What's Become Clear

When we talk about school change there is always a discussion about preparing students for college. There is no doubt that in the 21st century those people who are the most successful tend to be those with the highest level of education. But not all college degrees are highly correlated with being successful in the 21st century.

I’ve been giving this a lot of thought and in fact later this week I’m going to be visiting with my friend Dr. Jackie Vietti, at Butler Community College to help me make sense of the whole question of college ready. You see, I can give you a whole pile of evidence that we are doing poorly when it comes to preparing kids for college, and that even many of those who make it through college, don’t get jobs that are high paying enough to pay off their college loans. So I am suffering from cognitive dissonance on this issue.

So I’ll tell you what I think I believe up to this point. I’m looking at college degrees from two perspectives. One, is the degree in high demand in society today; and two, is it a high skill degree? I’m still compiling a list of college degrees that I believe are high demand and high skill degrees. In this category I would put engineering degrees, many health science related degrees such as nursing, and some IT degrees. But I also put many two year technical degree, and even some industry certification programs. I’m sure there are others, so if you have some examples send them to me.

So that begs the question, are there some high skill low demand degrees? I think that some degrees in the sciences may fit this category; physics, biology, and chemistry. But I’m not completely sure of this.

And as I was thinking further about these categories I started to wonder if there are high demand and low skill degrees. I think there used to be, but I don’t think there are anymore. I think that liberal arts degrees used to be high demand and low skill. I think now liberal arts degrees are low skill and low demand.

when I graduated from college almost 40 years ago a liberal arts degree, like all college degrees, was the ticket to a good job. Today, that just isn’t true. Graduates with liberal arts degrees are perfectly prepared to go on to graduate school, but the jobs available for most of these degrees are for the most part low skill and sadly, low pay.

And therein lies one of our big problems. All of our K-12 core curriculum, and all of our gen ed courses in post secondary institutions are liberal arts courses. Which means we are spending huge amounts of our time, our most precious educational resource, preparing kids in low skill low demand areas, which the students see as boring and irrelevant. Perhaps it’s time as we talk about school change to begin to deal with the sacred cow of education … the liberal arts degree. – Steve Wyckoff

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There is a growing conversation about the need for national standards. But do we need national standards? And what if they pick the wrong standards? I just finished Howard Gardner’s new book, Five Minds For The Future, and as always Dr. Gardner did a wonderful job. But, everything Dr. Gardner talked about, in terms of preparing high school kids, was aimed at preparing them for college. And the vast majority of our kids will not attend a four-year college and complete a degree.

In fact, only about 25% of our population ever finishes a bachelors degree. And, as I’ve stated before, more than 75% of our population will engage in work as adults that does not require a college degree. Less than a third of recent graduates at the University of Kansas obtained employment that required the degree they earned while at the University of Kansas.

So when we talk about national standards I can guarantee you that they will be designed to prepare every student to be admitted to a four-year liberal arts college. That’s problem number one. Problem number two is our students, in the 21st century, see those standards as boring and irrelevant.

Ask anyone, “If you ask high school kids to describe school in one word, what word would they choose?” The answer is almost universal, boring.

But we continue down this path as if establishing national standards that everyone has to follow will magically transform our students into highly engaged, well-educated, productive 21st-century citizens. It’s not going to happen.

We should be running 50 different experiments, one in each state, to see how best to prepare our students for the 21st century. How much evidence do we have to compile that centrally controlled bureaucracies are inefficient and ineffective before we unshackle schools to do its best for kids? -  Steve Wyckoff

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Compliance or engagement, which is most important? I am often concerned when educators talk about engagement that they are actually talking about compliance. Let me give you an example. I’ve seen several surveys that purport to measure engagement but when you look at what they measure they talk about students who get to class on time, students who turn in their homework, students who don’t miss school, and students to do their homework. To me those are all issues of compliance, students are doing what they’re told, when they are told, and how they are told.

Engagement on the other hand is much more about students that are so involved in what they’re doing that they lose track of time. So involved that they spend evenings and weekends working on schoolwork, not because they’re required to but because they want to.

But the most important issue around compliance and engagement is how well our students being prepared for their future. Students who are compliant are being perfectly prepared for algorithmic jobs. Those are the jobs that have established processes and procedures that lead to a defined correct outcome. That’s exactly what we prepare kids for in schools. Look at standardized tests, we want students to know exactly the right steps to come up with exactly the right answer. Algorithmic.

