The next generation of American workers faces challenges almost completely unknown to those who preceded it. My career in banking and my public service in education have convinced me of this.
When I was of school age, Americans took for granted that there was very little foreign competition for jobs. This has changed dramatically. By 2030, China will account for 30 percent of the world’s new college-educated workers, according to a study by McKinsey Global Institute, compared with 5 percent for the United States. That’s six times as many college-educated workers for China, which has only four times our population.
To that competition, add the problem of automation, which has dramatically changed my own industry. Bank tellers behind the counter are replaced by ATMs, and loan applications are increasingly decided according to computer-generated algorithms. To access the professional opportunities of tomorrow, young people must be smarter than the computers that have replaced so many jobs.
For six years, I looked at the problem of how our public schools could provide such 21st-century skills from another perspective. I oversaw the District of Columbia’s 16-year-old public charter school reform. This important innovation, which today educates 41 percent of D.C. public school children, has significantly altered the education landscape in the nation’s capital. Charters are free to set their own school culture and curriculum, and they are held accountable for improved student performance by the city’s Public Charter School Board. These unique public schools have helped improve standardized test scores and graduation rates — a welcome development.
But neither math nor reading proficiency, nor even a high school diploma, will be sufficient for today’s children to thrive as adults in this new century’s economy. That is why I was so pleased to be able to visit Two Rivers Public Charter School, which is located near the intersection of New York and Florida avenues in Northeast D.C. Founded by a group of Capitol Hill-based parents just eight years ago, the school now educates 450 students, preschool through the eighth grade, on two campuses.
The school is meeting the challenge of teaching students 21st-century skills from an early age. Two Rivers’ curriculum emphasizes the importance of learning by critical thinking over learning by rote. Using a research-based approach known as Expeditionary Learning, the school aims not only to lay the foundations of knowledge that students need, but also to teach them how to solve complex problems. This includes building their ability to collaborate with others, reflect on what they have done and change strategies accordingly. The school reasons that these skills will place their students ahead of the curve as adults.
A recent example of Expeditionary Learning at the school involved teaching second-graders the forces that make flight possible. Instead of simply memorizing that the four forces of flight are lift, thrust, weight and drag, the students took what they learned and created stories to teach others about the physics of flight. The second-graders then had the opportunity to visit the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and have their stories read to students from other schools.
While heavily investing in teaching 21st-century skills, the school also performs strongly on the city’s standardized reading and math tests, which measures students’ basic proficiency. They had the highest scores for reading of all elementary public charter schools in the District last school year, and the fifth-highest math scores. In addition, the school was recently recognized as one of only 22 “high performing” charter schools by the city’s Public Charter School Board.
With global educational attainment rising, a failure to teach all of our children 21st-century skills will come at a high cost. According to the most recent Program for International Student Assessment study, which is run by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, U.S. students rank 17th in reading, 30th in math and 23rd in sciences among the OECD’s industrialized member nations. In the face of this unprecedented global competition from more highly educated adults overseas, every public school should be investing heavily in the skills required for future success.
Thomas Nida is regional president for United Bank for D.C. and Maryland.
