Most Likely to Succeed Summary

In Most Likely to Succeed, education scholar Tony Wagner and entrepreneur Ted Dintersmith argue that American schools remain organized around an obsolete model of learning. Their book grew out of Dintersmith's experience producing the documentary Most Likely to Succeed, which followed students and teachers at High Tech High, a project-based charter school in San Diego. Wagner and Dintersmith contrast that setting with conventional classrooms obsessed with content coverage, standardized testing, and credit accumulation—habits they trace to the industrial era and to reforms like No Child Left Behind and the Common Core. The authors build their case around a set of school "habits" they label obsolete and an alternative "innovation mindset" they believe students actually need. They identify skills such as critical thinking, communication, collaboration, creativity, and character, and argue that these are best developed through interdisciplinary, student-driven projects rather than lectures and worksheets. The book is organized into chapters that examine why the current system persists, what a genuinely engaging classroom looks like, how colleges and employers reinforce outdated metrics, and what changes in curriculum, assessment, and teacher preparation would be required to shift course. It also profiles educators, parents, and students who have experimented with alternatives, and critiques the mismatch between what schools reward and what adult life demands. Wagner and Dintersmith are blunt about the stakes: they claim that a system optimized for compliance and test scores leaves many graduates unprepared for a rapidly changing economy and for democratic citizenship. Rather than offering a step-by-step program, the book functions as a manifesto and a provocation, urging parents, teachers, and policymakers to rethink what success in school should mean. Their central claim is that schooling should cultivate curiosity, purpose, and the ability to solve unfamiliar problems—capacities they say are too often suppressed by the very structures meant to measure achievement.