Most Likely to Succeed INTRODUCTION This book is a product of an unlikely collaboration that began with a breakfast in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on a snowy day in early 2012. We come from very different worlds. Tony Wagner has spent his career in the world of education. He taught English for more than a decade, ran a school, got a doctorate from Harvard''s Graduate School of Education, started an education-related nonprofit, is a frequent keynote speaker at major conferences around the world, and has written five books on education. His body of work points the way toward a completely reimagined education system, one optimized for a world of innovation and the complexities of twenty-first-century citizenship. His two most recent books, The Global Achievement Gap and Creating Innovators, have sold almost a quarter of a million copies, received widespread critical acclaim, and have been translated into more than ten languages. Ted Dintersmith spent his career in the world of technology and innovation. He got his PhD in Engineering from Stanford and then ran a start-up making the semiconductors that helped enable the digital revolution.

The majority of his career has been in the field of venture capital, as a senior partner with one of the nation''s top-tier early-stage venture firms, Charles River Ventures. He''s been on the board of directors of the National Venture Capital Association, championed their national competitiveness initiative, and was ranked by Business 2.0 as the top-performing venture capitalist in the United States during the period 1995-1999. A few years ago, Ted began directing more of his focus toward education. As a father of two school-aged children, he was concerned by what he saw as a disconnect between schools and an increasingly innovative world. He knew that rapid advances in innovation were eliminating traditional jobs from the economy. Workers performing routinized tasks were becoming an endangered species. Companies wanted to hire creative problem-solvers able to continually invent ways to add value to their organizations, but found few of them graduating from our schools.

Alarmingly, the schools he visited seemed intent on crushing the creativity out of students-erasing the very skills that would have allowed them to thrive. Ted began meeting with education experts to learn more. These meetings were highly informative, but they often ended with, "Well, the person you really need to meet is Tony Wagner." After reading Tony''s books, Ted sent him a blind email, asking him to get together on one of Ted''s upcoming trips to Boston. Tony agreed, and a one-hour breakfast turned into a three-hour discussion about how our obsolete education system was stymieing the innovation crucial to success in today''s economy. By the end of the breakfast, the two of us found that, despite vast differences in professional backgrounds, we shared convictions that could be distilled to these points: - Rapid advances in innovation are eliminating structured routine jobs from our economy, leaving millions of young Americans at risk; - The critical skills young adults need in the twenty-first century for careers in the world of innovation, and for responsible citizenship, are the very skills the school years eviscerate; - The education policies our country is pursuing to "fix" schools only serve to harm students and disillusion teachers; - While education credentials were historically aligned with competencies that mattered, they have become prohibitively expensive, emotionally damaging, and disconnected from anything essential; - Unless we completely reimagine school, the growing divide between the haves and have-nots will threaten to rip civil society apart; and, - We have an urgent obligation to speak out, since we know what our education system needs to do to give every student a fighting chance in life. That initial three-hour breakfast conversation subsequently blossomed into a daily collaboration. The two of us have worked closely with award-winning documentarian Greg Whiteley on a feature-length film on education, Most Likely to Succeed, which premiered at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival in January 2015.

The documentary has served as the foundation for a broad and ambitious initiative we are launching to help schools move forward. Together, the documentary, the outreach initiative, and this book provide a framework for reimagining school. What Mattered to You When we talk to people, we always find it revealing to inquire about their school experiences; we''ve all been students. For starters, we thought it might help if we provide a bit of context on our own school experiences. Tony hated school, had average SATs, and went to two nondescript colleges before finally earning his BA degree at what was then one of the most experimental (but equally anonymous) undergraduate programs in the country. He went on to earn a Master of Arts in Teaching and a Doctorate in Education at Harvard University, where he found himself to be a complete outlier. While at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Tony was almost constantly at odds with the mainstream of education, and he developed his views despite what was covered in classrooms. Tony is an example of someone who survived the education system and went on to have a successful career as an author, speaker, and consultant.

And he''ll be the first to admit that a doctorate from Harvard has a sort of "Wizard of Oz" benefit-the credential is important largely because everyone thinks it''s important. Ted has an innate ability to do simple math problems quickly. While this skill is of limited value in life, it was his best friend in school. He never missed a point on a standardized math test, and excelled at his math and physics courses. Only when he went to Stanford for graduate school did he realize that what is required to be a great physicist has almost nothing to do with what is required to be a great physics student. Fortunately for his career prospects, after earning an MS in Applied Physics and a PhD in Engineering from Stanford University, he switched out of physics into technology and innovation, where he experienced considerable success. He is now an active education philanthropist, providing guidance and funding to several high-potential organizations seeking to move education into the twenty-first century. The authors went to school in the 1960s and ''70s, a period that stands in stark contrast to today''s pressure-packed school years.

Back then, there was dramatically less competition to get into colleges. The concept of test preparation wasn''t on the radar screen. Kids didn''t do activities simply for the sake of building the perfect college application. Instead, they had ample time in their childhoods to explore, create, and develop passions. And no matter what your education level was when you entered the workforce, entry-level jobs were relatively easy to secure. For children in America today, those days are long gone. Whether over the dinner table or in large auditoriums, we have found it invaluable in setting the tone for a discussion about education to ask participants to reflect on their school years. Specifically, we ask them to describe what aspects of their education had a profound positive impact on them: experiences in and out of the classroom, teachers, mentors, coaches, et cetera.

The sharing of these results is revealing, and it gets everyone energized to think hard about what really matters in education. We''d like to encourage you to take a few minutes to reflect on the most transformational aspects of your education-experiences that took place either inside or outside the classroom. You can jot them down on a piece of paper or in the margin of this book (assuming it''s not an e-book!). We''ve asked this question to thousands of people and received a wide range of responses. People describe participating in an after-school club; leading a committee; designing and completing an ambitious project; being inspired by a teacher with an infectious love for a given field; hearing from an adult who believed in them; practicing and playing on an athletic team; failing at something and recovering. Not a single person we''ve asked has responded, "Well, there was a lecture class with multiple-choice quizzes that really changed me." In case you''re curious, here''s who each of us would like to thank: Tony: I changed schools in the twelfth grade, and sadly I cannot recall the name of the teacher who made the greatest difference for me in high school. I''ve tried to track him down, but the school I attended then has since closed its doors.

I was a late starter as a reader, but I grew to love the beauty and evocativeness of words and stories. I devoured great novels and began writing stories of my own in ninth grade. I wanted to be a novelist. Unfortunately, my English teachers throughout high school were of no help. To the extent that we received any classroom "instruction" in writing, it consisted of lessons in grammar-subject-verb agreement, the proper use of commas, dangling participles, split infinitives, and so on. The few papers my teachers assigned were usually essays, where the purpose of the paper was to repeat the teacher''s interpretation of the book we''d "discussed" in class. (The teachers did all the talking!) And they''d spend an inordinate amount of time spilling red ink all over our papers. We, like most students today, would glance at t.