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.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674988392

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 21^stcentury. 

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 school with a joyless culture, where a student explained, “No one actually likes it here.”

If the best products of the contemporary accountability-driven, charter-driven reform movement are schools with “an absence of relationships” and where extrinsic measures drive out opportunities to build intrinsic motivation and lifelong learning, what does that say about the No Excuses pedagogies the corporate reformers imposed on the poorest children of color? If even the best examples of reform take inequities and often make them worse, one would think that would be the explicit conclusion.  But Mehta and Fine document the damage done to teaching and learning when “the many” (our diverse public education systems) are forced to implement the ideas of “the few” (the 21^st century corporate reform movement’s co-conspirator #1?).

Whether or not Deeper Learning should have been less diplomatic, it does a great job of surveying the wastelands that the Billionaires Boys Club, following their forerunners who imposed Taylorism in the 20^th century, helped create. It cites the Gates-funded Gathering Feedback for Teaching (2012) which videotaped 4^th through 8^thgrade classes and found that only 1 percent of math lessons received the top rating for analytic complexity, while 70 percent received the lowest rating. Also, the Education Trust’s 2015 survey of middle school instruction “only found that 4 percent of assignments asked students to think at higher levels,” while “about 85 percent asked students to either recall information or apply basic skills and concepts as opposed to prompting for inferences or structural analysis.”

Deeper Learning cites research by Martin Nystrand and Adam Gamoran (in 1997) which found that 9^th graders doing 224 lessons only engaged in an average of less than 15 seconds a day of free-flowing discussion! This is evidence of failures predating NCLB. But Mehta and Fine watch today’s teachers “appropriate the early shoots of what students were trying to say,” and “incorporate them into their own longer comments.” Consequently, “We seldom heard students speak more than a sentence or two.”

Similarly, by 2015, a Gallup poll found that 75 percent of 5^th graders were engaged in school, while only 32 percent of 11^th graders were engaged. Deeper Learning then explains in depth how reforms that require “teaching a formula” result in schools where, “students couldn’t name a piece of work they were proud of.”  They cite a No Excuses school leader with the inspiring vision of increasing time on task in their 49 minute classes from 44 to 46 minutes! Mehta and Fine nail the case for unlearning the practices that have most damaged poor children by emphasizing “hierarchy, control, and fear of failure.” They thus conclude that the “rush of teaching and testing for an enormous amount of content … must be rethought.”

Mehta and Fine cite teachers’ rejection of “district pacing guidelines, [the] teacher evaluation system, and the pressure of state tests.”   They are particularly great at explaining how and why “most teachers we saw were highly concerned with what was covered, and would rush or lecture if they were ‘falling behind’ their expected goals.

I would just add some anecdotes in support. When my principal distributed the state’s aligned and paced standards guides on the eve of NCLB, she acknowledged that we would ignore them, but she said that they could benefit rookies and struggling teachers. Our principal merely requested that we not to throw the guides in the trash. She asked us to keep them on file in case a central office or state administrator enquired about them.

After NCLB when the pacing schedule became a mandate, not a guide, our school’s veteran teachers pushed back against hurried in-one-ear-out-the-other, skin-deep teaching that was the inevitable result. Compliance was achieved by mandating that students’ math and reading benchmark tests be graded. The result was that 40 percent of students in tested subjects dropped out of school in nine weeks!

Resistance to high-stakes testing, I suspect, was a key reason why reformers used value-added teacher evaluations, Race to the Top, and School Improvement Grants (SIG) to “exit” veteran teachers and socialize 23-year-olds into obedience.  For instance, when I was runner-up district teacher of the year, another principal said she knew I’d ignore the pacing mandates, so we reached a compromise. My students would keep the book on their desk, and turn to the mandated pages, and pretend to comply when administrators inspected us.

After I retired, our SIG school was staffed disproportionately with young teachers who couldn’t push back. When visiting my old school, I’d feel physically ill when seeing how the $11 million grant took the lowest-ranked mid-high in Oklahoma and made it worse. I’d get sick at my stomach visiting classes with no meaningful teaching and learning, just students watching Thunder basketball games on their laptops and doing each others’ hair, as teachers went through the motions of delivering their boring, mandated “preset” lessons.

Mehta and Fine offer some hope. They found deeper learning in electives and extracurricular activities. They do a great, nuanced job of describing ways that a few “sensible adjustments,” such as assigning shorter reading passages and “scaffolding” unfamiliar words,” allow some teachers of high-poverty, low-skilled students to offer instruction for “seminal learning experiences.” Rather than focusing solely of remediating kids’ deficits, these teachers learn from their students and build on their strengths.

As some of Deeper Learning’s evidence shows, worksheet-driven malpractice has a long history. Teachers tend to teach the way they were taught, prompting a systemic inertia and reluctance to build humane innovative pedagogies. And, yes, today’s venture philanthropists follow in the footsteps of disgusting micromanagers from outside of the education profession.

So, maybe Mehta and Fine are right to not name the names of the elites who turned 21^st century students into their lab rats, just as Mueller may have had reason to not indict but to lay out plenty of evidence for impeachment. They are definitely correct in calling for a new era of “undoing and unlearning” so we can create schools worthy of a dynamic democracy.