A curriculum that combines rigor and relevance is the ticket to success for students entering today's competitive job market, says Willard Daggett.
The employment prospects for students appear pretty bleak. We hear about high school graduates getting stuck in dead-end jobs, or college graduates who can't find work in their field. Do you think that the school curriculum bears some of the blame for that?
Absolutely, because the curriculum doesn't prepare kids for the world in which they are going to live.
Is that because the economy is changing so dramatically?
That's part of it. We've moved from an industrial-based economy to a technological information-based economy. In 1950, 60 percent of the jobs in the nation were unskilled compared to 33 percent today and only 15 percent by the year 2000, according to the latest projections. My dad worked in production/manufacturing. He used screwdrivers, hammers, and pliers. Today, they use statistical numerical controls, instrumentation, computerization, and robotization. The unskilled jobs are disappearing, and the workplace is being transformed. Increasingly, employees from entry-level workers to senior management need the ability to use a wide array of knowledge, to access information, and to manipulate data. So the workplace today demands very different skills than the workplace of 1950 did.
But if you look at our typical math or science or language arts curriculums, they haven't changed that much since 1950. Then and now, they were developed for the purposes of building intellectual capacity and transmission of culture. Those are worthy aims, but schools have to do more than that.
I want to come back to that point. But maybe you could clear up some confusion first. We hear that students need more specialized training to find jobs. Yet it seems many of the entry-level jobs have been “de-skilled.” You see workers writing and computing less and punching little screens with pictures on them instead. What kind of training is required?
People often have a skewed view of what workers need, because they see employees in the service sectors, punching little screens on the register, and draw their conclusions from that.
The main thing to understand is that unskilled and low-skill jobs are rapidly disappearing, partly through the advent of technology. Look at the office-related job structure. New products that have voice recognition and grammar and spell-checking capability are coming out. You speak, they print. What's going to happen to word processors, clerk typists, file clerks? They need other high-level skills or they won't keep their jobs, just as those in the agriculture and manufacturing sectors who couldn't work with advanced technologies lost out.
Like it or not, we compete today in a global economy. And the reality of it is, we either have to compete against high skill or low wages, and we surely aren't able to compete against the low wages found in other nations. The problem is, we're not yet high-skilled in these new jobs either, because our graduates are functionally illiterate. They are well-educated, they are nice people, they are bright, but how many recent college graduates can program their own VCR?
I recall hearing you say that the requirements of some good entry-level jobs have surpassed the kinds of skills students need to be admitted to most colleges.
The math, science, and language arts skills needed for entry level employment today are higher and different from the math, science, and language skills needed for all but the top 20 percent of colleges. We have assumed for a long time that if we prepare our students for college, everything will be okay. I would suggest everything is not okay. First of all, many students who begin college leave before getting a diploma. When you add in the number of students who drop out of high school or never go to college, you find that only one in five students obtains a college degree. So it makes no sense to assume that going to college will lead to a good job. Many kids go that route and wind up living with Mom and Dad and waiting tables.
Why is the school curriculum so divorced from what the modern workplace requires?
For one thing, we still provide two fundamentally different kinds of curriculums, neither of which is fully successful. The college prep curriculum does a good job of transmitting culture, but it's highly theoretical and students often have difficulty applying what they've learned. The vocational curriculum seems more relevant, but the academics too often are watered down.
What kind of curriculum is required, then?
My view is that schools need to have a single curriculum for all students that is both rigorous and relevant. Our present system of college prep versus voc ed, or tech prep versus general track, is leaving all those students inadequately prepared for the technological demands.
What makes you say that?
Well, because the vocational students don't have the academic rigor they need. They don't get the rigor in science and language arts content that is extremely important. The college prep students don't have the ability to apply that theoretical curriculum they have. Schools have not addressed application. And the students in the general track have neither the relevance nor the rigor, so they're in the worst position of all.
It's becoming more common for people to propose a more applied curriculum, one that's more relevant to what students will need to be successful after leaving school. It seems some of the applied or practical approaches to curriculum have a bad reputation, though.
In fact, some of the applied courses have been lower-level, not because they should have been, but because they were filled with the students we perceived as less capable. We still view applied courses with suspicion. But in Europe and Asia, the term “applied” doesn't carry that stigma: it's considered to be high-level work.
