What's Become Clear

Is a great deal of discussion around school change is focusing on the dropout problem. In Kansas, the governor has formed a commission to study dropouts because it has become such an economic issue. As the demand for high skill workers increases dropouts are increasingly a burden on society.

I think one of the positive things that could be addressed is the core curriculum in K-12, and the gen ed curriculum in higher ed. Both of these curricula are at least 115 years old dating back to the Committee of 10, and are primarily focused on the liberal arts.

There was a time in our history when the liberal arts meant well educated. In fact, when I graduated from college in 1972 a liberal arts degree was the ticket to a good job. That’s no longer the case. In fact if you look at two aspects of a college degree, the skill level that the degree instills in graduate, and the demand for the degree in society, the liberal arts degree today is both low skill and low demand. In days past the liberal arts degree was low skill, but very much in high demand.

The second piece of the liberal arts education has to do with our students. The vast majority of our students feel that our core curriculum in K-12, and gen ed curriculum in higher ed, are boring and irrelevant. Boring and irrelevant are not good conditions under which learning can occur.

When you couple all of these issues is obvious to me that our core curriculum and the gen ed curriculum in higher Ed serve no purpose today. They are a relic of education past. We can make major strides to increase the engagement and the relevance of our curriculum for all students by redesigning the primary focus of our system.

What might that new focus be? I’m not sure I have an opinion yet, I need to think about it more. But it may include a focus on globalization, who knows. But if we really want school change, real school change, and to reduce the number of students who leave our system uneducated, then we should take a critical look at the core curriculum in K-12, and the gen ed curriculum in higher Ed. – Steve Wyckoff

Tweet This Post

I believe it was George Bernard Shaw who said, “all great ideas began as blasphemy.” Well, here’s some blasphemy for you, when it comes to school change our universities are the tail wagging the dog. We spend at the least 80% of our time in K-12 education preparing kids for a four-year liberal arts degree. Well I say enough is enough!

It’s time for those of us in K-12 education to ignore the universities. Even better, tell them to stick it where the sun don’t shine! We need to focus on what’s best for our kids and, in spite of the rhetoric from politicians, going to a four-year college is not best for all kids.

Yet we continue to kowtow to universities as they tell us what we must teach, how we must teach it, and even how we must organize to teach it. Our universities are as out of date as our K-12 schools, and in many ways, the cause of our obsolescence.

Don’t get me wrong a university degree is extremely important for about 25% of our population. And most universities do a wonderful job with some of their students. But it has become nothing more than a sorting process where we prepare every student to go to colleges and then they systematically weed out all but the best performers.

That used to be an appropriate and effective because those students who are simply sloughed off of the system could still go out and find good, high-paying jobs. That’s no longer the case. Which means we can no longer allow our universities the luxury of running a process of survival of the fittest.

Real school change will focus on the needs of our students not the wishes of our universities. – Steve Wyckoff

Tweet This Post

I’ve written many times about our obsession in K-12 schools with preparing every student to attend a four-year liberal arts college. The data are clear, we need less than 25% of all of our students to have a four year college degree. In fact only about 23% of all jobs require a four-year degree. In the workplace about 65% of all jobs require post secondary education, but not necessarily a four year degree. These high skill jobs are also high wage jobs.

One of the hidden unintended consequences of our attitude in K-12 schools is that we are preparing our very best kids to leave our communities, especially rural communities, and never returning. So in many cases our very best kids leave our communities, get a four year degree, often in the field with little or no job demand, and end up in a job that they would’ve never chosen given all the information. And these jobs are not in our rural communities where many of our kids would like to live.

So while our rural communities are engaged in a life-and-death struggle to maintain viability they are shooting themselves in the foot by having schools that aren’t focused on preparing each individual student for the future of their choice, which in many cases would be in that rural community  if the student had all the information.

It is imperative that our schools began immediately to help every individual student develop an individual plan for their future. But just having the plan isn’t enough if they’re only course choices are the traditional curriculum that only lead to one thing, leave home and go to a four-year college, and earn a degree.

