U.S. Education: "My Incompetence Fragged your Business"

Mr. Sumser talks today  about a subject near-and-dear to my heart – the massive gap between what the U.S. education system provides and what the companies of tomorrow will need.

Implementing an ATS is a lot like trying to change the United States education system. You start  at your new implementation customer and find out within a couple of weeks that their processes, systems and objectives are almost completely unchanged since the late 50’s (around the time that the U.S. educational system got scared by the notion of pink satellites raining bombs from space). You, being the clever consultant, realize that it is going to take almost a year to get through requirements gathering, specifications development, process design, systems selection, installation, training and process improvements. So (and here I am about to make a real stretch, because ATS consultants rarely if ever do this), realizing that the customer’s business may be radically different in a year than it is today, you start asking questions like “Where is your business going? Who will be your customers a year from now? What kinds of products will you deliver to them? What kinds of skills do you need to deliver those products? And (most importantly for your job) what kinds of tasks will recruiters undertake to find those newly skilled people?” And, still quite the clever if almost completely mystical consultant, you develop your specification against that future need.

You take this spec to the employment manager, who has a vested interest in bringing in cool new technology but who wouldn’t recognize a “web 2.0” if he got caught in it by a giant man-eating spider, and they (the employment manager) laugh and says, not too kindly, “This doesn’t address any of the problems I had last week!” To which you reply, fully prepared (remember, I said this consultant was mythical, so I can endow him or her with powers that consultants rarely display) “Sure, but you won’t have the same problems in a year that you have now.” And the employment manager thinks “Hey, sport, my boss isn’t any rocket scientist, and if I go to them and tell them some story about how the world is going to change when they are confronted with all these problems today I am going to get fired” and instead says “You know, people would be more likely to use the system if they felt it addressed their needs today rather than the possibility of their needs tomorrow, so let’s just focus on what’s wrong today.”

And thus the ATS is implemented and, almost universally, the chorus echoes from the cubicle walls “This doesn’t address the problems I am facing today! It is worthless!” But by that time the notoriously transitory employment manager is on to their next job, a big “Implemented ATS” on their resume.

I take you through this adventure down the modern business rabbit hole as a way of exemplifying why the modern public education system has such a wide gap between what companies will need when their young charges graduate, and what they will produce anyway.

If you were a consultant coming into the education system to help them reform, you would quickly realize that their processes, systems and objectives are almost completely unchanged since the 50’s (sound familiar). Whole language learning has come and gone, as has new math and other erstwhile “fuzzy” programs that were purported to help students learn new and exciting ways to read, write and compute, but each of which failed miserably. You would do a little research and find a recent New York Times Magazine article called What it Takes to Make a Student which shows that, even with the “No Child Left with a Chance” law voted into law (and then ignored by everyone except the people who withhold money from local schools because test scores aren’t going up):

(D)espite the glowing reports from the White House and the Education Department, the most recent iteration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the test of fourth- and eighth-grade students commonly referred to as the nation’s report card, is not reassuring. In 2002, when No Child Left Behind went into effect, 13 percent of the nation’s black eighth-grade students were “proficient” in reading, the assessment’s standard measure of grade-level competence. By 2005 (the latest data), that number had dropped to 12 percent. (Reading proficiency among white eighth-grade students dropped to 39 percent, from 41 percent.) The gap between economic classes isn’t disappearing, either: in 2002, 17 percent of poor eighth-grade students (measured by eligibility for free or reduced-price school lunches) were proficient in reading; in 2005, that number fell to 15 percent.

The most promising indications in the national test could be found in the fourth-grade math results, in which the percentage of poor students at the proficient level jumped to 19 percent in 2005, from 8 percent in 2000; for black students, the number jumped to 13 percent, from 5 percent. This was a significant increase, but it was still far short of the proficiency figure for white students, which rose to 47 percent in 2005, and it was a long way from 100 percent.

