In the article, Mathews softens, albeit slightly, his stance on 21st century skills and their incredibly important presence within schools. Never, as you would agree, has the Partnership advocated for the integration of 21st century skills at the expense of core subjects, like reading, math, science, social studies, etc.
In fact, the Partnership's work has been focused on how 21st century skills fit seamlessly into core subjects because it is both easy and vital to infuse core subjects with 21st century skills. As noted in research and materials, the teaching of core subjects is enhanced when students are expected to think critically and creatively, innovate, display oral communication skills and work and collaborate in diverse team settings. Quite simply, this is important work because teachers in their specific disciplines need to know how 21st century skills manifest themselves inside their discipline.
At the end of the article, Mathews states "I will remain skeptical. I have seen too many glittery labels come to a bad end when applied to classes organized with very little thought. But...I will also welcome any firsthand observations of 21st-century skills classes readers might have. E-mail me at mathewsj@washpost.com."
It would be great if you could send him your thoughts and share with him anecdotes of how 21st century skills are currently impacting teaching and learning and helping students thrive. Thank you for your time and work in championing this vital cause.
WASHINGTON POST
Why I Don't Like 21st-Century Reports
By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 10, 2008; 6:20 AM
Another well-intentioned report on the future of American schools reached my cubicle recently: "21st Century Skills, Education and Competitiveness: A Resource and Policy Guide." It is available on the Web at www.21stcenturyskills.org/index.php. It is full of facts and colorful illustrations, with foresight and relevance worthy of the fine organizations that funded it -- the National Education Association, the KnowledgeWorks Foundation, the Ford Motor Company Fund and the Tucson-based Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a leading education advocacy organization that also produced the report and sent it to me and many other people.
So why, after reading it, did I feel like tossing it into the waste basket?
Maybe this is just my problem. Maybe everyone else who obsesses about schools loves these reports. There certainly are a lot of them. I seem to get at least one a month. There must be a big demand.
The reports are usually sponsored by energetic organizations, like the ones above, that have devoted themselves to making schools better for our children. They include business groups, teachers unions, think tanks, government agencies and universities. They have a lot of meetings about what the report should say, hire good writers, editors and graphic artists, put in long days and late nights, print up and put online the results, hold news conferences, answer questions and think about their next report.
The problem I have is that these major pronouncements often seem to have been conceived and written by people who are miles away from real classrooms. Many of the producers and writers, I am sure, have been educators. They know what it is like to work with children for whom the notion of a 21st-century classroom is as inexplicable -- and maybe as laughable -- as the school janitor coming to work in a spacesuit. But so little of that hard-earned knowledge of the grungy unpredictability of teaching ever finds its way into their big national studies.
This latest report is a perfect example. The first three paragraphs summarize its point very nicely, decorated with the ellipses that are common in this form of communication:
"In an economy driven by innovation and knowledge . . . in marketplaces engaged in intense competition and constant renewal . . . in a world of tremendous opportunities and risks . . . in a society facing complex business, political, scientific, technological, health and environmental challenges . . . and in diverse workplaces and communities that hinge on collaborative relationships and social networking . . . the ingenuity, agility and skills of the American people are crucial to U.S. competitiveness.
"Our ability to compete as a nation -- and for states, regions and communities to attract growth industries and create jobs -- demands a fresh approach to public education. We need to recognize that a 21st century education is the bedrock of competitiveness -- the engine, not simply an input, of the economy.
"And we need to act accordingly: Every aspect of our education system -- preK--12, postsecondary and adult education, after-school and youth development, workforce development and training, and teacher preparation programs -- must be aligned to prepare citizens with the 21st century skills they need to compete."
Okay. Sounds good. I kept reading. There was much detail, accompanied by pie charts and graphs and photos of smiling children, about the growth of information service jobs, the lagging improvement in student proficiency and the changing demographic character of the country. It listed the "21st century skills" that our children need for the rapidly evolving labor market. These included thinking critically and making judgments, solving complex, multidisciplinary, open-ended problems, developing creative and entrepreneurial thinking, communicating and collaborating, making innovative use of knowledge, information and opportunities and taking charge of financial, health and civic responsibilities.
Good stuff. I liked all of those suggestions. I had only one question: How in the name of every teacher who has ever contemplated suicide during the unit on fractions are we supposed to make those things happen?
Tragically, the report ran out of steam at that point, as do most of these heavily promoted studies. It said that we need to get support from voters, employers and educators. Fine. It recommended new positions and budget items in federal, state and local offices, for instance, a senior adviser to the president for 21st-century skills, 21st-century skills offices at both the education and labor departments, a $2 billion research and development fund, and so on.
I looked carefully, but it never explained how teachers are going to find the time to introduce all these skills to students who, at the moment, are still struggling with plain old reading, writing and math.
