At-Risk students. Are our schools at risk? NCLB Act. Reaction to the NCLB. At the turn of the century. The digital evolution. Where did we begin? Notable changes. The result from newly added education goals. Goals changed. Standardized learning. Are we ready for the 21st century? What do employers seek? Digital data banks. The Progressive Era. The way we learn. The future. Peter Drucker.
2. In 1983, almost one generation after the National
Commission on Excellence in Education published
the historic report, A Nation at Risk, which provided
a comprehensive assessment of the U.S. schools had
ultimately determined that our education system was
seriously lacking in four areas including:
• Curriculum Content
• Student Expectations
• Instruction Time
• Teacher Preparation
3. In 2002, 19 years following this report, the No Child
Left Behind Act of 2001 was passed with a focus
“aimed at closing the achievement gap by holding
schools more accountable through increased use of
standardized tests” (Wagner, 2008). The changes
that ultimately ensued centered more on curriculum
modifications that would ensure students passed the
mandatory testing required to obtain funding for each
school district.
4. Teachers quickly found themselves
using their instruction time to teach
students what they needed to know
to pass these tests and little else.
Have these recent changes also
incorporated modifications in the
curriculum that ensure students are
actually learning the skills that will
be relevant to compete and succeed
in the 21st Century? Or do we need
a new model that will support the
new goals and education
requirements our children must
obtain to compete in a global
economy?
5. With the turn of the century our
world began to evolve rapidly into
the “digital age” of an interconnected
global society. (Palfrey, and
Gasser, 2008) The expansion and
adoption of technology has officially
taken center stage and has
irrevocably changed the economic
landscape. In 1964, Marshall
McLuhan introduced the idea of a
“global village”, interconnected by
an “electronic nervous system” and
described how “events in one part of
the world could be experienced from
other parts in real-time” (Stewart,
2007). However in 1964, McLuhan’s
“global village” of networked people
was not a reality in our daily lives.
6. Now, 40 years later, we live, work and breathe in a digital world
connected instantly to people around the world. We have an entire
generation of “digital natives” born after 1980, who are not even
aware of what life was like prior to cable and satellite television,
cell phones and the internet (Palfrey, and Gasser, 2008).
Children born in 2010 enter a world consumed and driven by
multiple channels of instant communication networks.
7. If our ability to connect and communicate across the globe
and access huge repositories of information on the world
wide web has impacted how we live, work and
communicate, has it also affected our methods of education?
Ironically while the past decade has introduced monumental
technical innovations into our every day lives, our education
models have remained relatively static for the past 40 years.
While many say that the current education model is broken,
does our 40 year old model simply not meet the new
educational goals for global economy in the 21st Century?
Well, before we can adequately answer whether new models
of education are needed, we need to first examine the current
model, identify the goals and purpose of education and
finally determine whether the current model fulfills the goals
of preparing students to compete and succeed in the 21st
Century.
8. According to the National Conference of
State Legislatures, compulsory education
which was first established in
Massachusetts in 1852 and finally adopted
by all states in the union by 1918, required
that all children enroll and attend public or
private school or be home-schooled.
The original intention for requiring
children to attend school was to protect
our democracy. “Basic education needed
to be universal, so that all citizens could
participate in the democracy.”
(Christensen, 2008).
As the nation shifted from an agricultural
society to an industrial one around the
turn of the last century, the goal of
education shifted from preparing citizens
to participate in a democratic government
to also include preparing “everyone for
vocations” (Christensen, 2008).
9. With the newly added educational goal, “the number of high school
graduates exploded”, increasing from an average number of 100 students
enrolled in high school at the beginning of the century to an average of
1,000 high school students by 1970 (Christensen, 2008).
Another change during this period included the number of different
course offerings. “In 1890 there were only nine different course offerings
across the whole of U.S. high schools; by 1973, high schools offered
2,100 classes under different headings” (Christensen, 2008).
Toward the end of the 1960s the goal and purpose of education changed
again and moved from preparing students for vocations, to “asking
schools to take on a new job of keeping the United States competitive” in
an emerging global economy (Christensen, 2008).
10. With the newly added educational goal, “the
number of high school graduates exploded”,
increasing from an average number of 100
students enrolled in high school at the beginning
of the century to an average of 1,000 high school
students by 1970 (Christensen, 2008).
Another change during this period included the
number of different course offerings. “In 1890
there were only nine different course offerings
across the whole of U.S. high schools; by 1973,
high schools offered 2,100 classes under different
headings” (Christensen, 2008).
