I Got Schooled: The unlikely story of how a moonlighting movie maker learned the five keys to closing America’s education gap
-M. Night Shyamalan
In this vital book, the famed filmmaker tells how his passion for education reform led him to learn that there are five tested, indispensable keys to transforming America’s underperforming schools.
Famed director M. Night Shyamalan has long had a serious interest in education. The foundation he and his wife started once gave college scholarships to promising inner-city students, but Shyamalan realized that these scholarships did nothing to improve education for all the other students in under-performing schools. When he learned that some schools were succeeding with similar student populations, he traveled across the country to find out how they did this and whether these schools had something in common. He eventually learned that there are five keys to closing America’s achievement gap. But just as we must do several things to maintain good health— eat the right foods, exercise regularly, get a good night’s sleep—so too must we use all five keys to turn around our lowest-performing schools.
These five keys are used by all the schools that are succeeding, and no schools are succeeding without them. Before he discovered them, Shyamalan investigated some popular reform ideas that proved to be dead ends, such as smaller class size, truculent unions, and merit pay for teachers. He found that the biggest obstacle to school reform is cognitive biases: too many would-be reformers have committed themselves to false solutions.
This is a deeply personal book by an unbiased observer determined to find out what works and why so that we as a nation can fulfill our obligation to give every student an opportunity for a good education.
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I don’t read non-fiction very often, but when I do, I choose topics that interest me. At the time I read this book, my sister was the librarian of the rural K-8 school (graduating classes were under 30 students) she and I attended as children and a boy from her class is the principal. That little school has changed considerably since we attended and it now has a charter school attached to it. I was interested in the differences between the school I remembered, the school while my sister was the librarian and I was reading this book and the differences between both of those versions of our old school and the charter school there now. I enjoyed sharing what I learned in this book with my sister and she recommended the book to her colleagues at our old school. When I began reading, I just wanted to know about “the five things” and didn’t think I’d read the whole book - but as I started reading, it pulled me in. I found it interesting to learn about his motivation and how he went about gathering this information and then making organized sense of it. He did a good job explaining statistical concepts in a straightforward and easy-to-understand format. I hope you will pick this book up and give it a read, too.
The Five Keys:
Remove ineffective teachers. High quality instructional leadership.
Frequent student feedback (w/ feedback response processes).
Smaller schools.
Increased instructional hours (during the year AND summer school).
The above factors are extremely well known in the education community. The fact they are not all widely used speaks more to systemic dysfunction than a lack of knowledge. Overall, I felt he overgeneralized the ‘solution’ when he detailed how easy and doable he believes the fix is for the entire national education system, because I don’t believe it can be *snaps fingers* that simple to change decades of traditional schooling. Still, as a thought-provoking read about helping to improve our school system so all students can have a truly fair shot at succeeding? I believe it deserves a shot and I highly recommend this book.
Heidi Y.