“Beyond Measure” Panel Discussion

In October of 2015, I participated in an event sponsored by the Princeton Public Library and the Princeton Public Schools that drew an audience of 425 to the John Witherspoon Middle School auditorium – the screening of a new documentary entitled “Beyond Measure.”  This film was the sequel to “The Race to Nowhere,” a documentary released a few years previously that had focused on the damaging effects of the college admissions frenzy on young people and had become a catalyst for community action across the country. “Beyond Measure” took the conversation to the next level by highlighting schools that have elected to “do education” differently. The film’s website posed these questions: “Rather than ask why our students fail to measure up, the film asks us to reconsider the greater purpose of education.  What if our education system valued personal growth over test scores? Encouraged passion over rankings? What if we decided that the purpose of school was not the transmission of facts or formulas, but the transformation of every student?”

Because Princeton Friends School is known in the broader community for “doing education differently,” I was invited to appear on a panel of respondents to the film. The other panelists were Steve Cochrane, superintendent of the Princeton Public Schools, and Joel Hammon, co-founder of the Princeton Learning Cooperative, an “un-school” serving students for whom traditional high school doesn’t work.  Asked to reflect on how the messages of the film resonated with our understanding of the state of our schools, I responded with these remarks.