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children like Jeremy struggle because they don't get these sorts of opportunities in school. And all too often they don't have the offerings in their own lives to compensate.

      Sorting

As if this weren't bad enough, the current education system was built to rank and sort students out of the system at various intervals. It makes judgments about the capacity of students before they have had a fair chance to prove themselves.

      The traditional grading system doesn't exist to convey what a student knows and can do. The grades are there to rank students—and sort them out of certain life paths. This didn't cripple an individual when the economy offered well-paying jobs for those who hadn't succeeded in school. But that no longer describes today's economy.

      When Jeremy doesn't turn in his homework because he doesn't have a structure at home conducive to reminding him—and his school hasn't explicitly helped him develop his own self-direction and executive function skills—his grade is docked. And he can't change that because the grade is designed to label him so that schools know in which classes he should and shouldn't be enrolled.

      Summative and standardized tests similarly aren't used to help students and teachers figure out how to make progress. They're used to help sort students into different pathways.

      Tests aren't inherently bad. They are critical to learning. But when they are used as an autopsy on a student, as opposed to an actionable moment, they become counterproductive. If Jeremy developed a misconception in an earlier grade because he lacked the background knowledge to make sense of a concept that is critical to a new lesson he's tackling in the fifth grade, his lack of understanding will show up on a test. The implications will haunt him.

      These structures of our schools are built from a historical legacy of sorting students into different careers, from factory-line workers to managers to leaders. They stem from a scarcity mentality—that there are only a few select opportunities such that we must select the few students who will benefit from them.

This zero-sum mindset—that for every winner there must be a loser—means that by age 18, before people have lived most of their lives, we have labeled the vast majority of students and signaled to many that they aren't good enough for certain pathways or that they are “below” others.

      Although this might be easier administratively than the alternative, it is devastating. This overlooks talent that could be developed. And it ignores that so much of our society—like capitalism, when it works properly—is built on a positive-sum mindset. Schooling and its scarcity mindset are anomalies today.

      As Todd Rose, author of The End of Average, told us on our Class Disrupted podcast, the opposite of a zero-sum game is a positive-sum one in which the pie grows larger as individuals achieve success. One of Adam Smith's central insights in the 1700s, Rose said, is that “the mercantilist idea of zero-sum economies was just fatally wrong” and that society should instead create the correct conditions in which self-interest could create positive-sum outcomes. A big benefit from moving to a positive-sum system is that instead of competing to be the best—as in a zero-sum game—you compete to be unique.

      “The last thing you want to do is be competing with some other people on the exact same thing. It limits you. It limits your value,” Rose said. “[Our research shows that trying to be unique] translates into much higher life satisfaction.”

That's the opposite of those who compete to be their best, “in which even higher levels of achievement do not correlate with higher life satisfaction or happiness. So there's something about understanding how to compete, to be unique and achieving on that uniqueness. That matters both for personal fulfillment and the life I want to live, but also ultimately my greatest contribution to society.”⁵

      Competition can be good. Social comparisons can help an individual realize certain things are possible that they never otherwise would have imagined. But when we narrow the definition of life success and only rank and value people on a uniform and narrow dimension, competition is problematic. Competition is also a problem when we declare prematurely that the game is over.

That's because people don't learn in a linear way all on the same path and at the same pace. People develop at different rates. They have different strengths and weaknesses, which means they have what some call “jagged profiles.” That's because students have different working memory and cognitive capacities, background knowledge, social and emotional learning states, and contexts.⁶ Customizing is critical to meet this reality and help every child fulfill their human potential. It's vital that we do not sort students out of a pathway too soon.

      An anecdote that played out in California several years ago shows just how flawed this system is—and how the Jeremys of the world could benefit if we would just change the assumptions.

      At Santa Rita Elementary School in the Los Altos School District in California, a suburban school in an affluent area of California, a scene unfolded in 2010 not too different from scenes in schools around the country. A fifth-grade student, “Jack” (his name has been changed to protect his identity), started the year at the bottom of his class in math. He struggled to keep up and considered himself one of those kids who would just never quite “get it.” In a typical school, he would have been tracked and placed in the bottom math group—because the system is built to sort, not support, students. That would have meant that he would not have taken algebra until high school, which would have negatively impacted his college and career choices.

      But Jack's story took a less familiar turn. His school transformed his class into a blended-learning environment in which students not only learned in person but also used some online learning. After 70 days of using Khan Academy's online math tutorials and exercises for a portion of his math three to four days a week, Jack's learning started accelerating. He went from a student who was well below grade level to one who was working on material well above grade level.

Of importance wasn't just the use of technology to personalize Jack's learning, but that his class rejected a fundamental and implicit assumption in today's schooling model: that just because Jack started the year behind his peers, the school should judge him as a slow learner and place him in a group out of which he couldn't move. Fixed grouping of children by perceived ability as measured by point-in-time tests and grades narrows opportunities.

      What blended learning looked like in Santa Rita:

       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7lttowsC0Y

      What Santa Rita looks like today:

       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gU6KRKHndJI

      It's Not Just Bad for the Jeremys of the World

      People's typical perception is that the schooling system won't change because those who come from well-off families benefit from it. Although there's some truth to that, the system doesn't work well for students from privileged backgrounds either.

      For students like Julia, who has lots of resources outside of school, we leave a lot to chance. How is an elementary school student with busy parents to know what digital resources to trust or which ones are reliable or safe? Social media and search engines expose individuals to lots of questionable information.

      A long summer break probably doesn't work for Julia. She crams a bunch of her interests into the break instead of spreading them throughout the year. Why is this negative? Instead of modeling a balanced lifestyle, it pits academics, athletics, arts, and other areas of passion against each other.

It also doesn't work for her busy parents as they figure out in which camps to enroll Julia and how to make the schedules work with their demanding

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