Global Competence? Deeper Learning? Technical Skills? . . . For Everybody or Some? . . . Says Who?

So already, thanks to a constellation of articles in the Boston Globe earlier this week (Monday, March 24 and Tuesday, March 25), there's still more to talk about regarding who in America should be learning what, when, and for whom. Though in our democracy, we speak often and reverently of everybody--everybody has certain entitlements and responsibilities--we persist in having a terrible time talking about everybody in American education. The fact is that while every American student is entitled to an education intended to make next positive life steps possible, not every American student needs, wants, or is ready at the same prescribed moment for the same educational program or opportunity. Our policy-making efforts are hampered by the fact that the focus of our efforts--teenage children--are constantly changing because they're adolescents and still developing: we struggle to talk about and respond to students' needs and differences as present but not necessarily permanent realities. In addition, we tend to think very differently about the great abstraction of "American high school students" and the American teens we know and see daily for whom we advocate, hope, and generate creative and personalized educational solutions on an ongoing basis. For the students we don't know, we devise programs and policies to address problems and needs; with the students we do know, we carefully build relationships in the contexts of which we support, guide, confront, challenge, and encourage them as they navigate school as it is.

Our Different Perspectives May Not Be Our Biggest Challenge
Whatever our adult struggles of perception, response, and distance might be, the economic, linguistic, social, and learning differences of American students do not eradicate their common entitlement--and those differences must not rigidly dictate which educational choices and paths are open to or designed and selected for them. But several of the Globe  articles that have me writing today suggest that our different philosophies and perceptions may not be what most complicates educational dialogue and problem-solving. Our bigger problem may be a reluctance to express the values and priorities that underlie our educational proposals. One of our tactics is to provide few specifics about which students we have in mind; what exactly they need, lack, or deserve; and on the basis of what research we've concluded this. When it suits our purposes, including our desires to be perceived as citizens who care about everybody, we hide behind deliberate obscurities that mask our willingness to predispose certain students to certain futures. This vagueness leads to anger, then blame, and then--all too often--absolution of oneself and one's organization or movement from responsibility, present or future. Once again, the interests of one group of students are pitted against those of other groups in conversations from which student voices are absent. Talk stops, and the status quo persists.

So here are the articles that have gotten me thinking and writing. My apologies ahead of time to any of you who try to open the boston.com links below and are unable to. 

• Mass. schools require dramatic change, report says (March 24)
• Walsh makes push to get struggling teens summer jobs (March 24)
• Hundreds of parents band together to oppose charter school expansion (March 24)
• In China, Michelle Obama turns her focus on education (March 24)
• The changing face of citizenship (March 25)

"Mass. schools require dramatic change, report says"
Of all the articles that are listed above, the one that's most dangerously obscure is the first one. Its first sentence does not specify if the "state's employers" are looking at high school, two-year-college, or four-year-college graduates, although the word "children" in the following sentence offers us a clue: "More than two thirds of the state’s employers report difficulty hiring employees with the appropriate skills, underscoring the need for major changes in how Massachusetts educates its children, according to a report and survey set for release Monday by the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education." Furthermore, while the Business Alliance sees the creation of more charter schools as part of the solution to the problem, even though the article offers no data about the number of charter school graduates whose skills have led to their being hired for the "'good jobs, high-tech jobs'" that too often go unfilled, it also worries that an over-emphasis on standardized tests, which charter school students also must pass, is "to the detriment of . . . skills critical to success in the workforce, such as the ability to think critically, communicate, and collaborate."

The article lays out a partial list of desirable soft, non-technical "workforce success" skills that students should have, but does not offer a comparably specific list of missing technical skills, even though the absence of these is the problem the Business Alliance wants addressed*: are we talking about the competences laid out in the state vocational education frameworks, or about other skills as well? In the Rindge School of Technical Arts, the vocational school within Cambridge Rindge and Latin School (CRLS), the technical and technological overlap considerably in such areas as graphic communications, graphic design, business, biotechnology, and video production. But a number of the technologies that students use in these technical fields are also used for teaching and learning in the other courses they take at CRLS.  So what technical skills are we actually talking about? Some specificity here would really help, especially in terms deciding when and where students should and could be mastering them.