On the other hand, those jobs that don’t have established processes and procedures that don’t lead to one correct outcome make up about 70% of the new jobs being created in America. Yet in most schools little or no time  is spent with students in preparation for this heuristic types of work. Again, if you look at standardized tests they in no way reflect heuristic thinking.

So which is important compliance or engagement? Obviously the answer is engagement. Yet it’s not what we’re doing in schools. If we are going to prepare students for the 21st century  it’s important that they become self-directed, and problem solvers. And I don’t mean problems that have a well-defined process with one correct answer. For our students, having an educational system that is algorithmic by nature is boring and irrelevant. One of the keys to school change will be to quit focusing on standardized tests and instead preparing our kids for their future. That will mean making the educational experience heuristics in nature, not algorithmic. – Steve Wyckoff

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Every school district has a mission statement, they’re all pretty much the same. In some way they all talk about preparing students to be productive members of society. But in spite of the fact that society has changed dramatically not just over the last hundred years but in the last 15 years, schools are doing pretty much the same things they’ve done for my entire life, and that’s a long time.

I think that the three most important things that schools try to accomplish, from their perspective, are:

1. Custodial care … make sure that we provide a place for every child to be in a safe secure environment.

2. Raise standardized test scores …  the growing emphasis on standardized test scores has almost every school obsessively focused on raising their standardized test scores.

3. Cover the content required by the Board of Regents for students to get into a four-year colleges … I’ve written many times about the core curriculum but as obsessive as we are about standardized test scores, we are even more obsessed with covering the content mandated by the Board of Regents, and in a manner mandated by the Board of Regents.

I’ve been spending time trying to make sense of this and thinking about what I believe the mission of schools should be. In fact I agree for the most part with the mission statements that schools have. The reality is they rarely have their systems aligned with accomplishing their mission. With that in mind three things that I believe are the most important for schools to try to accomplish are:

1. Custodial care … yes, it’s the same number one is traditional schools but I do think it’s important. I think it may look a lot different in that a safe and secure environment is necessary, but may not occur within the walls of the school.

2. A love for learning … okay, so I stole this one from W. Edwards Deming. Deming is one of the great thinkers of our time and he said if schools did nothing but send every student out into the world loving to learn that most of our issues could be dealt with more effectively. I agree completely. Our students come to school not even intending to learn, let alone developing a love for learning. They most often described high school as boring and irrelevant.

3. Self-directed … I believe that if kids love learning and are self-directed in their learning, whatever they need to learn to do to be successful, they will learn. In addition on top of learning they will learn how to do something with what they’ve learned. I would observe that over all the years that I’ve been involved with hiring and watching new employees integrate into the organization, the single greatest characteristic that they can have in the workplace is to be self-directed.

Tell me what you think I’d love to know your opinion. And to be honest my three most important areas of accomplishment are not written in stone, so I could be persuaded of others.

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I’ve given a lot of thought to the standardized test phenomenon. How is it that so many well-intentioned and highly intelligent people can have so much faith in such a detrimental process? I think I might have at least part of the puzzle figured out. We’ve been using standardized tests for decades, and educators through those decades have tried to convince policymakers and the public alike what a great job we’re doing by sharing our standardized test scores.

And we’ve convinced the public and policymakers how important they are. The problem is we liked our test scores when we could pick and choose which scores to report. Now that we have to report the scores of all kids they’re not, in our minds, nearly as representative of our efforts and success as they were when we only reported the best scores.

But I think the bigger issue is we’ve confused what standardized test scores represent to us. Over the years we became aware that bright, well-educated, highly successful students, did very well on standardized tests. We interpreted that to mean that if you have high standardized test scores you will be bright, well-educated, and highly successful. Our reaction as educators, and the reaction of policymakers was to say that if we had more and more kids obtaining high scorers on standardized test they two would be bright, well-educated, highly successful.

But the relationship is not causal, it’s correlational. And on top of that we’ve reversed the relationship:

Highly successful =  high test scores

THEREFORE …

High test scores =  well-educated

That appears to be the logic that all of us, educators and policymakers alike, seem to be following. Yet when I looked at the issue in these terms I didn’t believe it at all. We’re proving that we can raise test scores but there is a growing sense that our kids are less well educated.  And that doesn’t even begin to address the issue of what “well-educated” means!

