cover image Deeper Learning: How Eight Innovative Public Schools Are Transforming Education in the Twenty-First Century

Deeper Learning: How Eight Innovative Public Schools Are Transforming Education in the Twenty-First Century

Monica R. Martinez and Dennis McGrath. New Press, $26.95 (224p) ISBN 978-1-59558-959-0

The inspirational tone Martinez and McGrath (The Collaborative Advantage) take in their presentation of the Alliance for Excellent Education’s Deeper Learning initiative masks a reliance on qualitative rather than quantitative evidence. Deeper Learning, as defined by the authors, develops “the single most important ability students should possess: the capacity for learning how to learn.” Anecdotal examples from schools using project-based learning, co-opted here under the Deeper Learning umbrella, demonstrate the advantages of combining experiential education with traditional methods, but the sample group is unrepresentative. Of the eight schools mentioned, half are charter or magnet schools, and all are substantially smaller than average. While the fewer than 300 students at Portland, Maine’s Casco Bay High School no doubt love the experience of camping in yurts and kayaking with teachers, would that be realistic for a high school serving 4,000 students? Evidence of academic performance and college achievement would have been helpful in determining whether, once students learned how to learn, lasting knowledge was the result. (June)