Dissatisfaction with American education is growing. It is a cascading wave, as evidenced by a worrying mix of statistics and trends, from declining public awareness of education to drastic declines in enrollment and attendance. You can feel it rising.Not just students speaking Regarding dissatisfaction with education, walk That too.
Enrollment in U.S. colleges and universities peaked in 2010 and has steadily declined since then, with more than a quarter of students in K-12 schools now chronically absent. . To be sure, there are many factors at play here, from mental health issues and pandemic hangovers to technological disruption and a series of education policy failures. But the ultimate cause of our dissatisfaction may be the most difficult to recognize and address. The cruel reality is that for too many students, education is not exciting, engaging, or relevant.
It sounds harsh when I say it, and it's even harder when I write it, but “exciting,” “engaging,” and “relevant” are not words often used to describe education. Ask students, parents, and employers, and you're likely to hear descriptions like “boring,” “outdated,” and “disconnected from the real world.” In fact, only 26% of U.S. adults who have attended higher education strongly agree that course content is relevant to work and daily life. And just 13% of K-12 students give their school an “A” grade for “increasing engagement in learning.”
One of the many consequences of students who feel little excitement or relevance to what they are learning is that they are not only less likely to attend, but also less sought after by employers of all shapes and sizes. It means that you can't find the right person to do it. With nearly 10 million job openings in the United States and only 11% of business leaders strongly agree that graduates are job-ready, we can't afford to let the crisis of educational dissatisfaction go unchecked. .
We have spent much of the past 30 years focused on improving students' standardized test scores, and we have made virtually no progress toward this goal. The most high-profile solution to improving schools in recent memory was “Common Core.” This took ten years to roll out, then faced repeal and backlash, with no tangible results. And as more emphasis is placed on “academic standards,” the real-world work experience of students, the lowest-performing generation in U.S. history, has been diminished. At the higher education level, less than a third of graduates complete work-integrated learning experiences (such as internships or semester-long projects) as part of their degree.
How can schools remain relevant when there is so little exposure to the real world of work? How do schools compete with the engaging and addictive content found in size media? How do schools stay current amidst the most rapidly changing technological and social changes in history? Unfortunately, there is no easy solution to the great dissatisfaction with education. But we can start by establishing new fundamental goals for education.
Our goal is to make education more engaging and relevant. This sounds very simple. However, this has never been a stated goal of education policy reform in the past half century. If this is our driving goal, we will need to place greater emphasis on the art and science of teaching and learning, and on the integration of learning and work. And we will need a new “North Star” or metric to aim towards.
We have national laboratories for all kinds of important national priorities. But we don't have one for teaching and learning. Although the United States has two distinct departments, the Department of Education and the Department of Labor, none are designed to integrate learning and work. The average student in the United States takes 112 mandatory standardized tests throughout their K-12 education, but the national There is no exact scale.
Where there is a will, there is a way. And that will is developing amid growing dissatisfaction with American education.
follow me twitter Or LinkedIn.