“I am trying NOT to write off the 21st century skills movement as a sham, but its leaders don’t make it easy,” writes the Washington Post’s Jay Mathews this morning on his Class Struggle blog.
Mathew raises a skeptical eyebrow at a new book by Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel, 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times. The pair are Silicon Valley corporate honchos and members of the board of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. He was hoping the book would “prove wrong those of us who could see nothing in this movement but a lot of buzz words and jargon describing principles of teaching and learning that have been with us for many decades.” Keep hope alive, Uncle Jay.
I sense Trilling and Fadel are smart tech guys who just don’t know much about real schools with real kids who have difficulty learning how to read, write and do math. The perspective of much of the book is from thousands of feet up, as if the authors were on a jetliner flying into San Francisco’s airport. They can’t see the scuffed floors and trash-strewn playground of a public middle school in Oakland, but can use their laptops to write nice sentences about how the six emerging principles of the movement are “vision, coordination, official policy, leadership, learning technology and teacher learning.”
Meanwhile Common Core continues to treat P21 like its personal chew toy. In his book review, Mathews sees “no sign that the Partnership, based in Tucson and Washington, D.C., is using its revenue to buy beach mansions in Bali. However, Lynne Munson and James Elias parse a list of 230 organizations that signed on to P21’s National Action Agenda on 21st Century Skills and conclude it’s “a laundry list of vendors who undoubtedly either profit from or would like to profit from P21’s work.” The list is also significant, they say, for who is not on it.
Just 11 of P21’s 13 member states signed. The holdouts were New Jersey and Massachusetts, where P21 has encountered very strong resistance. A number of the mostly for-profit heavyweights that sit on P21’s Strategic Council also were absent, including Ford Motor Company, Lenovo, Nellie Mae, Verizon, Walt Disney, and CPB.
“The closer we look,” Munson and Elias conclude, “the more P21’s unproven educational program appears to be just another mechanism for selling more stuff to schools.”
I haven’t read the book but I suspect that Trilling and Fadel are thinking about the kind of education they wish they had received themselves and the kind they would want for their own children. I live near Silicon Valley and it’s very easy for highly educated, affluent white collar professionals out here to live in a “bubble” full of folks just like them. I didn’t even realize how different things were outside the bubble until I spent 5 years as an Army wife. Talk about an eye-opening experience! I’ve since returned to the bubble but with a new appreciation of just how atypical our social circle is.
As Matthews points out, the project method has been around for many decades. Where is the evidence that it’s been a smashing success? In my experience, students do not necessarily find projects more fun and engaging than a good lecture, and the amount they seem to learn from them usually disappoints me.
It was very interesting to read that the P21 people think that NCLB-style test prep involves cramming facts in kids’ heads! As if. This does suggest a profound lack of understanding of schools’ reality. They remind me of the ubiquitous business world “consultants” who parachute in to a corporation and tell everyone who’s been there for years how to do their jobs. Only these P21 guys, so contemptuous of schools, don’t even parachute in. They issue their dictates from 30,000 feet (to piggy-back on Matthews’ analogy).
I live in the tech world myself but come from the backwoods of Kentucky. The gap between those two lifestyles is not measurable by books or tests. Projects and progressives are words that don’t have meaning when everyday is filled with just getting to tomorrow alive. I see the same thing in the troubled neighborhoods of my metro city. The worried brows on the children trying to figure out solutions to impossible problems – am I going to be beaten? am I going to die? am I going to be cold all night?
The problem with education is that it is not a ladder that people can climb anymore; the rungs are missing. Core information needs to come first, then progressive inspiration will follow. Yes, some children get more core at home than most. However, that select few we can not – must not – ruin the chances of the others by cutting out a rungs here and there that don’t suit their pampered purpose.
I am glad for the kids of Silicon Valley and other education hotspots and don’t wish them to be held back but PLEASE don’t punish the rest of us that need a little more drill and a little less thrill. We deserve success also and a safe home and a warm bed and a full stomach and good math scores.