing and worth listening to. It’s also been argued by many people who are a part of the education system and have been working for change long before Dintersmith arrived on the scene. That being said, I did genuinely enjoy how Dintersmith emphasizes the plurality of what schools can be, especially when he highlights progressive education in a detention center and a homeless shelter.
Unfortunately, the potential for What Schools Could Be to challenge the dominant narrative about education is quickly lost because of what Dintersmith describes as his ‘frame’: his “innovation career”, “having lived through waves of disruption”. Dintersmith’s sense of urgency for a transformation of schools is filtered through the late capitalist economics popular in Silicon Valley that, along with the financialization of the economy, has been responsible for the destruction of whatever security some people had gained in the 20th Century. Contrary to the venture capital mythology, it was massive investment by the U.S. government with taxpayer money that fueled innovations and helped to bring them to market.
Dintersmith’s disruption frame comes through most clearly when he describes a fictional abstraction of a ‘good’ suburban school that does well on test scores. Dintersmith says that the school and its students “are museum artifacts in an innovation era”:
“Regarding their studies, I asked which topics they found exciting. Blank stares, as though I was speaking a foreign language… When I inquired about interests pursued in their free time, silence punctuated by a few nervous giggles. No signs of absorbing hobbies, internships, projects, or jobs.”
Rather than rely on what sounds like an implausible caricature of students in a ‘good’ suburban school, you’d be better to read the in-depth Inequality in the Promised Land by R. L’Hereux Lewis McCoy.
In contrast to what Dintersmith describes as dull individuals turned out by ‘good’ suburban schools, he claims that the workforce requires smart creatives: “If adults are competing with smart machines for jobs, they need distinctive and creative competencies – their own special something.” In the first few sentences of the book, Dintersmith warns that: “Machine intelligence is racing ahead, wiping out millions of routine jobs as it reshapes the competencies needed to thrive. Our education system is stuck in time, training students for a world that no longer exists.” Dintersmith writes as if people and corporations have exerted no agency in the destruction of work.
The sections where Dintersmith writes about economic realities are especially dangerous because we might assume that as a venture capitalist, he’s an expert in this area. However, Dintersmith backs up his disruption frame with a sparse fifteen endnotes and no other sources. More importantly, he fails to offer even a basic critical analysis of the ‘new economy’. In contrast, Tressie McMillan Cottom does superb work in Lower Ed dissecting the ways that the new economy “shift(s) new risks to workers.” Dintersmith simply tells us “Everyone needs to be entrepreneurial” when we really need an analysis of precarity and of the fact that many people are over-qualified for the work they do. When Dintersmith portrays students who score well on tests as ‘museum artifacts’, he lends credence to the dominant ‘skills gap’ narrative which functions as an excuse for stagnating wages.
While some of the one-page anecdotes in What Schools Could capture interesting practices, we need to take them with a grain of salt and apply caution because elsewhere Wagner and Dintersmith have shown that they don’t understand basic facts about both the past and present of the U.S. education system. To take one example, they claim that the Common Core curriculum does not feature any storytelling: “In an effort to implement the policy mandate of ‘all students college ready,’ the Common Core state standards have been designed to align with college admissions requirements. … In English, high school student writing will be limited to essays on the assumption that skill in writing essays is what is required for college. The ability to tell stories — an essential tool for making one’s point in the adult world — is not in the curriculum.” As a teacher had pointed out in the comments section (no longer available), narrative writing is a full third of the curriculum alongside argumentative and explanatory writing. The Common Core standards argue for exactly the kinds of things that Wagner and Dintersmith say they want: that students need to use technology to “publish writing and to interact and collaborate with others” and students “need to know how to combine elements of different kinds of writing—for example, to use narrative strategies within argument and explanation within narrative— to produce complex and nuanced writing.” (p. 41)
When it comes to practices in the classrooms he visits, Dintersmith lacks a critical eye though he claims to be sorting out ‘fools gold’ from the ‘real gold’ in education. Dintersmith begins by highlighting a teacher who has 6 year-old students “program their robots” to model subtraction problems by moving blocks. “To teach his students to read, Jared was supposed to adhere to ninety-minute uninterrupted blocks of time. He laughed. ‘I wish the people designing these schedules could show me a roomful of five- and six-year-olds who will sit still for ninety straight minutes.’ His kids are doing fine on reading, which Jared can’t explain definitively. It could be that they’re reading to figure out how to use the technology. … Or maybe it’s just this simple: engaged kids learn rapidly across the board.”
