Learning for the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Eight Education Competences 2018055470, 2019002622, 9780429399664, 9780367024369, 9780367024376

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LEARNING FOR THE AGE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Learning for the Age of Artificial Intelligence is a richly informed argument for curricular change to educate people towards achievement and success as intelligent machine systems proliferate. Describing eight key competences, this comprehensive volume prepares educational leaders, designers, researchers, and policymakers to effectively rethink the knowledge, skills, and environments that students need to thrive and avoid displacement in today’s technology-enhanced culture and workforce. Essential insights into school operations, machine learning, complex training and assessment, and economic challenges round out this cogent, relatable discussion about the imminent evolution of the education sector. Alan M. Lesgold is Renée and Richard Goldman Dean Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Education, Psychology, and Intelligent Systems at the University of Pittsburgh, USA.

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LEARNING FOR THE AGE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Eight Education Competences

Alan M. Lesgold

First published 2019 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Alan M. Lesgold to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lesgold, Alan M. Title: Learning for the age of artificial intelligence : eight education competences / Alan Lesgold. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018055470 (print) | LCCN 2019002622 (ebook) | ISBN 9780429399664 (eBook) | ISBN 9780367024369 (hbk) | ISBN 9780367024376 (pbk) | ISBN 9780429399664 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Educational technology. | Computer-assisted instruction. | Artificial intelligence--Educational applications. Classification: LCC LB1028.3 (ebook) | LCC LB1028.3 .L465 2019 (print) | DDC 371.33--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018055470 ISBN: 978-0-367-02436-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-02437-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-39966-4 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books

This book is dedicated to the memory of my colleague Martin Nahemow, who was my partner in developing a way to provide apprenticeship for the machinist world and in developing intelligent systems to teach technicians to repair new and extremely complex equipment. He was also the source of many of the ideas in this book and helped me crystallize a lot of ideas that were only vaguely in my mind before we started working together. He was both a real polymath and a truly good person.

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CONTENTS

List of tables Acknowledgements

x xi

1 Overview

1

2 Human Life in the Age of Smart Machines

5

3 Competence Needed for Work in the Age of Smart Machines

16

Summary 22 4 Public Schools Today and What Is Missing

24

Introduction 24 Goals of Education in the Past 29 Goals for Education in the Future 31 5 Schooling: Curriculum and How It Should Change Transition: Living in Two School Worlds at Once 39 The Ability to Learn Efficiently and Quickly 41 Socioemotional Skills 44 Skills of Civic Participation 47 Ability to Evaluate Information 50 Facility in Collaborative Activity 53

36

viii Contents

Management of Personal Finances 55 Confidence 56 Physical and Mental Fitness 58 6 Where Can Children Learn All This?

65

The Importance of Redundancy 68 7 Some Personal Reflections

73

8 How Do Schools Evolve?

78

Dealing with the History of American Education 82 Schooling in the Age of Smart Machines 83 9 Apprenticeships and Similar Experiences

87

Traditional Apprenticeships 88 Porous Career Paths 89 Learning the Eight Competences In and Out of School 90 Deepening the Subject-Matter Curriculum 91 An Example of In-School Focus on the Eight Competences 92 Out-of-School Opportunities for Every Child 94 10 Creating a “Third Place” 11 A Few Possible Ways to Address the Eight Competences

98 102

Stories 102 Informal Apprenticeships 104 Scaffolded Real Tasks 105 Scaffolded Simulated Tasks 107 Games 108 Clubs and Sports 109 Governance Structures 110 12 Learning to Teach the Eight Competences

112

Teachers 115 Parents, Political Leaders, and Business Leaders 116 “Third Places” 118 13 Assessing Learning of the Eight Competences The Tyranny of Assessments 123 Tests That Do Good without Causing Problems 126

123

Contents ix

Stealth Assessment 127 Structured Social Moderation and the Use of Rubrics 129 Simulation-Based Assessment 131 A Choice: Continuous Improvement for All Children or Strong Public Control 133 Transparency 134 14 Concluding Observations

137

Preserving Democracy 137 The Value of Redundancy 139 The Role of Charters 141 Lifelong Learning 142 Needed Data Systems 143 Investing in Learning Opportunities 145 It Is Time to Act 145 Other Countries Are Pursuing These Goals 147 A Possible Path toward a Transformed Educational System 148 We Are a Society that Can Do Hard Things 150 Index

