This week’s digest features stories on how putting students at the center transforms the learning experience. Whether it’s through capstone projects on topics selected by students, or giving students real-world work experience that is related to their interests, giving students the reins can make a difference.

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This week’s digest examines why deeper learning is especially important in a world where any fact is available from Google, highlights the relationship between art and math, and showcases an assessment system that supports deeper learning.

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Did you catch the Senate education committee’s hearing on the quality of the plans that states are developing under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) on October 3?

We’ve got a post-game, behind-the-scenes video with two of the four witnesses, New Mexico Public Education Secretary Christopher Ruszkowski and Executive Director of Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy David Steiner.

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The film For Ahkeem is the coming-of-age story of Daje Shelton, a seventeen-year-old African American girl from north St. Louis, Missouri. Expelled from her public high school, Shelton is sent to the court-supervised Innovative Concept Academy (ICA), which offers her a last chance to earn a high school diploma. The film follows Shelton for two years, as she struggles to maintain focus in school, attends the funerals of friends killed around her, navigates a loving-but-tumultuous relationship with her mother, and falls in love with a classmate named Antonio. As her boyfriend is drawn into the criminal justice system and events in nearby Ferguson, Missouri, shine a national spotlight on racial bias and poor community-police relationships, Shelton learns that she is pregnant and must contend with the reality of raising a young African American boy.

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Chicago ninth graders who earn As and Bs experience positive academic outcomes far beyond landing on the school honor roll. Freshmen who earn higher grades are more likely to graduate from high school, enroll in college, and continue their college education for a second year. Furthermore, students’ grades during the first year of high school predict the outcomes of these important academic milestones better than do their test scores, according to a new report from the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research (the Consortium). Unfortunately, few ninth graders are earning top marks. In 2013, only half of Chicago’s ninth graders ended their year with an A or B grade point average (GPA), with students of color far less likely to earn top marks than their white peers.

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This week’s digest features highlights from a deeper learning gathering in Detroit, new data on student success in New Tech Network schools, a story on student-centered learning, an upcoming webinar on using Title I funds for deeper learning, and more.

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Last week was one of the most rejuvenating weeks I have experienced in a long time; it began in Detroit, Michigan, and finished in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. Despite great differences between the two in cultures and contexts, I saw a steady and strong commitment to improving equity in education despite significant hardships that educators and advocates face.

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This month, as students across the country return to the classroom, those in Silver Lake Unified School District (USD 372) in Kansas will find technology and resources that were not available previously. Their computer lab has been transformed into a print shop where students can participate in project-based learning with the help of predictable and reliable Wi-Fi, changes made possible by the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC’s) E-rate Modernization Order, adopted in 2014 and implemented in 2015.

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This week’s digest features a new set of toolkits to deepen learning for students, an upcoming deeper learning webinar series, a look at the connection between military values and deeper learning, and the importance of sharing learning.

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Nearly a century ago, civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois was asked about the system of education in the United States. He remarked, “Education must not simply teach work—it must teach life.” With his choice of words, Du Bois demonstrated what education leaders and practitioners, policymakers, and researchers now are coalescing their efforts around—creating an education system that prepares students for college, career, and life in the twenty-first century and that builds success of the individual, the community, and overall society. One way this body of work has emerged is called deeper learning.

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