President Obama has a really bad idea

President Obama recently visited a school that "relies 100 percent on project-based learning." Not just visited, lauded.

Sigh.

Apparently the White House is launching a "High School Redesign" initiative, which appears to be supported by the National Governors Association and the National Association of State Boards of Education:

Today's global economy requires new approaches to teaching and learning in America's high schools to foster problem solving and analysis, to support creativity and collaboration, and to connect student learning directly to the real world. Students learn best when they are engaged in complex projects and tasks aligned with their interests and when they work with others through practical examples and case studies that engage them in rigorous academics and in the application of knowledge.
Fact Sheet: Redesigning America's High Schools

Manor New Technology High School, a 100% project-based school, is cited as one of five Promising Examples of Redesigned High Schools.

From the President's speech:

• at Manor a history teacher might get together with a math teacher and develop a project about the impact of castles on world history and the engineering behind building castles
• or a group of students might be in charge of putting together a multimedia presentation about the moral dilemmas in literature as applied to WWII
• folks who use mathematical equations to build musical instruments
• tests on bungee jumping with rubber bands and weights
• robots that were being built
• all kinds of great stuff
• there's a lot of hands-on learning here
• part of what makes this place special is that there's all this integration, various subjects and actual projects, and young people doing and not just sitting there listening
• I could not be prouder of what's happening here at Manor

AND SEE:
Help Desk: Project-Based Learning
High School Redesign Gets Presidential Lift
Smartbrief on How to Make Project-Based Learning Work
Tips for Transitioning to Project-Based Learning
Manor New Technology High School

The founder, chairman, and CEO of Netflix has a really bad idea
Larry Summers has a really bad idea
David Brooks has a really bad idea
David Brooks has a really bad idea, part 2
All is forgiven.

The good news

help desk: project based learning

I'm posting this email without the writer's name:

My local school district is talking about reinventing the high school around a project-based learning model. I don't know much about this stuff, but I'm concerned about some of the things I'm hearing. Are you aware of any scholarly research that's been done on PBL? There will be some public forums coming up soon, and I'd like to have some hard evidence (one way or the other) to rely on. I just recently found your blog, so perhaps you've written something on PBL that you could recommend as well?

That reminds me: I never got around to writing a post about what happened in Holland when the public schools there moved wholesale to integrated, interdisciplinary, project-based learning.

People hated it. Hated it. People hated it so much they pulled their kids out of the schools and put them in the Gymnasium. I don't know what the Gymnasium are, but I do know that they are in some way associated with Erasmus and that students attending Gymnasium learn Latin and Greek. 

We heard this story from a professor friend of Ed's, who said her sister had attended Gymnasium and had read Homer in the original Greek by the time she was in 8th grade. As I recall.

Ed's friend said so many people pulled their kids out of the project schools that they finally had to drop the project method and go back to teaching subjects.

I cherish that story.