Anyone familiar with teaching literacy knows that long blocks are essential and do not mean that kids sit still for 90 minutes. A balanced literacy program would include a read-aloud that would propel meaningful discussion about important issues relevant to students, small group guided reading and guided writing, time for independent writing (including illustration), time for conferencing with students, and independent reading time where students read a book they choose. If young students are only reading to figure out how to use technology, we might be preparing kids for the economy, but not for citizenship. Dintersmith fails to ask the right questions about this classroom practice in this example because he’s not an education expert and is too easily seduced by a ‘disruption’ narrative.
The same teacher also tells us that one of his kindergärtners “designed a prosthetic hand” which Dintersmith says is “complex, with multiple interlocking parts.” From news reports, it sounds more likely that the students used a kit that you load into a 3D printer and then assemble. It’s beyond implausible that 6 year olds designed and made a working prosthetic hand from scratch, which is why Dintersmith needs to act as a critical investigator. It doesn’t help that Dintersmith shares Ken Robinson’s Romantic vision of the child, claiming that “young children learn at warp speed”, “a child that gets interested in something they can become an expert in days”, but that “by high school, learning slows to a trickle.” While these unsubstantiated claims may be designed to draw attention to the agency of children which is too often ignored, they ultimately harm progressive movements because they discourage a nuanced reading of cognitive science.
While I appreciate that Dintersmith emphasizes the plurality of what schools can be, he then filters that plurality through his entrepreneurial ideal arguing that students who live in poverty in New Mexico need the schools to “plan backward from what our industry partners need”. To illustrate how a more vocational K12 education could unlock the entrepreneurial capacity of teenagers in the present, Dintersmith suggests that if more schools taught kids how to use “social media expertise applied to real-world challenges” (in his example, promoting a local soccer team), then “a student can earn about $20,000 in a year, working fifteen hours per week during the school year and full time during the summer.” However, jobs that pay in that salary range – Dintersmith estimates “at least $30/h” – require Bachelor’s Degrees with 5 to 7 years of experience.(Here are job descriptions: one and two) If college is now ‘obsolete’, the business world has not heard the news.
When it comes to this history of how the U.S. education system got to where it is now, Dintersmith commits the same mistakes as in his earlier work with Wagner, skipping from 1893 when the Committee of Ten sought to “to transform education from one-room schoolhouses to a standardize factory model” (not their goal) to Brown v Board, skating past a period full of critical debates about vocational education and social efficiency. Just like in the MLTS film, Dintersmith repeats this fabricated John Dewey quote as an epigraph to his book: “If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.”
"If we teach today's students as we taught yesterday's, we rob them of tomorrow." – John Dewey #MLTSFilm pic.twitter.com/ps5Wxdy6NR
— MostLikelytoSucceed (@MLTSfilm) June 30, 2016
This fake John Dewey quotation is supposed to help enlist us in the re-invention of education for the purpose of preparing students for work. In fact, Dewey argued against David Snedden, who sought to vocationalize education. Dewey wrote in The New Republic (1915, republished in Curriculum Inquiry in 1977):
“Apart from light on such specific questions, I am regretfully forced to the conclusion that the difference between us is not so much narrowly educational as it is profoundly political and social. The kind of vocational education in which I am interested is not one which will ‘adapt’ workers to the existing industrial regime; I am not sufficiently in love with the regime for that. It seems to me that the business of all who would not be educational time-servers is to resist every move in this direction, and to strive for a kind of vocational education which will first alter the existing industrial regime, and ultimately transform it.” (38-9)
Without any reference to the actual report, Dintersmith argues that the Committee of Ten (1893) wanted to “transform education from one-room schoolhouses to a standardized factory model. Teach students the same subjects, in the same way. Train them to perform routine tasks time-efficiently, without error or creative deviation. Produce a uniform workforce ready for lifetimes on the assembly line.”
