Intel’s Paige Kuni, who chairs P21′s board and was quoted in our recent blog, Lectured to by P21, posted a comment to that blog on the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s blog, which had linked to ours. Are you with me? 
Anyhow, we wanted to make sure the readers of our blog had a chance to read Kuni’s comment and that of the many others who responded. Including us.
Lynne Munson
A lecture format is about as far as you can get from the dynamically collaborative, robustly interactive, self-directed project-based learning strategies touted by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. But a lecture is indeed what they delivered yesterday to a crowd of 75 or more at the National Education Association. The NEA hosted a panel to tout the virtues of learning, P21-style. The panel was a who’s who of P21 leadership: John Wilson, executive director of the NEA and former chairman of the board of P21, Intel’s Paige Kuni who currently chairs P21’s board, P21 president Ken Kay, and Barbara Pryor, a longtime legislative assistant to West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller. West Virginia was one of the first states to become a member of P21 and the Senator’s apparently a fan.
Suffice it to say that the event was not an example of critical thinking in action. There was no press there. The audience was comprised largely of NEA staff and representatives of DC’s alphabet soup of education associations. The question at hand was not whether the 21st century skills agenda was the right one for America’s schoolchildren, but rather how quickly more students can get signed on.
For those who are concerned, as we are, that P21’s approach to learning will fail students because it does not integrate the teaching of skills with the acquisition of content knowledge, there was much said at the NEA to worry you. Paige Kuni explained that in the “search, cut, and paste environment” students live in today, they only need to know “enough of the most crucial information.” She didn’t say who decides when enough is enough or what P21 considers crucial. Is it enough earth science to know that the earth is round? Enough literature to have heard of Shakespeare? Enough history to know that we once fought a civil war because the North and South disagreed about something?
John Wilson said that with P21 “students create the learning environment with their peers and their projects” and the “teacher becomes the facilitator.” Ken Kay is more selective in his choice of words but the upshot of his comments fall in line with the others: Skills are what is most important while content is optional. In their remarks, none of the panelists mentioned science, geography, foreign languages, history, literature, art, civics—the list goes on and on.
Lynne Munson
A new Government Accountability Office study claims to find that the arts have not been sidelined in our schools by the push for accountability. Or so the Dallas Morning News and Eduwonk are reporting. But the findings actually don’t support that interpretation. Indeed they indicate that minority children are experiencing deep cuts in their exposure to the arts.This finding is hinted at in the study’s overextended title: “Access to Arts Education: Inclusion of Additional Questions in Education’s Planned Research Would Help Explain Why Instruction Time Has Decreased for Some Students.” Replace the word “some” with “minority” and you have the real news out of this study. Of the 7 percent of schools that reported reducing the amount of time spent on the arts the drop was most severe in schools that serve mostly minority students—and at schools that have failed to make AYP for two years running. Schools serving low-income students lost 49 minutes per week of arts instruction, on average, in comparison to an average 31 minute loss at schools with a low percentage of poor students.
Beyond that, this study contains obvious methodological flaws that are the reason that we—and we had assumed others—didn’t jump on it when it was released in February. Most of these flaws flow from the fact that the study attempts to repurpose two US Department of Education teacher surveys. The surveys were administered in 2004-05 and 2006-07, setting the baseline for the study a full two years after NCLB was signed into law. Any curriculum narrowing that may have happened from 2002-2004 cannot be captured in this study. And the surveys were given so close together their comparative value is marginal at best.
Additionally, GAO’s study isn’t based on actual, raw data because the USDOE refused to release it. Instead, GAO worked off of data summaries compiled by the USDOE. This summarization becomes even more problematic once you realize that the report does not contain even a single sample question from the surveys. So there’s no way to assess the quality of the data—rather, the data summaries—let alone evaluate margins of error or aspects of the survey methodology.
This study is supposed to help inform additional research the USDOE intends to do in the area of curriculum narrowing. This initial foray undermines our faith in those efforts. And not just for the reasons listed above. But also because, as one commenter has pointed out, the study recommends that future research should count extracurricular arts programs as equal to in-school arts instruction. As if participating in a club is interchangeable with taking a class. Is this education research or a shell game?
