The formulation of the problem is often more important than the solution.
—EINSTEIN
Some Facts We Need to Face
• The high school graduation rate in the United States—which is about 70 percent of the age cohort—is now well behind that of countries such as Denmark (96 percent), Japan (93 percent), and even Poland (92 percent) and Italy (79 percent).1
• Only about a third of U.S. high school students graduate ready for college today, and the rates are much lower for poor and minority students. Forty percent of all students who enter college must take remedial courses.2 And while no hard data are readily available, it is estimated that one out of every two students who start college never complete any kind of postsecondary degree.
• Sixty-five percent of college professors report that what is taught in high school does not prepare students for college. One major reason is that the tests students must take in high school for state-accountability purposes usually measure 9th or 10th grade–level knowledge and skills. Primarily multiple-choice assessments, they rarely ask students to explain their reasoning or to apply knowledge to new situations (skills that are critical for success in college), so neither teachers nor students receive useful feedback about college-readiness.3
• In order to earn a decent wage in today’s economy, most students will need at least some postsecondary education. Indeed, an estimated 85 percent of current jobs and almost 90 percent of the fastest-growing and best-paying jobs now require postsecondary education. Even today’s manufacturing jobs now largely require postsecondary training and skills.4 According to the authors of “America’s Perfect Storm”: “Over the next 25 years or so . . . nearly half of the projected job growth will be concentrated in occupations associated with higher education and skill levels. This means that tens of millions more of our students and adults will be less able to qualify for higher-paying jobs. Instead, they will be competing not only with each other and millions of newly arrived immigrants but also with equally (or better) skilled workers in lower-wage economies around the world.”5
• The United States now ranks tenth among industrial nations in the rate of college completion by 25- to 44-year-olds.6
• Students are graduating from both high school and college unprepared for the world of work. Fewer than a quarter of the more than 400 employers recently surveyed for a major study of work-readiness reported that new employees with four-year-college degrees have “excellent” basic knowledge and applied skills. Among those who employ young people right out of high school, nearly 50 percent said that their overall preparation was “deficient.”7
• Only 47 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds voted in the last presidential election, compared to 70 percent of 34- to 74-year-olds.8
The conventional view of the underlying problems suggested by these data is simply that our schools are “failing.” We’ve heard this line from Republicans and Democrats alike. We’ve heard it in the media and from academics and policy pundits. We’ve heard it so often that it has become the accepted wisdom of the day. But what I see in high school classrooms all over the country suggests a different conclusion. What I see there is, in fact, not very different from what I saw thirty-five years ago when I began my career as a teacher—or even what I experienced as a high school student myself. No better, and no worse. Just more testing—and more teaching to the tests.
My view is that the numbers cited in the above list, taken together, point to a new and little-understood challenge for American education: In today’s highly competitive global “knowledge economy,” all students need new skills for college, careers, and citizenship. The failure to give all students these new skills leaves today’s youth—and our country—at an alarming competitive disadvantage. Schools haven’t changed; the world has. And so our schools are not failing. Rather, they are obsolete—even the ones that score the best on standardized tests. This is a very different problem requiring an altogether different solution.
What are these new skills, and why they have become so important? Why don’t our schools—even the best ones—teach and test them? What are the best ways to hold our schools accountable, and how do we need to differently prepare and support educators to meet these new challenges? How do we motivate today’s students to want to excel in this new world, and what do good schools look like that are meeting these challenges and getting dramatically better results? What can and must we do as citizens about this growing global achievement gap? These are some of the questions I address in this book.
A New Context for Schooling
A little over fifty years ago, Rudolf Flesch wrote a slim volume titled Why Johnny Can’t Read. More than any other book, this one started the “reading wars”—vehement and often ideologically driven debates about the best way to teach students how to read, which continue to this day—but the nature of the disagreements matters less than the topic. Throughout much of the twentieth century the basic skills of reading, computation, and rudimentary writing were the focus of our attention in schools and at home. For most students, a “rigorous” curriculum meant having to memorize more vocabulary words and do more math problems at night. There were disputes among academics and parents alike over the ways in which various skills were best taught, but there was no disagreement about their importance. Thomas Jefferson first declared literacy to be the key to citizenship. And, increasingly in the twentieth century, the “Three R’s” became essential in the workplace as well.
