Crain’s Detroit Business recently reported that Governor Snyder is going to propose that coding earn a foreign language credit in high schools. This would be part of a major initiative to push more Michigan high school and college students into computer science occupations.

In a recent interview with Bloomberg TV technology entrepreneur Mark Cuban said:

The people who are writing software, unless you are doing advanced things, they’re gone. … I personally think there’s going to be a greater demand in 10 years for liberal arts majors than there were for programming majors and maybe even engineering. When the data is all being spit out for you, options are being spit out for you, you need a different perspective in order to have a different view of the data. In particular, experts in philosophy or foreign languages will ultimately command the most interest from employers in the next decade.

So Cuban––who started his career as a programmer––believes sooner rather than later the occupations our Governor wants more and more of our kids to pursue are going to be automated away. That what is coming is the automation of automation. That software––not humans––will increasingly do the coding and programming.  That what humans will be needed for is not math-based work, but rather understanding what to do with data. And that comes from the liberal arts––including foreign languages––not STEM-based skills.

Who knows if Cuban is right about the degree and timing of when automation will take over coding and programming. I sure don’t. But I sure wouldn’t dismiss him. There is a reasonable chance that he is right. What we know is that automation is going to transform work. We just don’t know what occupations and when.

This is the debate we should be having most now about the education system we want for all kids in Michigan. One path is represented by the Governor and many other public officials and business leaders. Educate other’s kids for the jobs in demand by Michigan employers today. The other, as represented by Cuban, is to educate all kids to build the skills needed for a successful forty-year career, not a first job. In a world where we know many occupations are going to be continuously automated away.

We clearly prefer the latter. The education system we recommend in our new state policy agenda is:

Our education policy recommendations are built on two core principles:

First, that all children deserve the same education no matter whom their parents are. Without that we cannot live up to the core American value of equal opportunity for all.

We are on the opposite track at the moment as both a country and a state. The education that is provided for affluent kids is, by and large, designed and executed differently than it is for non-affluent kids. One system delivers a broad college prep (dare we say liberal arts) education, the other delivers an increasingly narrow education built around developing discipline and teaching what is on the test or narrowly preparing non-affluent children for a first job.

The second is that none of us has a clue what the jobs and occupations of the future will be. Today’s jobs are not a good indicator of what jobs will be when today’s K-12 students finish their careers in the 2050s or 2060s. We simply don’t know how smarter and smarter machines are going to change labor markets. So the purpose of pre K-12 education (maybe even pre K-16) is to build foundation skills that allow all Michigan children to have the agility and ability to constantly switch occupations.

To thrive in the new economy, workers have to be adaptable, have a broad base of knowledge, be creative problem solvers and be able to communicate and work well with others. In other words, workers need to be really good at all of the non-algorithmic skills computers aren’t good at yet.

The best definition we’ve found for this complex set of skills comes from the book Becoming Brilliant, by learning scientists Roberta Michnick Golinkoff and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, who label these skills the six Cs: collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creativity and confidence.

These are the skills students will need to complement rather than be replaced by machines, solve today’s problems, and create new solutions to problems we can’t yet envision.

If Michigan is going to be a place with a broad middle class, if employers are going to have the supply of skilled workers they need and if Michigan is going to be a place once again where kids regularly do better than their parents, it will happen because the state made a commitment to provide an education system for all from birth through higher education that builds rigorous broad skills that are the foundation of successful 40 year careers.

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A little more than three years ago the Grand Rapids Public Museum hosted Outsmarting the Robots: Redesigning education from the classroom to the halls of Lansing. The conference was organized around the question “How do we redesign our system for learning to build the 21st century skills that matter to meeting the needs of our children, economy, society, and world?”

The conference organizers––including Michigan Future––believed that our education system needed redesign of both what we teach and how we teach. That standardized test driven schooling is designed to teach a too narrow set of skills and is delivered in a way that does not engage students nor create lifelong learners.

The conference was organized around the belief that all schools and youth development programming needs to be designed to build more rigorous and broader skills than what is on the test and that how we teach needs to be far more engaging and experiential. Our premise? We don’t have an education reform challenge; we have an education redesign challenge.

New York Times best-selling author of Becoming Brilliant: What the science of learning tells us about raising successful children Kathy Hirsh-Pasek served as the conference guide.

Becoming Brilliant makes the case that foundation skills for all students––no matter what path they choose to take after high school––are the 6Cs: communication, collaboration, content, critical thinking, creativity and confidence.

They also are the foundation skills students will need to outsmart the robots. To complement, rather than be replaced by, machines and to compete in a labor market that is increasingly rewarding those who are good at working with, solving problems with, innovating with, and leading people who don’t look like you and don’t think like you.