So, being the clever consultant, you seek to discover what exactly will make for a “good employee of the future.” What skills and abilities will someone need 20 years from now? You quickly that:

• Information gathering will increasingly be mechanized and automated, but this will make interpreting the meaning and value of that information increasingly difficult.
• Most work will be done by distributed groups of individuals who will need to be able to communicate in short hands that are richly descriptive to the respective reader but almost meaningless to people outside the group.
• Information retrieval and number calculation will be nominal problems, highly commoditized across any one of a number of systems.
• Individuals at an early age will expect to be able to form clear objectives, select the team that will achieve those objectives, assess their team by their own standards, share disproportionately in the benefit of the gain if they succeed and be fired quickly if they don’t.
• Teachers will no longer be considered “the font of all knowledge” since it will be virtually impossible to keep up with the volume, diversity and velocity of information needed to bring our kids into the 21st century. Instead of tacit knowledge, teachers will be evaluated on their ability to inspire, innovate, challenge and integrate people and knowledge being applied towards reinforcing the social, intellectual and creative capacities that almost all humans beings natively posses.
• Since society will still, inevitably, require person-to-person (f-2-f in the common lexicon) interactions, and since students will decreasingly have early childhood exposure to the physical presence of other children as they spend more time in virtual play and communication, a special emphasis will have to be spent on teaching emotional intelligence, group dynamics, systems perspective and economic theory (none of which is widely covered today).

(By the way, you will notice that the modern MMORPG video game includes many of these elements, and that John’s assessment that the “My Gamer Fragged Your Honor Student” is a harbinger of bad things to come is exactly right.)

So you go to the school board and provide a spec that recognizes these changes and calls for sweeping overhauls in processes, systems and educational objectives that, since they will take about 20 years to fully implement, should be just about right by the time they are completley integrated into the education system. You present these findings to the district superintendent and… well, you read the rest of the story above. The superintendent says “That’s nice, but the school board isn’t going to get this, the education bureaucracy isn’t going to fund it, the teacher’s union is going to fight it and the parents are just going to want to know how their kids can get ‘A’s’ in this stuff.” And they will be right - especially about the parents, who may be amongst their kids worst enemies in helping their kids prepare for the future.

And where is business in all this? The ultimate consumer of the services and products of the educational system is sitting on the sidelines warming it’s thumb and hoping that the next quarter’s results won’t be too bad. Trying to invest in the K-12 education infrastructure to dig us out of this hole, focusing some time and energy convincing shareholders than investing in education is better than having a corporate jet, investing in their own training systems to address the gap left by the educational system (university level included) and otherwise trying to play a leadership role in solving this huge problem – well, all of that just doesn’t make the strategic radar of the average large business.

Every executive suite should be required to read John's post and the New York Times Magazine article and think of the following: those kids that can’t read and can’t add are coming your way. Millions of them. Your corporate future (and the democracy which made it possible) are hanging in the balance.

Comments

[Bill Dueease]

David Maister at http://davidmaister.com/blog/312/ listed your article as one of his favorites. I followed his recommendation and clicked on your article. I believe your message is remarkable and frightening, not only to the future hiring managers but to the future marketers, product designers, and media moguls. When you consider that the apparent dumbing down of our students who are making it through our educational system will affect everyone. Yet the Europeans, the Japanese, and other advancing countries are actually educating their students to read, write and handle mathematics, and frequently in multiple languages.

What will it take for the people in control of our education systems to revamp their education model on actually educating their (our) students?

I will admit that the Swiss model of education has gained a strong foothold in some of the high schools in my state (Florida) through the International Baccalaureate (IB) program with set standards and learning requirements of the students. Through school choice and competition, two of my teenage children have been accepted into the local high school with a recognized IB program, and they have thrived, because they are actually learning. My son went on to The University of Florida and was accepted in the honors program, because he completed the IB program. This is no easy thing, because UF has an approximate freshman acceptance rate of approximately 28% even though it is one of the largest campuses in the US. When you consider that Newsweek has been rating the top 100 high schools in the US for years, and that Florida has had the highest percentage (20%) of high schools in the top 100 every year because of the acceptance of the IB program, maybe the word is getting out through the back door. In fact, five of the top ten rated high schools were in Florida two years ago. Florida is not noted for spending lots of money per student, but through local school choice competition and the adoption of the Swiss IB model, Florida high schools are improving, and have surpassed other states that spend far more money per student. I am not associated with any aspect of the Florida education system, and I am frankly as amazed at this turn of events in Florida as anyone.

I hope you get your message out about the need to improve our education system overall, so everyone affected, including hiring managers, will be able to tap into an educated and capable pool of skilled talent.

[Suzzane Donald]

I think it is a questions of balance and judgment. So, it’s okay to let us know “you” (not Will) are training for a marathon or reading a great book…as well as all of the great professional info we share on Twitter. I love Twitter for my PSL, and I also love learning more about my friends…things I may not know otherwise. It connects us.
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http://www.educationalwriting.net

[danial]

good blog

[essay writing]

It's always nice when you can not only be informed, but also entertained! I'm sure you had fun writing this article. Excellent entry! I'm been looking for topics as interesting as this. Looking forward to your next post.

[Abs Inc1]

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