In fact, the Committee of Ten, led by Charles Eliot, the president of Harvard, wanted to make sure that the pathway to college was not prematurely closed off to students:
“every subject which is taught at all in a secondary school should be taught in the same way and to the same extent to every pupil so long as he pursues it, no matter what the probably destination of the pupil may be” (p. 17)
Much like Dintersmith argues against the effects of the current college admissions model on high school, the Committee of Ten wrote:
“The present subjects are very unsatisfactory, not because they are uninteresting in themselves, but because in many schools they are studied with a view only to the college examinations, and without reference to any preparation for life. In one of the schools in which preparation for history is best and most systematic for other pupils, boys and girls who are going to college are habitually deprived of that instruction, and are systematically crammed during a few weeks of preceding exams.” (p.183)
And as for preparing students for life in a factory through ‘routine tasks’, it’s worth reading what the Committee of Ten said about the teaching of history:
“To sum up, one object of historical study is the acquirement of useful facts; but the chief object is the training of the judgment, in selecting grounds of opinion, in accumulating material for an opinion, and in putting things together, in generalizing upon facts, in estimating character, and in applying the lessons of history to current events, and in accustoming children to state their conclusions in their own words.” (p. 170)
“we recommend further that a practice be establish in the schools of using two, three, or four parallel text-books at a time. (Resolution 21) By preparing in different books, or by using more than one book on a less, pupils will acquire the habit of comparison, and no less important habit of doubting whether any one book covers the ground.” (p. 189)
I certainly never had a history education where we compared sources like this. But what we then need to explain is not why the ‘factory’ vision of the Committee of Ten still lingers, but why the more progressive academic vision they Committee of Ten laid out was never made available to all.
While might seem inconsequential that Dintersmith gets the Committee of Ten wrong, his larger error consist in portraying U.S. educational history has having make the country a meritocracy:
“for much of our history, quality K-12 education was a free public good and college was affordable. Education equipped kids with relevant skills and sorted them on the basis of merit. But this is no longer true.”
Or as Wager and Dintersmith write:
“irrespective of birth circumstances, Americans could access a sound public education, move into the middle or upper class, and build a better future for their family and community. Our schools extended opportunity to all and made our country great.”
Dintersmith argues that current inequities in education are “just more signs of a country that bears no resemblance to what our forefathers imagined for their future America. While America won the Cold War, Dintersmith repeats a favorite claim of Milton Friedman the father of neoliberalism, that “our policies come right from the Soviet playbook.”
This is, to put it mildly, a bad history. As Linda Darling-Hammond writes, “Americans often forget that as late as the 1960s most African-American, Latino, and Native American students were educated in wholly segregated schools funded at rates many times lower than those serving whites and were excluded from many higher education institutions entirely.”
At what time during U.S. history did education actually sort people by merit? What did the founding fathers imagine for the education of people experiencing poverty, immigrants, enslaved people from Africa, and the Indigenous population? When was college actually accessible to marginalized peoples?
But Dintersmith’s jeremiad has a purpose.
Despite being historically incorrect, the backdrop that Dintersmith paints of economic success in the 20th century U.S. being driven by an education system adapted to the needs of factory work supports his recommendation that we now escape the current historical hiccough by returning to what worked before: ”Plan backward from what our industry partners need.” Rather than grapple with the historical legacies of inequity in U.S. education from its inception, Dintersmith frames a new economic crisis that requires new educational solutions. “Machine intelligence isn’t going to wait for us to resolve education infighting” and so we should focus on “equipping graduates to capitalize on machine intelligence”. Unless I’ve missed recent AI advances, machines don’t have any agency yet. Changes in the economy are driven by the decisions of people, mostly those in the 0.1% that Dintersmith himself is part of.
Sometimes Dintersmith is so enraptured with the new and experimental that he only gestures at what in fact are some very substantive criticisms. Dintersmith tells us that “some academics” think Michael Crow’s “experimental” reform of Arizona State University is “dystopian” and “terrifying”, but he never explains what the problem is supposed to be. Through some research, I figured out that Dintersmith was referring to John Warner’s criticism of ASU:
“It will take us to a place where writing instructors are tasked to teach more than twice as many students as recommended by disciplinary experts.