With the advances in technology it is possible today to engage in many more careers than were possible in the past in rural communities. But our kids will only choose those career options if they are given the guidance necessary to develop individual future plans, and educational experience commensurate with that plan. –  Steve Wyckoff

Tweet This Post

I used to be surprised, I’m not anymore. It used to be noteworthy when I would read a book and the author would give some advice to help individuals overcome the effects of public education. Today I’m more surprised if I read a book and they don’t give advice to help individuals overcome the effects of public education.

Just recently I have read Linchpin by Seth Godin, Book Yourself Solid by Michael Port, Drive by Daniel Pink, and Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan. In each of these books there is significant advice for the reader about how they might overcome the learning that they experienced in public school. And these are just a few of the recent examples.

One of the reasons I’m sure I see this a lot is because I read so many books that deal with how to be successful in the 21st century. And our schools have nothing to do with being successful in the 21st century. Our core curriculum has nothing to do with preparing students to be successful as adults. While there is some movement in our high schools to try to do a better job it’s the side dish, not the entrée. Their focus is much more on improving standardized test scores, and preparing kids to go to college. And even in those subjects that don’t do standardized testing, raising test scores is still their excuse for not changing education.

Our two-year post secondary education institutions, community colleges and technical colleges, are doing an excellent job of preparing their students for the real world. Unfortunately we lack emphasis in K-12 schools to prepare our kids to attend those post secondary institutions that prepare students for industry-standard certifications and associate degrees, that lead to high-paying, highly satisfying careers.

I was especially struck by Dan Pink’s description in Drive of the two kinds of work that exist today, the algorithmic and heuristic. Our schools focus almost entirely on preparing students to do algorithmic work, and almost completely ignore preparation for heuristic work. This, in spite of the fact that estimated 70% of all the new jobs being created involve heuristic work. So perhaps the advice that the authors give to overcome the effects of public schools is important and valuable. – Steve Wyckoff

Tweet This Post

I read this phrase the other day and I thought it applied to education perfectly. Best in execution but worst in strategy. It is my observation that we are doing the best job in education we have ever done, doing what we’ve always done. Our execution is excellent. State assessment scores are on the rise. Dropout numbers are in decline. Each time the state or federal bureaucrats give us a new task to accomplish with our students we commit ourselves to accomplishing it, regardless of how little sense it makes.

On the other hand our students are less well prepared for the world they are going to live in than they have ever been. We have the wrong strategy. We are still preparing our kids as if a small percentage are going to go on to college and earn four-year degrees and the rest, at some point, are going to drop out of the system and go to a factory where they will do mindless work exactly as management tells them to.

Want some supporting evidence? Our core curriculum was designed over 115 years ago. It is still the core of what we teach our kids. It was designed to prepare the small percentage of high school students who were going on to college in 1892 to be successful. It was deemed to be such a good curriculum that every high school student should have it. And it was okay, because those kids who didn’t do well in the curriculum could still go into the workplace, show up every day, do what they were told, and make a good living.

More evidence: in 1950 over 60% of the jobs in America required unskilled workers. Today less than 15% of the jobs in America require unskilled workers. Only about 23% of all the jobs in America require a four-year college degree. The remaining 60% to 65% of the jobs require some type of technical skills.

But we are still preparing every student to go to college in the hopes that they will earn a four year college degree. And we are ignoring the vast numbers of students who need a different kind of preparation to be productive members of society in the 21st century.

Our strategy is all wrong …  but our execution is flawless. – Steve Wyckoff

Tweet This Post

For the 34th and 35th time I had the opportunity this week to speak to students in the College of Education at the University Kansas. Twice each semester for the last nine years I’ve had the opportunity to speak to students in Dr. Mike Neill’s class. These are students who hope to become teachers. Usually there are 80 to 100 students in each class. That means that over the last nine years I’ve had the pleasure to interact with between 2,800 and  3,500 students. Okay, so if you do the math it should have had the 35th and 36th time right? Well they missed one day a couple of years ago because school was dismissed because they won some basketball game. You may remember

Anyway, these are always some of my favorite days. I have the opportunity to interact with students who are pretty much fresh out of high school, but also are committed to becoming educators. In many ways it’s refreshing and uplifting. In other ways it’s depressing.

Let me explain. I always love their enthusiasm and their commitment. They possess a passion for what they think they’re going to face. They are bright, engaged, and ready to take on the world.