Fast forward to today where the latest headline grabbing smarter bot is ChatGPT. ChatGPT is widely viewed as a precursor to a wave of artificial intelligence which will take over from humans much of our high-paid mental work. Which, of course, raises the question in a world of constantly improving A.I. “What work will humans do?”.

In an insightful New York Times column, entitled In the Age of A.I., Major in Being Human, David Brooks suggests this list of outsmarting A.I. bots skills: a distinct personal voice; presentation skills; a childlike talent for creativity; unusual worldviews; empathy; and situational awareness.

It is clearer today that if Michigan is serious about preparing all its children to be successful in life and work we need to redesign schooling. One where students are engaged, not bored; one where all students are developing agency to create and realize their own dreams; and one where all students develop the broad non-content and non-occupation specific skills that will enable them to keep learning and adapting in a world characterized increasingly by constant change.

That means we need to deemphasize standardized tests which focuses schooling on way too narrow content skills and drives out developing the Becoming Brilliant and Brooks’ foundation skills.

We need to deemphasize building occupation-specific skills. Knowing coding or welding or accounting is not what matters most to having a successful forty-year career. All of those occupational skills have a shorter and shorter half life. It’s not that knowing how to code, weld or do accounting is irrelevant to getting a job today, it is those are the icing on the cake career-ready skills, not the essential skills. 

We need to reemphasize the liberal arts. As Harvard economist Dave Deming writes:

A liberal arts education fosters valuable “soft skills” like problem-solving, critical thinking and adaptability. Such skills are hard to quantify, and they don’t create clean pathways to high-paying first jobs. But they have long-run value in a wide variety of careers. … But even on narrow vocational grounds, a liberal arts education has enormous value because it builds a set of foundational capacities that will serve students well in a rapidly changing job market.

And maybe most importantly we need to redesign how we do teaching and learning. Schooling needs to look like the rigorous and engaging projects featured in the movie Most Likely to Succeed. And to look far more like extracurriculars and electives than the tradition classroom.

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Success in today’s and tomorrow’s economy is largely dependent on having a set of skills that are critical in today’s workplace. At Michigan Future, we’ve been using a framework articulated by learning scientists Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff for these skills, which they define as: collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creative innovation, and confidence (the “six Cs“). There are other frameworks around non-cognitive skills or social emotional skills that are also helpful, though we haven’t seen others that combine both these human capacities and content so clearly. Kids equipped with the six Cs are prepared to be adaptive, lifelong learners, able to rebound from challenges, and successful in both postsecondary pursuits and in their careers. Building these skills for all kids needs to be the goal of the education system.

To define these vital skills as the purpose of education, across learning environments, for all kids, does not mean erasing all common content standards. But it does mean that content is no longer the focus to the exclusion of growing other skills. Fortunately, the type of learning environments that foster six C skill development also help kids to integrate their content learning more deeply. Instead of cutting drama to fund literacy tutors, for example, schools with a focus on six Cs will recognize the other skills that drama class nourishes in kids, and may build on the ability of a drama course to shore up weaker literacy skills.

Raising the standard

To reorganize schooling around critical skill building is not a minor tweak to education. It’s a major shift, and it is a raising of the bar as to the purpose of our public education system. It’s a shift: from teacher explains, to teacher facilitates; from defining what kids should know, to how kids should learn; from increasing standardization to increasing adaptability and individuality; from a system that requires teachers to control as much as possible, to a system that asks teacher to empower kids. Most critically, it’s a shift from a filtering system to a system that provides all kids with opportunities for growth.

This shift will of course take resources, but not simply putting money into delivering the same system better or distributing today’s funds more equitably.

On the ground, this shift would entail tens of thousands of Michigan teachers adopting new teaching practices. Districts would have to mandate and support their new approaches. The greater community would need to agree on alignment in the system around skill development as the goal, and the state would need to incent innovation and transformation.

A new type of schooling: what it is

The good news is that there are models for this type of learning, even within the current system. I’ve seen many in action, and while I’d say there isn’t definitive proof that one of these approaches is the most effective or most scalable, I do believe that project-based learning (PBL), inquiry-based education, integrated/thematic instruction, and expeditionary learning seem to have the greatest promise to foster simultaneously deep learning around content and critical skill development. What the schools doing this work tend to have in common, regardless of the pedagogical approach they’ve adopted, are:

• a unity of purpose from leadership on down;
• an emphasis on students having some direction over their learning;
• a recognition that the human brain does not learn in discrete content blocks, so learning is often be more cross-disciplinary than in traditional schooling;
• the pursuit of depth over breadth in understanding;
• a move to performance tasks or assessments to evaluate student learning, rather than standardized testing;
• the presence of strategies that increase student engagement—not simply by adding pop culture to the curriculum, but by asking students to wrestle with meaningful questions about the world and their role in it or to take on projects that have potential impact for others; and
• alignment of the school’s infrastructure to support the purpose—which can involve a rethinking of schedules, classroom arrangements, and collaborative teaching; student cohorting; changes to grading policy, credit requirements, and report cards; and student placement in internships, early college, and in educational settings outside the school building; among many other changes.

