The first thing to know about the debate over “21st-century skills” that has gripped the state’s education circles is that it has nothing to do with 21st-century skills. That’s because no one disputes the value of critical thinking, an ability to work collaboratively, or effective communication skills.
“Who could be against that,” says Sandra Stotsky, a member of the state Board of Education. “It’s motherhood and apple pie.” What Stotsky and other skeptics of the new trend fear, however, is that an embrace of the “21st-century skills” movement will end up watering down the focus on academic-content standards that has, in the 16 years since the state launched its ambitious education reform effort, catapulted Massachusetts to the forefront of nearly every national measure of student achievement.
The curriculum brouhaha has grown out of a report issued last November by a state task force that calls for integrating 21st-century skills into teacher training, curriculum standards, and MCAS tests. Along with questions about the practicality of systematically assessing students’ mastery of difficult-to-measure skills, it is not at all clear that there is a need for a focus on such skills that is distinct from the overall pursuit of high achievement in academic subjects. That’s because many educators say the ability to think critically and creatively can’t be developed in a content-free vacuum; it flows out of the acquisition of the rich content knowledge that is at the heart of the state’s standards-based reform effort.
“One thinks critically by comparing and contrasting and synthesizing what one has learned,” said noted education historian Diane Ravitch at a Washington, DC, conference earlier this week on the 21st-century skills debate. “One must know a great deal before she or he can begin to reflect on its meaning and look for alternative explanations.”
In a Boston Globe op-ed on Tuesday, board of education chairwoman Maura Banta suggested that shortcomings in educational achievement in Massachusetts make the case for a turn toward 21st-century skills. “The simple fact is that a focus on standards and academics is no longer sufficient, as evidenced by persistent, troubling achievement gaps,” wrote Banta.
Her claim demands an astonishing leap of logic.
The yawning achievement gaps show that it is much harder than many reformers anticipated to raise the basic skills level among poor and minority students. But it makes no sense at all to think what is missing is a focus on so-called 21st-century skills. The achievement gaps reflect the lack of proficiency among these students in basic reading and math, not shortcomings in critical thinking, collaborative learning ability, or the other fuzzy touchstones of the 21st-century skills movement. The persistence of large achievement gaps should prompt a redoubling of efforts to ensure that all students reach a basic level of mastery in these areas, not an ill-defined quest to reshape the education agenda.
Alas, the search for a new holy grail in education is nothing new. At the Washington conference on the 21st-century skills initiative, Ravitch pronounced the movement the latest in a long history of “infatuation with fads and lemming-like behavior” in education. Ravitch ticked off half a dozen similar efforts, spanning the 20th century, all searching for “the ultimate breakthrough that would finally loosen the shackles of subject matter and content.” The efforts ranged from a campaign for students to “learn by doing” in the early 1900’s to the Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills in the 1990’s, a Labor Department effort, which, Ravitch said, “recommended exactly the kinds of functional skills that are now called 21st-century skills.”
Tom Fortmann, a member of the state Board of Education, says, “My reaction when I first heard about the 21st-century skills movement was that everyone I worked with in the 20th century already had these skills.” The retired MIT-trained electrical engineer says such skills are indeed crucial, but he says many of them are already embedded in the state’s existing curriculum standards. The problem, he says, is they are “underemphasized in the classrooms.” Fortmann thinks the main focus should not be on changes to the curriculum, standards, or statewide assessments, but on recruiting high-achieving teachers whose own subject-area knowledge and command of 21st-century skills will facilitate their acquisition by students.
“Some opponents of testing and ed reform who have been hunkered down since 1993 see the 21st-century skills initiative as an opportunity to weaken MCAS,” says Fortmann. He says he’s convinced that is not the intent of state education officials and most fellow members of the board. “But preventing it will require some vigilance.”
