Robert Atkinson, the head of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, has published a piece in the Huffington Post lamenting the incompetence of recent college graduates he’s hired over the years. He’s frustrated that America’s top schools can’t mint “graduates who can write basic sentences and do basic math.” Atkinson’s job applicants were unable to perform basic tasks on a short do-at-home test emailed to the applicants before they are selected for an interview. Atkinson says that ”[t]he questions are pretty simple: “Go to this person’s bio online and write a three or four -sentence version of their bio for us to include in a conference packet,” or, “Enter these eight items in a spreadsheet and tell us the average for the ones that end in an odd number.””
According to Atkinson, these grads can’t perform these tasks because colleges teach content rather than skills, and Atkinson believes that “for most college graduates and for most jobs (one exception being science and engineering jobs), it really doesn’t matter if they learn English literature or 20th century comic books. What does matter is if they acquire needed skills. And this kind of 21st century skill acquisition is at best something they pick up by chance in the course of learning about French literature or 20th century American politics. The result is that too many graduates have grown in knowledge on various subjects but not developed practical skills.”
Ignore, for a minute, that students actually don’t know all that much basic stuff. (This lack of knowledge is what Don Hirsch has called “the most significant deficit in most American students’ education.”) Look at the sample tasks from Atkinson’s test: Writing three or four sentences about something. Calculating the average of a few numbers. Don’t you think students should be able to do these things long before they arrive for orientation? (Hint: Many of them can’t.) But is it really a good use of time to have college professors diagramming sentences and demonstrating long division? If, as Atkinson puts it, “the American K-12 system is a failure,” is the best solution turning seminar rooms into fourth grade classrooms?
Atkinson thinks that’s part of the answer. He wants “a national test that all college grads should take to measure skills competency. This wouldn’t measure whether you know that Adolph Hitler was Chancellor of Germany or other “facts,” but rather skills like logic, reasoning, basic writing and math, etc.” There are already acouple of tests that try to do this. And the no-stakes NAEP assessment (the gold standard for ed testing) of reading ability for 12th graders shows that “students who leave school at the end of our K-12 education cannot read, learn, or communicate very well…because the schools are not effectively imparting the knowledge that the effective use of standard language depends on.” So Atkinson’s suggestion that students would learn skills if only we didn’t spend so much time on knowledge-building just doesn’t make sense because skill proficiency is contingent on domain knowledge.
The second component of Atkinson’s fix is a national survey of employers to find out what kind of skills they’re looking for. This is necessary because “most college students don’t even know the types of skills that are valued by the industries they want to work in. For example, do managers in accounting firms prefer young workers who can quickly and accurately proofread a spreadsheet or give a persuasive power point presentation?” Well, the Partnership for 21st Century Skillsalready does this kind of survey. Atkinson just wants one done by somebody else (the U.S. Department of Education). Atkinson’s survey would include questions on which schools produced the best employees (a very objective metric), and he believes that “doing so would help parents and prospective college students make decisions on which school is best for them.” There you have it: College is for learning how to write memos. Not all that other stuff. I’m glad I got out before the humanities were really and truly dead.
When P21 released a study documenting the importance of the “4Cs” to “workforce preparedness and business success,” we criticized them for marketing products without providing proof that using them affects student learning. The Washington Post has taken note. Reporter Stephanie McCrummen provides fresh evidence of the sleazy relationship between ed-tech companies and school districts, such as ed-tech companies sending school district officials on resort junkets and booking them for speaking engagements. She also reveals how unreliable, even dishonest, much of the research is behind tech ed products.
McCrummen discovered that Promethean, a manufacturer of whiteboards, is among the worst offenders. Sherwin Collette, the tech director for Montgomery County schools, spoke at Promethean-sponsored education conferences after the school district signed “a $13 million deal with Promethean to lease 2,600 whiteboards in 2008.” The Arizona attorney general – remember, P21 is headquartered in Tucson – “criticized Tucson Unified School District officials for accepting rooms, meals, an open bar and free iPods at a resort conference paid for by Promethean after the district spent $2.1 million on products.” Doug Levin, the head of the State Educational Technology Directors Association, doesn’t see anything wrong with Promethean’s behavior. According to Levin, it’s the “[job] of the public sector to evaluate claims of these vendors.” Levin’s organization counts Promethean among its $30,000 platinum sponsors.
