An Educational Equity Nightmare

My nightmare is that we will eliminate the achievement gap in the old basics but never even check to see how equitably we help students learn the new competences needed in our times.

Like most educators, I worry greatly about inequities in our educational system. We do well by students whose parents have enough free time to assure that they enter kindergarten with a base of key experiences: using language, experiencing number, being able to interact with others. But what about a student whose parents work almost all their waking hours for low wages and struggle more with childrearing because they’re the next generation after parents who had similar struggles. That student starts out behind and likely will continue to experience the “Achievement gap” we keep hearing about. We bemoan this inequity annually when average scores are posted for state tests or for the National Assessment of Student Progress, but the gap will be there next year, too, perhaps increased by inequities of remote access during the pandemic.

Many of us are committed to doing better. We may see, at least in some areas, a greater public investment in extra learning time and more personal attention from teachers for students who are behind. We may even see schooling arrangements where ethnic and racial communities underrepresented in the teacher corps invent new ways for students to see learning as the beginning of participation in communities of folks just like them. We may even find ways to provide tailored learning resources to all students who need them despite the current Internet access gap. I dream about this, and I am optimistic that at least some corners of the country will achieve this. In pockets of the U.S., we will greatly narrow the achievement gap soon, and perhaps eliminate it.

Still, my dreams often end up as nightmares. Here’s why. Ask anyone what kids learn in school and you’ll get about the same answers my grandparents would have given: reading, writing, math, science, social studies. While the curriculum has been tuned a lot, it hasn’t changed that much. Yes, the Common Core State Standards partly beefed up how the subjects are taught, so that kids are prepared better for life in the age of automation and artificial intelligence, but assessments too often are limited to the most basic levels of achievement. The annual bemoaning of educational inequity is around basic math and basic literacy, not the full range of what is needed to thrive in our times. My nightmare is that we will eliminate the achievement gap in the old basics but never even check to see how equitably we help students learn the new competences needed in our times.

A couple years ago, I wrote a book[1] about what new skills are needed. Here’s the list I came up with:

· the ability to learn efficiently and quickly,

· socioemotional skills,

· skills of civic participation,

· ability to evaluate information,

· facility in collaborative activity, including the 4 C’s (dealing with complexity, communication, collaboration, and creativity),

· management of personal finances and some basic economics,

· confidence, and

· physical and mental fitness

There are other lists that are similar but more focused on the new economy. For example, the World Economic Forum[2] has this list:

· Analytical thinking and innovation

· Active learning and learning strategies

· Complex problem-solving

· Critical thinking and analysis

· Creativity, originality and initiative

· Leadership and social influence

· Technology use, monitoring and control

· Technology design and programming

· Resilience, stress tolerance and flexibility

· Reasoning, problem-solving and ideation

· Emotional intelligence

· Troubleshooting and user experience

· Service orientation

· Systems analysis and evaluation

· Persuasion and negotiation

There are many such lists of needed competences, and they all overlap. What is true of all of them is that we don’t assess how well we are doing in assuring that every child leaves school with a strong foundation of competences like these. So, we never see any achievement gap, though I am quite positive that there is a huge one. Right now, the best we are doing in terms of equity in helping children and adults learn the basic survival skills of the information economy is talking about these skills and hoping that people somehow get them. We’re not measuring to see if we are succeeding, and we certainly aren’t assessing whether any people are being left behind.

Now, for the wealthy, we probably are doing a pretty good job in providing chances to develop the needed competences. Private schools, after-school programming in wealthier areas, top tier summer programs, and the like provide a lot of opportunities for becoming a competent participant in the automation/information age. Maker spaces in schools provide a chance to build some of the needed competences, but they usually are not integrated into the curriculum, and they are much more likely to be well equipped and staffed in wealthy districts. The kids who depend upon school for almost all of their learning are not getting a decent chance to really develop the competences they need. In fact, their schools likely eliminate some of the few opportunities that they do have in order to focus more drill on what the state tests measure.

So, my nightmare is simple. We’ll wake up some morning to read that the achievement gap on basic literacy and math tests has disappeared, but we won’t even see that the gap on readiness for the information/automation age is bigger than ever, possibly growing, and not being measured. We can learn how to measure the newly critical competences; some we know how to measure today. We can even learn how to measure them more humanely than current high-stakes testing. But, do we have the will to do that, or will we settle for achieving parity on readiness for 20th century life and let the achievement gap on readiness for our times keep growing.

[1] Lesgold, Alan. (2019). Learning for the Age of Artificial Intelligence. New York: Routledge.

[2] World Economic Forum. (2020). The Future of Jobs Report 2020. http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_2020.pdf