How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century

Monday, October 5, 2009

American schools aren't exactly frozen in time, but considering the pace of change in other areas of life, our public schools tend to feel like throwbacks. Kids spend much of the day as their great-grandparents once did: sitting in rows, listening to teachers lecture, scribbling notes by hand, reading from textbooks that are out of date by the time they are printed. A yawning chasm (with an emphasis on yawning) separates the world inside the schoolhouse from the world outside.

For the past five years, the national conversation on education has focused on reading scores, math tests and closing the "achievement gap" between social classes. This is not a story about that conversation. This is a story about the big public conversation the nation is not having about education, the one that will ultimately determine not merely whether some fraction of our children get "left behind" but also whether an entire generation of kids will fail to make the grade in the global economy because they can't think their way through abstract problems, work in teams, distinguish good information from bad or speak a language other than English.

This week the conversation will burst onto the front page, when the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, a high-powered, bipartisan assembly of Education Secretaries, business leaders and a former Governor releases a blueprint for rethinking American education from pre-K to 12 and beyond to better prepare students to thrive in the global economy. While that report includes some controversial proposals, there is nonetheless a remarkable consensus among educators and business and policy leaders on one key conclusion: we need to bring what we teach and how we teach into the 21st century. Right now we're aiming too low. Competency in reading and math—the focus of so much No Child Left Behind testing—is the meager minimum. Scientific and technical skills are, likewise, utterly necessary but insufficient. Today's economy demands not only a high-level competence in the traditional academic disciplines but also what might be called 21st century skills. Here's what they are:

Knowing more about the world. Kids are global citizens now, whether they know it or not, and they need to behave that way. Mike Eskew, CEO of UPS, talks about needing workers who are "global trade literate, sensitive to foreign cultures, conversant in different languages"—not exactly strong points in the U.S., where fewer than half of high school students are enrolled in a foreign-language class and where the social-studies curriculum tends to fixate on U.S. history.

Thinking outside the box. Jobs in the new economy—the ones that won't get outsourced or automated— "put an enormous premium on creative and innovative skills, seeing patterns where other people see only chaos," says Marc Tucker, a lead author of the skills-commission report and president of the National Center on Education and the Economy. That's a problem for U.S. schools, which have become less daring in the back-to-basics climate of No Child Left Behind. Kids also must learn to think across disciplines, since that's where most new breakthroughs are made. It's interdisciplinary combinations—design and technology, mathematics and art—"that produce YouTube and Google," says Thomas Friedman, the best-selling author of The World Is Flat.

Becoming smarter about new sources of information. In an age of overflowing information and proliferating media, kids need to rapidly process what's coming at them and distinguish between what's reliable and what isn't. "It's important that students know how to manage it, interpret it, validate it, and how to act on it," says Dell executive Karen Bruett, who serves on the board of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a group of corporate and education leaders focused on upgrading American education.

Developing good people skills. EQ, or emotional intelligence, is as important as IQ for success in today's workplace. "Most innovations today involve large teams of people," says former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine. "We have to emphasize communication skills, the ability to work in teams and with people from different cultures."

Can our public schools, originally designed to educate workers for agrarian life and industrial-age factories, make the necessary shifts? The skills commission will argue that it's possible only if we add new depth and rigor to our curriculum and standardized exams, redeploy the dollars we spend on education, reshape the teaching force and reorganize who runs the schools. But without waiting for such a revolution, enterprising administrators around the country have begun to update their schools, often with ideas and support from local businesses. The state of Michigan, conceding that it can no longer count on the ailing auto industry to absorb its poorly educated and low-skilled workers, is retooling its high schools, instituting what are among the most rigorous graduation requirements in the nation. Elsewhere, organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Asia Society are pouring money and expertise into model programs to show the way.

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Attitude Adjustment

Sunday, August 30, 2009

When church bells rang out before dawn on a Saturday morning last winter, it was a sign that change was afoot in this hard-luck city. An even clearer sign was what the bells helped deliver: hundreds of sleepy teenagers tumbling from their warm beds to take the SAT.

Fewer than 300 students typically turned out for the college-admission test here. But on that December day, the number topped 1,300. Something was definitely up in a city that even its biggest boosters say tends to expect too little of itself.

“In many respects, Stockton has been a no-can-do town when it comes to education and the quality of life,” says Clem Lee, a former teacher who served on the school board and City Council before becoming an assistant to Superintendent Anthony Amato. “So those church bells were something new for us. It was like the community was telling the kids,...