And how is the public sector supposed to evaluate claims about these products if the only research into the products is paid for by the tech companies? One of the most-cited articles about whiteboard effectiveness, published by Marzano Research Laboratory (“powered by Solution Tree,” which is also a paid promoter of 21st century skills), was funded by whiteboard manufacturer Promethean. The study makes great claims about how whiteboards increase student achievement, but even Robert Manzano, the study’s author, concedes that “23% of teachers reported higher test scores without the whiteboard, and some reported lower scores using it.” The study’s methods were criticized by Dan Willingham in a separate article for the Post, and Steve Ross, an education professor at Johns Hopkins, characterized the study as “suggestive” and inconclusive – “and that’s being generous.”
You tell us – is it a cheap shot to suggest that something fishy is going on here?
EdWeek and Joanne Jacobs have brought new attention to the College Board’s SpringBoard program. According to the College Board’s materials, SpringBoard “enablesstudents to build the skills and understanding they need for success in AP courses and college-level work without remediation.”
Not so fast. Tampa Bay Online provides a useful comparison of Hillsborough County’s (FL) old English curriculum with the SpringBoard program, and the differences are distressing. In 12th grade, for instance, SpringBoard replaces a unit on the English Renaissance (Spenser, Raleigh, Shakespeare, and the King James Bible) with a unit on My Fair Lady, The Manchurian Candidate, Nine to Five, Cinderella, and The Legend of Bagger Vance. 12th grade Victorian literature (Tennyson, the Brownings, Kipling, Dickens, Bronte) is replaced by a current events unit focusing on the Waco massacre, Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” and newspaper editorials (which SpringBoard also emphasizes in 11th grade).
Some teachers are pushingback, as well they should, since SpringBoard is totally unlike AP or college-level instruction. Unsurprisingly, SpringBoard advocates claim that critics are missing the point, as teacher Alice Wurkovich puts it: “It’s about being able to critically read. If you can read, you can read the classics on your own.”We’ve heard that one before.
Most education reform efforts claim to improve student achievement or close achievement gaps between groups of students. So it’s puzzling that the Partnership for 21st Century Skills has enjoyed as much success as it has when there’s no data – none – that P21’s program improves learning one bit.
Don’t get us wrong: P21 does excel at producing data. But it is all about business’ opinions of what schools should be doing. Their most recent effort is a survey of 2,115 “managers and other executives” at member companies of the American Management Association, an organization that specializes in professional development for executives. The executives all placed high importance on P21’s “4 C’s” – critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity – not because they help provide students with a full education, but because the skills were deemed “crucial to workforce preparedness and business success.”
Forget English, history, art, and science class. Coming soon to classrooms near you: “How to Use a Photocopy Machine,” “Preparing for the Big Meeting,” and “How to Write a Business Plan.” See for yourself.
Dan Willingham’s Washington Post blog today on the relationship between income inequality and test scores is worth a read. “Some countries have successfully minimized the disparity in educational outcomes between rich and poor,” Willingham points out. “According to the PISA, the countries doing the best job include Iceland, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Canada, and Finland.” What strikes us about this list is that five of these six nations have also repeatedly outranked the US on the PISA exam. So these nations are not just closing equity gaps they are getting all of their students across the finish line better than the rest of the world.
Willingham adds: “I don’t know how other countries have addressed this problem. It may be curricular.” We can confirm that his guess is on target. We studied the content of education in these nations in Why We’re Behind and found that each was delivering a comprehensive, content-rich education to their students. Some guarantee this education via a national curriculum or national tests, and some take a state-level approach, but each finds a way to make sure all of their students learn the arts, science, foreign languages, and much more (than just reading and math).
RAND’s report on reauthorizing No Child Left Behind surveys the law’s successes and failures and provides recommendations for improving it.
