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The failure of U.S. higher education

July 3, 2010 by

Higher education is failing almost as badly as K-12, writes Robert D. Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

Over the years, he’s interviewed many recent college graduates for jobs at this think tank.

Because the quality of so many of the graduates was so poor, ITIF has taken to giving the small share of the most promising applicants (based on their resumes and cover letters) a short test that we email them to complete at home in one hour. The 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.”

. . . In our current hiring process (for an office manager/research assistant) we have so far given the test to approximately 20 college grads. Only one did well enough to merit an interview.

Most of the 19 were graduated from  top-ranked institutions. A recent Princeton graduate  “submitted a test that was full of spelling and grammar mistakes.”

“Why can’t colleges turn out graduates who can write basic sentences and do basic math?” Atkinson asks. He blames professors who want to teach their favorite subject, but don’t teach logic, debate, writing, research or other workplace skills.

One of the best college grads I ever hired (a graduate of Dartmouth) majored in history. In his job . . .  he didn’t need to know history. What he needed to know was how to think, how to write, how to speak intelligently, how to find information and make sense out of it, how to argue coherently, and how to do basic math. Fortunately, he had acquired these skills. But other graduates of colleges such as Kenyan, Bowdoin, Bates, or the University of Pennsylvania, whom I have hired over the years, clearly had not, or at least not nearly as well.

Science and engineering graduates need to know their subjects, he writes. Liberal arts and social sciences majors need practical skills, which they may or may not pick up by accident while studying French literature or the history of the comic book.

Atkinson wants a national test for college graduates of logic, reasoning, basic writing and math skills.

Next, he calls for a national employer survey to determine “what are the specific skills employers are looking for in recent graduates.” The survey also should ask which colleges and universities have provided the best employees.

Finally, we need radical experimentation in college design. It’s time for a foundation or wealthy individual to endow an entirely new college founded on teaching 21st century skills, not 20th century subjects.

I can’t imagine teaching these skills without teaching subject matter as well. Of course, I can’t imagine a Princeton grad who hasn’t mastered grammar and spelling — or, at least, spellchecker.

Many colleges do try to teach writing to students; most professors require research papers. K-12 students do lots of oral presentations. Are college graduates really that hopeless?

Filed Under: Careers, College Tagged With: , , , , ,

21st-century smarts

December 6, 2009 by

What are 21st-century skills? Finally, there’s a coherent answer, writes Jay Mathews. Craig Jerald defines a 21st-century education in a report for the Center for Public Education.

“Traditional knowledge and skills in school subjects like math, language arts, and science is not being displaced by a new set of skills,” Jerald writes. However, students will have to learn how to apply what they learn to meet “real world challenges.”  The most successful students will develop “the ability to think critically about information, solve novel problems, communicate and collaborate, create new products and processes, and adapt to change.”

Applied skills and competencies can best be taught in the context of the academic curriculum, not as a replacement for it or “add on” to it; in fact, cognitive research suggests that some competencies like critical thinking and problem solving are highly dependent on deep content knowledge and cannot be taught in isolation.

Jerald warns school districts not to neglect factual knowledge, the ability to follow directions or “knowing how to find a right answer when there is one.”

Cognitive scientists warn against efforts to teach critical thinking as isolated skills outside of content, and commercial programs that promise they can do so have little to no strong evidence backing them up. Therefore, districts should be especially wary of sales pitches that ask them to spend less time on traditional
subjects in order to fit in stand alone lessons related to 21st century skills.

To teach content and skills, schools may have to narrow the curriculum to cover fewer topics more thoroughly, Jerald advises, suggesting a look at Singapore’s math textbooks as an example.  Some interpersonal skills are best taught not by academic teachers but developed through sports and extracurricular activities, he writes.

As Mathews writes, much talk of 21st-century skills seems like “Star Trek idealism.” Jerald is rooted in the world we actually live in.

Update: David Foster’s Myth of the Knowledge Society argues that there’s nothing new about the need for smart, skilled, expert workers.