11. Toward the end of the 1960s the goal and purpose of education changed
again and moved from preparing students for vocations, to “asking schools to
take on a new job of keeping the United States competitive” in an emerging
global economy (Christensen, 2008). With this next new goal established,
further attention focused on comparing average test scores and performance
of U.S. students to those in other countries. While the “College Board,
revealed in the mid-1970’s that average SAT scores had been declining since
1963”, it wasn’t until 1983 when the U.S secretary of education created the
National Commission on Excellence in Education which produced the
“landmark report, “A Nation at Risk”, that all eyes began to focus on how we
were educating the nation’s youth (Christensen, 2008).
12. As the country began to recognize that our education
system was failing to reach the goal of preparing
students to be competitive in the global economy,
scrutiny on the established standard education model
began to unfold. While the report identified a number
of various weak points in the education system from
“homogenized, diluted and diffused” curriculum
content, to student expectations, to comparison of time
spent in the classroom to teacher qualifications and
certifications, it missed the biggest problem of all (A
Nation at Risk Findings). We had not adjusted our
teaching model to meet student’s individual needs nor
were we teaching students based on their individual
learning styles.
13. The classroom of the 1950’s compared
to 2010 has changed very little in 60
years. Granted computers adorn desks
scattered throughout the room and
frequently a television monitor can be
located hovering in a corner to view
educational videos, but generally
speaking, desks remained lined in rows
pointing toward the front of the
classroom where the teacher lectures to
students, disseminating knowledge and
directing them to move from one lesson
to another. “The teacher, who is
generally the center of attention in the
classroom, initiates most of the talk and
orchestrates most of the interaction in
the classroom around brief factual
questions, if there is any discussion at
all. Hence, the teacher is the main
source of information” (Elmore, 2008).
14. “Students’ work is typically assessed by asking them to repeat information that
has been conveyed by the teacher in the classroom, usually in the form of
worksheets or tests that involve discrete, factual, right-or-wrong answers”
(Elmore, 2008). “Much of the support behind this standardization –categorizing
students by age into grades and then teaching batches of them with batches of
material – was inspired by the efficient factory system that emerged in industrial
America” (Christensen, 2008). However the process of standardization in
education became further entrenched with the passing of the No Child Left
Behind Act which mandated that all students be taught the exact same
information at the same grade level regardless of individual ability.
15. While this instructional model of
disseminating knowledge met the
goals of educating students in the
industrial age at the turn of the 20th
century, it is no longer applicable for
achieving the task of educating
students to compete in a global
market. The primary reason this
instructional model is failing is
because it does not teach students the
skills that will be required in the
emerging “knowledge society”
(Drucker, 1994). What are the skills
that we need to teach our students to
be competitive in the 21st Century?
16. In his recent book, What Would Google Do?, Jeff Jarvis asked Jonathan
Rosenberg, senior VP of product management at Google, what were the
skills that Google looked for when hiring new employees? Rosenberg
said that Google looks for individuals who have the following five skills:
Analytical Reasoning Communication Skills
Willingness To
Experiment
Playing In A Team Passion and Leadership
“In the real world, “he said, “the tests are all open book and your success
in inexorably determined by the lessons you glean from the free market”
(Jarvis, 2009).
17. Furthermore, in The Global Achievement Gap, Tony Wagner interviews a number
of CEO’s from Fortune 500 companies asking them what skills do students need
to learn in order to compete in the global market. He identifies what he calls the
“Seven Survival Skills” and lists them:
Critical
Thinking &
Problem-Solving
Collaboration Across
Networks and Leading by
Influence
Agility &
Adaptability
Initiative and
Entrepreneurialism
Effective Oral &
Written
Communication
Accessing & Analyzing
Information
Curiosity & Imagination
If our corporate leaders have clearly identified what skills and knowledge will be
necessary to succeed in the 21st Century, then we are now equipped with a
roadmap providing us the direction needed to create a relevant curriculum for our
students. Have we modified the curriculum to teach these skills? Are teachers
educating students to problem-solve and think critically?
18. Our current model of education provides knowledge disseminated from teacher to
student through oral lectures and written text books. Students obtain information,
memorize facts, dates, statistics and data, and then regurgitate the data in
response to test questions which determines whether or not a minimum number
of questions were answered correctly in order to pass onto the next level. People
are not information systems and computers process and disseminate data at a far
superior rate than humans will ever hope to achieve. Why then are we educating
our children in the same manner as we would download data into an electronic
database? The answer is relatively simple to grasp, but more difficult to
implement. While information technology and computers have been in existence
since the 1960’s, the “Digital Age” did not arrive until the birth of the first
generation of “digital natives” in 1980 (Palfrey, and Gasser, 2008). Thirty years
later we are now just beginning to truly understand how to utilize and capitalize
on digital information technology. People are frequently slow to move, change
and adopt new ideas. According to Marshall McLuhan in the 1965 interview,
McLuhan Predicts ‘World Connectivity’”, “we still have this obsessional,
compulsive drive to fit into patterns, to fit into classifications” and “we are
terrified when automation threatens to integrate us.” Essentially people find
standardization and classification easier to process and understand.