However, in the twenty-first century, mastery of the basic skills of reading, writing, and math is no longer enough. Almost any job that pays more than minimum wage—both blue and white collar—now calls for employees who know how to solve a range of intellectual and technical problems, as we will learn in Chapter 1. In addition, we are confronted by exponential increases of readily available information, new technologies that are constantly changing, and more complex societal challenges such as global warming. Thus, work, learning, and citizenship in the twenty-first century demand that we all know how to think—to reason, analyze, weigh evidence, problem-solve—and to communicate effectively. These are no longer skills that only the elites in a society must master; they are essential survival skills for all of us.
What I have seen in some of our best public schools over the past decade is that while Johnny and Juan and Leticia are learning how to read, at least at a basic level, they are not learning how to think or care about what they read; nor are they learning to clearly communicate ideas orally and in writing. They memorize names and dates in history, but they cannot explain the larger significance of historical events. And they may be learning how to add, subtract, and multiply, but they have no understanding of how to think about numbers. Not knowing how to interpret statistics or gauge probability, many students cannot make sense of the graphs and charts they see every day in the newspaper. They are required to memorize (and usually quickly forget) a wide range of scientific facts, but very few know how to apply the scientific method—how to formulate a hypothesis, test it, and analyze the results. Yet this way of thinking is at the very heart of many kinds of analysis and research. Finally, I have observed that the longer our children are in school, the less curious they become. Effective communication, curiosity, and critical-thinking skills, as we will see, are much more than just the traditional desirable outcomes of a liberal arts education. They are essential competencies and habits of mind for life in the twenty-first century.
The simplest explanation for the low level of intellectual work and general lack of curiosity found in classrooms—even in our best high schools—is that our schools were never designed to teach all students how to think. Since our system of public education came into being at the turn of the last century, the assumption has been that only those in the college-preparatory classes were going to have to learn how to reason, problem-solve, and so on, and historically they comprised only a small percentage of students. And even those few often learned such skills in school more by accident than by design. For the most part, teachers haven’t been trained to teach students how to think. The textbooks and tests we used in the past were not designed to teach and assess the ability to reason or analyze—and they remain substantially the same today.
Throughout history and until very recently, most people worked with their hands—not with their heads—and so they didn’t need these analytical skills in their daily life. Many generations of the most successful students were often more likely to learn how to think from the conversations they had with parents at the dinner table or during family trips than from their classes. They came to school smart and motivated and left the same, and whatever “value-added” some teachers provided often was and continues to be the result of random acts of excellence—at least in public schools. Private schools were established to educate the elite and so have always demanded more of students, but these schools educate less than 5 percent of the high school student population.
If you doubt my observations about public school classrooms, then those of you who attended these schools should simply ask yourself: How many of your high school teachers demanded that you really think in your oral and written work—as opposed to merely memorizing and regurgitating? How often were you required to write an essay in which you developed your own well-reasoned interpretation of a piece of literature or the significance of an event in history? How frequently did you have to develop and test a hypothesis for a science class or explain your thinking about how you solved a complex math problem? How often were you asked by a teacher, “So what do you think about . . .”? I don’t mean just once in a while—I mean every day. Even students in many private schools aren’t asked to do these things nearly as often as I think they should be.
Many of you who are reading this book may have been in a college or honors track in your high school and so could not see the kind of education the majority of your peers were getting in the other classes. Students in the lower academic tracks—a high percentage of whom were poor and minority students—rarely had intellectual challenges of any kind. And this remains true to this day. Boredom continues to be a leading cause of our high school dropout rate—a problem we’ll explore in depth later on.