We’ve approached the evidence produced by standardized tests as if the relationship between the test and student success is causal. But in reality there is simply a correlational relationship between kids who are successful and their scores on standardized tests.

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Drive by Dan Pink

One of the biggest issues that we face in education is that we are in adequately preparing our kids for their future. I recently finished Dan pink’s new book Drive, and sure enough more evidence that we’re not preparing our kids for the 21st century.

Let me explain. In his book he talks about two kinds of work. The first, algorithmic, “are those tasks in which you follow a set of established instruction down to a single pathway to one conclusion.” The second, heuristic, are  “tasks that are just the opposite. Because no algorithm exists for it, you have to experiment with possibilities and devise a novel solution.” Now, which of those most sound like school. You got it, the vast majority of the work done by our kids in school is algorithmic. In fact, the measure that the public, well politicians anyway, love is the standardized test. Most of which measure how well the student follows established instructions down a single pathway to one conclusion.

Interestingly, those activities in school that are most algorithmic are in our beloved core curriculum. Which by the way happen to be the classes that kids see as the most boring and irrelevant. On the other hand, those activities   which are the most  heuristic are found in the co-curricular courses, and extracurricular activities. Drama, band, art, newspaper, yearbook, athletics … you get the picture.

But here’s the kicker, again from Pink’s book, “McKinsey & Co. estimates that in the United States, only 30% of job growth now comes from algorithmic work, while 70% comes from heuristic work.” He goes on, “A key reason routine work can be outsourced or automated; artistic, empathic, nonroutine, work generally cannot.”

One of my favorite educational researchers Larry Lezotte always said, “What gets measured gets taught.”  Well, what we’re measuring in schools is the algorithmic stuff, that means that it will get taught! So we are doing a great job spending most of our time making sure that students acquire the skills and behaviors that are most likely to be outsourced to other countries.

What do you think? Leave me a comment.

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You read that right, we are cursed by our core curriculum. Did you know that our core curriculum is over 115 years old? Did you know that it was created to make life easier on universities in 1892 America? Did you know that the president of Harvard University in 1892, Charles Elliott, formed the Committee of 10 to define the high school curriculum?

Take a few minutes and read the final report from the committee of 10 and you’ll be astounded. I put together PowerPoint slides that outline the curriculum designed by the Committee of 10, who completed their work in 1894. I’ve shown the slides often to audiences and asked them what it represents. In Kansas, where I reside, it is often identified as the Regents curriculum. The high school curriculum required of high school students in Kansas to gain admission to the six regents universities. I’ve shown the slides around the country with similar results.

And yes it’s 115 years old. And it needs to be questioned, and changed. Not only is it not appropriate for a student being prepared to be a productive member of the 21st century society, it isn’t even appropriate for preparing a student to go to Harvard University in the 21st century. That’s because the curriculum was designed to prepare kids to go Harvard University in 1894 and Harvard University has changed so dramatically since 1894 that students taking the curriculum now are ill-prepared.

In an age of customization and individualization a curriculum that is 115 years old is boring and irrelevant to the vast majority of our students in high school. When we talk about school reform and school change you never hear a discussion about junking the core curriculum. But that’s exactly a conversation that we should be having.

What’s even worse, in my state of Kansas, the Board of Regents won’t even allow the curriculum to be taught in applied courses, which only adds to its irrelevance for kids. If we were serious about a 21st-century curriculum, our students would be emerged in learning by doing experiences, that are contextually based in the real world. I think that it’s obvious that the younger the student the less likely they are to be able to learn abstract concepts without a real world context for learning. Yet that is exactly what we’re asking them to do. And we wonder why our kids aren’t prepared for the next level of education.

If we didn’t require core curriculum courses, I would be amazed if more than a handful of our kids ever voluntarily took courses in the core curriculum. If our core curriculum teachers had to compete for students like our elective course teachers do, I can assure you the content and instructional strategies would be far different than they are today.

But don’t be confused that I think courses are good. They aren’t. The way we put courses in divided silos only adds to the irrelevance for our kids. The world that our kids will live in is integrated and their learning should be also. And the context of what they learn should be the real world. We’ve allowed the academics in our colleges and universities to dictate what, and how, we teach long enough. Our job is not to please the professors at our universities, but rather to prepare our kids for their future.

So if you have an opinion on this rather controversy stand let me know by leaving a comment below. I look forward to hearing from you.

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