Lynne Munson
Yesterday, President Obama delivered an education speech to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. This was a major speech, chock full of news for ed-types. Most are discussing his endorsement of merit pay and a longer school year. But here’s a relatively overlooked section of the speech that deserves attention:
“The solution to low test scores is not lower standards – it’s tougher, clearer standards. Standards like those in Massachusetts, where 8th graders are now tying for first – first – in the world in science.”
We’re glad that President Obama recognizes that Massachusetts has been a model state for rigorous standards. But what’s strange about Obama’s use of the Massachusetts example is that he went on to say,
“I am calling on our nation’s Governors and state education chiefs to develop standards and assessments that don’t simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test, but whether they possess 21st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking, entrepreneurship and creativity.”
Massachusetts students have hit the targets they have while following standards that are uncluttered with “21st century skills.” Unfortunately, Massachusetts has recently signed on with the Partnership for 21st Century Skills and may soon alter their standards in ways that are likely to undermine that state’s accomplishments. But they got where they are right now—at the top of US and some international rankings—without 21st century skills. The buzzwords “21st century skills” are suffering from overuse. The notion is a fad that stands on the weakest of foundations. We hope that the President, Secretary Duncan, and their advisors will recognize this and be more careful about such phrase-dropping in the future.
Lynne Munson
The president of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills is responding to serious scholarly criticism of his organization’s agenda with spin and more spin. First he called the criticisms that Diane Ravitch, E.D. Hirsch, and Dan Willingham leveled against P21 a “sideshow.” That’s a strange way to refer to scholars who have authored and edited more than two dozen books between them. Then Kay produced a YouTube video in which he sits in front of a representation of P21′s infamous rainbow chart and misrepresents these scholars’ criticisms as touting “a false choice” between skills and content.
Ravitch, Hirsch, and Willingham never said skills weren’t important. They said the opposite: That skills are important and only can be successfully taught alongside content. Now Kay’s taking his barrage on the road with three presentations at the upcoming ASCD annual conference in Orlando. Kay is a master at saying things that sound true. Such as this statement taken verbatim from his YouTube video: “The truth is that 21st century skills and core curriculum are mutually supportive of one another.” So let’s just take a moment to discover how that “mutually supportive” relationship plays out.
On YouTube Kay touts P21′s work in North Carolina, in particular how they have reshaped teacher education in that state. Here’s a link to a lesson plan for K-8 teachers in NC seeking to advance their students’ understanding of goal-setting. It is called “Goals, Goals, Goals….” which I guess is an attempt at humor because if you want to follow along you’ll have to get a soccer ball. The entire lesson consists of getting a group of students to figure out how they can all touch the ball in the shortest period of time. They start by standing in a circle and, when the ball is tossed to them, giving one “feeling word” to describe how they feel that day. Then they just start coming up with ways to toss and touch the ball more and more quickly. We had an entire class dedicated to this type of activity when I was in school. It was called Gym–not English, Social Studies, or Math.
Lynne Munson
Two scholars who participated in Common Core’s panel about 21st century skills– NYU historian of education Diane Ravitch and UVA cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham –have now written blogs expanding on their critiques of P21. Last week Willingham talked about two assumptions that underlie P21′s work, which he deemed unsound. Now he’s found a third. Not only is P21 mistaken in believing that skills can be taught separately from knowledge and that teachers (like the rest of us humans) cannot possibly retain the amount of knowledge needed to conduct the kind of project-based learning P21 touts. But Willingham also finds that P21 confuses the ideas of experience and practice:
Practice entails trying to improve: noticing what you’re doing wrong, and trying different strategies to do better. It also entails meaningful feedback, usually from someone knowledgeable about the skill. This means that 21st-century skills like “working well in groups,” or “developing leadership,” will not be developed simply by putting people in groups or asking them to be leaders. Students must be taught to do these things. Read more here.
Ravitch has engaged educator Deborah Meier on the topic of 21st century skills in their regular “Bridging Differences” blog exchange in Education Week. Her debate with Ken Kay has left her wondering about P21′s intentions:
I have often written about education controversies, and in every case, one group of educators argues with another group of educators. In this instance, a panel of educators (me, Hirsch, Willingham) was debating a public relations executive. This seemed odd to me, and made me wonder about the movement itself. Is it an effort on the part of the technology companies to sell more high-tech hardware and software to schools?
Good question. Read more here. Lynne Munson