Making the Grade

Reinventing America's Schools

Tony Wagner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781135957964
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book provides a guide for a long-overdue public dialogue about why and how we need to reinvent our nation's schools. How has the world changed for our children; what do all students need to know in light of these changes; how do we hold students and schools accountable for results; what do good schools look like; and what must leaders do to create more of these schools? These are some of the questions that drive this book. The answers emerging to these questions may surprise many. The most successful public schools of the 21st century look a lot more like our 19th century village schools than our current factory model of schooling. This book describes these "new village schools" that have been created in the last decade and suggests that they are a prototype for the schools of the future.

1
How Has the World Changed for Children?

LIVING in the midst of rapid change, most of us have a hard time truly seeing, its essential features. But if we are to understand more deeply what students need to know and be able to do, as well as what kind of schools will be most helpful to them, then we must first consider how a changing world is shaping today’s young people and their future.

In teacher and community forums around the country, I have often asked audiences to reflect on how our world has changed in the last quarter century or so. People’s first response is frequently—“everything!” Everything, that is, except schools. Schools probably have changed less than any other institution in our society. Did you know, for example, that the unit of study used in almost all American high schools today—called the Carnegie Unit— was introduced in 1906? It determines how the overwhelming majority of teachers and students spend their days in school, and it is still the way we organize information that is sent to colleges. Is there one other thing invented at the turn of the last century that remains in daily use in this country by millions of people that has changed so little?

But just saying that everything has changed except schools doesn’t get us very far in deepening our understanding of what must be done to improve them. We have to look further, and to do so we need a framework that will help us order and make sense of all the change around us. In my work with parents, educators, and community leaders, for some time now I have discussed the important changes we need to understand in four broad categories:

• Work
• Learning
• Citizenship
• Motivation for learning

This is not meant to be a complete list or categorization of all changes, but rather a way to capture those that are critical to our understanding of education for the twenty-first century. Most who’ve used this framework have found it very helpful.

Work

When our system of education was invented a hundred years or so ago. most people in this country earned their living with their hands—at first, mainly on farms and then on assembly lines. For most of the last century, the vast majority of work in this country required very little or no formal education—beyond the ability to follow the boss’s orders and show up for work on time. Even as late as 1960, only about 20 percent of all jobs in this country required any kind of training beyond high school.

But in a very short period of time, all that has changed. We have moved from an industrial, assembly-line economy to one that is increasingly dominated by technology, information, and service—and the pace of change in this direction is accelerating rapidly. The skills required in this new economy are radically different. “Smart hands” are no longer good enough. Today one has to have both intellectual and social skills in order to get a decent job.

A number of studies have described the skills now needed for work in our rapidly changing economy. Harvard’s Richard Murnane, and Frank Levy from M.I.T. perhaps best summarize this consensus in their book Teaching the New Basic Skills. They document a fundamental change in what employers now expect their workers to know and be able to do for both blue- and white-collar work and explain “the new basic skills” now needed to get a decent-paying job:

Over the last decade, more and more businesses have begun to look for a similar kind of worker. In addition to things that employers have always looked for—reliability, a positive attitude, and a willingness to work hard— these employers now look for hard and soft skills that applicants wouldn’t have needed 20 years ago:

• The ability to read at the ninth-grade level or higher
• The ability to do math at the ninth-grade level or higher
• The ability to solve semi-structured problems where hypotheses must be formed and tested
• The ability to work in groups with persons of various backgrounds
• The ability to communicate effectively, both orally and in writing
• The ability to use personal computers to carry out simple tasks like word processing

Murnane and Levy go on to observe, “A surprise in the list of New Basic Skills is the importance of soft skills. The skills are called ‘soft’ because they are not easily measured on standardized tests. Today, more than ever, good firms expect employees to raise performance continually by learning from each other through written and oral communication and by group problem solving.”¹

In the groundbreaking and well-researched book Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman, comes to a similar conclusion. He finds that what he calls “EQ”—the capacity for self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills—is much more of a determinant of adult success in work and in relationships than IQ is. And the authors of both books observe that there is no correlation between high IQ scores and EQ, or mastery of soft skills.

The implications of these economic changes for education are profound: all students must now learn new skills. Let’s consider each part of this new problem.