It will take us to a place that relentlessly mines student data to feed into algorithms that advise students on what courses to take, or what they should major in, a path that may differ depending on things like the student’s ethnic background or family structure.
It will take us to a place where enrollment increases by 8% – a “record” 82,000 students – even as state funding is reduced.
It will take us to a place with something called the “Office of Knowledge Enterprise Development” that lists ten staff at various levels of “Vice President” along with three “Directors,” all of whom make six-figure salaries.
It will take us to a place where the president of a public university makes $900,000 per year.”
In another case of reform, Dintersmith tells us that the Acton Academy is “for all kids”, while failing to examine how billionaires Jeff and Laura Sandafer in fact run the school. Acton seems to have retained many of the traditional testing structures that are now filtered through platforms and re-branded ‘personalised’: The school uses a Points Tracker “to move each person forward on their own hero’s journey to find a calling and change the world.” In their morning ‘individual learning blocks’, “a student using DreamBox to learn math must pass the unit tests that DreamBox’s LMS delivers before moving on.” Laura Sandefer writes about an essential truth at Acton that parents need to understand when they talk to their kids about success: “I’m sorry you hate math right now. You think you’re not good at it? How much time did you spend on Khan Academy this week? Let’s look at the dashboard…oh, 65 minutes this week?” Even more alarmingly, “Another feature of the Acton Academy is that students complete a survey every week on SurveyMonkey, and teacher bonuses are tied to their satisfaction.” So much for trusting teachers.
In another case, Dintersmith heaps praise on Gov. Phil Bryant of Mississippi who is “on this” new educational crisis by implementing a Grade 3 reading gate test. Dintersmith tells us that “Mississippi’s poverty lends credence to his practical bent”, which in practice would mean that students would be held back if they can’t pass a standardized test. Bryant, whose most important memory about school according to Dintersmith is catching a snake and throwing it into the classroom, is also being sued for cutting $20 million from the education budget by the SPLC (it sounds like this happened after Dintersmith’s 2015/16 tour through the U.S.). The money matters. When Florida put in place a similar reading gate, they put forward $1 billion in funds. At times, Dintersmith seems to believe that Brown v Board is no longer relevant because San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez “makes clear that America is fine with vast disparities in rich v. poor”. But segregation based on race is still a core issue at the heart of educational inequality in Mississippi – as it is in New York, too. Please read and listen to Nicole Hannah-Jones if segregation in U.S. schools is something you need to learn more about.
It takes five chapters before Dintersmith gets around to talking about equity – or even mentioning race, and when he does, it’s with mixed results. Chapter 6 starts with a brief mention of Brown v Board and says “most people know we’re falling short”. Dintersmith dismisses the idea of an ‘achievement gap’ because he doesn’t believe standardized tests measure anything valuable. He puts the difference in test scores down to a push from “affluent and well-educated” parents saying that “most children in challenging circumstances don’t get this daily push.” That’s a shallow analysis of the so-called racial achievement gap that depicts people ‘in challenging circumstances’ as having less to offer. When he looks at New Orlean’s post-Katrina “charter school makeover”, the only critical thing Dintersmith says is that the charter schools pursue test scores. Again, this is a disappointingly shallow analysis of a destructive reform movement driven by neoliberal economics, and it also fits what he wrote with Wagner: “like Hurricane Katrina bearing down on New Orleans, innovation will wipe out millions of routine jobs, imposing hardship across society.” This imagery is borrowed straight from Milton Friedman, an advocate of privatizing education in the wake of Katrina, as is the idea that the U.S. education system is somehow Soviet because it is in the hands of the government.
Dintersmith briefly does better when he writes about equity issues in schools in Alaska that fail to be “aligned with tribal life and heritage”, but he then quickly falls down again when he suggests one project might include “designing wind power with parts picked from the junk strewn across their village”. This kind of thinking falls quite short of culturally relevant and culturally sustaining pedagogy by any measure.