In these classrooms and schools, teachers have less control over exactly what material students learn, because they don’t just deliver content through readings, lectures, and homework assignments. Instead, they set up the conditions and experiences for learning and guide students along the path.

I was extremely lucky during my time here to interview a number of the people who are doing leading this work in Michigan–like Danielle Jackson in Detroit, Lisa Bergman and Lisa Diaz in Mt. Pleasant, and Kevin Polston and Carol Lautenbach at Godfrey-Lee–and around the country, like Sarah Fine at High Tech High. If you need some inspiration, and want to know how differently they imagine school, check out these and other What Now? interviews.

What it isn’t

Because in too many education environments I have seen tablets and responsive software explained as innovation, I want to note that in my view, none of the models that foster six C learning are dependent—except in a pandemic—on the use of new technology. Technology in schools should be viewed as a tool, like a chalkboard once was, or a pencil, or a book. Used wisely, technology can help students collaborate, or serve as a vehicle for creative projects, or help students think about communicating their findings. But massive technology upgrades are not the core way we will achieve broad six C learning, which depends much more on well-designed learning experiences and an authentic relationship with an engaged adult. Let’s not be lazy in defining adaptive technology deployment as a stand-in for actually personalized instruction.

Equity demands imagination

Finally, a word about innovation and equity. We know that innovation is vital to achieving educational equity, as our current system is failing to achieve equity at any scale. Yet I have seen first-hand what can happen when innovation is deployed first on poor and Black and brown children: before it has been well-tested, without adequate support (funding), or without any local, or nonwhite leadership. I have seen the utter failure of “innovative” models that were deployed first in a low-income, Black and brown neighborhood. The response by the system to the failure has been additional harm to children (blaming the kids or families and lowering the standard, or closing the school and causing immense disruption). Poor and nonwhite children can’t be guinea pigs, though they are the children who most need us to be innovative because they are the most poorly served by our current system.

While I don’t know exactly what policy changes will bring about the system I’m describing, I do know that in too many conversations, we are constrained by our inability to truly understand today’s reality, by a lack of imagination as to what school could be like, and by a shameful tolerance of the status quo, which so poorly invests in so many children. Today’s reality is marked by inequality and system failure, where harm to children is common. We lack urgency if our kids are in “good enough” schools, even though kids one town over are not. When we try to envision the future, too many of us can only go as far as imagining our favorite teacher from 7^th grade. Those excellent teachers may be inspirations, but we have to now ask how to get that kind of learning across the system, in all classrooms, for all of Michigan’s children.

Today is my last day with Michigan Future. I am offering a series of reflections on education in Michigan from my years of work understanding what the future, and the present, will demand of our children. While there have been many others, my most critical learning opportunities have been: our relationships with the school leaders that were a part of Michigan Future Schools; planning, with a series of remarkable educators, the Outsmarting the Robots event, where we tried to model the learning experiences we should be offering to kids; and each of the leaders, educators, and researchers I interviewed during the pandemic for What Now?–our video series on education. You can read my two earlier posts: What I want for Michigan’s children, and How better measures would leave no doubt about the need for school redesign.

The post The urgency of imagination for schooling redesign appeared first on Michigan Future Inc..

K-shaped economy is how many describe our economy since the pandemic. And most expect the recovery to be K-shaped as well. The reality is that the Michigan economy was K-shaped pre-pandemic. With those at the top doing well, but far too many households struggling in the strong 2019 Michigan economy.

As we explored in our last post, the Michigan Association of United Ways calculates that nearly four in ten Michigan households in 2019 could not pay for basic necessities. So a K-shaped economy is structural. A reality when the Michigan economy is expanding as well as when it is contracting. A reality when unemployment is low and high. A reality when the stock market is booming as well as when it is collapsing.

It is now crystal clear, far too many of our families have not been succeeding for far too many years. If they are not succeeding, our state is not succeeding.

Figuring out how you get an American capitalism that as it grows benefits all is the economic challenge of our times. We can––and should––debate how to achieve an economy that benefits all. What we should not do is celebrate an economy that is leaving so many behind.

It is far past time that we commit to turning a K-shaped economy into an economy that benefits all. We need a new economic strategy in Michigan. One that starts with rising income for all as the state’s economic mission. Income––particularly good-paying jobs and careers––needs to become the prime focus of economic policy and economic and workforce development programming.

We believed before the onset of the pandemic––and even more so now––that this is the time to make fundamental change in the state’s playbook to increase the economic well-being of all Michiganders. That now is the time for a transformative redesign of our approach to the economy. To us mid-course adjustment in what we have been doing is not the path to achieving rising income for all. So our recommendations for turning our K-shaped economy into an economy that benefits all are explicitly designed for fundamental change. To rethink what is foundational to state policy and programming to achieving rising income for all and go big in building that foundation.

To us that means a state economic policy laser-like focused on good-paying jobs and careers. We need policies designed so that all Michigan workers have wages and benefits that allow them to pay the bills, save for retirement and the kids’ education and pass on a better opportunity to the next generation.

Specifically we need policies that will:

Increase income and health coverage for today’s low-wage workers through an expanded and no red tape safety net.

Michigan cannot substantially reduce the proportion of households that cannot pay for basic necessities unless it finds ways to increase the amount of work and the pay and benefits for those who work in low-wage jobs. The past four decades have made clear that market forces alone will not turn low-skill, low-wage jobs into family-supporting work. In the strong 2019 Michigan economy 58 percent of payroll jobs were in occupations with a full-time median wage below the nation median of $39,810. We need public policy designed to raise the returns from work.

What low-wage workers need more than anything is more income and health coverage. We need cash-based benefits for those who are working. And we need cash-based benefits for those who have lost their jobs. We also need to make safety net benefits far easier to get. The struggles today that way too many Michiganders are going through to get safety net benefits make clear that we need to go to no red tape cash benefits plus health coverage.

Prepare all Michigan children for good-paying forty-year careers by making the 6Cs the foundational skills for all students from birth through college.

To thrive in the new economy, workers have to be adaptable, have a broad base of knowledge, be creative problem-solvers and be able to communicate and work well with others. In other words, workers need to be really good at all of the non-algorithmic skills computers aren’t good at yet.

The best definition we have found for this complex set of skills comes from the book Becoming Brilliant, by learning scientists Roberta Michnick Golinkoff and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, who label these skills the six Cs: collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creativity and confidence.

In Michigan today the education that is provided for affluent kids is, by and large, designed and executed differently than it is for non-affluent kids. One system delivers a broad college prep/6Cs education, the other delivers an increasingly narrow education built around developing discipline and what is on the test or to narrowly preparing non-affluent children for a first job. Our goal should be to design an education system that provides for all children the experiences that affluent children take for granted. Only then can we say that we’re providing each and every Michigan child with an education that will prepare them for good-paying forty-year careers.

In addition to current education funding, an annual grant from birth through college for all children in households unable to pay for the basics.

We strongly believe Michigan under invests in its children. Particularly its non-affluent children. And even more so its Black and Latino children. There is no path to income equality and racial equality that does not include, front and center, far better education outcomes.

To us the evidence is clear: The formula for ending what is increasingly becoming an education caste system—where for the first time in American history parents’ education attainment is the best predictor of a child’s education attainment—is both far higher quality teaching and learning and substantially more funding for children growing up in non-affluent households from birth through college.

We believe that under investment starts at birth and continues through college. So we propose Michigan substantially increase its investment in the education of every child growing up in a household struggling to pay for basic necessities each year from birth through the age of 21.

Think of this as something that operates, for education related expenses, like a health savings account. An annual government deposit, above and beyond current education spending, for each child 0-21 growing up in a Michigan household struggling to pay for the basics. Where the decision on education-related programming is controlled by parents and students. Including the option of utilizing those funds for extracurriculars and out of school programming.

Create more high-paid jobs by creating places where people want to live and work.

Every Michigan region needs more high-wage jobs. This is an economy where talent attracts capital. Creating a place where people want to live, work and play is what matters most to retaining, attracting and creating more high-wage jobs. Those regions without the quality of place that mobile talent is looking for will be at a substantial disadvantage.

It is also clear that the desirable mix of infrastructure, basic services and amenities differ from region to region. What makes small towns and rural communities attractive places to live and work are different than what makes big metros and their big central cities attractive places to live and work. So Michigan’s diverse regions need the resources and flexibility to develop and implement their own strategies to retain and attract talent. It’s an essential ingredient to their future economic success.

Responsibility and funding should be moved from the state to regions for all modes of transportation (except state highways); water; parks and outdoor recreation (except state parks); housing; and all other local/regional infrastructure, basic services and amenities. Responsibility and funding should be returned with little or no state mandates on how funds can be raised and used. The goal is to empower regions to develop and fund their own strategies for creating places where people want to live, work and play.

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A little more than a year ago the Grand Rapids Public Museum hosted Outsmarting the Robots: Redesigning education from the classroom to the halls of Lansing. The conference was organized around the question “how do we redesign our system for learning to build the 21st century skills that matter to meeting the needs of our children, economy, society, and world?”

The conference organizers––including Michigan Future––believed that our education system needed redesign of both what we are teaching and how we are teaching. That standardized test driven schooling––now delivered both in schools and at home––is designed to teach a too narrow set of skills and is delivered in a way that does not engage students nor create lifelong learners.

New York Times best-selling author of Becoming Brilliant, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek served as the conference guide.

Becoming Brilliant makes the case that the foundation skills for all students––no matter what path they choose to take after high school––are the 6Cs: communication, collaboration, content, critical thinking, creativity and confidence. These, of course, are essential life skills. They also are the skills students will need to outsmart the robots. To complement rather than be replaced by machines and to compete in a labor market that is increasingly rewarding those who are good at working with, solving problems with, innovating with and leading people who don’t look like you and don’t think like you.

Becoming Brilliant describes what we should be teaching. In a new report for Brookings entitled A new path to education reform: Playful learning promotes 21st century skills in schools and beyond, Hirsh-Pasek and her co-authors describe how to teach those skills. They detail six key characteristics that are inherent in playful learning contexts:

• Active (Minds on): Where children are focused and engaged in the learning process through questioning and reflection—over passive learning where students listen and memorize information.
• Engagement: Learning environments for children to filter out distractions and focus their attention on the task at hand.
• Meaningful: Where children can connect their own experiences and interests to new information.
• Socially interactive: Beginning in infancy, we seek out interactions with others. This desire for social interaction is fundamental to education.
• Iterative: An ever-growing body of literature demonstrates that children generate, test, and revise hypotheses while interacting with their environment based on data.
• Joyful: Emotion and imagination go hand in hand, and are integral to the development of creativity

The authors conclude:

This approach fundamentally alters the traditional view of educational success of “Did our child do well on the test?” to a definition that celebrates happy, healthy, thinking, caring, and social children who become collaborative, creative, competent, and responsible citizens tomorrow.

This is a very different redesign of teaching and learning than the one we most often hear about: self-paced learning on a computer. As our former colleague Patrick Cooney wrote in a blog entitled A 21st century education, technology not required:

It is clear that students don’t need computers to engage in any of the 6Cs listed above, and if used incorrectly they can be counterproductive. We’ve seen schools where personalized learning platforms simply take the mindless, skill-building exercises students would normally do in a textbook and transfer them to a computer screen. And we’ve seen kids plopped in front of a computer to progress through material at their own pace, only they lack both the requisite skills needed to access the material, and the motivation to engage in the work in the first place.

This isn’t a 21st century education. No matter how sophisticated the platform, if digital tools lead to students spending a large portion of their day working alone on a narrow-band of skills, rather than building deep understanding, working collaboratively with classmates on meaningful projects, and being asked to think critically about the information they’re presented, then computers can in fact hinder the development of the 6Cs.

The how to lesson we need to learn is that you build 6Cs foundation skills in all our children through the active, engaging, interactive teaching and learning––both in school and at home––that Hirsh-Pasek describes.

Another important lesson to learn is that the same what and how applies to extracurriculars as well as after school, youth development and summer programs. Sports, the arts, robotics, or science may be the theme of these programs, but the essential skills these programs can and should be designed to build are the 6Cs.

The “21st century skills in schools and beyond” in the title of the new Brookings report is exactly right. Extracurriculars, after school, youth development and summer programs are already designed around active, engaging, interactive learning. They should be considered essential components of our teaching and learning system and be widely available to all children.

The post What are and how to teach 21st century skills appeared first on Michigan Future Inc..

Last week I wrote about “Outsmarting the Robots: Redesigning education from the classroom to the halls of Lansing,” an event we co-hosted in October with a number of great partners in Grand Rapids. (Click here for that part 1). Today I want to share a little more about the day.

I already told you about the debates that ensued when participants took a few sample standardized test questions. Were these questions relevant to the skills that matter? Are they good measures of how well a school is preparing them for the future?

But earlier that morning, we had a chance to hear directly from four middle school students who attend the Grand Rapids Public Museum School, a public school located in the Grand Rapids Public Museum, and a 2016 winner of the XQ “Super School” award of $10 million for innovation in education. The school prioritizes design thinking, inquiry-based education and fosters critical skills through authentic projects—not worksheets.

Hearing directly from four students at the school, who weren’t prepped in any way except to “be honest,” was captivating. A few things they said stuck out to me. First, their descriptions of great learning experiences were all descriptions of projects, and on topics that had clearly captured their interest. Their identities had started to become connected to the projects that had fascinated them.

On the subject of standardized tests, one said that she feels they do a poor job of capturing how much she knows and understands about a topic. She said that the presentations she has to do at her school are a much better chance for anyone to really gauge what she has learned. “Because you have to be really prepared for questions you might get, so you really have to know what you’re talking about.” This matches the decisions of many progressive schools to invest in portfolios and public presentations to showcase student work in a meaningful way, rather than relying on testing. Another student shared that he gets really anxious about tests. “My grade in math is really good, but it’s stressful because if I don’t do well on this one test, I won’t be in honors math next year.”

And responding to a vital question about how they feel about the fact that this school is based on a lottery and doesn’t serve everyone who wants to go there, one student said frankly, “Every school should be like this.” The other young people echoed this: each school should have a way of being highly and deeply engaging. The students recognized that it “wasn’t fair” that they got to attend the Museum School while others didn’t.

It’s exciting to have this type of innovation in our backyard. Now we need to figure out how to make sure every child can access it. The equity implications were obvious to the kids, and they thought the grown-ups should fix it.

In the afternoon, conference participants participated in a design simulation where, in groups, they used legos to build their ideal school—designed to serve the children in their own lives (we observe that people are most ambitious when thinking about their own children or other children they know and love). They first listed the type of characteristics and features they wanted to prioritize. Then they build a representation with legos. But during the building process, facilitators added conditions: some legos had to be reassigned due to a new literacy program, for example. When the building was done, participants received a pie chart showing the new Michigan School Index System—a new method for evaluating school performance. In all, standardized tests account for almost 70 percent of a school’s rating. Participants were asked: will the school you designed perform well on this index? One intrepid group said that they had faith that treating the children more holistically and developing broader skills—as their group hoped to do in their school—would still payoff in the rating system. Others expressed feeling that there had been a “bait and switch.” I heard educators explain the ways this indexing system influenced teachers—incenting them to give undue attention to standardized test prep. “It just doesn’t match,” was the most common refrain. This system doesn’t match the priorities we would set for our own kids.

If what you measure, matters, then it really matters that we are measuring the wrong things.

Look, this was an experience designed to generate this kind of conversation and dissatisfaction. But it’s not hypothetical. Our system is designed to measure test-taking almost exclusively. It is not designed to measure the development of critical skills, like collaboration and critical thinking (which our keynote speaker, Dr. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, co-author of Becoming Brilliant, reminded us are both malleable and measurable). Therefore, we are getting schools that are trying to develop test-takers and not trying to develop collaborators and critical thinkers (despite the motivations of most teachers who got into the business to develop young minds!).

The system is powerful, and it’s pushing and pulling in the wrong direction.

This gets at the heart of why we wanted to co-host this event. Our schools need to be redesigned to build the skills of the future, and there is a fundamental mismatch between the policy system and the features and outcomes that should be our priorities. We hope “Outsmarting the Robots” helped participants imagine what’s possible for schooling, feel discontent–or anger–at the system we’ve got now, and get motivated to be a part of changing it.

[For another perspective on the day, I’m also glad to share this write-up from Erin Albanese, a journalist with the School News Network who observed the entire conference.]

The post Report from “Outsmarting the Robots”: Part 2 appeared first on Michigan Future Inc..

We are constantly besieged with messaging that a liberal arts degree is useless. Maybe even worse than useless: a path to being a pauper or something close. Stuck in low-paying work that leaves you unable to pay off the loans and earn enough to buy a house and raise a family. Think again!

In a New York Times column, entitled In the Salary Race, Engineers Sprint but English Majors Endure, David Deming, Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, presents the data that destroys the above nonsense. Turns out getting a liberal arts degree is one of the most reliable paths to a good-paying forty-year career.

The column is highly recommended, particularly for anyone who is involved in advising students about careers, either professionally or as parents or other family members. The bottom line: you are not doing students a favor by steering them into a STEM or business degree they do not want to pursue.

Deming writes:

The advantage for STEM (science, technology, engineering and
mathematics) majors fades steadily after their first jobs, and by
age 40 the earnings of people who majored in fields like social
science or history have caught up.

This happens for two reasons. First, many of the latest technical
skills that are in high demand today become obsolete when
technology progresses. Older workers must learn these new
skills on the fly, while younger workers may have learned them in
school. Skill obsolescence and increased competition from
younger graduates work together to lower the earnings
advantage for STEM degree-holders as they age.

Second, although liberal arts majors start slow, they gradually
catch up to their peers in STEM fields. This is by design. A liberal
arts education fosters valuable “soft skills” like problem-solving,
critical thinking and adaptability. Such skills are hard to quantify,
and they don’t create clean pathways to high-paying first jobs. But they have long-run value in a wide variety of careers.

Deming then presents the data:

Computer science and engineering majors between the ages of
23 and 25 who were working full time earned an average of
$61,744 in 2017, according to the Census Bureau’s American
Community Survey. This was 37 percent higher than the average
starting salary of $45,032 earned by people who majored in
history or the social sciences (which include economics, political
science and sociology). Large differences in starting salary by
major held for both men and women.

Men majoring in computer science or engineering roughly
doubled their starting salaries by age 40, to an average of
$124,458. Yet earnings growth is even faster in other majors, and
some catch up completely. By age 40, the average salary of all
male college graduates was $111,870, and social science and
history majors earned $131,154 — an average that is lifted, in
part, by high-paying jobs in management, business and law.

The story was similar for women. Those with applied STEM
majors earned nearly 50 percent more than social science and
history majors at ages 23 to 25, but only 10 percent more by
ages 38 to 40.

We have explored the reasons why this is true in past posts. It is the main story of our most read post: Google finds STEM skills aren’t the most important skills. Which details how Google found that the skills that defined their most successful employees were: being a good coach; communicating and listening well; possessing insights into others (including others different values and points of view); having empathy toward and being supportive of one’s colleagues; being a good critical thinker and problem solver; and being able to make connections across complex ideas.

And our recent post on employers increasingly preferring generalist over specialists. I wrote:

But where we have gotten off track, across the board in education and training, is which are the foundation skills. To use Heather McGowan’s terrific analogy the generalist skills are the operating system we all need; the specialist skills are the apps (with a shorter and shorter half life). So it is not either/or but both/and for most of us, but where the most important 40-year-career-ready skills are the generalist skills. … As readers of this blog know, we think the best description of those skills are the 6Cs from the book Becoming Brilliant. Collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creativity and confidence.

Deming is exactly right when he concludes his column with:

To be clear, I am not suggesting that students should avoid majoring in STEM fields. STEM graduates still tend to have high earnings throughout their careers, and most colleges require all students — including STEM majors — to take liberal arts courses.

But I do think we should be wary of the impulse to make college
curriculums ever more technical and career focused. Rapid
technological change makes the case for breadth even stronger.
A four-year college degree should prepare students for the next
40 years of working life, and for a future that none of us can
imagine.

For those interested in diving into this topic more I recommend both George Anders’ You Can Do Anything and Fareed Zakaria’s In Defense of a Liberal Education. I also explored the value of a liberal arts degree in my 2014 Alma College commencement speech which you can find here.

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All of a sudden there is lots being written about the trend of employers hiring generalists more than specialists. What is so disturbing is the disconnect between this reality and way too many policymakers pushing our education and training providers towards preparing students for a trade or profession.

In a world where generalists are what increasingly is being rewarded, the emphasis on occupation-specific skills in our education and training systems is not good for either students or the economy. Knowing coding or welding or accounting is not what matters most to having a successful 40-year career. All of those occupation skills have a shorter and shorter half life. It’s not that knowing how to code, weld or do accounting is irrelevant to getting a job today, it is those are the icing on the cake career-ready skills not the foundation skills. 

Two recent books detail this trend towards generalists: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein. And How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World, by New York Times economic columnist Neil Irwin. Both highly recommended.

Fatherly has an article about Range entitled Why Parents Should Raise Kids to be Generalists, not Specialists. But maybe the best place to start is an Atlantic article written by Jerry Useem entitled At Work, Expertise is Falling Out of Favor. For those who prefer listening to reading, there is a terrific NPR podcast which starts with Useem’s article.

All of these books, articles and podcast make clear that what employers value now–and, almost certainly, will even more going forward––are generalists, those with broad, rigorous, non-occupation specific skills.

As readers of this blog know, we think the best description of those skills are the 6Cs from the book Becoming Brilliant. Collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creativity and confidence.

This trend of employers preferring generalists is consistent with Google’s findings that STEM skills were not the defining characteristic of their most successfully employees. Of the focus groups we did on the path those without a four-year degree took to get jobs paying at least $40,000 a year. Of Heather McGowan’s framing of losing job skills being the operating system, a job skills the apps. And of George Anders’ findings of the value of a liberal arts degree.

My summary of all these writings about future work: All of us will need generalist skills––no matter what our first job/occupation is––and most of us, at least for a first job, will need some specialist skills. But where we have gotten off track, across the board in education and training, is which are the foundation skills. To use Heather McGowan’s terrific analogy the generalist skills are the operating system we all need; the specialist skills are the apps  (with a shorter and shorter half life). So it is not either/or but both/and for most of us, but where the most important 40-year-career-ready skills are the 6Cs/generalist skills.

To make matters worse too many of us are telling parents and kids that the only path to prosperity is to be a specialist in the trades or STEM. Which is not supported when you look at today’s data, let alone what is likely to happen in the future. So our messaging even narrows the fields where one can do well as a specialist.

The other reality of all this emphasis on learn a trade or profession is that it completely misses the reality that most of us got to where we are today through our second and third jobs, not the first. It is the promotion job that makes one prosperous for most.  And that for most our first job specialist skills were not what got us the promotion jobs. It was the generalist skills.

If, as all these readings say, increasingly rigorous generalist skills are what the labor market most demands––rather than learning a trade or profession–– we need to rethink completely what we mean by career ready and to redefine our definition of career-ready skills. This is the core of the education policy debate we need to be having.

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The article describes the bottom line this way: General Motors is a technology company that makes cars and the skills its employees had yesterday are continuously becoming outdated.

The article continues with quotes from Marick Masters, professor of business at Wayne State University:

“Technology has changed so fast and is changing so fast that if you’ve been out of school 10 or 20 years, you’re not at the leading edge anymore,” said Masters. … “I don’t know if they’re extinct or need a new degree, but they need to be engaged in continued learning and advancement,” said Masters. “They need to be agile. Organizations do not guarantee lifetime employment anymore. This is a statement that the world is changing.”

The “new” GM will want workers who are highly creative and capable of working autonomously as well as collaboratively, Masters said. The future employee will take initiative and have a strong technology background, good communication skills and project-management capability. GM might do more contract hiring to keep fixed costs low and GM’s agility high, he said.

Research by David Deming and Kadeem Noray demonstrates that what veteran GM engineers are experiencing is common for those with STEM degree. They write:

This paper presents new evidence on the life-cycle returns to STEM education. We show that the economic payoff to majoring in applied STEM fields such as engineering and computer science is initially very high, but declines by more than 50 percent in the first decade after college. STEM majors have flatter age-earnings profiles than college graduates who major in other subjects, even after controlling for cognitive ability and other important determinants of earnings.

The need, first and foremost, to be able to constantly adjust to the changing nature of work in order to have a good-paying forty-year career is not limited to GM engineers or more broadly those with a degree in a STEM field. The reality is none of us have a clue what the jobs and occupations of the future will be. Today’s jobs are not a good indicator of what jobs will be available when today’s K-12 students finish their careers in the 2050s or 2060s. We simply don’t know how smarter and smarter machines are going to change labor markets.

Who knows when autonomous vehicles will replace truck drivers; software, not healthcare professionals, will do diagnostics; software, not financial advisors, will provide us with investment advice; machines will move materials in warehouses; on and on and on. But it is a matter of when, not if, much work now done by humans will be done by smarter and smarter machines.

Its not that work will disappear but that most of us are going to have to be able to adapt and learn new skills to be able to have successful forty-year careers. That requires a transformation in our system of lifelong learning and how we support people as they transition from one occupation to the next and more and more of us are contingent workers. So the purpose of pre K-12 education (maybe even pre K-16) is to build foundation skills that allow all Michigan children to have the agility and ability to constantly switch occupations – to be successful rock climbers.

The best definition we have found for this complex set of skills comes from the book Becoming Brilliant, by learning scientists Roberta Michnick Golinkoff and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, who label these skills the six Cs:

• Collaboration, the ability to work and play well with others, which encompasses a wide range of soft skills necessary for success in the modern workplace;
• Communication, the ability to effectively get your point across and back it up with evidence, both verbally and in writing, and the ability to listen and be empathetic;
• Content, deep understanding and a broad base of knowledge in a range of subject areas, rather than simply surface knowledge of reading and math skills;
• Critical Thinking, the ability to sift through mountains of information and get a sense of what’s valuable and not and to solve unanticipated and unpredictable problems;
• Creativity, the ability to put information together in new ways;
• Confidence, which encompasses capacities like grit, perseverance, and a willingness to take risks.

These are the foundation skills that all of us need, no matter what first job/occupation we decide to pursue after we finish our education.

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Largely because of machines increasingly doing the work now done by humans, we are now in an economy where losing a job will almost certainly be routine. McGowan writes:

As machine intelligence advances, humans will offload work to machines, and then adapt, re-skill, and redeploy to new, uniquely human work. That process of adaptation requires a foundation in learning agility and a mindset that prepares them for change. You might think of it this way: Mindsets are like operating systems and skill sets are applications. Higher education and workforce development have operated like application development; skills are defined in curriculum and applied to the student. This approach is reaching its useful end. Just like an old computer becomes obsolete, so will this application transfer process. Instead, schools need to focus on providing students with an operating system upgrade, developing fundamental abilities to acquire and shed rapidly changing skills requirements (a metaphoric app update). This foundation instills the ability and agency to continuously learn and adapt. This is a big shift in how we think about preparing a workforce.

At Michigan Future we have used for years the analogy that 40-year career success will look a lot more like rock climbing than climbing a career ladder. And that the foundation skills for rock climbers are the 6Cs described best in the book Becoming Brilliant: collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creativity and confidence. Not occupation-specific skills.

McGowan’s analogy that broad adaptability skills are the operating system and occupation-specific skills are the applications is terrific too. She continues:

The right mindset provides safe harbor in a sea of disruption. It enables graduates to make sense of shifting context and to recast their story so that they can march back to relevance. This continuous reinvention will dominate the future of work, and developing empathy for yourself and the grit to manage your internal critic will separate those who are successful in the future with those who struggle.

Exactly! In our new state policy agenda report we include a quote from U.S. Senator Ben Sasse:

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