The Global Achievement Gap Why Even Our Best Schools Don't Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need-- And What We Can Do About It by Tony Wagner
Basic, 288 pp., $26.95
Tony Wagner, codirector of the Change Leadership Group at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, has written several books on how to "transform" America's public schools, based on visits to schools and talks with educators and employers. In Making the Grade: Reinventing America's Schools (2001), he set up Central Park East High School in Manhattan as one model of what we should aim for to make sure that students are taught the critical "competencies" they need for the 21st century.
In The Global Achievement Gap, he heavily promotes seven sets of so-called 21st-century skills that he claims are not being taught in our schools, and must be. But the basic flaw in Wagner's thinking is his assumption that achievement gaps, global or national, are due to a lack of skills (or competencies), not to a deficient knowledge base that governs their development and use.
The seven sets of "survival" skills he is selling are also being pushed by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, an advocacy group supported by prominent high tech companies, the National Educational Association, the National Council of Teachers of English, and other business or educational organizations with no recent record of interest in strengthening the academic content of the school curriculum.
What skills are missing from the K-12 school curriculum? According to Wagner, such "skills" as critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, agility, adaptability, initiative, entrepreneurialism, effective oral and written communication, accessing and analyzing information, curiosity, and imagination. It's hard to think of anything that has been left out of this utopian view of what K-12 teachers should teach--except, perhaps, the "skills" of honesty and integrity.
It is a mystery why Wagner thinks our schools have not been teaching problem solving in their mathematics classes, given the influence of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics since 1989 on the K-12 math curriculum. Every "reform" curriculum concentrates precisely on this. Nor does he provide any clue as to why he thinks such character traits as agility, adaptability, curiosity, and entrepreneurialism can be clearly defined, taught, and measured.
But to judge by the absence of references to research studies or solid information of any kind in his endnotes, Wagner has little use for the fruits of scientific research or for up-to-date facts that might contradict his sales pitch. Indeed, this book provides more disinformation on what is or is not in the school curriculum and how teachers teach than any other current work in education I have read. And Wagner is at one of our elite schools of education!
Who would disagree that our public schools fail to teach effective oral and written communication? But who are the villains? Wagner believes that teachers' obsessions with teaching grammar, test-prep, and teaching to "the test" are the problems here.
Really? What English teachers? A lot of parents would kill to find out whose classroom they should get their kids into if they knew the teacher cared about grammar--or at least was brave enough to teach conventional sentence structure and language usage despite the NCTE's long campaign against grammar teaching. Yet Wagner wants professional teacher organizations like NCTE to define what a "literate" citizen should know.
Nor does he have a word to say about the "writing process," the tsunami that hit the teaching of writing in the late 1960s. Since education schools sold teachers on the writing process, K-8 students in most schools have been encouraged to produce a steady flow of autobiographical pieces--also known as experience-based writing--rationalized by an increasingly self-fulfilling assumption that all they really know about is themselves, and that all they can be motivated to write about are their own experiences and opinions.
No wonder high school English teachers who are so inclined have found it difficult to develop writing skills that are based on an analysis of something students have read or observed! Does Wagner not know about the influence of Writers' Workshop approaches on elementary and middle school teachers? Or the number of workshops that three generations of teachers have attended, extolling the virtues of having students produce and revise drafts on their experiences and opinions, with feedback chiefly from peers?
It is disingenuous to imply that the development of analytical thinking and effective oral and written communication (goals of the lyceum in ancient Greece) are new to the 21st century. American education schools and their satellite networks of professional development providers heavily promoted such "21st-century skills" as critical thinking, problem solving, and small group work throughout the 20th century.
If our teaching corps hasn't yet been able to figure out how to translate these buzzwords into effective classroom lessons, what does this tell us about the teaching skills of our very expensive standing army of teacher-educators, either to prepare teachers properly in the first place or to get them up to snuff after they've failed in the field?
To give the devil his due, Wagner does give lip service to the value of core knowledge, or academic content, on one page in his 288-page book. But this crumb is quickly followed by two pages of qualifications showing the problems in focusing on academic content. It is clear that his real interest is in reducing what he perceives as a misplaced emphasis on academic content in the schools. And a specific example of the content he would like to eliminate--Algebra 1--should raise eyebrows even if we could trust what he reports as fact to support his case.
To discredit attempts to increase the number of high school students studying algebra and advanced mathematics courses, he refers to a study of MIT graduates that, he claims, found only a few mentioning anything "more than arithmetic, statistics, and probability" as useful to their work.
However, when you use the URL he provides in an endnote, it turns out that this "study" consisted of 17--yes, 17--MIT graduates. Moreover, according to my count, two-thirds of the "sample" explicitly mentioned linear algebra, trig, proofs and/or calculus, or other advanced mathematics courses, as vital to their work--exactly the opposite of what Wagner reports.
Evidence-free rhetoric in support of reducing academic content in the schools, diluting academic standards for K-12, and eliminating large-scale academic testing, has found a receptive audience across the country among those who don't want any form of real accountability. Unfortunately, the valuable skills misidentified as 21st-century skills cannot be taught and assessed without a strong emphasis on academic substance, standards, and objective assessments--as academic researchers know.
Wagner is the latest in a long line of educational pied pipers leading an uncritical and growing mass of school administrators and teachers into a curricular wilderness. And this latest book is just the currrent manifestation of the goal driving most of our education schools and professional development providers--how to reduce the academic content of the curriculum while claiming to enhance it--this time in the name of closing the "gap," or providing worker bees for this century's employers.
What the 21st-century skills movement may ultimately reflect is an issue Wagner never addresses: the declining academic quality of America's teaching corps. If the United States could transform entry into teacher training programs and into the education profession along the lines that, say, Finland has taken--prospective core subject teachers must get a master's degree in their academic area, as well as a master's degree in teaching, amounting to a three-year post-baccalaureate course of studies--we would not be debating about inserting "21st-century skills" into state content standards, distorting and diluting them in the process.
Sandra Stotsky is professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas.