LearnmoreMN Blog

This way or the highway

By Lindsey Alexander, July guest blogger

Last week, the New York Times published an article on the challenges facing vocational education in the U.S. today. They profiled a young man, Matt Kelly, who was disinterested in school and failing several high school classes. His mother feared he wouldn’t graduate. But a counselor encouraged him to take some classes at a nearby vocational academy in his junior year. There he found himself interested and motivated by the coursework. He started getting A’s and B’s and earned a scholarship to a community college.

Mr. Kelly’s experience mirrors that of thousands and thousands of students across the country. They have a hard time taking interest or finding motivation in the current educational system and upon graduation from high school (if they make it that far) — they are essentially set adrift in the labor market.

In his 2009 State of the Union speech, President Obama spoke of a plan to increase U.S. post-secondary attainment. In his speech, he asked every American to commit to one year or more of education beyond high school adding, “this can be community college, a four-year school, vocational training or an apprenticeship.” The range of post-secondary options presented by President Obama is important. For the past few decades, the four-year degree has been touted as the ticket to the middle class. While this emphasis on the bachelor’s degree has worked well for many students, there is a significant portion of the population that it does not work for. It is critical that we find a way to train and educate all young people if we expect to meet the future needs of individuals and our economy.

According to Pathways to Prosperity, a report released earlier this year by the Harvard Graduate School of Education, 70% of high school graduates go to college within two years of graduating, but only 40% of them obtain a degree by their mid-20s. Furthermore, the U.S. has the highest college dropout rate in the industrialized world. In addressing why these problems may be occuring, the report says:

Certainly a major reason is that too many [students] can’t see a clear, transparent connection between their program of study and tangible opportunities in the labor market. We fail these young people not because we are indifferent, but because we have focused too exclusively on a few narrow pathways to success. It is time to widen our lens and to build a more finely articulated pathways system — one that is richly diversified to align with the needs and interests of today’s young people and better designed to meet the needs of the 21st century economy.

This focus on “a few narrow pathways to success” might explain a lot of the problems plaguing higher education: non-completion, skyrocketing costs, students arriving and/or graduating unprepared, unsatisfied employers, increases in student loans, barriers to access, etc.

Creating multiple pathways to careers might help young people find a connection to a future, stay interested in school and explore post-secondary options that make sense for them.

The Department of Education reports that 75% of students who start public high school graduate within five years, but this figure increases to more than 90% when students concentrate in “career-oriented courses.” As the guidance counselor of the young man in the New York Times article said, “Matt came in with zero motivation — let’s face it. [Technical courses were] a route to get him to see his future.”

As part of the Citizens League’s higher education project we’ve asked people to re-imagine our system of higher education — the institutions themselves, but also K-12, students, employers, families and society. If clearly defined career pathways are indeed what is needed, what do they look like? How might we create them? What role would the various players (employers, students, K-12, etc.) have in these pathways?

Making learning a better experience

By Joe Graba, July guest blogger

Over the last 30 or so years, we have greatly escalated our expectations for our public education system. What is most curious about this effort is that while we have elevated our expectations for our public education system, we have almost unknowingly assumed that the system itself does not need to be changed in any significant way. We seem to assume that learning can be significantly better without school being significantly different.

We know today that students vary enormously in their early development, in their interests, aptitudes, motivation and learning styles, but we continue to use a system that was designed more than a century ago when our expectations for learning were very different. Even while we acknowledge this growing diversity of our young people and state firmly our commitment to these higher expectations — we continue to predominantly depend on a one-size-fits-all system that no longer serves us well. 

I believe that motivation is key to meeting our escalated goals for learning in this new century. Learning is a natural part of living for almost all young people. As Jack Frymier said: “Students learn when they are motivated to learn. If they want to learn, they will. If they don’t, you can’t make ’em.” Students don’t dislike or resist learning. What many dislike and resist is schooling as it is experienced today. Even many of our better students find school boring, unchallenging and even irrelevant. Others of our less focused students find themselves lost, confused, frustrated and humiliated by their inability to reach anything approaching success. In sum, many students find schooling diminishes their motivation and enjoyment of learning.