Maybe that will be the topic of the next report. Maybe I am not appreciating the importance of painting the big picture so everyone knows where we have to go. I showed a draft of this column to a spokesman for the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. He said many schools are already successfully incorporating the report's ideas into their lessons. He said the Catalina Foothills district in Tucson has "completely revamped their education system around 21st-century skills." Progress has also been made at schools in Lawrence Township, Ind., Manassas, Virginia Beach, Milwaukee and Darlington, Wis.
I welcome e-mails from anyone involved in those schools on what specific changes have been made. I will be keeping an eye on the introduction of 21st-century skills in Manassas, not far from where I sit. My Post colleague Jennifer Buske wrote in August of initial moves in this direction by Manassas Superintendent Gail Pope. The organizations involved in the 21st-century effort are staffed by good people. I am going to assume that we agree that we need to look closely at the details of teaching these skills, and in that spirit I want to make two suggestions.
First, please try to avoid the lethal disease that infects so many of these studies. I call it All-at-once-itis. That refers to the irresistible urge to insist that the changes have to be accomplished ALL AT ONCE, or we will fall short of our important objectives. In past columns, I noted the appearance of this ailment in otherwise admirable reports such as "Tough Choices or Tough Times" (2006) or " 'Restoring Value' to the High School Diploma" (2007). In this democracy we never make good changes all at once. The presidential campaign and economic crisis are proof of that. So please don't tell us we have to.
Second -- and this will wreak havoc with report deadlines -- why not wait to release your recommendations until you have tried them out on at least two or three schools with a few hundred students? I won't insist on proof of success. I just want to get a sense of how young human beings, and their teachers, react to all these new hoops they must jump through. (This will also help stifle my suspicion that you don't actually know how to do any of the things you are suggesting.)
No one is going to pay attention to what I want, of course. The report writers know I will keep reading their stuff, full of hope that I will eventually find some classroom reality among all the pie charts.
I am not saying the people who issue these pronouncements are wrong. Many of their ideas are excellent. But if we are going to make them happen, they have to show us what it is going to take, besides just more concerned citizens spending more money to produce more reports like this one.
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WASHINGTON POST
A Surprisingly Sensible 21st-Century Report
By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 21, 2008; 6:17 AM
Only six weeks have passed since my last cranky diatribe about teaching what are called "21st-century skills" in our schools. I think the 21st-century skills movement is mostly a pipe dream, promoted by well-meaning people who embrace the idea of modernity but fail to consider how these allegedly new and important lessons can be taught by the usual victims of such schemes, classroom teachers.
Now I am forced to calm down, take a breath and consider the possibility that I was wrong about this, because a scholar whose work I admire has produced the first sensible report on 21st-century skills I have read. "Measuring Skills for the 21st Century" was written by Elena Silva, senior policy analyst at the Education Sector think tank in Washington. It is available at http://www.educationsector.org/research/research_show.htm?doc_id=716323. It suggests that this idea is vital, important and ought to be pursued, no matter what I say.
I telephoned Silva to express my concern that we differ on this issue, since she always knows what she is talking about and I sometimes don't. Our conversation reassured me. She has the same doubts I do about the loose and overheated way the 21st-century skills concept has been marketed, and the failure to give teachers useful guidance on what to do with it. She agrees with me that much of what is labeled 21st-century learning is not new, but represents what our best educators have been teaching for several centuries.
For those of you unfamiliar with this topic, here is what alleged 21st-century skills are: the ability to think creatively and to evaluate and analyze information. Does that sound futuristic to you?
Silva and I are also of one mind on the need to make sure this emphasis on analytical and critical thinking does not derail the national effort to make sure all students learn the basic content of the important disciplines, such as literature, math and science. Learning how to learn, one of the goals of the 21st-century skills movement, is fine, but it is not a substitute for being able to recall without resort to Google vital facts and concepts, like the causes of World War I, the usefulness of active verbs and how to calculate growth in percents.
The most important conclusion of Silva's well-sourced 11-page study is that the best learning happens "when students learn basic content and processes, such as the rules and procedures of arithmetic, at the same time that they learn how to think and solve problems."
Okay, I said. That sounds good. But what of my complaint in that peevish column last month, "Why I Don't Like 21st-Century Reports"? Before our various 21st-century think tanks show me their shining vision of a revolutionized education system churning out a new generation full of Warren Buffetts, Antonin Scalias and Rachel Maddows, how about letting me see one or two schools that are already showing this is possible?
Silva has done that. Her prime example is the New Technology High School Model, created by teachers, business executives and community leaders in Napa, Calif., in 1996. They got money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and now have 40 schools in nine states.
"Student learning at New Technology is designed to simulate real life and real work," Silva writes. "Instead of completing traditional worksheets and daily assignments, students are assigned periodic projects, often as teams, and must complete a combination of products, including written essays and practical demonstrations. Each project assigned to students is accompanied by a set of rubrics that measure a student's performance on fundamental skills, like writing, as well as criteria such as critical thinking, application and originality. Students receive multiple grades, one for each criterion, for each project."