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The business of '21st-century skills'

December 4, 2009 by

As Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) becomes more influential, critics charge it’s a way for high-tech companies to influence schools, reports Education Week.

“The closer we look, the more P21’s unproven educational program appears to be just another mechanism for selling more stuff to schools,” Lynne Munson, the president and executive director of Common Core, a Washington group that advocates a stronger core curriculum, wrote in a recent blog item.

For Ken Kay, the president of P21, such criticism amounts to a “cheap shot” by those who don’t believe that the education system should be more responsive to business needs. . . . “All we’re trying to do is lay down a thoughtful set of design specs [for education].”

Business members of P21 become part of “a proactive process for creating a new vision of education,” Kay told Ed Week.

They have new networking opportunities and better access to federal policymakers and state leaders. Finally, they can access “early intelligence” about where the education system may be headed in order to help ensure that products and services align with that vision.

Recently, Karen Cator, a P21 board member and former Apple executive, was named head of education technology initiatives in the Education Department. But P21 isn’t pushing technology as the silver bullet, Kay says. It’s much broader.

Education historian Diane Ravitch, a Common Core trustee, thinks that P21 doesn’t know much about curriculum.

She scorns, for instance, its recently released “skill map” for 12th grade English that suggests having students reduce dialogue from Shakespeare to a series of text messages.

Kay says P21 is a catalyst, not a designer of standards, curriculum or tests. However, the group is starting a project to “devise assessment prototypes that measure 21st-century skills.”

My problem with P21 is not the business end of it. I’m dubious about the education part, which often seems fuzzy and faddish.

P21 has poor learning skills, writes Common Core’s Lynne Munson, complaining the group has dismissed sound advice on improving the program.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , ,

21st century skills: no substance

October 27, 2009 by

Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel’s book, 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times, is a disappointment, writes Jay Mathews on Class Struggle.

Were the 21st century skills people finally going to show us how this idea actually works in the classroom? Would they have data? Would there be lesson plans, and detailed testimony from students and parents and teachers? Were they going to prove wrong those of us who could see nothing in this movement (here is a previous column) but a lot of buzz words and jargon describing principles of teaching and learning that have been with us for many decades?

No.

Mathews thinks the authors are “smart tech guys who just don’t know much about real schools with real kids who have difficulty learning how to read, write and do math.”

They can’t see the scuffed floors and trash-strewn playground of a public middle school in Oakland, but can use their laptops to write nice sentences about how the six emerging principles of the movement are “vision, coordination, official policy, leadership, learning technology and teacher learning.”

The real-world examples weren’t useful either, Mathews writes. One features a fifth-grade teacher with 21st century skills training, who has her students research a leader of their choice and explain how that person succeeded on a Web page available to “students around the world.”

. . . other than the web page. it did not seem any different from the group projects my classmates and I did in the middle of the 20th century, mounting our findings on big cardboard displays and showing them off at a special night for parents and classmates.

The book never mentions how to teach reading, he adds.

I share Jay’s qualms about the 21st century skills movement.

If you want specifics about what works in real life and what doesn’t, read my book, Our School, about a start-up charter school figuring out how to educate underachieving Mexican-American students.

Filed Under: "Our School", Education Tagged With: , , ,

Common Core challenges P21

September 16, 2009 by

Today Common Core released a letter calling on P21 and other advocates of 21st century skills to “reshape their effort by putting knowledge and skills together at the core of their work.” It is signed by an array of educators, advocates, scholars, and policymakers, including E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Chester E. Finn, Jr., Sol Stern, Sandra Stotsky, Diane Ravitch, Daniel Willingham, Randi Weingarten, Jason Griffiths, Lynne Munson, and Mark Bauerlein. I signed it too, so I won’t comment on it; I simply encourage you to read it!

And over at the Core Knowledge blog, Robert Pondiscio makes a compelling argument that the key difference between advocates and critics of the 21st century skills movement is “one of orientation”–and no trivial matter.

Update: The letter inspired the first-ever sing-along on the Core Knowledge blog.

