They also express concern that students without the deep and broad background knowledge and fluency that affluent children generally absorb from their homes and communities first need to develop that core knowledge before they can benefit from a collaborative, project-based approach.

Research on both inequality across schools and tracking within schools has suggested that students in more affluent schools and top tracks are given the kind of problem-solving education that befits the future managerial class, whereas students in lower tracks and higher-poverty schools are given the kind of rule-following tasks that mirror much of factory and other working-class work.”

When most of our current pedagogical practices were developed more than a century ago, the essential economic purpose of public schools was to produce industrial workers who were fast and reliable when assigned repetitive mechanical or clerical tasks. In this century, deeper-learning proponents argue, the job market requires a very different set of skills, one that our current educational system is not configured to help students develop: the ability to work in teams, to present ideas to a group, to write effectively, to think deeply and analytically about problems, to take information and techniques learned in one context and adapt them to a new and unfamiliar problem or situation.

student-centered learning

But students in schools serving mostly low-income children were almost all (91 percent) in classrooms marked by basic, uninteresting teaching.

And while the Science authors found instruction to be basic and repetitive even in American schools with a mostly middle-class or upper-middle-class student population, they found that the situation was considerably worse in schools that enrolled a lot of low-income children.

Pianta’s researchers found that in almost every school they observed, the instruction students received was repetitive and undemanding, limited mostly to the endless practice of basic skills.

21. Challenge