Thoughts on Most Likely to Succeed

Finished Most Likely to Succeed by Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith.

It talked about the US education system and many of the flaws of K-12 through university. Compared us a bit to different countries around the world and dove into different solutions to the problems we currently have.

They didn’t talk much about the type of work that we need to support students in learning. Rather they put an emphasis on the skills that the system should help students build (according to them). They argued — communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creative problem-solving were super important. I’d agree. Although, building specific knowledge around growing fields (like cyber) I think is also important and not something they touched a ton on except through the idea of bootcamps.

The rest of the book was focused around illogical uses of time in education for kids that I was in agreement of.

Reading was definitely an affirmation of many of the things I had been back-of-mind thinking about in relation to education and it got me more riled up about the issues we have and mistakes the system is making.

Issues

Making kids memorize material that can be accessed online

There is a lot of learning that is way less useful today than it has been in the past because of the emergence of technology. Me knowing the exact date that the Civil War ended isn’t a particularly helpful use of mental space because I can just Google it any time (May 9, 1865).

We have all these classes where there’s rote memorization of information and it’s just not worth that much. I took history all through middle school and high school and never got lower than a B in those classes (with mostly As). Yet, I remember very little from my classes about American history, the first two world wars, the cold war, the Holocaust and Rwandan genocides, and the Middle Eastern conflict.

It’s too bad because at the time, I didn’t really connect the dots for why that stuff was important and now it’s more interesting to me and I’ll probably go back to learn some of it when I can.

This is also super tied with standardized tests. They help create bell curves and rank students which allows colleges to make easier choices and allows better comparison of students across income/diversity ranges and geographic location.

Yet, the tests, they argued, and I’d agree, put an emphasis on memorizing material and solving problems quickly which isn’t particularly useful often. They also give a big advantage to wealthy students that have the resources for prep and such.

Plus, problematically, high schools are incentivized to get their kids into good colleges, thus often putting emphasis on these tests more than they should, which alters the power teachers have (less) and the things being taught to students.

Tenure issues at university.

They talked about how at universities, the idea of tenure incentivizes professors to do lots of research, which I thought was a new and interesting idea.

First off, teachers that come in and have super high reviews from their students can sometimes get hate from older faculty that have been around for longer. And these new teachers need older faculty support in order to receive tenure.

Plus, there isn’t a ton of incentive often to get good student reviews (and being a college kid, I’d argue that the feedback we fill out about our teachers at the end of the semester isn’t even that useful or good at capturing what’s going on in the class anyway).

Research, and getting published on the other hand is way more tangible and incentivized for college teachers. Sadly, a lot of the research isn’t even looked at by that many people.

Taking a step back, I’d argue a lot of the research being done would be better energy channelled into improving student education.

Plus, looking at the college system:

a). how many students really learn best by listening straight through a 60–90 minute lecture?

b). with MOOCs and stuff like Stanford online, why listen to someone talking about the cold war that’s semi qualified, when I could pull up a video of the US Cold War expert instead?

If we look at the topics being taught at colleges, there’s often a better way to now learn that information than through the university.

You could make accountability and proximity arguments, which are fair, but partially just because that’s how things have been historically.

Doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be better in a different way.

College news rankings

Colleges succeed and survive by having lots of students attend and by having a strong reputation.

The things that US news looks at for rankings (like college selectivity, research output, student ACT/SAT scores, graduation retention rates and perceived reputation) create ill incentives for universities. Therefore, schools put lots of money into getting more appicants so they can be more ‘selective’ even though that doesn’t help the students education at all.

Interesting facts from the book

not 100% on these but they’re from my reading notes

• 4/5 adults don’t use more than 6th grade math
• There are 2 million American adults over age 60 still paying off college debt
• Business majors are the second most unemployed major
• 15% of Googles hires as of the writing of this book were non college students
• In 1980, Finland closed 80% of it’s teacher institues to focus on the best ones
• Finish teachers are in the classroom, on average, 600 hours a year, vs. 1100 for American teachers
• The military R&D budget for the US in 2014 (I think) was $72B (4x that of China). Our education R&D is less than 1/200th of that

Alternate models/solutions

I didn’t think that their alternatives were super compelling, easy to scale, or for sure the best path forward.

But they argued assessing students differently and in more qualitative ways based on some of those attributes I listed above. They argued for pushing for more collaboration, pushing students to direct their learning, and applying that stuff to the real world. The idea of assessing students by how they interact in teams and such.

All stuff that sounds good in theory, but supporting that at scale and then measuring progress I’d argue is super tough.

Still not sure what the solution is, and this book brought up more problems than solutions in my mind.

I have much more to learn about/inform my own opinions about what the goal of education should be before I can say much.

Either way, was an interesting and compelling read that pointed out lots of flaws, many based on historical systems and incentives. Would definitely recommend to people interested in education and good stepping stone ot keep thinking about these issues and reform moving forward.

Big challenge

Thoughts on this review/the book in general? Comment or send me a note :)

Full reading list here