Jal Mehta

A practical guide to deeper instruction—a framework for challenging, engaging, and empowering students of all ages For schools to meet ambitious new standards and prepare all students for college, careers, and life, research has shown unequivocally that nothing is more important that the quality of daily instruction. Learning That Lasts presents a new vision for classroom instruction that sharpens and deepens the quality of lessons in all subject areas. It is the opposite of a 'teacher-proof' solution. Instead, it is predicated on a model of instruction that honors teachers as creative and expert planners of learning experiences for their students and who wish to continuously grow in their instructional and content knowledge. It is not a theoretical vision. It is a model of instruction refined in some of the nation's most successful public schools—schools that are beating the odds to create remarkable achievement—sited primarily in urban and rural low-income communities. Using case studies and examples of powerful learning at all grade levels and in all disciplines, Learning That Lasts is a guide to creating classrooms that promote deeper understanding, higher order thinking, and student independence. Through text and companion videos, readers will enter inspiring classrooms where students go beyond basics to become innovators, collaborators, and creators. Learning That Lasts embraces a three-dimensional view of student achievement that includes mastery of knowledge and skills, character, and high-quality work. It is a guide for teachers who wish to make learning more meaningful, memorable, and connected to life, and inspire students to do more than they think possible.

Winner of the Grawemeyer Award“In their brave search for depth in American high schools, scholars Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine suffered many disappointments…Undeterred, they spent 750 hours observing classes, interviewed more than 300 people, and produced the best book on high school dynamics I have ever read.”—Jay Mathews, Washington Post“A hopeful, easy-to-read narrative on what the best teachers do and what deep, engaging learning looks like for students. Grab this text if you’re looking for a celebration of what’s possible in American schools.”—Edutopia“This is the first and only book to depict not just the constraints on good teaching, but also how good teachers transcend them. A superb book in every way: timely, lively, and entertaining.”—Jonathan Zimmerman, University of PennsylvaniaWhat would it take to transform our high schools into places capable of supporting deep learning for students across a wide range of aptitudes and interests? To find out, Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine spent hundreds of hours observing and talking to teachers and students in and out of the classroom at thirty of the country’s most innovative schools. To their dismay, they discovered that deeper learning is more often the exception than the rule. And yet they found pockets of powerful learning at almost every school, often in extracurriculars but also in a few mold-breaking academic courses. So what must schools do to achieve the integrations that support deep learning: rigor with joy, precision with play, mastery with identity and creativity? In Search of Deeper Learning takes a deep dive into the state of our schools and lays out an inspiring new vision for American education.

Ted Kennedy and George W. Bush agreed on little, but united behind the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Passed in late 2001, it was hailed as a dramatic new departure in school reform. It would make the states set high standards, measure student progress, and hold failing schools accountable. A decade later, NCLB has been repudiated on both sides of the aisle. According to Jal Mehta, we should have seen it coming. Far from new, it was the same approach to school reform that Americans have tried before. In The Allure of Order, Mehta recounts a century of attempts at revitalizing public education, and puts forward a truly new agenda to reach this elusive goal. Not once, not twice, but three separate times-in the Progressive Era, the 1960s and '70s, and NCLB-reformers have hit upon the same idea for remaking schools. Over and over again, outsiders have been fascinated by the promise of scientific management and have attempted to apply principles of rational administration from above. Each of these movements started with high hopes and ambitious promises, but each gradually discovered that schooling is not easy to "order" from afar: policymakers are too far from schools to know what they need; teachers are resistant to top-down mandates; and the practice of good teaching is too complex for simple external standardization. The larger problem, Mehta argues, is that reformers have it backwards: they are trying to do on the back-end, through external accountability, what they should have done on the front-end: build a strong, skilled and expert profession. Our current pattern is to draw less than our most talented people into teaching, equip them with little relevant knowledge, train them minimally, put them in a weak welfare state, and then hold them accountable when they predictably do not achieve what we seek. What we want, Mehta argues, is the opposite approach which characterizes top-performing educational nations: attract strong candidates into teaching, develop relevant and usable knowledge, train teachers extensively in that knowledge, and support these efforts through a strong welfare state. The Allure of Order boldly challenges conventional wisdom with a sweeping, empirically rich account of the last century of education reform, and offers a new path forward for the century to come.

Worries about the quality of public schooling in America are not new. Present since the mid-nineteenth century, the issue became a perennial one after 1918, the year in which elementary school attendance became compulsory in every state. The Allure of Order traces the cyclical efforts to 'order' American schooling over the course of the twentieth century, from 1920s reform efforts up through No Child Left Behind and the current school accountability movement. The book explores why reformers from both the left and right have repeatedly placed such high hopes in these reforms and why teachers and schools have been unable to resist these external reformers. As he shows, the measurable has repeatedly crowded out the educationally meaningful, and reforms have never realized the hopes placed in them. In each reform effort, higher-status professionals have drawn from policies outside the educational arena and ridden roughshod over the teaching profession, which has remained, as he puts it, under-professionalized. Outside reformers looked to fix schools using Taylorist principles in the 1920s, Department of Defense metrics in the 1960s, and maxims from management gurus in our own era. In each case, a largely male administrative elite dictated to a largely feminized teaching profession that had little say over policy. In fact, the whole American educational sector was put together backwards: we draw less than our most able people to teaching, underprofessionalize the field, equip teachers with a weak knowledge base, put them in a highly challenging situation because of a comparatively weak welfare state, and then, when they don't achieve the results we seek, impose increasingly stringent regimes of external accountability. Mehta proposes that we do the reverse: draw more talented people into teaching, train them well, support their efforts through a more robust welfare state, and stimulate a cycle of increased trust and lessening control. This is the strategy of a number of the countries that outpace the United States on international assessments, and it is essentially the opposite of America's preferred strategy. Empirically rich and sweeping in scope, The Allure of Order will force anyone who cares about educational policy to re-examine his or her fundamental beliefs about the problems plaguing our schools.

The first study to examine violence in small towns and suburbs uses interviews with more than two hundred people to challenge the "loner theory" and illuminate the role of parents, communities, and schools in missing the warning signs.