The generation born this year in OECD countries is likely to lose $ 260 trillion in economic output over their lifetime because school systems in the industrialised world are not delivering what the best performing education systems show can be achieved. These gains, put in terms of current GDP, far outstrip today’s value of the short-run management of the economic cycle. This is not to say that efforts should not be directed at economic recessions, but it is to say that improvements in education cannot be neglected.
Assessments Are Now Global
Skills together with technology have flattened the world such that all work that can be digitized, automated and outsourced can now be done by the most effective and competitive individuals or enterprises, wherever on the globe they are located. In the flat world the relevant educational standards are no longer those of the city or state next door but those achieved by the best performing education systems.
A generation ago, teachers could expect that what they taught would last for a lifetime of their students. Today, schools don’t need more of the same. Instead, they need to prepare students for more rapid change than ever before, for jobs that have not yet been created, using technologies that have not yet been invented, to solve problems that we don’t yet know will arise. For example, the ten high demand jobs this year in the US did not exist in 2004.
One of the keys to educational success in the future is not memorizing and reproducing knowledge, it’s extrapolating from what students know and applying that knowledge in novel situations. The former risks students being prepared for jobs that are in fact disappearing. State-of-the-art knowledge will always remain important. But schooling today needs to be about ways of thinking, involving creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving and decision-making; about ways of working, including communication and collaboration; about tools for working, including the capacity to recognise and exploit the potential of new technologies; and, last but not least, about the capacity to live in a multifaceted world as active and responsible citizens.
Student Today; Global Citizen Tomorrow
In today’s schools, students typically learn individually and at the end of the school year, we certify their individual achievements. But the more interdependent the world becomes, the more we need great collaborators and orchestrators. For a more inclusive world, we need people who can appreciate and build on different values, beliefs, cultures. The conventional approach in school is often to break problems down into manageable bits and pieces and then to teach students how to solve these bits and pieces. But in modern economies, we create value by synthesising different fields of knowledge, making connections between ideas that previously seemed unrelated, which requires being familiar with and receptive to knowledge in other fields. Modern schools need to help young individuals to constantly adapt and grow, to find and constantly adjust their right place in an increasingly complex world.
Elements of Education System Transformation
So how can schools get from where they are to where they need to be? Naturally, such transformation will involve many dimensions, including curricular and assessment reform; new teacher recruitment and development strategies; leadership development; and the integration of collaborative technologies that allow individuals to create, adapt and share content and systems to manage and mobilise knowledge.
Assessment Systems for the 21st Century
Typically, what is assessed is what gets taught. Thus, education systems will, first of all, need to get their goals and standards right and transform their assessment systems to reflect what is important, rather than what can be easily measured. The future is not about more high-stakes testing. It is about the development of multi-layered, coherent assessment systems that: extend from classrooms to schools to regional to national to international levels; actively involve teachers and other key stakeholders; are derived from clear and focused educational standards that focus on career and college-readiness; measure individual student growth; are largely performance-based; make students’ thinking visible; build capacity in both teachers and students; and generate data that teachers and schools can act upon and allow for divergent thinking.
It is no longer governments alone, but corporations too, that recognise the importance of tomorrow’s skills and are working with governments towards ways to make these visible and teachable. The latest example is the Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (www.atc21s.org) initiative which was launch in 2008 with the support a public-private partnership and the OECD to foster groundbreaking research to develop new approaches, methods and technologies for measuring students’ acquisition of these skills.
None of this is rocket science, it is a doable agenda. And yet progress remains slow. But the cost of inaction far outstrips any conceivable cost of improvement. Success will go to those individuals and countries which are swift to adapt and open to change. The task governments have is to ensure that countries rise to this challenge.