Filed Under: Culture, Education, technology Tagged With: , , ,

"We do not start the world anew with each generation"

September 15, 2009 by

In today’s Boston Globe, Diane Ravitch shows with pith and verve that “the same ideas proposed today by the 21st-Century Skills movement were iterated and reiterated by pedagogues across the 20th century.”

Whether it was “learning by doing,” the “project method,” the “activity method,” the “life adjustment movement,” or “outcome-based education,” pedagogues downplayed the importance of academic knowledge.

For over a century we have numbed the brains of teachers with endless blather about process and abstract thinking skills. We have taught them about graphic organizers and Venn diagrams and accountable talk, data-based decision-making, rubrics, and leveled libraries.

But we have ignored what matters most. We have neglected to teach them that one cannot think critically without quite a lot of knowledge to think about. Thinking critically involves comparing and contrasting and synthesizing what one has learned. And a great deal of knowledge is necessary before one can begin to reflect on its meaning and look for alternative explanations.

Ravitch writes, “we do not start the world anew with each generation.” We need the experience, knowledge, and wisdom of those who came before us.

Such knowledge allows us to practice true critical thinking. Without it we are lost.

(And to P21 people who say they never denied this, I say: then let’s teach literature and history. Enough with the nonsense, enough with the marketing of “21st century flotsam” and “21st century jetsam.”)

Read the entire article.

Update: Read also David Foster’s “Thinking and Memorizing.”

Filed Under: Culture, Education, technology Tagged With: , , , ,

21st century science, geography

July 3, 2009 by

Partnership for 21st Century Skills has come out with science and geography road maps that show how to integrate “new” skills into old subjects. Last year’s maps covered English Language Arts and social studies. Math is in the works.

The science and geography maps provide educators with teacher-created models of how 21st century skills can be infused into instruction and highlight the critical connections between science, geography and 21st century skills such as critical thinking, problem solving and communication.

There’s no content, complains Common Core. Instead, P21 explains that learning skills is more important than “acquiring information” and “assessing to learn what students do not know.” 

So, under P21’s plan, students will learn less and their knowledge gaps will go undetected. 

Common Core also wonders how students can learn from the suggested activities if they haven’t acquired any information.

The fourth-grade science activity is light on science:

 Students in the class role-play citizens in a town meeting where members of the community express different points of view about a local issue, such as the location of a new school, building a bypass for traffic, or a re-zoning of downtown to be “pedestrian only” without vehicles, etc.

Eighth-grade science focuses on how a citizen evalutes scientific claims, not how to be a scientist. Most of us will be, at best, informed citizens, but what about the students who want to do science?

Students view video samples from a variety of sources of people speaking about a science-related topic (e.g., news reporters, news interviews of science experts, video podcasts of college lectures, segments from public television documentaries, or student-made videos of parents and professionals in their community). Students rate the videos on the degree to which the person sounded scientific…

A proposed 12th-grade geography activity asks students to conduct a survey to ”test the law of retail gravitation (i.e., the number of visits a resident makes to competing shopping centers is inversely proportional to the distances between residence and center and proportional to the size of the center).” That is, people will travel longer distances to visit a large shopping center with many choices than to go to a small shopping center.

Given the percentage of young Americans who can’t find Iraq and Iran on a map — much less tell the difference between them — mastery of retail geography seems a bit esoteric.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , ,

School of the Future flounders

June 25, 2009 by

Philadelphia’s high-tech School of the Future (SOF), designed with help from Microsoft, was supposed to revolutionize education, writes Meris Stansbury on eSchool News. So far, we’ve seen the future and it doesn’t work very well. (I had doubts when the school opened in 2006.)

It would teach at-risk students critical 21st-century skills needed for college and the work force by emphasizing project-based learning, technology, and community involvement.

. . . From alternative school hours to laptops for every student, from a customizable school portal to campus-wide wireless access, and from a panel to design 21st-century curriculum to a new teacher hiring model, the SOF was thought to be a sure winner.

The school went through four principals in three years. Union contracts made it hard to hire teachers who were a good fit for the school.