I need to see data on this approach, but at least as a guide to teachers it is clearer and more comprehensible than I have seen in other 21st-century skills reports. Assessment turns out to be a very important part of Silva's paper. She recognizes that we need some way to determine whether 21st-century schools are producing anything more valuable than cool-looking brochures and Web sites.
Here are some existing assessments of advanced skills -- the College Work and Readiness Assessment, the Programme for International Student Assessment, PowerSource, the Key Stage 3 Information Communications Technology Literacy Assessment and a new National Assessment of Educational Progress Science Assessment. I threw all those into one sentence to emphasize the fact that a lot of these measures are very technical and may induce slumber if read late at night. Some seem rudimentary. It is unclear, at least to me, whether what they are measuring are teachable skills or character traits, like persistence and affability, that most schools have barely an inkling how to foster.
But Silva cites enough research to convince me, almost, that if 21st-century skills, as she says, "can be measured accurately and in a common and comparable way," we will have the tools to do that before long. I would be happy with a yardstick that did no more than separate schools that I grudgingly admit may be adding value, such as New Technology High, from those that slap a 21st-century label on the same old courses in hopes of fooling the PTA.
The report reminded me of something I knew but had not put in this context. We already have in several hundred American high schools a program that teaches critical thinking and measures the results with depth and clarity. That would be the International Baccalaureate program. Its three- to five-hour final exams at the end of college-level courses in all the major disciplines -- no multiple choice questions allowed -- provide a more sophisticated assessment of student learning than anything else in American public schools.
Silva says IB "is built on the principle that students can and should master both basic subject matter and higher-order skills." I think Advanced Placement, which also offers college-level learning and assessment in many more U.S. high schools, does the same thing, even if its final exams are not quite as good. To their credit, neither IB nor AP advertise themselves as the key to 21st-century skills. Once we get straight that the 21st-century label is a marketing trick, and refers to the kind of learning that has produced scientific and cultural advances in every era, we might be able to do something with some of the programs Silva describes.
I will remain skeptical. I have seen too many glittery labels come to a bad end when applied to classes organized with very little thought. But I will look for more from Silva. I will also welcome any firsthand observations of 21st-century skills classes readers might have. E-mail me at mathewsj@washpost.com. Good or bad, we can learn something from what you have seen.
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Education Sector Reports
Measuring Skills for the 21st Century
- Author:
- Elena Silva
- Publication Date:
- November 10, 2008
When ninth-graders at St. Andrew's School, a private boarding school in
Students were given research reports, budgets, and other documents to help draft their answers, and they were expected to demonstrate proficiency in subjects like reading and math as well as mastery of broader and more sophisticated skills like evaluating and analyzing information and thinking creatively about how to apply information to real-world problems.
Not many public school students take assessments like the CWRA. Instead, most students take tests that are primarily multiple-choice measures of lower-level skills in reading and math, such as the ability to recall or restate facts from reading passages and to handle arithmetic-based questions in math. These types of tests are useful for meeting the proficiency goals of the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and state accountability systems. But leaders in business, government, and higher education are increasingly emphatic in saying that such tests don’t do enough. The intellectual demands of 21st century work, today's leaders say, require assessments that measure more advanced skills, 21st century skills. Today, they say, college students, workers, and citizens must be able to solve multifaceted problems by thinking creatively and generating original ideas from multiple sources of information—and tests must measure students' capacity to do such work.
While many policymakers, including Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, have emphasized the need for schools to, first and foremost, teach the basics, learning science—an interdisciplinary field that includes cognitive science, educational psychology, information science, and neuroscience—suggests that the best learning occurs when basic skills are taught in combination with complex thinking skills. Decades of research reveals that there is, in fact, no reason to separate the acquisition of learning core content and basic skills like reading and computation from more advanced analytical and thinking skills, even in the earliest grades.
But standing in the way of incorporating 21st century skills into teaching and learning are widespread concerns about measurement. The cost, time demands, and difficulty in scoring tests of these less easily quantified skills have slowed the adoption of such tests, as have concerns among civil rights advocates that these tests would erode progress toward ensuring common standards of learning for all students. Collectively, these concerns derailed efforts in the late 1990s to move toward the use of performance-based assessments such as portfolios, exhibitions, and projects.
New assessments like the CWRA, however, illustrate that the skills that really matter for the 21st century—the ability to think creatively and to evaluate and analyze information—can be measured accurately and in a common and comparable way. These emergent models also demonstrate the potential to measure these complex thinking skills at the same time that we measure a student's mastery of core content or basic skills and knowledge. There is, then, no need for more tests to measure advanced skills. Rather, there is a need for better tests that measure more of the skills students' need to succeed today. … Read the full report: Measuring Skills for the 21st Century
This report was funded by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. Education Sector thanks the foundation for their support. The views expressed in the paper are those of the author alone.
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