By Ganesh Sitaraman | bio
A great article in Time this week talks about how Michigan is rewriting its graduation requirements to prepare students for the 21st century. In a global world of commerce, industry, and politics, students can no longer assume that good jobs are attainable without skills or education – and educators can no longer delay in reforming education to prepare young people for an increasingly dynamic global economy.
For three months last fall a task force of state education officials, school superintendents, college deans and a Ford Motor Company executive pored over scholarly research on curriculum reform, borrowed ideas from private schools with strong college preparatory curricula and International Baccalaureate programs that infuse instruction with a global perspective. The panel also studied the education policies in countries such as Singapore, whose students routinely ace international proficiency exams. And the group consulted education chiefs from states that were early adopters of tougher standards, including Indiana, Oregon and Arkansas—all of which require four years of English and at least three years of math and science.
The goal was to craft rigorous learning standards that would give students the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in college and in the 21st century workplace. The group recommended that every Michigan student, whether college-bound or not, be required to complete four years of English and math; three years of science and social studies; two years of foreign language; one year of phys ed; one in a course covering visual, performing or applied arts, as well as an online course—not necessarily for credit—offered by Michigan's web-based Virtual High School or another Internet instruction provider that meets state guidelines. As juniors, they should also take the state merit exam that, like the ACT, measures college readiness.
Meanwhile, the state board of education wanted to see elective classes that expose them to diverse cultures and international issues; explore the rights and obligations of citizenship; teach finance and business principles in depth; and challenge them to access, analyze and use information from multimedia sources. The coursework, state officials recommended, should also improve critical-thinking, problem-solving and communication abilities through team projects. Last spring the legislature overwhelmingly approved the new graduation rules—all of which take effect with next fall's freshman class.
The article then considers three schools that have started down this path – Henry Ford Academy, Farmington High School, and Roosevelt High. It's of course too early to know what the results of these changes will be. But this is the kind of innovative spirit that is necessary in a constantly changing world.
Hopefully educators, politicans, and parents around the country will follow Michigan's lead and dedicate themselves to reinventing American education. The future depends on it.
A great article in Time this week...
One more feel-good hup, hup, hooray education screed. Perhaps, the author will be back in five years to tell us Michigan abandoned this naively legislated silliness two years before. But, probably not.
Yes, yes. Education is wonderful. However, every new educational this-or-that for the 21'st century seems to be focused on the 48 million or so Americans with an IQ of 115 or greater. What about the left tail of the distribution, the 48 million individuals with IQ 85 or less? (Assuming mean IQ=100, SD=15 and population 300 million.) The stronger the future depends on Michigan's brilliant education initiative, the more people it doesn't include at all.
These are good and worthy individuals who are entitled to the opportunity to support themselves and their famillies with dignity. They need jobs too. Jobs that used to be provided by Ford.
-- Jalmari. "Good people can have honest differences of opinion. Bipartisanship will be impossible so long as Republicans are neither."
As an economist at the Upjohn Institute in Kalamazoo, and a member of the Kalamazoo School Board, I have a different perspective on the new Michigan high school graduation standards.
In my view, these standards reflect an overly narrow view of what skills are needed, either for the U.S. economy, or for individual students to obtain high-wage jobs. The standards essentially assume that we should require all high school students to take the courses that would be required for selective four-year liberal arts colleges. However, as many economists have pointed out, the skill needs of the future U.S. economy are likely to be more diverse than the skills produced by four-year liberal arts colleges. For example, Alan Blinder recently argued, in an article in the American Prospect, and in Foreign Affairs, that increasingly a lot of high education jobs will be outsourced, and that many of the jobs we can keep will involve delivering personal or customizable services. The job skills for such jobs are not necessarily best produced via four year liberal arts colleges. For example, there will be a lot of high-wage job openings in the future for construction workers, auto mechanics, plumbers, and electricians. Blinder’s American Prospect article is at http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=12150. I am not sure whether this article is behind a subscription wall or not.
The new Michigan graduation requirements will make it extremely difficult to run effective vocational education programs that will prepare Michigan students for high-wage jobs that do not require a four year liberal arts education. The vocational courses will be squeezed out because students will not have space in the schedule to do such courses, which in general will not fulfill the new requirements. And redesigning the courses to meet the new requirements is quite difficult: how do you redesign a vocational ed course to cover all the contents of Algebra 2? In addition, even if you somehow did so, the teacher of the course would not only have to be a certified teacher, and meet the work experience requirements for voc ed teachers, but would also have to meet the “highly qualified” teacher requirements to be allowed to deliver math or science education.
Along with a colleague of mine, I testified against the new Michigan graduation requirements. After explaining why there is not a strong economic rationale for the new Michigan graduation requirements, we proposed an alternative that would have required all students, after certain minimum requirements were fulfilled, to either follow a course of study preparing them for a selective four-year college or a course of study preparing them for vocational education leading to high-wage jobs. There would be sufficient overlap between the two courses of study to allow students to change their minds at the end of high school with relatively little lost time. Our testimony can be found at
http://www.upjohn.org/Bartik-Hollenbeck_testimony.pdf .
In education, as in many other public policy areas, it is frequently the case that the “devil is in the details”. The general direction of increasing educational standards is a good direction to pursue. The specific details of Michigan’s approach are flawed.
Tim Bartik.