The depressing part, I always visit with them about authentic engagement. The flow that learners are in when they are so engaged they lose track of time. I tell them it is my opinion that the most important thing they can do is to create learning experiences that are so engaging that their students are regularly authentically engaged. But then I ask them how many of them were authentically engaged on a regular basis in high school.

Yesterday was most one of the most depressing days when I asked this question. Not one hand was raised. Think about it, these are young adults who want to spend the rest of their life in school, and yet none of them were regularly authentically engaged in high school.  Normally, there are only five or six students in the entire class who were regularly authentically engaged in high school, but still to have no students raise their hand was a little bit shocking.

Through our dialogue it was clear that they understand what being authentically engaged is. They even talked about their school experiences that were authentically engaging. They listed them, year book, drama, athletics, and other experiences that were almost all outside of the core curriculum.

When we talk about the core curriculum students in this class through the years have rarely, if ever, identified them as authentically engaging. Interestingly enough  when students did find a class in the core curriculum that was authentically engaging to them, that is typically the subject they are preparing to teach. I hope they don’t model their teaching after the teachers they had simply because it was authentically engaging to them.

The other thing that I’m always aware of when speaking to the students is how pervasive the thinking is that the way our system operates is the only possible way the system can operate. I wish that we had more time to talk about how the system could be modified in order to engage students and yet still learn the things that we want students to learn, that usual in education time limited how much we can accomplish.

Other interesting topics we cover: standardized tests, which always realize a conversation; the need for individualizing instruction; innovation; and our system is pervasively focused on preparing kids to go to four years college rather than preparing them for their life. – Steve Wyckoff

Tweet This Post

In the innovative educator’s dilemma part 1, I talked about how your best customers can drive you out of business if you’re not careful. That your best students with the most influential parents will keep you in the old paradigm of education, traditional schooling, right up to the point that they leave for private schools, and your school isn’t meeting the needs of any of your students.

But there is a further dilemma to this story. Even the parents of students who are the least successful, and those that are far less successful, than your best students, believe that every child should be prepared to go to a four-year liberal arts college, and that schools should look much like they did when the parents were students.

This is a real problem. I talk to school leaders all the time who tell me that the fastest way for them to get in trouble is to suggest to some parents that their kids should not go to a four-year college. We’ve done a tremendous job getting parents to believe that education is the key to success. Now we’ve got to convince them that a four-year liberal arts degree is not necessarily the kind of education that is the key to success for their child. Only about 25% of jobs today require a four-year professional degree. On the other hand about 65% of jobs are what we refer to as skilled. These skilled jobs require post secondary education.  But the post secondary education may be in the form of certification programs, associate degree programs, and yes even bachelors degree programs.

Four of 10 of the most popular majors include Social Sciences (ex. History and Political Science) Psychology, Communication, and English

Popular careers of these majors include:
retail store manager
customer service representative
administrative assistant

So the dilemma for school reformers is that we must not only convince educators that they must redesign how they prepare students for their future, but we must also help parents understand that we need to change how their children are educated if they are to be successful in the 21st century. – Steve Wyckoff

Tweet This Post

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.

Tweet This Post

I love technology. I’m a gadget guy. I use technology to learn. when I want to learn something new I google it, I look it up in Wikipedia, and I try to watch it on YouTube. And I always try to figure out what is the best tool to accomplish the work I’m doing, and to improve my productivity.

So what does that have to do with kids in school? I have the opportunity to interact with lots of educational technologists. And I’m always kind of disturbed by the discussions that occur between educators and the instructional technologists. It appears to me that the goal of educational technology is to make the things we have been doing in school for the last 115 years tolerable for the kids.

So why the title of this blog? It is my belief that we should be using technology with every single student in a manner that is much more congruent with how technology is used in the real world. What I see in schools is technology being used as a method to increase the engagement of our students in curriculum that they consider to be boring and irrelevant. As if somehow using technology will entertain the students enough that they’ll ignore their emotions, or lack of emotions, they have about the curriculum we make them cover.

Of course this isn’t a technology problem, it’s an education problem. It’s just that I’m bothered when I see technology used as a strategy to deal with a symptom rather than the systemic problems that are causing it.

Consider this, if we had kids using technology like it’s used in the real world, we would have to give them real world problems, or at least simulations of real world problems. That in turn would require us to integrate our curriculum, and tear down the silos between content areas. That in turn would mean that instead of covering a list of standards and benchmarks we would cover the things that are inherent in real-world problems.