19. Increasingly more theories are directing us toward innovative instructional
techniques that would help us revise and improve our educational models. Some
of these ideas are not necessarily new, but instead are being reintroduced given
our current technological advancements. From “the early teens and into the
1940’s, education experienced an era of reform that was called “the Progressive
Period” (Elmore, 2008). While “the progressive period had a wide agenda, one
priority was an explicit attempt to change the core of schooling from a teacher-
centered, fact-centered, recitation-based pedagogy to a pedagogy based on an
understanding of children’s thought processes and their capacities to learn and
use ideas in the context of real-life problems” (Elmore, 2008). The primary goal
of this movement was to “break the lock of teacher-centered instruction and
generate high levels of student engagement through student-initiated inquiry and
group activities” (Elmore, 2008). The challenge that most schools encountered
during the progressive period was that they lacked the ability to incorporate a
curriculum based on individual student learning styles into the large educational
organization. Since no viable, scalable, practical application beyond a 1:1 teacher
student ratio could accommodate and incorporate specific individualized
instruction, the concept became dormant until the dawn of the digital age and the
integration of information technology.
20. In the early 1980’s Howard Gardner, a Harvard psychologist, developed the idea
that people have many types of intelligences and two of his definitions of
intelligence include, “the ability to solve problems that one encounters in real life
and the ability to generate new problems to solve” (Christensen, 2008). Gardner
identified eight different “intelligences” and ways in which people learn
including:
Logical-Mathematical Bodily-Kinesthetic
Musical
Interpersonal Intrapersonal
Naturalist
Linguistic
Spatial
If research has now proven that people have multiple “intelligences” and various
individual learning styles, then “a key step toward making school intrinsically
motivating is to customize an education to match the way each child best learns”
(Christensen, 2008).
21. If our current instructional model is failing to teach students
what they need to learn in order to compete and succeed in a
global market then we can no longer afford to maintain the
model and we must change.“Standardization clashes with the
need for customization in learning. To introduce customization,
schools need to move away from monolithic instruction of
batches of students toward a modular, student-centric approach
using software as an important delivery vehicle” (Christensen,
2008). “The current educational system the way it trains
teachers, the way it groups students, the way the curriculum is
designed, and the way the school buildings are laid out – is
designed for standardization. If the United States is serious
about leaving no child behind, it cannot teach its students with
standardized methods” (Christensen, 2008). “If the goal is the
educate every student-asking schools to ensure that all students
have the skills and capabilities to escape the chains of poverty
and have an all-American shot at realizing their dreams” as well
as compete in a new interconnected global market, we need to
identify methods for adopting and integrating “student-centric”
instructional models for education (Christensen, 2008).
The Future
22. According to Peter Drucker in his article The Age of Social Transformation, the
new commodity in the knowledge society is education. “The acquisition and
distribution of formal knowledge may come to occupy the place in the politics of
the knowledge society which the acquisition and distribution of property and
income have occupied in our politics over the two or three centuries that we have
come to call the Age of Capitalism”(Drucker, 1994). If education is now not just
required, but needed in order for the U.S. to maintain a position of strength in the
global economy, then we need to ask ourselves whether or not the current
education model is achieving this new goal by teaching students the relevant
skills they will need to be competitive. If the primary goal of education is in fact
to educate U.S. citizens to be competitive in a global market, then we must
change, adopt and incorporate a student-centric education model that will teach
each student based on how they best learn. With the aid and integration of digital
technology we can create software that will help us develop a student-centric
curriculum based on individual learning styles. We can create smaller,
collaborative, learning groups led by teachers facilitating problem-solving
dialogue while being networked to a larger global community. We can teach our
children the critical thinking skills they will need to solve future problems that
have not even yet developed. We can not only succeed in educating our youth to
compete in the global economy, but more importantly thrive in a diverse,
networked world. First we need to change our current educational model to one
that will enable us to teach based on how each individual child best learns. Only
then will we provide a foundation for the next generation to succeed.
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The Way The World Learns. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
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