All Students

Historically, as I’ve mentioned, American public schools—especially our high schools—have been sorting machines. We have always sorted out— or tracked—the small percentage of students who were going on to college and have given them a more rigorous education. The remainder— perhaps 80 percent—got just bare-bones schooling, which was all that was needed in the old economy. Now, however, we have to teach all students “higherorder” thinking skills—such as how to form hypotheses and solve problems—if they are to be employable. We must also teach all students how to use new technologies.

But we don’t yet know how to educate all students to these higher standards, nor do we know how to teach all students how to use new technologies. We’ve never had to do it before.

New Skills

In elementary schools, children are taught to treat each other nicely, but these efforts are a far cry from what is now needed. As the work of the previously cited authors makes clear, students today must have EQ, or soft skills to be successful in work—the ability to communicate effectively with different kinds of people and work in teams, for example.

We do not know how to teach these skills, nor do we know how to assess them. We’ve never had to do it before.

This analysis makes even more clear, I think, why the educational problem we face is reinvention, not reform.

Murnane, and Levy and a growing number of economists are concerned that more and more jobs in the “new economy” require skills that high school graduates simply don’t have. While the percentage of the population that has earned a B.A. degree has stayed nearly the same for the past thirty years—about one-third—the number of jobs that require further learning has shot up dramatically. According to Stephen Rose, senior economist at the Educational Testing Service, “You need a bachelors degree just to apply for the best jobs. That is as it should be for doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers, computer specialists. But look at middle level managers. In 1960, only 40 percent had a bachelors degree and today it is 80 percent.”²

The only jobs left over for students with no more than a high school education are those that require virtually no skills—and which pay next to nothing. According to Murnane, and Levy, between 1979 and 1993, the average annual wages of high school graduates dropped from about $28, 000 to less than $20,000, while college graduates’ wages stayed about the same (as expressed in 1993 dollars). Since 1993, all wages have increased during a prolonged period of economic growth. However, the wage gap between those who only have a high school diploma versus a B.A. degree has actually widened. According to the Economic Policy Institute, in 1999 the average hourly wage for high school graduates was $11.83, while college graduates were earning nearly double—$20.58.³

The need for a better-prepared workforce has, in fact, been the driving impetus of school reform since the early 1980s, not new research about learning. The primary reason given for the need to improve our schools is economic: the argument is that we need more highly skilled workers in a highly competitive global economy.

School reform, then, has been “business-driven.” Corporate CEOs like IBM’s Lewis Gerstner, have led the national school reform efforts and lobbied for higher standards and accompanying tests. In many cities, it is the business leaders who are pushing hardest for significant change in schools. Indeed, corporate leaders organized all three of the national Education Summits that took place in the past decade, and educators were not even invited to the first two!

Many educators are disturbed by the increased focus on workplace skills in schools. They fear that corporate leaders are dictating what should happen in education and believe that it is not the role, of schools to prepare students for work.

I disagree. First, the skills needed for work and for higher education are now essentially the same. To prepare students for work is not simply to give them a vocational education—such as learning how to weld, for example. Preparing students for work today means developing the skills of independent learning, problem solving, and teamwork, as we have seen. In fact, business leaders say they do not want schools to teach students a particular set of skills, fearing that new technology will quickly make specific skills obsolete.

The second reason we must think about preparation for work is to ensure that all students have equal access to economic opportunities in this country. It is a matter of ensuring greater economic democracy. If we look more carefully at the consequences of students not having real skills, we begin to understand how urgent our task is. Gone forever are the days when a high school graduate could go to work on an assembly line and expect to earn a middle-class standard of living. Students who leave high school today without skills and unprepared for further learning are unlikely to ever earn enough to raise a family—let alone buy a house. They are being sentenced to a lifetime of poverty. A generation’s future is at stake.

Learning

What Must Be Learned

At the heart of the new economy is the transition to what many call “the information age.” The implications for education of the explosion of information and its increasing availability are as profound as the economic changes to which these changes are tied.