The problem with that? Well obviously our kids wouldn’t be prepared for college after such an experience. But on the other hand, they would be much better prepared for the real world. Perhaps, we should have a discussion with postsecondary education, specifically the four-year colleges, about changing their requirements and their curriculum! And perhaps then we could change the core curriculum in our schools to meet the needs of our students rather than the needs of colleges.

I know this is a novel thought, and for some heresy, but perhaps colleges should look at how well they are preparing their students for the real world. Just a thought.

Tweet This Post

I’ve been preparing for a presentation that I’m going to do for the school board of one of the largest districts in the state. They are involved in strategic planning, and to their credit they are looking at all aspects of their school district with the intent to improve. My presentation is built around my belief about the biggest issues we face in education. I’ve given this presentation several times, each time modifying it as I clarify the issues in my mind.

I put about 1000 miles on my car this week which has given me a lot of time to clarify exactly what I want to say. But I wanted to put it in writing here because it always seems different when I put my thoughts into writing, or present them to an audience for the first time. So with that in mind…

The issue that I’m dealing with is the conflict between what academia considers to be a well-educated person, and what the greater society that we live in considers to be a well-educated person. The first, academia, is made up of our universities. The second mostly centers around the workplace.

I’ve often ranted that our core curriculum is over 115 years old and was designed by the Committee of 10 which was made up of individuals from the world of academia. In this world individuals who are considered to be “well-educated” have been exposed to the classics in literature, theoretical mathematics and science, and have studied the social sciences through abstractions. Being “well-educated” in academia is measured by what you know.

Individuals who are considered to be “well-educated” in the workplace are knowledgeable about the issues related to the work they do, but in addition their knowledge is concrete and can be applied to real problems in the workplace, adding value to the work being done. Being “well-educated” in the workplace is measured by what an individual knows AND can do.

I know that both of these definitions are oversimplifications, but I think I can provide proof of their accuracy. If you want to get into college the measure is standardized tests, the ACT and SAT. Furthermore, in Kansas and many other states, your high school curriculum cannot have been taken in “applied” classes. Your classes must have been taken in a setting where the content was studied in an abstract manner absent the context of the real world.

When I speak to the business community and I ask them if it makes sense that students should learn math in the context of real-world problems so that the math can be applied in a concrete way, they completely agree. When I tell them that a student who takes a math class in an applied setting does not meet the criteria set by the Board of Regents for entry into the regents universities, they are appalled.

If you look at the regents required curriculum for high schools in Kansas it’s the same curriculum that was designed by the Committee of 10. Sure, there have been modifications to the content over time, but the emphasis on the instructional style and the expectations of the student are still aligned with the curriculum that that committee designed all those years ago.

Making every student take this curriculum really wasn’t an issue in the industrial age. Students who did well in the traditional curriculum went on to college in numbers that were appropriate for the times. But gradually as it became more important to be “well-educated” in the workplace more and more students were encouraged to go to “college.” The problem that arose in the workplace with students who were coming to the workplace with college degrees was that they did not have the knowledge relevant to the workplace, nor the ability to apply the knowledge to real situations. This is a growing problem. Businesses report regularly that students are not for prepared for the work environment they are entering in the 21st century.

You’ve heard it before, somebody describing a college graduate as “book smart” with no common sense. I’m not sure whether or not the student had common sense, but I’m pretty sure they did not possess the appropriate knowledge nor were they skilled at applying the knowledge they had to real situations.

Up to this point the academics have won the argument, or possibly they have just been able to keep the tradition alive. But the reality is we believe that our kids will be “well-educated” if we continue in K-12 to expose them to a curriculum that is abstract in nature, unrelated to the real world, taught in isolation, and measured strictly by what the student knows.

I believe that K-12 schools should be about learning experiences where the students apply the knowledge and skills necessary to solve real-world problems. They should learn to use 21st-century technologies in conjunction with up-to-date knowledge to solve today’s problems.

An unintended consequence of this conflict is the outrageous emphasis on standardized test scores. Standardized test scores have been the traditional measure of whether or not a student is “well-educated.” As students have graduated from college and gone to the workplace there has been an increasing dissatisfaction with our incoming workers. The natural response has been we have to educate them better, schools need to do a better job.