153

TABLES

Tables

2.1 Areas predicted to thrive in the age of smart machines 5.1 Portion of email received 4 August 2017 from Tauck. Reproduced with their permission 5.2 Example transcript of medical teaching rounds 13.1 Sample of simple rubric 13.2 Collaborative problem-solving elements from PISA

13 47 52 130 132

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have had wonderful mentors throughout my life, and that has been important in preparing me to write this book. These include Dick Atkinson, Patty Beeson, Gordon Bower, Herb Clark, Bob Glaser, Jim Maher, Arthur Melmed, Marty Nahemow, Mark Nordenberg, Lauren Resnick, Charles Wrigley, and other colleagues. My parents, Rubin and Edith Lesgold, and my grandfather, Harry Weinstein, also taught me a lot. And, of course, many fine teachers at Washington High School in Milwaukee played a role, along with the faculty of an NSF Summer Program for High School Students taught at Oregon State University in 1962. My apologies to others who also should have been on this list. Even greater apologies are due to any of these fine people who might advocate different views than those I have expressed. Among those who have read early drafts, especially those written before an effort to convert academic pidgin to English, are Sharon Lesgold and Olga Votis. I’m sure that I failed to incorporate some of their excellent suggestions, purely from lack of adequate cognitive capacity to deal with them all. I received excellent advice on how to get the book into the hands of a wide range of readers from Rich Milner and Peter Kracht. I thank the Routledge team, including editor Dan Schwartz, production editor Claudia Austin, editorial assistant Katie Paton, and copy editor Jonathan Merrett for making the process of turning draft into a book painless and for some great suggestions that improved the final result. A few excerpts in this book are used by permission, as indicated in notes and citations.

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1 OVERVIEW

Our education system got its basic shape in the early and middle twentieth century. Back then, parents’ goals for their children were to get them into a good job that would be theirs for life. Whether as a worker in a steel mill, as a farmer or as a partner in a law firm, the assumption was that everything you needed to do well in the job would be learned up front. Sure, people sometimes changed jobs, and more rarely they changed careers, but that wasn’t a real determiner of pre-college schooling requirements. School’s primary purpose was to prepare children for productive life in a relatively slow-moving world. Schools focused on certain core subjects: reading, arithmetic and basic mathematics, social studies, and science. Generally, small amounts of art, music, physical education, and health education also were part of the mix. There also was a “hidden curriculum” (Jackson, 1990), which included learning to show up on time, follow orders, get work done on time, be neat, etc. Whether one was destined for work in a steel mill or to go to college, that hidden curriculum was essential, since both colleges and factories were designed to work with people who did what they were told. This kind of schooling still is common today. Changes have been made in the curriculum for subjects like mathematics and science, but the hidden curriculum has remained about as it was 75 years ago. The problem is that the world has changed. People don’t keep the same role for life. They get displaced by smart machines and must find different jobs. They continually need to learn a lot, since all the routine stuff is getting done by those smart machines. They can’t count on a salary between jobs, so they need to know how to manage their finances to be prepared for that. And, of course, life in a “gig economy” is more stressful than life that is seldom disrupted. This book addresses what needs to change in our education system to help our next generations enjoy a secure and pleasant life. It also considers how those changes might become possible. To deeply understand the changes I suggest in this