Teachers received little training on how to use the technology to foster learning. Students had trouble using the laptops and worried they’d be stolen if they brought them home.

Although the technology itself was not supposed to trump basic classroom practices, Microsoft and the school’s planners had decided not to allow the use of textbooks or printed materials; instead, all resources were located online through a portal designed by Microsoft.

Yet educators frequently encountered problems accessing the internet, because the school’s wireless connection often would not work.

Just like Windows Vista, writes Lorri Giovinco-Harte at NY Education Examiner.

In a panel hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, Drew University Professor Patrick McGuinn found problems at every level.

“There is no clear definition of what project-based learning exactly is and how that can be step-by-step implemented in the classroom. Student remediation also didn’t fit with the project-based collaboration model.”

He added: “These teachers and administrators had to fly a plane while they were building it.”

Over time, the School of the Future adopted the district’s curriculum and assessments; it began to look a lot like schools of the present. However, school leaders are trying to learn from the early mistakes — they hired a tech support person! — and clarify the mission. We’ll have to see what the future holds for the School of the Future.

Update: Thirty-five years ago, Philadelphia’s school of the future was William Penn High, a “showpiece packed with amenities, including a television studio, an Olympic-size swimming pool, and a dance studio,” reports the Inquirer.  Now a wreck operating at less than 20 percent of capacity, the low-scoring school will be closed for two years for rebuilding. And, one hopes, rethinking.

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Making Connections, Part 2: The Butterfly

May 24, 2009 by

I am not shy about expressing skepticism of the “21st Century Skills” movement. In February I attended a fascinating panel discussion in D.C. on 21st century skills, hosted by Common Core, with presentations by Diane Ravitch, E. D. Hirsch, Dan Willingham, and Ken Kay. In March I attended another panel discussion in D.C., this one hosted by the NEA. I asked questions at both events. At the second event, I was startled when Paige Kuni (worldwide manager of K-12 education for Intel and a board member of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills) referred to the life cycle of a butterfly as a “factoid.” I brought this up in a comment on Flypaper and later read a response from Kuni (excerpted here):

The careful listener at this event would have heard that I believe that students absolutely need to be taught content in combination with instruction that leads to 21st century skills like critical thinking, innovation, and collaboration. I believe that by creating schools that adopt the approaches P21 supports, students will be able to make connections of how a changing form makes butterflies more successful in the ecosystem. That they can think critically about how life cycles connect to evolution. And that they could extrapolate to other topics such as how product lifecycles in business are the same or different from butterfly lifecycles in making companies successful. When they are 25 if they cannot recall the name of one-step in the lifecycle- it isn’t important as long as they possess the learning skills that allow them to access that information when they need it (search- cut- paste).

The life cycle of a butterfly is much more than a “factoid” or a story of “success”: it is beautiful, complex, and intriguing on its own terms. One could study it for a lifetime. Comparing and contrasting butterfly and business life cycles only distracts from the subject, as the analogies are superficial. This leads to the question: When are interdisciplinary connections enlightening, and when are they distracting? How do we help students see “connections” between subjects in a way that will sharpen, not dull, their understanding?
[Read more...]

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , ,

’21st century’ attack on standards

April 19, 2009 by

In the name of “21st-Century skills,” California Superintendent Jack O’Connell is trying to water down the state’s high standards, writes Bill Evers on his Ed Policy blog.

Indeed, the California standards have been judged among the best in the country by the Fordham Foundation and the American Federation of Teachers.

The superintendent says “evolving the standards” would “fully engage both students and teachers in the learning process in a way that sees both parties benefit and helps to better prepare students for success in the economy of the 21st century.”

Translation from education jargon: He wants to water down California’s existing high standards in the name of the woolly concept of “21st-century skills,” that is, communicating with each other, working in groups, media literacy, and so forth. He wants to subtract from classroom time spent on solid subject-matter content to teach these supposed stand-alone skills.

Evers was a key player in writing the math and science standards, which are considered very demanding.

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