When the modern high school curriculum as we know it was introduced in 1906, we were an information-scarce society. Many towns did not yet have a library, and very few families had anything like encyclopedias in their home. Thus, only a very small number of people had easy access to information that they might need. If, for example, you wanted to know the capital of Nebraska, it was not something you could easily look up somewhere. And a hundred years ago knowledge was also more stable or enduring than it is now. For the most part, what was learned in most academic subjects in 1906 was still true ten years later. At the turn of the twentieth century, then, memorization as a means for learning made some sense. It was the only way to retain common knowledge one might need later, and the knowledge retained was likely to remain useful over time.

Today, neither of these things is true. Instead of information scarcity, we have information glut—and the information is constantly new and changing. It is now commonly believed that the amount of stored information is doubling every five years, and most of it is almost as available as tap water.

In a very few years, the Internet has dramatically changed the information “problem” in learning. It’s as if children were suddenly given a 500-million-channel cable TV but no TV guide! The problem today is no longer access to information. The real challenge is how to filter and make sense of all the information that bombards us daily. Reasoning skills are more important than ever as we try to sort out both what is true and what is important from the overwhelming amount of data available online.

Not only do we have far more information, but it is also constantly changing. Almost daily, it seems that shifting political contexts, increasing globalization, rapid advances in technologies, and new discoveries in all the sciences quickly alter what we think to be true. Addressing this information revolution, former Harvard University president Neil Rudenstine noted that “the ‘half life’ of what is learned in the humanities is eight or ten years, and in math and the sciences it is three or four.”

What all this means for schools is that the dominant learning “technology”of the past one hundred years—textbook-based instruction and tests based on memorization of facts—is hopelessly obsolete. Many textbooks are out of date before they ever even get into classrooms. Once in place, they are often used for a decade or more before schools can afford to replace them.

It is true that you can walk into most classrooms in this country and find a computer or two in a corner—or an entire computer lab in a separate room. But these appearances are deceiving. In most of our public schools, there aren’t enough computers to go around, they are usually very slow and out-of-date, and they are not connected to the Internet. Even in wealthy school districts, where computers are newer, more plentiful, and connected, computers are seldom used in classrooms. Teachers haven’t been trained in how to integrate them into the curriculum—or are uncertain about giving up their role, as the “expert.”

In the new information age, the concept of the teacher as the sole repository of knowledge is as obsolete as the textbooks, but even under the best of circumstances, learning new teaching methods is a challenging task for an aging teaching force. And our circumstances are hardly the best. Many studies have shown that what little money is available for teachers’ professional development in public schools is often squandered on “one-shot” programs that have little connection to the most urgent challenges related to improving teaching and learning.

How Learning Happens

The need to develop new methods of teaching becomes all the more urgent as we better understand how children learn. The approach to teaching in our public schools for the past one hundred years has been heavily influenced by behaviorism, the dominant school of psychology for much of the twentieth century. Behavioral psychologists have assumed that children are empty vessels when it came to learning, mere repositories for whatever they were taught, and so educators knew very little about the internal learning processes in students. It appeared not to matter what they were thinking, or whether they thought at all, as long as the teacher had the right combination of rewards and punishments.

Today we know that, in the words of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, “to understand is to invent.” A growing body of accumulated research undertaken by both educational practitioners and developmental psychologists points to a new and very different understanding of the child and the learning process. The work of Maria Montessori, John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, and the current work of Howard Gardner, has in common a view of the learner as one who is driven to discover by an intrinsic need to make sense of the world.

Real learning happens at every age through a dynamic interaction between the student, his or her prior experiences and understandings, and new experiences or information. If a lesson is not organized around a students, inner activity of learning, then what is learned is superficial or fleeting. Often, even very gifted students do not really understand material they have supposedly learned in school.

Howard Gardner, in his book The Unschooled Mind, describes experiments with students from elite universities who had memorized the definitions of scientific and mathematical laws for gravity, motion, and so on, but who could not explain what they meant. More serious still, when these students were presented with phenomena in a laboratory that the theories were meant to explain, the students didn’t invoke the theories, but rather reverted to childlike explanations of the occurrences. Gardner, describes comparable misconcepti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Foreword
• Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: What’s Really Wrong with Our Schools?
• 1. How Has the World Changed for Children?
• 2. What Do Today’s Students Need to Know?
• 3. How Do We Hold Students and Schools Accountable?
• 4. What Do “Good Schools” Look Like?
• 5. What Must Leaders Do?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index