Unsurprisingly, RAND notes that “the narrow focus of the law on two academic areas and the states’ reliance on similarly narrow student tests have resulted in unintended outcomes, such as the narrowing of schools’ curricula, encouraging teachers to focus on some students at the expense of others, and discouraging the development of higher-thinking and problem-solving skills.” The GAO came to the same conclusion in November.
Additionally, the survey data indicated that “teachers also reported focusing more on students near the proficient cut score (i.e., “bubble kids”) and expressed concerns about negative effects on the learning opportunities given to high-achieving students.” This is congruent with data collected by Fordham for their report on High-Achieving Students in the Era of No Child Left Behind, which showed that 73% of teachers described the “brightest students” as “under-challenged in school” and said that “electives, humanities, and the arts” are being ignored to focus on basic skills. That’s not what high-performing countries do.
Arne Duncan has promised to work toward fixing this. We’re still waiting to hear how he plans to do that.
Recently there’s been a lot of talk from ED officials about the importance of a well-rounded education. In December, we noted Arne Duncan’s promise to make a commitment to the liberal arts a key piece of his revisions to ESEA, and in February we were surprised to hear ED’s Peter Cunningham acknowledge the severity of the curriculum narrowing caused by NCLB. And the Department’s blueprint for ESEA reauthorization argues that “[s]tudents need a well-rounded education to contribute as citizens in our democracy and to thrive in a global economy – from literacy to mathematics, science, and technology to history, civics, foreign languages, the arts, financial literacy, and other subjects.”
Arne Duncan’s speech at the Arts Education Partnership’s National Forum continues this trend of pleasant-sounding rhetoric. Duncan is absolutely right that “[a] well-educated student, in other words, is exposed to a well-rounded curriculum. It is the making of connections, conveyed by a rich core curriculum, which ultimately empowers students to develop convictions and reach their full academic and social potential.” And it’s heartening to hear Duncan tell a national audience that “[t]he case for a well-rounded curriculum begins with a disappointing reality: Many schools today are falling far short of providing an engaging, content-rich curriculum,” a conclusion also reached by the GAO in their November 2009 report on student achievement.
But Duncan’s speech is a disappointment because it lacks specifics. Okay, fine, he’ll be consolidating a bunch of old earmarks into a new, expanded $265 million fund to “strengthen the teaching of arts, foreign languages, civics and government,” and there will be new money set aside for developing assessments in subjects besides ELA and math. But notice who’s excluded from the Department’s “first large-scale survey of school principals, music teachers, and visual arts specialists in ten years”? Dance and theater instructors! Might this be because the 2008 NAEP arts assessment had to drop dance and theater after they couldn’t find enough students who had taken those subjects to assemble a nationally representative sample?
It’s going to take more than pleasant words from the Secretary of Education to reverse the deterioration of liberal arts education.
Jay Rockefeller’s 21st Century Skills Incentive Fund Act, which would establish a federal slush fund for states that implement 21st century skills initiatives, is still languishing in the Senate Finance Committee, so the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) appears to be attempting to sneak funding streams for their Strategic Council members into the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).
The Trojan horse is the NEA’s recently released Initial Legislative Recommendations for Reauthorization of ESEA. The document calls for funding for the development of standards for 21st century skills (p. 14), new assessments for 21st century skills (p. 14-15), an annual survey of 21st century competency conducted by the U.S. Department of Education (p. 142), and mandatory assessment of 21st century literacy “at least once” in elementary school and “at least once” in secondary school (also p. 142).
Who’s pushing for this? The tell appears on p. 151 of the NEA’s 170-page document. P21 wants ESEA’s Title V, Part B to include “21st Century Skills Grants to States.” From the document:
“Grants to states to develop (educators, business, and other stakeholders) and incorporate a 21st century standards and framework for education, with particular emphasis on high schools. Funds also should be available to review and revise assessments to ensure that students are provided opportunities to demonstrate critical thinking, problem solving and communications skills; to integrate 21st century skills and knowledge, including critical thinking and problem solving skills into the entire curriculum at the high school level; to support 21st century skills planning groups that include teachers and members with a range of backgrounds in business and education; and to provide professional development for educators regarding how to integrate 21st century skills into the entire curriculum. (www.21stcenturyskills.org)”
21stcenturyskills.org is, of course, the Web presence of P21. Keep in mind that when P21 refers to “stakeholders” they are referring to organizations such as Cisco, Dell, and Intel who pay to join the Partnership.