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Education Groups Put Muscle Behind Health-Care Overhaul

Education organizations—including both national teachers’ unions—are putting their muscle and money behind an effort by President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats to revamp the nation’s health care system.

The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers both are supporting advertising and grassroots advocacy campaigns in favor of the overhaul effort, as lawmakers gather public input on the proposals in advance of a legislative push expected this fall.

Generally, the measures now on the table—a bill approved by three House committees and another being worked on by a Senate panel—wouldn’t have a direct impact on schools. One exception is a provision in both proposals that would seek to expand school-based health centers, which deliver health care in schools.

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Educating for liberty

The President's belief that education should be a vehicle to transmit values and strengthen our democracy is shared by the great majority of the American people. The Annual Gallup Poll on Education in recent years has indicated majorities in the range of 70 to 80 percent in favor of teaching values in the classroom. This desire by the public is also in accord with the Founding Fathers who believed that the unique republic they were attempting to build depended on a virtuous and ethical population.

Madison said, "To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea." Franklin was equally vehement. "Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.... Nothing is of more importance for the public weal, than to form and train up youth in wisdom and virtue."

Values in textbooks and classrooms

Unfortunately, an increasing number of studies indicate that over the years values have been emphasized less and less in American textbooks. Some of this decline in emphasis is no doubt due to the difficulty in reaching a consensus about certain values in our pluralistic society. Yet even values on which there is wide agreement, for example, honesty, courage, humility, kindness and genorisity, and patriotism have been eliminated from many texts. In addition, all too often, in the place of these traditional values, textbook material is heavily weighted toward the philosophy of "values clarification" that teaches all values are relative. Reaction to such material has been understandable outrage--not only by parents but among many teachers also.

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has expressed grave concern about the failure to pass on clear-cut values in the classroom. In order to counter the trend, AFT has developed supplementary material that teachers may use as a vehicle to transmit value lessons.

A review of the AFT supplementary curriculum material demonstrates the richness of our cultural heritage and shows how it can be used to transmit the values that sustain us. For example, the student is exposed to the story of Penelope's fidelity to Odysseus during his 20-year absence--a story illustrating the loyalty between a husband and wife. Another story told by E. W. Cassels recounts how a young soldier risks his own life to save his mortally wounded sibling only to have him die when they reach safety. Finally, there is the tale of Ruth and Naomi, in which Ruth, recently widowed, promises to stand with her mother-in-law, Naomi, by pledging "Thy people shall be my people, and thy God, my God." (Although American Civil Liberties Union hearts may flutter with fear at telling a story in the classroom from the Bible, considered as great literature, there is no constitutional prohibition that is violated.)

Diane Ravitch, in American Educator, Fall 1982, succinctly describes why this type of material is needed. "Education without values is clearly impossible, for the very act of teaching expresses belief in the value of learning and human progress.... If public schools did not teach values, did not accept some shared societal values, parents would not entrust them with their children.... The teaching of history, for example, requires value judgments. More parents would expect the teacher to make the judgment that Hitler and Stalin were oppressive tyrants and that Freedom and democracy are valued in our society as both means and ends."

Teaching the responsibilities of freedom

In addition to the failure to pass on a core set of values in our textbooks and classrooms, some philosophers and political scientists are becoming increasingly concerned about whehter we are following the advice of John Jay "to teach the rising generation to be free."

Philosopher Sidney Hook in his 1984 Jefferson Lecture, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, contended it was not enough to teach our children math and science skills. He said, "I am suggesting that it is just as important to sharpen the students' understanding of a free society, its responsibilities and opportunities, the burdens of dangers it faces. Instead of relying primarily on the sciences and humanities to inspire loyalty to the processes of self-government, we should seek to develop that loyalty directly through honest inquiry into the functioning of a democratic community, by learning its history, celebrating its heroes, and noting its achievements. Integral to the inquiry would be the intensive study of the theory and practice of contemporary totalitarian societies, especially the fate of human rights in those areas where Communism has triumphed."

Hook added, "I am not making the utopian claim that anything we do in the schools today will of itself redeem or rebuild our society. Continued institutional changes must be made to strengthen the stake of all groups in freedom. But of this I am convinced: In our pluralistic, multi-ethnic, uncoordinated society, no institutional changes of themselves will develop that bond of community we need to sustain our nation in times of crisis without a prolonged schooling in the history of free society, its martyrology, and its national tradition. In the decades of mass immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries that bond was largely forged by the American public school. What I propose is that our schools, reinforced by our colleges and universities, do the same job today in a more intelligent, critical and sophisticated way."

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