Jack Schneider is a historian of education at the College of the Holy Cross and research director of the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment.

He explains here why billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs is on the wrong track in her effort to “reinvent” the American high school. She commandeered four major networks to present a glitzy television program showcasing the ideas she is funding. While none of them is fundamentally wrong, the premise of her project is, writes Schneider.

Americans expect more of their schools than just “college-and-career-readiness.” They see them as places that develop the full spectrum of their children’s social, emotional, academic, aesthetic, cultural, and physical needs. And besides, it is a silly myth that high schools have not changed in a century. Only someone who has not spent much time in high schools believes that.

He writes:

“XQ might highlight some exciting innovations. Unfortunately, however, the project is rooted in fiction. The schools themselves may be real, and some might even turn out to be “super.” But the assumptions underlying the project are false. And given that, the entire XQ extravaganza threatens to do more harm than good, by undermining what we know to be true about our schools.

“The first falsehood of the XQ narrative is the claim that a dramatically changed world requires us to rethink public education. Students today, they argue, need a totally different kind of education because, as the XQ website puts it, “we’ve gone from the Model T to the Tesla and from the switchboard to the smartphone.”

“Do new technologies require us to rethink the purpose of American education?

“If the primary goal of school is to teach students to build products, the answer might be yes. But interviews my research team has conducted with educators and parents show that Americans maintain broad and complex aims for education. They want students to develop interpersonal skills and citizenship traits. They want schools to teach critical thinking and an array of academic skills. They want young people to be exposed to arts and music, to have opportunities for play and creativity, and to be supported socially and emotionally.

“Many would also like to see students leaving high school with some job-ready skills. But as the latest Phi Delta Kappan poll indicates, Americans continue to support the broader purpose of education. That’s why students have always done far more in school than train for work.

“If Laurene Powell Jobs and her friends at XQ want an answer for why the Tesla and the smartphone haven’t transformed our schools, the simplest one is this: Our students don’t spend their days building cars and designing phones. Instead, they’re developing their full human potential, across a wide range of activities.”

It would have helped if anyone associated with the XQ project had any understanding of the history of American schools. They might have known of past attempts to redesign or reinvent the schools. I recall the first Bush administration’s $50 million project in 1991 to design “Break the Mold Schools.” Several teams won millions to create innovative models. Did you remember that? Neither does anyone else.