Enough proof that the NEA is ghostwriting for P21? Lest we forget: There is no evidence whatsoever that the program put forth by P21 increases student achievement or enhances their education in any way. In fact, according to cognitive scientists, P21′s program does not and cannot work.
The new Pioneer Institute review of the common standards credits the common standards with “considerable progress” between the January and March drafts, but claims that the standards writers have some work to do before the standards are “at least as good as those in states that have empirical evidence, within the state, nationally, and/or internationally, attesting to the effectiveness of their current standards.” Massachusetts is certainly one of those states; they outperform other American students on TIMSS and earn top marks on NAEP. The Bay State earned straight A’s in Fordham’s most recent State of State Standards, and its ELA framework was praised for its “competency, explicit and unmuddled expectations, and strong vocabulary instruction.” And Pioneer’s review includes many worthy recommendations for improving the standards, such as adding “standard D” from David Conley’s Understanding University Success, which requires students to be “familiar with a range of world literature.”
But we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the common standards are better – in some cases, much better – than the standards currently in place in most states. Massachusetts’ high standards are an outlier, and Massachusetts doesn’t have a compelling reason to adopt the common standards except the potential for more money.
The new issue of the AFT’s American Educator (circulation ~910,000)is out, and it offers a thorough overview of the debate over 21st century skills.
Common Core’s own Lynne Munson and Laura Bornfreundcontrast what high-performing countries are doing in their classroomswith what the Partnership for 21st Century Skills would like teachers to do in American classrooms. For example, the high school exit exam in British Columbia asks students to spend 25 minutes “discuss[ing] the parallels between the father-child relationship found both in these passages [fromKing Lear] and elsewhere in the play,” while P21 would like 12th-graders to “translate a piece of dialog from a Shakespearean play into a text message exchange.” 7th- and 8th-graders in New Zealand “learn to explain how the interaction between ecological factors and natural selection leads to genetic changes within populations,” and also “investigate physical phenomena (in the areas of mechanics, electricity, electromagnetism, light and waves, and atomic and nuclear physics), and produce qualitative and quantitative explanations for a variety of complex situations.” P21 would like 8th-graders to “view video samples from a variety of sources of people speaking about a science-related topic” and “rate the videos on the degree to which the person sounded scientific, then identify characteristics of speech pattern, word choice, level of detail, and other factors that influenced their perceptions.”
Munson and Bornfreund conclude that P21 can do better and highlight three lesson plans endorsed by P21 that could be worthy of classroom use. The lessons “have the potential to extend students’ content knowledge while also developing their higher-order skills.” The lessons are significant because they’re outliers; according to Munson and Bornfreund “what makes these examples stand out from the rest of P21′s lesson ideas is that they suggest interesting ways to go deeper into core academic subjects.”
The issue also includescommentary from Diane Ravitchon the history of education reform fads (Diane insists that 21st century skills are a mirage, and that while “pedagogues, policymakers, thought leaders, facilitators, and elected officials are rushing to get aboard the 21st-century-skills express train” there is, in fact, “nothing new in the proposals of the 21st-century-skills movement.”),Dan Willingham and Andy Rotherhamon what it will take to rehabilitate the 21st century skills movement (they say that “educators and policymakers must ensure that content is not shortchanged for an ephemeral pursuit of skills”), and Diana Senechal on why emphasizing the content of what is taught is the most daring education reform idea floating around today. Senechal writes that reformers should “pursue perfection in curriculum and pedagogy” through a conversation about “the meaning and purposes of education,” which includes “dar[ing] to specify what we will teach: the disciplines, works, ideas, and historical periods; the things to be mastered, grasped, and pondered.” As Russ Whitehurst put it:don’t forget curriculum.