Ted Dintersmith

You know, so who's rewarded?

You know, if you're creative, if you're entrepreneurial, if you're bold, you know, if you're a proactive problem solver or opportunity creator, that's what we need.

And I admire schools.

I write about schools that where a teacher will do that or even a school will do that.

But it goes against a model that says we're going to define success with these high stakes math and reading scores.

Yeah, and what's being tested and how do we interpret the decline, right?

Let's talk about that.

But to the first point, I feel like it worked really well from 1893 to about 60 years ago.

So there was a glorious period where America's more or less sore, not for everybody, but as a nation, those were glory years.

You know, today, you go back to, you know, a Nation at Risk report, 1983, sounded alarm bells about our education system.

That sparked more test prep, more drills, more worksheets, No Child Left Behind in 2002, even more drills and worksheets, you know, Race to the Top, Take It Up Another Level.

It's been the all-consuming goal of our schools.

Get better math and reading scores, and as you say, they've been flat to down.

And so why is that happening?

I think it's happening because teachers are demoralized, kids are bored, and we've dumbed it down so that the reading is, you know, take on some boring passage and train for a multiple-choice question about signs of author bias.

So you look at the data on high school kids.

I mean, most high school kids hate to read.

It's like, how are you gonna get great reading scores with kids feeling like reading is about the same as cleaning the toilet or something?

And then with math, and I wrote this book, Aftermath, to go right at the issue, everything about the world of math has changed in the last 50 years.

And what I go back to, in high school I was the last wave of kids using the slide rule.