For change to move beyond administrators’ offices and penetrate classrooms,
we must understand that professional
development is a massive undertaking.
Most teachers don’t need to be
persuaded that project-based learning is
a good idea—they already believe that.
What teachers need is much more
robust training and support than they
receive today, including specific lesson
plans that deal with the high cognitive
demands and potential classroom
management problems of using student-centered methods.
evaluate what is or is not being accomplished in the classroom. Fortunately, as
Elena Silva (2008) noted in a recent
report for Education Sector, the potential exists today to produce assessments
that measure thinking skills and are also
reliable and comparable between
students and schools—elements integral
to efforts to ensure accountability and
equity. But efforts to assess these skills
are still in their infancy; education faces
enormous challenges in developing the
ability to deliver these assessments at
scale.
Devising a 21st century skills
curriculum requires more than paying
lip service to content knowledge.
Unfortunately, there is a widespread
belief that teachers already know how to
do this if only we could unleash them
from today’s stifling standards and
accountability metrics. This notion
romanticizes student-centered methods,
underestimates the challenge of implementing such methods, and ignores the
lack of capacity in the field today.
Instead, staff development planners
would do well to engage the best
teachers available in an iterative process
of planning, execution, feedback, and
continued planning. This process, along
with additional teacher training, will
require significant time. And of course
none of this will be successful without
broader reforms in how teachers are
recruited, selected, and deselected in an
effort to address the whole picture of
education’s human capital challenge.
Better Tests
There is little point in investing heavily
in curriculum and human capital
without also investing in assessments to
The first challenge is the cost.
Although higher-level skills like critical
thinking and analysis can be assessed
with well-designed multiple-choice
tests, a truly rich assessment system
would go beyond multiple-choice
testing and include measures that
encourage greater creativity, show how
students arrived at answers, and even
allow for collaboration. Such measures,
however, cost more money than policymakers have traditionally been willing
to commit to assessment. And, at a time
when complaining about testing is a
national pastime and cynicism about
assessment, albeit often uninformed, is
on the rise, getting policymakers to
commit substantially more resources to
it is a difficult political challenge.
Producing enough high-quality
assessments to meet the needs of a
system as large and diverse as U.S.
public schools would stretch the
capacity of the assessment industry, and
incentives do not exist today for many
new entrants to become major players
in that field. We would need a coordinated public, private, and philanthropic
strategy—including an intensive
research and development effort—to
foster genuine change.
Substantial delivery challenges also
remain. Delivering these assessments in
a few settings, as is the case today, is
hardly the same as delivering them at
scale across a state—especially the larger
states. Because most of these assessments will be technology-based, most
schools’ information technology systems
will require a substantial upgrade.
None of these assessment challenges
are insurmountable, but addressing
them will require deliberate attention
from policymakers and 21st century
skills proponents, as well as a deviation
from the path that policymaking is on
today. Such an effort is essential. Why
mount a national effort to change
education if you have no way of
knowing whether the change has been
effective?
A Better, But Harder, Way
The point of our argument is not to say
that teaching students how to think,
work together better, or use new information more rigorously is not a worthy
and attainable goal. Rather, we seek to
call attention to the magnitude of the
challenge and to sound a note of
caution amidst the sirens calling our
political leaders once again to the rocky
shoals of past education reform failures.
Without better curriculum, better
teaching, and better tests, the emphasis
on “21st century skills” will be a superficial one that will sacrifice long-term
gains for the appearance of short-term
progress.
Curriculum, teacher expertise, and
assessment have all been weak links in
past education reform efforts—a fact
that should sober today’s skills proponents as they survey the task of dramatically improving all three. Efforts to
