What you assess is what you end up selecting for and producing.

Second, yes, trotting out national service as a solution to this or that social ailment has become a cliché. But a true national-service program would yield substantial benefits. Raj Chetty and his colleagues have found that cross-class friendships—relationships between people from different economic strata—powerfully boost social mobility. Making... See more

Schools should prepare people to build things, not just to think things.

Fishkin argues that we need to refashion the opportunity structure itself, to accommodate new channels and create what he calls opportunity pluralism. “The goal needs to be to give people access to a broader range of paths they can pursue,” Fishkin writes in Bottlenecks: A New Theory of Equal Opportunity, “so that each of us is then able to... See more

“What is each person great at, and how can we get them into the appropriate role?”

As the education scholar Todd Rose writes in The End of Average, this system is built upon “the paradoxical assumption that you could understand individuals by ignoring their individuality.”

Data are good for measuring things, but for truly knowing people, stories are better. In an ideal world, high-school teachers, guidance counselors, and coaches would collaborate each year on, say, a five-page narrative about each student’s life. Some schools do this now, to great effect.

Helpfully, some of these project-based-learning schools are pioneering a different way to assess kids. Students don’t graduate with only report cards and test scores; they leave with an electronic portfolio of their best work—their papers, speeches, projects—which they can bring to prospective colleges and employers to illustrate the kind of work... See more

Mehta and Fine profiled one high school in a network of 14 project-based charter schools serving more than 5,000 students. The students are drawn by lottery, representing all social groups. They do not sit in rows taking notes. Rather, grouped into teams of 50, they work together on complicated interdisciplinary projects. Teachers serve as coaches... See more