Many Americans strongly endorse the idea that high academic standards will result in better schooling. In a survey by the Public Agenda Foundation, 70 percent of the respondents supported raising standards of promotion from grade school to junior high, and 61 percent felt the standards in their local schools were too low (American Educator 1996). Although most people would like more rigor in the curriculum, there is far less agreement as to exactly where to focus that rigor. What are the basic, core skills and knowledge that are so important that every student should learn them?
Several studies have looked at basic skills from the perspective of the student's eventual success in the workforce. For example, Benz (1997) studied how instruction for students with and without disabilities predicts positive employment outcomes. One key finding was that students with disabilities who had strong reading, writing, or math skills were two to three times more likely to be competitively employed than their peers with low skills. The authors concluded that a narrow emphasis on vocational skills is insufficient to achieve workforce success. Alternative vocational programs should emphasize academic skills in reading, writing, and math, they noted.
Murnane and Levy (1997) argue that U.S. education has been largely unresponsive to changes in the marketplace, and that students leaving high school today are ill-equipped to compete for high-paying jobs. They advocate focusing on three types of "new basic skills": (1) "hard skills" in reading and math, at a higher standard than currently achieved by many students, (2) "soft skills" in areas like working in a diverse group and making a written presentation, and (3) the ability to use a computer for word-processing and other tasks. The authors contend that all high school students should master the new skills before graduating, thus enhancing their ability to compete with college graduates for high-paying jobs. Murnane and Levy see their new skills as a tool for decreasing opportunity gaps.
A Global Perspective
Willard Daggett (1994) adds a global perspective to the debate. He feels that U.S. schools teach core academic subjects to help students advance to the next grade level, not to prepare them to compete in a technological world. His International Center for Leadership in Education compared math, science, and language arts programs in the 10 most industrialized nations. The study found that even though U.S. schools have strong content coverage, they lag far behind Asian and European nations in teaching students how to apply this knowledge to the real world.
Daggett points out that while American students typically read novels and plays, industrialized European and Asian nations require four years of "technical reading" of documents like technical manuals and tax codes. He advocates a curriculum in which students are taught "reading for information" across different subject areas. For math, he recommends de-emphasizing standard algebra and geometry courses in favor of statistics, logic, probability, and measurement. In his view, curriculum should go far beyond a content emphasis to focus on helping students apply their content knowledge to the types of situations they will encounter when they enter the workforce.
Not everyone views education primarily as a vehicle for producing skilled workers, however. For example, in The Philosophy of Education, R.S. Peters noted in 1973 that "to be educated is not to have arrived at a destination. It is to travel with a different view" (as cited in Tribe 1996). Murnane and Levy (1997) counter this argument by observing that it is difficult to participate in a civil society if one cannot afford to feed one's children. Thus a delicate balance must be struck to create "a model for core skills that can satisfy the need both for vocational competence and critical awareness" (Tribe 1996). Determining that balance is part of what makes identifying basic skills all students need to learn such a complex and challenging problem.
