John Thompson On Deeper Learning
John Thompson is a historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma who blogs frequently.
Reading In Search of Deeper Learning: the Quest to Remake the American High School, by Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine, is like reading the Mueller report. Special prosecutor Robert Mueller compiled a thoroughly researched narrative documenting the Donald Trump’s impeachment-worthy misbehavior and law-breaking but he did not indict the President. Mehta and Fine do the education version of making the case that school reform failed, but they don’t explicitly indict the Billionaires Boys Club for their role in driving deeper learning out of schools.
My only complaint with Mehta and Fine’s narrative is that it charges the “command and control,” compliance-driven model that is antithetical to modern thinking,” imposed over the last century, without naming the names of corporate reformers who doubled down on socio-engineering an even more odious school culture during the 21stcentury.
The methodology of Deeper Learning and its findings would seem to provide a final verdict that corporate school reform, like previous top-down reforms, has been a disaster, so maybe I’m being unfair. Mehta and Fine study the most successful schools, that are disproportionately charters, and ask whether they offer deeper, more meaningful learning. They find that even the best of them succumbed to the inherent flaws in the test-driven, competition-driven model. For instance, a top charter, “No Excuses High,” could not fix the behaviorist, controlling essence of their model, and produced a CONTINUE READING: John Thompson On Deeper Learning | Diane Ravitch's blog