Public education exists to fill the needs of the commonwealth. In the 1800s it was citizenship and immigrant assimilation. In the late 1800s and early 1900s it was the need for literate industrial employment. In the mid-1900s it was national security. In the late 1900s and early 2000s it has been national and international economics. Along the way there has been a layering of social and humane purposing for educational programming, but they never were the fundamental drivers of educational policy. Today our nation needs to educate children to be informed problem solvers. We face cataclysmic issues of climate, economic, social, political, and ethical distresses. It is not enough that educated graduates can read, write, compute, and have an abundance of knowledge. These are nothing if they are not put to a purpose. We need our next generation to be educated in problem solving.
Problems du jour.
“Plastics”, Mr. Robinson told Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate. The future he said was in the plastics industry. Today Mr. Robinson rightfully could say “Water”. There are places on our planet where there is not enough or no water. Drought! Simultaneously, there are places where rainfall and flooding are deadly and ruinous and places where rising sea level erodes and overwhelms homes, towns, and cities. Flooding! As a natural resource, its scarcity and overabundance are causing humans to change how and where they can live. In its extreme, drought and flooding are killing us. We need a generation who are prepared to work the problem du jour – water – not just chase the hot trend du jour – plastics. If today’s Benjamin Braddock, Hoffman’s character, needed advice on what to do with his college diploma, a good answer would be “problems with water”.
But water is not the only problem needing solving. If not water, then childcare – the scarcity and cost of childcare devastates young families. Or, elder care – the costs of Medicare and Social Security are multiplying the national debt. Or, affordable housing. Or, ethical government. Or, aligning immigration to employment. Or, and the list goes on. We face a multitude of problems that live at the local, state, national, and global levels. We have problems that divide us into those who are affected versus those not. That is a problem unto itself – our problems divide us, they do not unite us. We need problem solvers.
A new mandate – active problem solving.
Mandates are needed. In the 1960s President Kennedy gave our nation a mandate to go to the moon. We did. In the later 60s President Johnson signed mandates to change the national view of civil rights. For a while, they did until we let problems of special and personal interest get in the way. In the early 2000s, President Bush mandated NCLB and reading and math became our national school focus.
At the state level, the Wisconsin legislature recently passed Act 60 to mandate financial literacy and Act 20 to require phonics-based reading instruction. Public education is a function of state government, and our educational mandates are embedded in the statutes. Once law, mandates must be implemented. Making mandates is not a state problem; making the right mandates is.
Locally, school boards mandate. During the pandemic, school boards mandated masking, mitigation, and virtual learning. Some mandates were popular and others were not. School boards approve policy and policies are their mandates.
Mandates make things happen.
I challenge every school district administrator to use UbD (Understanding by Design) techniques to create a district-wide, 4K-12 problem solving curriculum. This backward design process begins with a statement of the graduation outcome and then describes the programming to achieve the outcome.
Why start with local school districts? Because they can act unilaterally and usually apolitically. Partisan state government is either gridlocked or bent toward partisan issues.
The local school outcome of interest is – all graduates are informed problem solvers. Informed means three things. Each graduate –
- understands multiple problem-solving strategies and how they work,
- has an informed “BS” detector and can filter out all the (B)bias and (S)special interests that surround our significant problems, and
- is motivated to persevere until a problem solution is working.
Mandates are really easy. It just takes courage to understand that what becomes law or policy gets done. Therefore, if you want something done, mandate it.
If the current status quo is not working, change it.
A reader may say, “Our school curriculum is already overloaded. We cannot add a new program to our overworked faculty and students”. True. And the answer to that statement is brutal. The current school curriculum maintains the status quo. It educates children to fit into and be part of the current state of the world. Public education, as it exists now, is always behind the curve of our problems. It extends the life of problems; it does not help in solving problems. That is why courageous mandates are required at the school board level. Legislative processes at the state and national levels take forever making most solutions so lost in the problem they have little chance of changing anything.
This is not a difficult proposition, if there is a will by educational leaders to act. All they have to do is ask these simple questions.
- Are our current systems working positively and aggressively to fix or alleviate the crises we face today?
- Are today’s graduates skilled enough in problem solving to fix or alleviate these crises?
- Are children in the elementary and middle school grades learning problem solving strategies?
The answer is not “yes”.
Start here.
Every child receives instruction in the social studies in our 4K-12 curriculum. The traditional scaffolding of United States history in elementary, middle school, and high school with specific courses in US government or civics and economics only builds common background knowledge for all. There is no purposeful application.
The C3 Framework for Social Studies Standards is a game changer in terms of repurposing a social studies education. The C3 Framework adds this singularly unique focus –“preparation for a civic life”. The structure of this curriculum includes this mandate – how will students use their learning to purposefully engage in their community and state as informed and skilled problem solvers. The purpose of social studies is engagement.
A proper school board mandate is to approve the C3 Framework as the basis for district social studies instruction. Abandon curriculum that only prepares graduates for a game of Jeopardy. At grade level, this means children in 4K-12 annually will learn developmentally appropriate inquiry skills to ask problem-based questions and learn about civics, economics, geography, history, and the behavioral sciences. The focus is not knowledge for knowledge’s sake, but knowledge and tools for critically looking at community and state issues and developing age-appropriate conclusions. “This is what we should do…”.
The commonwealth.
Our local communities and state are so intertwined that the old concept of commonwealth is more important now than ever before. Our problems are large and forbidding so our approach to problem solving must be equally new and bold. The commonwealth needs problem solvers not gawkers lamenting why problems never get fixed. Public education can provide a next generation of informed and trained problem solvers. Instead of Generation (whatever letter comes next), let’s create Generation PS (problem solvers).