Dintersmith tells us that students “leave high school with no hirable competencies” and that low-skilled jobs are “just plain going away”. So why not make college free? Dintersmith rightly recognizes that simply making tuition free still means that students incur many other expenses that will not make college accessible for all. “If we continue to insist on a college degree to get to life’s starting line, affluent kids will be fine but only a smattering of low-income kids will make it through. Millions are at risk”. Arguing for free college only “reinforces the current obsolete model, which shifting costs from certain families to the general taxpayer.” The solution: “our best path to leveling society’s playing field is to make the high school diploma meaningful. Let students take on real-work challenges, gaining the ability to contribute effectively to an organization or community. Ensure K-12 graduates have hirable skills. … Turn the world upside down.”
I have two thoughts here. When people like Dintersmith spin the myth that high school doesn’t give students any hirable skills, it isn’t a neutral description of the economy, but rather part of an agenda to absolve corporations for stagnating wages and precarious work. As a related second point, Tressie McMillan Cottom argues that free college “reintroduces the concept of public good to higher education discourse—a concept that fifty years of individuation, efficiency fetishes, and a rightward drift in politics have nearly pummeled out of higher education altogether. We no longer have a way to talk about public education as a collective good because even we defenders have adopted the language of competition.” While Dintersmith is wary of any substantially renewed public good because it involves “shifting costs from certain families to the general taxpayer”, he instead shifts the costs onto the most vulnerable individuals through his entrepreneurial ideal. As Wagner and Dintersmith write, “if you can’t invent (and reinvent) your own job and distinctive competencies, you risk chronic underemployment.”
Dintersmith’s frame – his “innovation career”, “having lived through waves of disruption” – drives his view that schools are obsolete, marking a new turn in venture philanthropy. From Dintersmith’s perspective, The Gates Foundation was trying to reform an obsolete institution, rather than re-inventing it. In The Gift of Education, Kenneth Saltman traces the shift from the ‘Scientific Philanthropy’ of the Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations to the ‘Venture Philanthropy’ (VP) of Bill Gates. While Scientific Philanthropy extended the “logic of cultural imperialism” and worked to “serve ruling class interests”, it was to some extent built on the idea that the “public sector should make freely available the means for individual access to information that would benefit the individual and contribute to the making of a more educated workforce and informed citizenry.”I borrow parts of this paragraph from https://www.longviewoneducation.org/teach-like-theyre-data/
In contrast, Venture Philanthropy imposes a new logic where “public and civic purposes of public schooling are re-described by VP in distinctly private ways”: become a lifelong learner, an entrepreneur. If Dintersmith represents a new iteration of VP in contrast to The Gates Foundation, it’s not radically new in relation to core assumptions about vocationalizing education and using the world of business as a model for how to disrupt schools. As Saltman writes, “Business assumptions are not universally beneficial. They are selectively beneficial for those at the top of the business. But public institutions have a mandate of being universally beneficial.” In a penetrating analysis of Dintersmith’s agenda, Alison McDowell cautions us that he is “is not here to save neighborhood schools!” How could he be when he calls them ‘obsolete’?
In his attempt to portray himself as the outsider that education needs because he can see to the rotten core of test scores, Dintersmith argues that when it came to No Child Left Behind, “Civil rights leaders loved it, believing that test scores would show that poor kids are getting shortchanged.” Julian Bond, the president of the NAACP, certainly didn’t see NCLB that way. Speaking in 2004, Bond said “Today minority children face inequalities in school spending, and more – they face what Jonathan Kozol calls ‘punitive testing and accountability agendas’ imposed by the No Child Left Behind Act. Schools have adopted a ‘grill and drill curriculum’ that substitutes learning by rote and teaching to the test for the transmission of critical thinking from teacher to pupil.”
As I write this, I’m conscious of the fact that you might think I’m overly critical of Ted Dintersmith, who probably really cares about education and the future of young people. When you watch Bill Gates tour High Tech High which he invested in years before it featured in Dintersmith and Wagner’s film, you get the sense that he probably really cares about young people, too. But we must not base policy on personality. Hoping that Dintersmith may be the anti-Gates we’ve been waiting for confines us such a superficial analysis of personality. When billionaires like Dintersmith get behind efforts led by private schools to reshape admissions to colleges, we need to put these education reform agendas through a rigorous, historical analysis. Maybe you will enjoy Dintersmith’s book for the tour he takes you on of schools across the U.S., but you’ll need to look elsewhere to understand what’s really at stake in the movement to ‘disrupt’ ‘obsolete’ schools.