We need to greatly diversify our approaches to helping students learn. Fortunately, there are some learning models that provide students and parents with different options, including project-based learning and online learning. In general, the more options students have, the more likely they will be to find an approach that fits their individual needs. There is a spectrum of variations emerging that I believe will eventually help us to reach the ultimate goal of customizing the learning experience for every student.

This does not mean that students get to decide what they are going to learn. Customization can take a variety of forms. For example, some students seem to do well in small, personalized learning communities. The new and emerging technologies make these small learning communities more economically feasible and also can provide multiple approaches to learning the same content. Simply presenting topics in different ways can be very helpful to students with different learning styles. Much of this capability is still under development but it is coming along quite rapidly. Most all of us realize how adept our young people are at using these new technologies.

We also need to be open to different kinds of achievement. While it is reasonable to insist that all students learn the basic skills of reading, math and writing and some reasonable level in certain other areas, we should also provide for students to explore in-depth — areas they find particularly interesting and stimulating.

We should finally open up the pace of learning as well. We have many students who are sitting in classrooms coasting along at a pace that bores them. We should let these students move forward into their next levels and subjects if they can demonstrate that they are ready. It is just amazing to watch high school athletic coaches reach down into the junior highs for students that have outstanding skills in various sports. These coaches use competency as the basis for moving these athletes upward into senior high sports. In these same districts, there are dozens, maybe hundreds of students who are locked in a learning program that uses only time as the basis for upward movement. This has major negative impact on their enthusiasm for school.

These and other innovations will have an impact on the motivation of many students. The main point is that we need schools and learning programs that motivate our students.

All school design and education policy should be analyzed for its impact on student motivation. Students have enormous discretionary effort that they will use to expand their learning, if we create schools that support, excite and motivate them.

For more on these and other related topics, see the latest Education|Evolving policy paper, Innovation-based Systemic Reform.

Motivating kids is key to their success

By Kent Pekel, September guest blogger

How does Minnesota move beyond admiring the problem of the gaping gaps in educational achievement and attainment that persist in our state along racial and socioeconomic lines? That was one of the questions I had the opportunity to pose last night to more than 100 community members who gathered to watch a preview screening of a new TPT documentary, “Challenging Expectations.” The program offers a compelling overview of the urgent need to put students from groups that have long been underrepresented in higher education — especially students of color and low-income students — on the path to success at technical, community and four-year colleges.

The program describes many of the changes that schools, colleges and community partners need to make to reach that goal, from increasing access to challenging high school classes to providing mentors and support systems for students who face challenges beyond the classroom. Carlos Mariani Rosa — legislator and head of the Minnesota Minority Education Partnership — spoke about the need for systemic responses combined with individual commitment and community leadership. He also suggested that we need many more non-profit organizations like Admission Possible and publicly supported initiatives like the federal TRiO programs.

I agree with Carlos about the need for systemic reforms and supports, but I was most struck by the conversation afterward about another critical part of the formula for academic success: student motivation. Time and again, we heard students who were succeeding against the odds say they had a fire in the belly to make their way to college and a career. Some of those students said that motivation came from a family member, others drew it from a mentor or teacher and still others had no idea where it originated.

As I reflected last night on my years as a K-12 teacher and administrator, I realized that despite the fact that my colleagues and I were deeply committed to student success, no school or district I worked in had a formal strategy to increase and sustain students’ motivation to succeed in school. Instead, we assumed that strong relationships and good teaching would result in the motivation to learn. For many students, those things are enough. But my experience in recent years and the “Challenging Expectations” program reinforce my sense that schools and organizations that work with youth now need to put in place proactive and powerful strategies for motivating students to succeed in school and progress toward higher education and high-skill employment.

And so the question in my mind today is this: what would that look like? How can we do more than hope that students develop the persistence to work through academic and personal challenges to reach their goals? How can we help young people who tweet and text all day develop the willingness to undertake the “boring” work that is required to learn to perform a science experiment, write a great essay or create a great work of art?

What programs and educators are already doing this, what can we learn from them and how do we replicate them across Minnesota? We need to stop admiring the problem of the achievement gap and start solving it at scale for all of our students and in all of our communities.