If I was educated in school, what am I now? Am I edu-inoculated for years to come? The concept of an educated person is a constantly moving target. Each generation goes to school to graduate with a diploma certifying proficiency in a curriculum that is out of date or semi-irrelevant almost before the cap and gown have been removed. How is this so? We apply Moore’s Law regarding the speed at which computer chip generations change to education. Except for “rear view mirror studies” of history and literature as soon as something is learned in the present tense it is morphed and altered with new applications and needs of the future. Schooling today is not about being educated but about skills for a student’s ability to be constantly educating for all the years after graduation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law
Want a case in point? Members of the Class of 22 struggled to write the perfect college admissions essay or job application. Members of the Class of 23 will insert key words and an AI bot will generate as many essays and applications as class members could want. Moore told us this would happen. Education does not stand still.
Why is this thus?
We are an additive addicted people. We are addicted to the next new thing and want it immediately. Our closets are full of past year’s shoes. Our garages brim with gizmos that popped up in yesterday’s social media ad. Our front doors are drop off stations for Amazon Prime. We see it, we order it, we have it! We are addicted to the next things to add to our lives and the almost instant gratification of Internet shopping.
“New and more” are our go to solutions to problems. At the end of every commercial we anticipate the “…But wait!”, and the next bit of something we can purchase appears. Check your credit card bills to ascertain your personal addictions.
Addictive addiction also applies to education and it makes our current concepts of academic education obsolete. For our children to be educated for a life of education, Moore must become less to become better.
Where to start?
Empty the closet of what no longer works or is needed.
For almost 120 years public education has used the Carnegie Unit, the assignment of one graduation credit for one hour of daily instruction for one school year, as the gold standard for validating school learning. In our local school, a high school graduate must complete 26 credits of prescribed and elective course work. These are piled on the faux credits of middle school’s annual curricula of ELA, math, science, and social studies, that are piled on annual grade level curricula in elementary school. 4K-12 schooling is a box of Carnegie Units that depict our concept of education as an aggregate of additives.
The purpose of the Carnegie Unit was to standardize and stabilize secondary education using a collegiate model. This filled a need in 1906 that does not exist in 2023. The fact that we still use the Unit is testimony to education’s resistance to change. Sticking to four credits of English, three credits of math, three credits of science, and three credits of social studies assured that our out-of-date academics were change resistant. When the next “add this” is discussed by a school board, the educator’s response should be “The class day is full and can take no more.
Trade in the Unit for proficiencies
We, as educators, need to focus education on educational skills graduates will need to remain educable over time. Here is the “new bimodal model”: our 4K-8 students need to be proficient in academic skills needed for lifelong learning AND our grade 6-12 students need to be proficient in the use of knowledge and skills that can be expanded over time for their adult successes.
We must teach the essential life skills and dispositions for children in our primary grades that will be the foundation of their life’s continuing education. Everything else in 4K-12 and post-graduation education and training is application and extension requiring these essential life skills. It really is easy once we scrape back all the “nice to do” and “momentary enrichments” that cloud our ability to educate children for lifelong learning.
Proficiencies for the elementary school; all else is secondary
- Ability to read and listen, comprehend, analyze, and effectively use information to illuminate a student’s world.
- Ability to effectively listen and communicate (express ourselves through speech, writing, art, and music).
- Ability to quantify, measure, and value through statistical analysis.
- Ability to tolerate, collaborate, and cooperate in a multi-cultural, multi-dimensional world.
- Ability to respect and expect respect.
Why these?
The concept follows the truth of “Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach him to fish, you feed him for a lifetime”. Moore tells us that the speed of life changes is inexorable. Information is a daily flood. We are exposed to more things to see and hear every day. Therefore, essential skill sets that universally underlie Moore’s predicted changes need to be the foundational curriculum for every child. Regardless of what our future presents, these are skill sets that will allow children growing into adulthood to learn and always be educated to meet their future.
How do we do this?
- Align school board, administrators, and teachers to prescribed and defensible standards of student performance.
School boards, school leadership, and faculty are the products of past education. Start by declaring a new day; set aside the confines of how you were educated. Do not approve a future that is a clone of the past.
Historically, we provided children with instruction. “Provided” was a soft euphemism for “here it is kids, learn what you can” of what the school offers. Today, we must ensure student learning and performances validate learning. “Ensure” means we teach until we have evidence that all children meet or exceed the board-adopted standards. We no longer offer; we teach for learning.
Alignment starts with school board policies that are crafted by insightful school leaders and faculty. Within each policy must be wording that tells teachers, children, and parents, “these are the minimum proficiencies that your child must perform to qualify for promotion to the next grade”. Alignment continues with principals working with each teacher to write and teach units and lessons that incrementally cause all children to achieve the required proficiencies. Alignment means that teachers can use all appropriate skills to ensure the teaching and learning of the required proficiencies. Alignment means that parents must be adults with their children and support the teacher’s instruction. This does not mean that parents do not partner with their children’s teachers to mutually understand and daily schoolwork; but it does mean that all partnering is focused on a child’s achievement of required proficiencies.
- Commit to 4K through grade 5 learning proficiencies.
Commitment means to ensure that every child has successfully learned grade level proficiencies through 5th grade for these essential skills. Every child must be proficient.
For too long instruction has been time-based and taught to the standard of “if you don’t learn it this year, you will be taught it next year”. In an industrial culture that needed socialized and literate workers, graduates who never achieved proficiency in their essential skills found employment and adult life in factories. They were taught shop specific skills necessary for daily work. Many became skilled in the trades of the shop – foundry men, iron workers, mill operators, fabricators, assembly linemen (and women). I worked in the 60s and 70s with meat packers who started on the hog side of the plant doing entry level work and were promoted to skilled knife trimmers over the years. These men and women earned a good living and raised their families based upon the industrial wage and benefit. Those jobs no longer exist.
School boards must devise policies for administrators to enforce true proficiency standards for each grade’s skill sets. This starts with board members holding firm to standards of student performance, because there will be hue and cry for exceptions. No problem. Accommodation will allow all students to meet the standards without disregarding the standards.
- Commit to the professional development required for all teachers to teach to high student performance standards. This level of teaching does not exist universally today because educational traditions expect student performances to conform to a bell curve and teachers teach to that expectation. To lop off the left-hand side of the bell curve, teachers need training in explicit assessment and instruction and reinforced commitment that all children will perform at or above the former mean.
- Achieve the impossibility: Every child reads, writes, speaks, and listens at a 5th grade level of a standards-based curriculum. Every child not just the top 10%.
No school board has been able to say this historically. No community has ever been able to say this to all their children. It has been impossible when boards were blindly locked to archaic concepts of schooling. And, as long a board lacked commitment to universal high standards for student performance. And, if excuses were acceptable. Eliminate the archaic concepts and accept no excuses.
What is the future of Moore?
There always will be change. The speed and volume of change will increase. Moore got it right.
If we separate 4K-5 education from 6-12 education, we ca apply Moore to secondary education only after we have made all children in elementary school secure with the skill sets that will allow them to understand and apply the changes they are presented. No Moore until children are ready for Moore.