While the response comments on the boston.com web site identify and question a number of the article's assumptions and offer a range of possible solutions to the employment problem, most respondents agree that the primary role of secondary schools is not to train workers--which may well put them at odds with members of the Business Alliance. No data is provided about the schools and programs in which Alliance members' own children are enrolled and whether their children are being expected to develop the technical skills needed for employment in MA businesses, which always raises an important moral question about who should dictate what kinds of schools and programs will serve "other people's children." The article speaks of the need for an educational climate and era that "'unleashes greatness." But will greatness be unleashed by increased technical skills? Personally, I think human greatness, the appreciation of it if not the aspiration toward it, matters greatly (there's that word again, this time in adverbial form); in fact human greatness has been the overarching topic explored in my AP Literature and Composition class for the last four years.  But as any of my former students would tell you, "greatness" means many different things to different people and needs to examined from different perspectives. If the concept of "greatness" is going to underlie educational policy decisions, it needs to be understood commonly, at least to some degree.

"Walsh makes push to get struggling teens summer jobs"
So are there connections between the skills deficits the Business Alliance has identified and the lack of corporate willingness to create more summer teen employment? The front page of the Boston Globe suggests that there is, offering the two stories in the same outlined rectangle, as you can see above, and entitling the entire section "Applying Pressure." According to the teen summer jobs article, "Economists say that summer and part-time jobs play an important role for teens and the broader labor market because they can provide the experiences, skills, and sense of responsibility that help teens succeed over the course of their working lives." While the article isn't specific about the kinds of skills that teens gain through summer employment, it is clear that these skills and the greater sense of responsibility that accompanies them benefit the teen employees. The article also says that a number of large Boston firms do not hire teens, or at least Boston teens, and even names several. It would be interesting to know how much overlap there is between firms that offer teen jobs and firms that belong to the Business Alliance advocating for school change for the sake of the technical sector. Are there some employers who expect to help young employees learn job skills on the job and others who do not?

"Hundreds of parents band together to oppose charter school expansion"

Meanwhile, as made clear in the Globe article about parents speaking out against the raising of the cap on the number of charter schools in Boston, not every Boston parent shares the Business Alliance's belief that more charter schools are the answer. Predictably, but still significantly, parents cite as their concerns the effect of charter funding practices on district school programs and the under-representation of English language learners and students eligible for special services in charter school student bodies. Mark Kenen, executive director of the Massachusetts Charter School Association, acknowledged that proportional representation of "the most vulnerable" students, as Mendell School parent Ellen Shattuck Pierce described them, is a work-in-progress. But having taught for a year (2001-2002) at Boston's English High School,** which had large numbers of Spanish- and Somali-speaking students who were very much in the process of learning English, and among whom there were a number who, like many of their English-speaking classmates, had special learning needs, I can't feel genuinely enthusiastic about "improvements" to which "the most vulnerable" are less likely to have access and for which they are likely to pay programmatically because of the current funding practices.  So many EHS students (not all!) were poor and marginalized, but so many of them (not all!!) wanted to learn and make something of themselves. I love what many charter schools do and achieve, but I can't forget those EHS students whom I knew by name, face, and the effort they were making in a strange, new place that didn't yet feel like home.

"In China, Michelle Obama turns her focus on education"

So what do Michelle Obama and the Great Wall of China have to do with any of this? According to the Globe, "The purpose of Obama’s weeklong visit is to promote educational exchanges between the United States and China." I loved seeing the photo of all three Obama women on the Great Wall; it reminded me that a week earlier, the CRLS winners of the second annual EF Tours Glocal Challenge had also had the opportunity to visit China--Shanghai rather than Beijing. "Over the course of . . . [only one] month [last October], CRLS students [had] worked with graduate student mentors from Harvard Business School, MIT and Hult International Business School to identify a local social problem that was important to them, research how other companies have addressed that issues on a global scale, and then develop their own innovative social enterprise business plan to implement in Cambridge," explains the feature on the CRLS web site. The two teams of students whose designs won the contest traveled free to China; most of them would not have been able to travel to China had the trip not been free. 

Like Michelle, Malia, and Sasha Obama, I got to walk on the Great Wall; seeing was believing, and thrilling. Two years ago, thanks to the generosity of the NEA (National Education Association Foundation and the Pearson Foundation, I visited China with a group of similarly honored teachers, each representing his/her home state. Because a major purpose of our trip was authentic educational exchange, we needed to situate what we were learning about Chinese education in the context of Chinese culture, past and present. Though my fellow educators and I completed an online course prior to our visit to China, nothing could compare with the visit itself in terms of shaping and deepening our understandings of things Chinese, our understandings of one another and ourselves, our senses of who might learn what from whom. When two months later economist Jeffrey Sachs, at a plenary conversation at the August 2012 Project Zero Future of Learning Summer Institute, insisted that the best way to understand places and the people who lived in them was to visit them, that simply reading and thinking about them wouldn't do, I couldn't have agreed more.

The following September, back at our home schools, my fellow teachers and I faced the same challenge that the CRLS Glocal Challenge winners and their mentors now face: figuring out how to share significant insights and experiences effectively, vividly, memorably with fellow students and colleagues who stayed home.  Perhaps any group seeking to share knowledge and understandings it has developed through its unique experiences and process faces a similar challenge. I began by having my students use the Right Question Institute's Question Formulation Technique, one of my favorite tools for ensuring that learning is for everybody, to generate questions about Beijing's motto, pictured on the banner in the photo. The discussions the students' questions generated over the next few days became complex fast: since--oh so fortunately!--one member of the class was from Beijing and another had parents who spoke Chinese fluently, we began by exploring the translations and connotations of the motto's words.

Teaching for Global Competence and "The changing face of citizenship"
The truth is that few American public school students will get to travel to lots of distant and different places.  But as my classroom story shows, all of them will virtually or actually encounter people, products, ideas, languages, and problems with origins in distant places about which they currently know little--such as Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria, the countries of origin of a growing number of immigrants to Massachusetts, according to the last Globe article listed above. Given the certainty of such encounters, schools need to educate students not merely for interested and respectful acknowledgment of diversity and globalization, but for global competence. As this graphic sets forth, our students need to develop the skills that will allow them to investigate the world, recognize perspectives, communicate ideas, and take action. We can't just talk about others; we must be able to to talk to others. [Please note: The graphic above comes from Educating for Global Competence: Preparing Our Youth to Engage the World by Veronica Boix Mansilla and Anthony Jackson, which can be downloaded for free.***]

Global Competence:  For Whom, and How Soon?
So should everybody be educated to develop global competence (which, in my mind, is akin to being educated for deep understanding and even for college-and-career readiness when the Common Core is implemented creatively and not reductively)? Or should some American students be educated to become globally competent, while others are educated to become proficiently literate and technically skilled? Should only those students who encounter immigrant children be educated for global competence? Or is it children who are immigrants or the children of immigrants who should be educated for global competence? Or are these new and recent Americans the children for whom proficient literacy and technical skills are sufficient educational goals? Suddenly, I find myself feeling sinking unhappily into a 21st-century Americanized version of Brave New World.

But there are more difficult challenges. Can everybody be educated for global competence? If so, how soon? What if we can begin to educate some but not all for global competence, for reasons of funding and/or teacher preparation? Should we begin to do that as long as our plan is eventually to educate all? Even if we fear we can never afford to educate all? What if beginning to educate some has an adverse effect on the quality of what we can offer to others, even in just the very short-term? When should we feel justified in educating "some" differently than others, and for what purposes?

The pull-quote from the "changing face of citizenship" article, from a recent emigrant from Ghana, begins with the following sentence:  "'We love to be citizens of this great country.'" There's that word "great" again--and it carries with it all the possibility of the unleashing of that greatness via education and work, all the hope that's expressed by the name, provided in both English and Chinese, of a business several blocks from my home:  Promised Land Realty Group LLC.  

The Challenge of Talking Honestly Across Our Differences 
We live in difficult, contentious educational times, not all of us equally committed to equity and excellence, to democratic process, and to the "Life, Liberty, and pursuit of Happiness" of everyone who is proud to be part of this "'great country.'" But those differences among us have always been the case. Perhaps our best hope is that those empowered to shape or make policy be forthcoming with education-related specifics and educational reports before they generate authoritative sets of recommendations and make binding decisions on the basis of them. If those specifics and reports become the basis of honest, respectful dialogue and negotiation that includes the voices of students and their parents, perhaps we really can do right by everybody. But frankly, it's the honest, respectful part that most worries me.  Who will be honest enough to admit to caring little or not at all for everybody?

* The actual report may identify these skills, though the Boston Globe article, which the general populace is more likely to see, does not.
** Mansilla, Veronica Boix., and Anthony Jackson. Educating for Global Competence: Preparing Our Youth to Engage the World. New York, NY: Asia Society, 2011. Print.
*** Photo address: <http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l6vl7jb6rh1qajugo.gif> from "The Adventures of Sam and Caroline" blog: <http://samandcaroline.blogspot.com/2013/04/updates-from-english-high-school.html>