The response of policymakers was to mandate practices designed to improve test scores, thinking that improved test scores would equate to improved workers. It hasn’t worked. I believe the problem could be solved if we could agree which kind of “well-educated” student we want to produce.

Tweet This Post

This post is cross posted with Kansas Career website.

Regardless of how old you are you’ve heard for most of your life that you need to go to college. You’ve heard it from your mom and dad, grandmother and grandfather, and even the President of the United States. In fact, from many presidents of the United States. And when you go to school you are constantly reminded that what you’re learning is preparing you to go to college.

You need to understand, however that going to college today can have different meanings. In the past it meant that you were going to go to a four-year college. Plain and simple. And in the past that was good advice. For decades and decades having a college degree was the ticket to a good job. That is simply no longer true. A college degree in the wrong area isn’t much better than no college degree. While many employers still see the college degree as a sorting mechanism, what you learn in college, and more importantly what you learn to do in college, is more important

Today there are important factors to consider before you decide what “college education” means to you. Today more than ever you need to consider the path that you’re going to take to a four year degree. The first level of education in post secondary education that may be the best way for you to proceed is to obtain an industry accepted certificate in a community or technical college. Many certificates can be obtained in less than two years and yet open many doors to high-paying careers.

The second level that you may consider it a two-year, or associate degree. Often times after completing your certification program the completion of required gen ed courses will complete your associate degree. Both the certification program and the associate degree will enable you to acquire a well-paying job and a career.

The third level of education would be the pursuit of a bachelors degree. By pursuing these three levels in order, your bachelor’s degree will be much more meaningful and engaging. Typically students pursue their bachelors degree, associate degree, and industry certification in the same field. This enables the individual to learn not only in the classroom, but in their field of their choosing as they pursue more advanced degrees.

By pursuing the ultimate goal of a four-year college degree following this path, the students will have a better education and typically can leave school without any accumulated debt. It isn’t at all uncommon for a student to graduate from college today with debt exceeding $40,000. While students who follow the industry certification, associate degree, bachelors degree path leave with little or no debt, and in many cases have had employers pay for their education beyond the industry certification.

So while you contemplate your options, and everybody is telling you you have to go to college, remember there is a path other than going directly to a four-year institution a better suit your needs.

Tweet This Post

I have many opportunities to speak to school groups, policymakers, educational leaders, and educators at all levels. On many occasions after speaking to these groups or individuals, I am sought out to have conversations about improving education. So I have given a great deal of thought to the issues surrounding school improvement.

In many cases I believe we are and asking, or answering, the wrong questions. One of those issues is the idea of school improvement. It is my opinion that we are not trying to improve schools but rather we are trying to improve schooling.

Let me explain what I mean. I think that we are working very, very hard to get better at what we’ve always done in schools. The question, I think, we should be asking and answering is, what should we be doing in schools instead of what we’re doing, to better prepare kids for their future.

I would estimate that we spend at least 80% of a child’s K-12 educational experience preparing them to be successful in a liberal arts college. Our entire core curriculum is built around the expectations of liberal arts universities. This is a holdover from the days, even decades, when K-12 schools thought it appropriate to prepare kids who were going to attend college, and all other kids would enter the workplace and be successful simply by working hard.

But those days are over. Kids simply can’t leave high school expecting never to have post secondary training, and being successful in life. Furthermore, kids who do go to universities and obtain a liberal arts degree, are no better prepared to be successful in their life than students with no post secondary education.

If you analyze the data, about 23% of all Americans hold a baccalaureate degree. And about the same percentage of jobs require a bachelors degree. On the other hand, more than 65% of all jobs require skills typically obtained in certification programs, and or associate degree programs at community and technical colleges.

I recently had a Dean of a prestigious four-year college tell me that as  they analyze their data, about one in five, or 2%, of their graduates actually enter a career requiring the degree that they obtained.

So when we talk about school improvement  we need to consider that it is no longer appropriate to prepare 100% of our kids to enter four-year institutions knowing that over 75% of them will not be successful. Improving K-12 schools means changing our practices so that we prepare all of the kids for their postsecondary education experience, and the life they are going to lead.

Tweet This Post