High School Doesn’t Have to Be Boring (Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine)
This op-ed appeared in the New York Times, March 30, 2019
“The writers spent six years traveling the country studying high schools. Jal Mehta is an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Sarah Fine runs a teacher preparation program at the High Tech High Graduate School of Education in San Diego. They are the authors of ‘In Search of Deeper Learning: The Quest to Remake the American High School.’ “
When you ask American teenagers to pick a single word to describe how they feel in school, the most common choice is “bored.” The institutions where they spend many of their waking hours, they’ll tell you, are lacking in rigor, relevance, or both.
They aren’t wrong. Studies of American public schools from 1890 to the present suggest that most classrooms lack intellectual challenge. A 2015 Gallup Poll of nearly a million United States students revealed that while 75 percent of fifth-grade students feel engaged by school, only 32 percent of 11th graders feel similarly.
What would it take to transform high schools into more humanizing and intellectually vital places? The answer is right in front of us, if only we knew where to look.
When the two of us — a sociologist and a former English teacher — began our own investigation of this question several years ago, we made two assumptions. Both turned out to be wrong.
The first was that innovative schools would have the answers. We traveled from coast to coast to visit 30 public high schools that had been recommended by leaders in the field. What we saw, however, was disheartening. Boredom was pervasive. Students filled out worksheets, answered factual questions, constructed formulaic paragraphs, followed algorithms and conducted “experiments” for which the results were already known. Covering content CONTINUE READING: High School Doesn’t Have to Be Boring (Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice