Beating Up on 21CS

Eduflack Math, Science, STEM, technology, Workforce

It’s been a rough couple of weeks for the 21st century skills movement.  Last week, at an event hosted by Common Core, 21CS (embodied by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills) got pretty bloodied by the traditionalists who believe the teaching of soft 21CS mean denying our students much needed core content in reading, math, science, and the social sciences.  The Core Knowledge Foundation was the first to weigh in (http://www.coreknowledge.org/blog/2009/02/25/21st-century-skills-fadbusters/ ) and Eduwonk has a powerful commentary on the event, and its implications for the future (http://www.eduwonk.com/2009/02/21st-century-skills-in-critical-condition.html ).

This week, the traditional media weighs in on the controversy.  EdWeek’s Stephen Sawchuk has a terrific article on the throwdown in Education Week (http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2009/03/04/23pushback_ep.h28.html?r=1644068071 ) and USA Today’s Greg Toppo weighs in on the same debate this morning (http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-03-04-core-knowledge_N.htm ), pitting it as 21st century skills versus core knowledge.
Eduflack gets the controversy, don’t get me wrong.  When we start talking about teaching our students “soft skills” in what is already a severely limited academic day, it sends chills down the spines of those who fear we are already falling down on the job when it comes to teaching our kids the basics.  After all, who wants to substitute “world history with “Fun with Technology?”  Who wants to forgo advanced science so we can teach “Interpersonal Communication?”  And who would even think of sacrificing a foreign language so we can offer “Teamwork 101?”
At the end of the day, though, this is all a false debate.  Do our students need 21st century skills, like teamwork, problem solving, critical thinking, and such?  Yes.  Are these skills that many have already been teaching for decades (thus questioning whether they are really 21st century skills)?  Yes.  Should we, or do we, sacrifice our core curriculum to offer this collection of soft skills in its stead?  Of course not.
The debate over 21CS skills should not be one between one set of curricular goals versus the other.  This isn’t core knowledge versus soft skills.  No, our focus should be on how we teach those core subjects that are necessary.  How do we teach math and science so that we better integrate technology and critical thinking skills?  How do we teach the social sciences in a manner that focuses on project-based learning and team-based activities?  How do we ensure that a 21st century student is not being forced to unplug when they enter the classroom, and instead uses the technologies and interests that drive the rest of their life to boost their interest and achievement in core academic subjects?  And most importantly, how do we ensure all students are graduating with the content knowledge and skills needed to truly achieve in the 21st century economy?
If anything, 21CS is guilty of bad messaging and bad PR.  In a time when everyone is concerned about both academic quality and relevance to the economy, many 21CS advocates remain focused on the need for soft skills, believing they have discovered some long, lost map to student success.  In reality, they are calling for a reinforcement of the relevance of core instruction.  Their message has been off, and as a result, they’ve painted a nice, large target on the back of a well-meaning concept.
How do we move beyond it?  The first step is shifting from 21CS skills to STEM skills.  Science-technology-engineering-math education is a strong attempt at unifying core curriculum (at least math and science) with those skills needed in today’s workforce.  STEM literacy requires a keen understanding of core knowledge, along with an adeptness of 21CS.  Most importantly, it is a concept that policymakers and business leaders understand and are starting to embrace, seeing that how a student applies knowledge is just as important as the knowledge they acquire.
Yes, STEM education faces similar criticism to 21CS, but that’s only because some haven’t seen strong, effective STEM education at work.  It isn’t all keyboarding and web development.  It is advanced math and science.  It offers history lessons in technology.  And it even figures out how to teach topics like mechanical engineering in relevant concepts for secondary school students.  In its very soul, STEM is as core knowledge as it can be.
Regardless, this shouldn’t be an either/or debate.  When we look at our K-12 schools, we look at the pipeline into postsecondary education, and we observe the ever-evolving demands for a skilled workforce, it is clear we have miles to go before we solve the problem.  The answer is not more Latin, a better understanding of ancient Greek history, or a finer appreciation for the Great Books.  The true answer is found in how use new technologies, new approaches, and altogether new ways to teach our core subjects.  How do we cultivate new learning skills while reinforcing our tried-and-true curriculum?  How do we better engage a 21st century student on that core knowledge that they just don’t have an interest in or don’t see the relevance of?  How do we better engage students, rather than asking them to unplug and power down upon entering the schoolhouse doors?
What’s clear is the Partnership for 21CS is facing its last stand.  Its positioning and messaging is quickly making it irrelevant, while stoking the engines of those who have long lept to the defense of a deeply held sense of our core academic curriculum.  The Partnership needs to go back to the drawing board, build a new messaging platform, expand its pool of advocates and endorsers, and reassert its relevance in the debate on school improvement.  Otherwise, it is just another good idea that will have failed because of bad execution and an inability to connect with both those who must lead the change and the students we are trying to impact with the reform.

223 thoughts on “Beating Up on 21CS”

  1. I agree that the debate in the blogosphere and in the press sounds like it’s between skills and content. That was not the point of contention at the Common Core Forum. It did not break down as “the content people” vs. “the skills guy.” Everyone also agreed that skills and content are both important. Also, Hirsch, Ravitch, and I all explicitly said that we thought the goals espoused by the P21 group are good ones. The point of contention was how to get there. The substance of the argument was exactly what you suggest it ought to be, on pedagogy and curriculum. Hirsch, Ravitch and Willingham all argued (from different points of view) that they have serious doubts about the likelihood that the P21 plan can achieve the worthy goals the group sets out. Part of that concern was the likelihood that content knowledge will be jettisoned once things get down to cases. That prediction was based on the scant attention paid to content knowledge in the documents on the P21 website, and the way that knowledge and skill are described in those documents. Ravitch put the P21 movement in a broader historical context, describing why she was dubious that this movement would be any more successful than previous, similar movements, and I described what I see as fundamental flaws in the way that the group’s plan approaches the nature of learning and of knowledge. You can find these discussions at CommonCore.org. Unfortunately, Ken Kay, the President of P21, did not provide a written version of his remarks. I was surprised that you think the P21 group has suffered from bad marketing and messaging. Their ideas strike me as plausible but remarkably thin, falling apart when leaned on even a little. I was attributing their success to excellent PR and sloganeering. It may not be an accident that the President’s background is not in education, but in PR.

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  2. Completely agree on the need for continued and unrelenting focus on pedagogy and content.  Hopefully, EdSec Duncan’s recent embrace of national education standards will make that point even clearer to policymakers and the like.  And if schools or educators are jettisoning the content in favor of the skill, they have missed the entire point of the education “relevance” movement.I find your comment about P21 and PR to be most interesting, though.  There are some that define PR as being able to gain headlines and attention, and I agree that P21 has been able to do that.  But as you note, the thinness of P21 is a clear sign of poor messaging and poor marketing.  It should be a slam dunk to make the connections between relevant, 21st century focused instruction, student achievement, and opportunities later in life.  My concern is that P21 has gone with PR 101, rather than the graduate level study in effective public engagement.  Events like Common Core demonstrate that P21 doesn’t have the messaging platform or the understanding of audience to withstand the attacks that come when you are trying to move one through the three phases of scientifically based public engagement — Inform-Build Commitment-Mobilize for Action.  P21 needs to be focused on those latter two, which are the harder pieces and require far more more.  Simply informing the world of 21CS doesn’t get the job done.  That’s why their messaging and marketing fails.  They are informing of the need, but they aren’t driving us to change behavior, particularly by offering a solution others can stand behind.  If you look at the Yankelovich model on effective public engagement, part of the Build Commitment step is how one withstands and improves based on the attacks and the pushbacks from opponents.  P21 isn’t there.

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  3. I should have prefaced my PR comment with this phrase “I don’t know anything about PR, but. . . .” Your take on the public engagement aspect is very interesting. I don’t think, however, that the thinness of P21 is a clear sign of poor messaging and marketing. It’s a sign of ideas that have not been thought through. You wrote “It should be a slam dunk to make the connections between relevant, 21st century focused instruction, student achievement, and opportunities later in life.” It is. No one argues with this. The problem lies in the method to get to those goals. That’s where the P21 plan is inadequate because the underlying philosophy is “If we want kids to be able to do X when they graduate, put more X in the classroom.” Programs VERY much like P21 have been tried multiple times in the last 75 years and they haven’t worked. Those failures ought to give us information for a better try this time around. So, knowing very little about PR, my thinking was “Gee, with such a crummy, poorly thought through program, how did they get 10 states to sign on? I guess their PR is really good. . . .

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  4. It seems to me that the role of P21 is to influence the content of standards documents to represent the interest of employers. They’ve been successful in doing that so far.

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  5. Truth is we can’t compete with non-US citizens in US graduate STEM programs. They’re secondary schools in India and China prepare them better. The govt makes it very difficult for them to stay (with just a green card or student visa) so they take their knowledge attained from the greatest universities in the world back home.

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  6. “The Partnership needs to go back to the drawing board, build a new messaging platform, expand its pool of advocates and endorsers, and reassert its relevance in the debate on school improvement. “- Well said

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  7. “They are informing of the need, but they aren’t driving us to change behavior, particularly by offering a solution others can stand behind.”Precisely. This is where the long-term “Standards and Accountability Movement” has clearly failed. The “Standards” are content standards and can’t be “raised.” As with P21 they focus on the wrong end. As Dan has said, aspirations are empty if there are no replicable means of effecting the instructional accomplishment, with transparent demonstration of the accomplishment–something other than filling in bubbles on multiple choice questions.This can be done, but it’s not a question of PR. And it’s more than a question of sorting “content” and “skills.” Nailing those elements down is a part of the task, but in the era of the Internet and other powerful Info Tech, it’s a matter of balancing what should be “in the head” and what information access/organization and “bot” capability should be energized.The endeavor constitutes the D in R&D. For complicated political/professional reasons, R&D for the last three decades has been almost exclusively R. To get beyond rhetorical debate to “educational change we can believe in” will require product/protocols that deliver reliable transparent instructional accomplishments. People don’t use research; we use “things” that have been generated using systematic development methodology.There are indications from Carnegie, some of the beltway think tanks, and within the leadership of the Dept of Ed of what should be a slam dunk acknowledgment, but has been anything but that.

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  8. “.. the goals espoused by the P21 group are good ones. The point of contention was how to get there.”It’s not difficult to agree with a nice sounding laundry list of vague generalities. What happens when you get to the details. This is a common trick. Argue with generalities, but control the details. It’s like balance. Who could be against balance? What I don’t like is that many of the areas have always been important, except now groups are trying to change much, much more under the guise of modern technology.From the P21CS site we have this:”In addition to these subjects, we believe schools must move beyond a focus on basic competency in core subjects to promoting understanding of academic content at much higher levels by weaving 21st century interdisciplinary themes into core subjects: Global awareness Financial, economic, business and entrepreneurial literacy Civic literacy Health literacy”Yes, well show me that you get the basics done and then we’ll talk. If you continue with inefficient and low accountability top-down or thematic approaches to the material, compentency will never be achieved. In fact, we need to define how and when compentency is achieved. In fact, most of the arguments come down to different educational expectations. One educational reporter told me that the NAEP test was the “gold standard”. As a parent, I look at that test and get sick thinking about how that (like most state tests) have become the goal, not the minimum cutoff.The push for 21st century skills is just intellectual cover for a laundry list of modern educational ideologies. Applying modern technology to teaching and learning could be so much more, but that’s not what’s happening. Teachers don’t use email to increase the number of times students get feedback on their writing. Modern technology is not used to keep parents more informed about what’s happening in the classroom and with curricula. I don’t have a real problem with calculators in K-6, except they are used as avoidance tools, rather than educational amplifiers. Kids could be expected to process larger, more realistic, amounts of data. That never happens. All of this comes down to high versus low expectations, not 21st century skills. It’s a distraction from dealing with real differences of opinion over what constitutes a proper education. These differences of opinion cannot be hidden away under the rug of 21 century skills. As a parent, I don’t want to be limited to a debate over generalities. I want to be involved with the details. Don’t just talk about the glories of SmartBoards.While everyone is working on the ‘R’ and the ‘D’, please give us parents the choice to say “no thank you”.

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