July 2,2015
By Alan Shusterman
As “Pomp and Circumstance” plays at ceremonies nationwide this month, a record number of high school students are celebrating their hard-earned diplomas.
The celebrations won’t last. Despite their hard work, these students will soon find that they’re far from prepared for life after graduation. Academically, they’re worse educated than most of their foreign contemporaries. Occupationally, they’re ill-equipped for the jobs our economy needs. And emotionally, they’re less healthy than any generation in recent history.
America’s K-12 educational system is to blame. Despite huge advances in classroom technology and the science of learning, our nation’s schools remain a relic of another era.
Modernizing our schools isn’t just a matter of changing funding formulas and tweaking mechanisms for accountability. Instead, we must completely reimagine the American model of schooling, drawing on the science- and technology-driven practices that have revolutionized the modern world.
U.S. students are rapidly falling behind their international peers in primary and secondary education. A recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ranked countries based on the average math and science scores of 15-year-old students. America’s schools came in 28th.
Even worse, the OECD found that almost a quarter of American 15-year-olds failed to acquire “basic skills” in math and science. Of the 76 countries evaluated in the study, only Luxembourg performed worse.
This poor academic performance translates directly into inadequate workforce skills, especially in science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM. Because of a lack of qualified applicants, companies take more than twice as long to fill STEM positions than equivalent non-STEM ones. The problem will only worsen. STEM positions are projected to grow 17 percent by 2024, almost double the rate of non-STEM jobs.
As if leaving students undereducated and unprepared for the workforce isn’t enough, current school practices are also making students psychologically unhealthy. The incidence of anxiety and depression among American adolescents has reached alarming levels. And, according to the Centers for Disease Control, nearly one in five high school kids contemplated suicide in 2013, many due to stress from school.
If we are going to reverse these dangerous trends, we need to completely change the way we teach our young people.
That starts by acknowledging that every student is different, and that the same student can be different depending on the week, the month, and the year. As a result, students need an education customized to their evolving individual needs.
This idea is far from new. Individualized teaching has long been recognized as superior to standard one-size-fits-all instruction. A 1984 study showed that individually tutored students, on average, performed better than 98 percent of students educated in a standard setting.
The problem is that such tutoring has long been prohibitively expensive. But with the advent of new technology, programs such as Khan Academy and Coursera are demonstrating that personalized, self-directed learning is possible on a large scale.
That could mean a classroom full of students using laptops or tablets to learn at their own pace. Or teachers using technology to closely track individual student progress so they know when to step in and help.
Once students master foundational core knowledge and skill requirements, they need resources and time to pursue their own projects, internships, and other opportunities for applied learning.
Rather than trudge through unnecessary extra English courses, a science-lover should be able to spend her time in the laboratory. By the same token, an aspiring writer should be encouraged to work on the novel kicking around in his head rather than taking unwanted extra science courses. It’s amazing what teenagers are capable of if they are given agency and a little direction.
Apart from academics, schools should address students’ emotional and social growth. For too long, a skeptical public has brushed aside concepts like socio-emotional learning as hippie nonsense. But in this case, the hippies have it right. Those who embrace these concepts experience very real, measurable benefits — including enhanced academic achievement.
For example, in January, Developmental Psychology published a study of grade-school students who were taught meditation and mindfulness techniques. After 12 weeks, the students showed a 24 percent decrease in aggression and an overall reduction in depression-like symptoms — plus a 15 percent improvement in math scores!