Teaching all students to think and to be curious is much more than a technical problem for which educators, alone, are accountable. And more professional development for teachers and better textbooks and tests, though necessary, are insufficient as solutions. The problem goes much deeper—to the very way we conceive of the purpose and experience of schooling and what we expect our high school graduates to know and be able to do. Those of us who are old enough to have school-aged children had a set of experiences in school that define for us what learning is supposed to look like, and in most cases our past experience still shapes how we think about school. But these preconceptions may also prevent us from clearly understanding how very different the experience of schooling must be for children growing up in a new century. In the coming pages, I will invite you to question your assumptions about what all students should know—what it means to be an educated adult in the twenty-first century—as well as about what good teaching looks like, and how we should assess what students are learning.
I invite you to ask yourself these questions not as a philosophical exercise but, rather, because new answers are needed for our own economic survival—and that of our children. We have learned from the writings of Thomas Friedman, Daniel Pink, and many others that our children must now compete for jobs with increasingly well-educated young people from around the world.9 Technology has enabled a growing number of routine jobs—both blue and white collar—to be either “off-shored” or automated. These changes compel us to rethink what kind of education all of our young people will need in order to get—and to keep—a good job.
Economic survival is not the only factor that we must consider as we rethink education goals for the twenty-first century. To better understand how all of our schools must adapt to new realities, we need to explore three fundamental transformations that have taken place in a very short period of time:
• the rapid evolution of the new global “knowledge economy,” with profound effects on the world of work—all work.
• the sudden and dramatic shift from information that is limited in terms of amount and availability to information characterized by flux and glut.
• the increasing impact of media and technology on how young people learn and relate to the world—and to each other.
Separately, each of these transformations represents enormous challenges to our education system. Taken together, they compel a fundamental reconsideration of all of our assumptions about what children need to learn and how learning takes place. In the chapters that follow, I will explore these three forces of change and their implications for teaching, testing, schooling, training educators, and motivating today’s students.
In Chapter 1, we’ll look at how the world of work is changing and how these and other changes have created an imperative for individuals to master what I call the Seven Survival Skills—the skills that matter most for work, learning, and citizenship in today’s global “knowledge economy.” Then, in Chapter 2, we’ll contrast this New World of Work with the Old World of School—a world that has remained virtually unchanged for more than a half-century. In particular, we’ll visit classes in some of our most highly regarded public schools to explore the extent to which these new survival skills are being taught. In Chapter 3, we’ll look at the standardized, multiple-choice tests that students must take with increasing frequency and see what they are really like. We’ll explore why and how these tests became so prevalent and gauge their influence on education today; we’ll also look at some new assessments that have the potential to hold schools accountable for the skills that matter most.
The fact that future educators must be differently trained and supported in their work is the subject of Chapter 4. Chapter 5 explores the ways in which members of the “Net Generation” have been shaped by the very different world in which they’ve grown up, as well as the challenges involved in motivating today’s students and tomorrow’s workers. In Chapter 6, we’ll take a tour of three remarkable high schools that show how the Seven Survival Skills can be taught and assessed and that point the way toward a new vision for education. And finally, in the Conclusion, we’ll consider some questions—questions for me and questions for you—about what we can do to create a very different dialogue about teaching and learning and testing in the twenty-first century.
In The Global Achievement Gap, I begin by discussing why today’s students must be taught how to think—all students, not just those labeled as “gifted and talented”—and then I explore some of the essential questions that we must answer if we are to take this goal seriously. What changes must be made within the education system to prepare our nation’s students for both analytic and creative thinking? What must teachers do differently to stimulate students’ imaginations? What kinds of tests must be given to students to show whether we are making progress toward these ambitious goals? Determining the answers to these questions is important indeed; but, as Einstein suggested, “the formulation of the problem” is even more so.
The “problem,” simply stated, is that the future of our economy, the strength of our democracy, and perhaps even the health of the planet’s ecosystems depend on educating future generations in ways very different from how many of us were schooled. In this book, we embark on a journey together, not only to understand this global achievement gap but also to discover new ways of thinking about education and best practices in schools that are preparing all students for learning, work, and citizenship in the twenty-first century.