Please don't mistake my support for applied learning as a call for less emphasis on academics or less content. I'm not calling for less content. I'm calling for making the content we're teaching more relevant to our technological information-based society. What does that mean? That means everything has to be much more laboratory-based, but not in a theoretical sense, in a real-life sense.
What we're finding is that the students who have been in the college-bound track and the students in the vocational track need to apply math, science, and language arts skills in real-world contexts. Interestingly enough, some of the students we classify as poor students do as well or better when the content combines theory and applications. Some of the students who have done very well struggle: they're used to memorizing theory, spitting it back on a test, and never using it.
Colleges are awfully picky about the kinds of high school courses they'll accept. Will they really value a course in applied physics, for example, compared to a more traditional physics course that might be more theoretical?
Well, again, the quality of the applied courses we have right now is uneven. So I don't think we should assume all students should drop the traditional physics course and take the applied course. Instead, we need to make sure that theoretical physics includes a much heavier lab component to expose students to real-world, practical applications. Therefore, we don't need less theory or less content, or less rigor: we just need the application of the present academic curriculum. A rigorous applied curriculum forces every child to have both rigor and relevance. It is happening in Germany and Japan, where I have worked with school reform commissions. I've seen it work firsthand in both nations with all students.
Some might question your focus on the practicality or relevance of curriculum. For example, a teacher of poetry or ancient history might argue those topics are worth studying, even though one might not find much practical use for them.
I don't frame it as an either/or decision. In terms of studying English, for example, reading Shakespeare's plays and studying poetry are very important for the transmission of culture. But they're not adequate because our students are leaving school unable to read and understand the kind of materials required by many jobs.
You say students are hamstrung because they aren't good technical readers or writers. What do you mean by that? I thought a good reader was a good reader.
The focus of the language arts curriculum has typically been on developing students' personal response to literature and their broad conceptualization skills. So we have them read literature, newspapers, and so on. We rarely ask students to read for very specific detail or to read technical materials. And that's the kind of reading many students will have to do when they leave school.
What's the result of this? Well, there are a lot of VCRs right now blinking “12:00...12:00...12:00...” because people can't read technical material well enough to program the time. Many people can't read their computer manual, and they say the manuals are poorly written. It's not because they are written poorly, it's because they are written with a technical slant, and most people never learned to read that way. Technical reading and writing is a fundamentally different application from the reading and writing for personal response taught in American schools.
Do other countries teach technical reading or writing skills?
Yes. I participated last year in a study of the math, science, and language arts standards in elementary and secondary schools in 10 countries: Japan, Korea, China, Canada, England, Germany, Russia, Denmark, France, and the United States. We analyzed in detail what they were teaching.
We found that other countries have very demanding technical reading and writing requirements. But, in many cases, they were not taught as part of the language arts curriculum; technical reading and writing were taught in math and science. This is an important distinction. I don't want to leave the impression that language arts teachers are doing a bad job. Having looked extensively at language arts programs in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, I think ours is among the best in the world. Technical reading and writing should be taught by science and math teachers, the technical teachers. These skills have to be taught in conjunction with applied physics, statistics and logic, probability, and measurement systems.
Can you give an example of how another country approaches teaching technical reading and writing skills?
Look at Germany. Germany has developed a reputation for the success of its vocational programs, its youth apprenticeship programs. But I would suggest that the strength of their system is what they provide for all students in math and science. In science, they'll spend up to 25 percent of all their instructional time, K–12, on technical reading and writing as a part of science. Daily activities and instruction move from very simple technical reading and writing to very high-level technical reading and writing. When German students are assessed, they're not just tested on their ability to read literature. They are given technical materials to read. They might have to read 12 or 15 pages of a manual for the installation of a nuclear emergency system in a community. The reading is very long and technical, and the students have to respond to questions on what they've read.
This is the direction we need to move in if we're going to better prepare students for the kinds of good jobs that will be available in the future. We need to ensure that all students receive a rigorous and relevant curriculum. Schools should not have different curriculums for different students; they should vary the instructional strategies to play to students' different interests, learning styles, and aptitudes.
