Reimagine Education to Help Students Thrive

A community is needed to ensure that students have a successful future.

In the last year and a half, thanks to COVID-19, it seems that everything has changed, especially education. Beyond moving from physical classrooms to online classes, the pandemic challenged the educational community to imagine teaching and learning differently. It forced us to rethink what matters when it comes to educating a generation of students who have had to endure contingency.

The role of universities

Universities cannot continue to neglect their role in preparing students for the workforce. Students continue to study after high school to get a job, earn more money, yet there is a disconnect between what employers are looking for and what they want. Colleges are the guardians of talent for the workforce, and you have to prioritize career readiness. For industry leaders, higher education is the source of professional skills.

Since the start of COVID-19, jobs requiring a degree have plummeted by 45%, showing that employers increasingly value skills and experience more than completing a college degree. This is why institutions need to understand how well they prepare their students for the world of work and adjust their curricular and co-curricular programs; they must constantly be changing specializations and programs, primarily the skills desired by employers.

Currently, the skills gap can be summarized in two categories: digital and soft. 66% of jobs created in the last decade require high or moderate digital skills. When many companies switched to teleworking during the pandemic, they demonstrated that digital fluency is not limited to the technology and business sector; it is necessary for all areas.

Even students recognize their need to learn digital skills. In a 2014 survey by Internships.com and General Assembly, 52% of students said these skills should be an indispensable part of their education.

On the other hand, there are soft skills such as written and oral communication, teamwork, decision-making, problem-solving, critical thinking, and applying knowledge in a real environment, among others. However, only 14% of employers believe that recent graduates have these skills.

To address the challenges of your students’ future employment, focusing only on skills is not enough. Institutions must look at the overall institutional landscape, labor trends, and market saturation. They should include a review focused on career admission, student affairs, curriculum, and the academic calendar, in addition to knowing precisely the needs of employers and not only the existing but future labor demand. Together, this information will provide colleges with a clearer view of curricular and co-curricular offerings.

Once an institution has an available picture of job and program demands and the skills employers expect from students entering the workforce, the next task will determine when and how to deliver that learning across a larger cross-section of students.

It is also important to consider that more and more jobs require constant training, especially with continuing technological developments. For this reason, colleges should consider creating micro-credential programs that directly align with industry needs, such as boot camps or individual courses. This opens the door to a never-ending market for corporate partnerships that can create modular building blocks or classes based on your needs.

However, to prepare the workforce for the future, it is necessary to focus on college students and the youngest. According to the McKinsey organization, the pandemic left students with an average of five months behind in math and four months in reading at the end of the school year.

The consequences of COVID-19 threaten to limit the opportunities of these generations. Your chances of going to college are one of the things that were affected, which impacts finding a satisfying job that allows you to support a family. McKinsey’s analysis suggests that American students may earn between $ 49,000 and $ 61,000 less over their lifetime due to the impact of the pandemic on their education.

The Texas Case: Helping Young People Thrive

One in ten young people under 18 in the United States lives in Texas; how is this state preparing to offer quality education by 2036? To answer this question, the George W. Bush Institute, in conjunction with “The 74”, an educational digital publishing platform, undertook the task of mapping third grade reading scores, high school graduation rates, level higher education, and salaries for Houston Dallas and Austin. The researchers focused on examining how well Texas students are preparing for the workforce as the country recovers from the pandemic.

His research focused on the coalition of organizations and community leaders focused on education, describing as “ecosystem,” the actions of the school board and the use of legislation and public policies, that is, “governance,” and finally, the use of sound policies, “innovation.” These three elements are complementary and should work together in the service of young people because strong school governance and effective educational ecosystems are essential to help students thrive.

The data shows that many students are behind in reading in third grade and math in eighth grade and still graduated from high school. For the study authors, this raises the question, “were they really prepared for the opportunity and their next step, or did we prepare them to fail by passing them into the system?”

This data is made even more relevant by its connection between education level and annual income. Higher educational attainment translates to more extraordinary earning power, helping to assess whether Texans will have a meaningful life. The higher their salaries, the greater their ability to make decisions, have access to opportunities, and the ability to adapt during economic downturns.

Houston

Fifteen years ago, Houston had an effective government and a supportive community that produced impressive innovations and better results. Today, according to researchers, student progress has stopped.

The problem stems from the Houston Independent School District (HISD), Texas’s most extensive public school system. It has had a superintendent who lasted two years and two interim superintendents for three years for the past five years. In addition to this, the Texas Education Agency took control of HISD in 2019, sparking a control fight for the past two years. This internal struggle has left the progress of the students and their results in the background.

Fortunately, in June of this year, HISD appointed Millard House, an educator for more than 26 years, as the superintendent. He promises to use research to create best practices, especially in underperforming schools. This worked before in the city as, in the early 1990s and for the next two decades, business leaders, non-profits, and philanthropists came together to gather information and evaluate data to drive innovative educational strategies, like the merit pay system for educators.

Having a good ecosystem helps to analyze what is essential to students. Joining forces with organizations can benefit education. For example, there’s Good Reason Houston, an organization that launched a plan to change the quality of learning. They suggest replicating or expanding successful schools, creating systems to identify and reward effective teachers by incentivizing them to teach in the city’s most challenging schools. In addition to this, using curricula that have been proven effective, giving students individual supports and interventions if they need it, and involving families in all school decision-making.

Dallas

In 2011, the Dallas ecosystem toured cities across the country to learn about different urban school systems to find out which direction to take as, in 2010-2011, 33 of its 230 schools were rated “academically unacceptable.” This trip resulted in hiring a new superintendent in 2012, Mike Miles, and the launch of “The Commit Partnership,” a non-profit that brings together other organizations to drive the county’s educational success and economic mobility. This project was promoted by businessman and philanthropist Todd Williams. The Commit focuses on collecting, reporting, and analyzing data to help school trustees make research-based decisions.

At that time, the mayor of Dallas was Mike Rawlings, the son of teachers, reinforcing the movement to rethink education. He told the George W. Bush Institute and The 74 that We couldn’t grow with marginal schools. Education is the only thing to overcome the gaps between Dallas’ haves and have-nots. “

Major changes began to occur in education focusing on students; for example, Dallas ISD differentiated effective teaching. It went from an evaluation system where 95% of teachers scored high to multiple evaluations to identify the most effective and best-performing educators. They received incentives to teach in the “Accelerating Excellence on Campus” program, created by Mike Miles, to serve the lowest-performing schools.

Even with all this, the academic progress of the students has been uneven. 2019 eighth-grade math scores were below the level of other urban districts, but third-grade reading results improved by 9% between 2012 and 2019.

Creating a new ecosystem based on student results taking into account differences between minorities has helped Dallas maintain this momentum to ensure better results despite the pandemic. But, taking Houston as an example, these kinds of approaches can quickly evaporate if the supporting ecosystem weakens.

Austin

Unlike the other two cities, Austin has not had strong governance or culture focused on results. Still, between 1999 and 2009, under the superintendence of Pat Forgione, the county had initiatives like free kindergarten, small learning communities, and more high school options.

The district twice ranked first or second among urban communities on the National Assessment of Educational Progress exams during this period. An intense public participation campaign boosted student enrollment growth by 8.5%. On the other hand, charter school enrollments increased, resulting in a variety of options between schools. This has decreased enrollment in schools within the Austin Independent School District. And the school board is focused on closing community schools as enrollment drops, rather than looking to improve quality to attract more families from the district. Additionally, the board did not enact an extended timetable to address learning losses stemming from the pandemic.

Thanks to the results of the State of Texas Academic Readiness Assessments (STAAR), an exam provided by the Texas Education Agency, there is data on the gap before the pandemic and how it has affected students in the last 18 months. COVID-19 disproportionately affected students of color in the region.

The schools’ job is to prepare their students for future opportunities. Joint work is needed between the government, organizations, universities, students, and families to achieve this. As Texas demonstrated, having a good ecosystem is key to generating substantial change. Information needs to be collected to recognize students’ needs to improve their results. In the case of universities, what employers are looking for and what students are offering.

For students to truly thrive, education needs to be reimagined from kindergarten. If students have difficulty reading from the third grade and later perform poorly in mathematics, the ecosystem must assess what they need and how to improve. The same happens with universities; if the data shows that certain skills are required to guarantee the success of future graduates, why not change to be able to offer them?

Translation by Daniel Wetta.

Paulette Delgado

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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0