2 Overview

book, we need to start by looking in more detail at how the world is changing. Since many aspects of life, including satisfaction, status, and having enough to live on, depend upon one’s profession or work role, a good starting point is a look at what it takes to have a valued human role in the age of smart machines. Work roles have been an important way of assigning value to the human activities on which people and their communities depend, especially those beyond the core family. Today, the value of work roles is changing rapidly, with some roles being taken over by machines and others involving a sharing of work activity with machines. We are experiencing a major economic revolution currently, one as big as the prior revolutions caused by the development of the steam engine, the means for generating and distributing electricity, the inexpensive computer, and the Internet that allows information to move everywhere instantly. In each of those past revolutions, secure employment was disrupted. With the advent of the steam engine, many jobs that depended mainly on physical strength were lost when steam engines and then other mechanical devices replaced human strength. Eventually, the steam engine’s introduction led to a higher standard of living overall, but first the expectations of a generation or two of workers were shattered, and unexpected poverty disrupted what previously would have been comfortable lives. When it became possible to move energy to locations remote from where it was generated, via the electrical grid, secure jobs in areas near energy sources were lost as enterprises moved to grid-connected places where they enjoyed other advantages. Again, the long-term effect was a higher average standard of living and the invention of new kinds of jobs, but the short-term effect was the disruption of the lives of people who thought they had secure niches in which to be productive and thereby to have a good life. Similar disruptions have been produced by various aspects of information technology such as the ability of machines to do routine thinking, the ability to shift information around the world instantly and at almost no cost (including specifications used by 3D printers to make artifacts), and other major technological advances. Especially powerful in changing employment is the emergence of an age of smart machines, in which computer technology replaces not only routine but even some skilled jobs. Even when smart machines only take over part of an existing human job, the total impact can be to reduce the number of jobs available to people and increase the requirements for the jobs that remain, since each person, if they learn to use intelligent tools, can now get more work done. When inventions change the nature of work, the pattern is always the same, loss of secure work for a generation or two along with a long-term improvement in average standard of living and the emergence of new jobs requiring new forms of knowledge and competence.1 While the current disruption is likely to collide with impacts of global warming, even global warming will likely lead to new work roles. But, the immediate impacts of both the emergence of smart machines and global warming will be disruptions of lives that people expected to be more secure and more comfortable. Such short-term disruptions inevitably produce significant unrest. When people expect a secure, comfortable life and the prospect for one disappears, they search for someone or something to blame for the disruption. An aristocracy or other

Overview

3

elite, an occupying power, a minority group, immigrants, those poor enough to get some needs filled by government, bureaucrats, and wealthy people – all have been made scapegoats for the disruption produced by technologies past and present. In the early to middle twentieth century, many of my relatives died in pogroms and the holocaust, partly triggered by economic disruption. Minorities in the US have suffered because of the disruptions produced by the end of slavery (just as they suffered also during slavery) as well as the other forces mentioned above. Today, immigrants, especially those of the Muslim faith, and people of color are the scapegoat targets, along with teachers, government workers, and others whose jobs seem more immune to the effects of the disruption. And, as occurred a few hundred yards from my home as I was preparing this book’s manuscript for the publisher, we also have seen anti-Semitic killings partly connected to feelings of hopelessness prompted by the disruption of job opportunities. The evil actions of those suffering disruptions must be resisted, of course, but it also is worthwhile to ask how the disruption can be ameliorated and how the positive long-term potential can be brought about more quickly. My goal in this book is to suggest that our society needs to do a major redesign of our education system to assure that all people grow up prepared to pursue a path through life that permits them to adapt to disruptive changes in available work roles and therefore to live without fear of sudden impoverishment. Since this is a goal not achieved previously even in more stable times in our country, it is no small task. However, history teaches us that the cost of failing in this task can be dramatic. As I sometimes tell professorial colleagues, in the next event that is like the French revolution we professors and teachers will be treated like the French aristocrats were! The education profession has a high proportion of people protected from sudden job loss. That makes us even more responsible for helping avoid hard times for those less protected. The chapters that follow address key aspects of this problem. First, I consider how ever-smarter machines will replace many human roles, and I make some guesses about new roles we will invent eventually to make our lives better. Then, I make suggestions about what needs to be learned to assure a good life in the age of smart machines: skills and knowledge likely to be valued and the ability to quickly retool for new roles if current roles disappear. I introduce eight competences that our children will need to thrive in the age of smart machines: the ability to learn efficiently and quickly; socioemotional skills; skills of civic participation; ability to evaluate information; facility in collaborative activity, including the 4 Cs (dealing with complexity, communication, collaboration, and creativity); management of personal finances and some basic economics; confidence; and physical and mental fitness. Third, I consider the general nature of curriculum in our schools and how that might need to change. I suggest that a broad public discussion is needed not only of what content should be taught in the traditional subject areas but especially of what kinds of cognitive practice is necessary beyond core subject content. Some of the latter might be thought of as a new “hidden curriculum” (Jackson, 1990), though it should not be hidden.

4 Overview

Fourth, I consider which aspects of an overall set of learning goals can be met in schools and which may be achieved more readily in other learning environments. I do not believe that anyone with a good life today learned needed skills and competences only in school, and I expect that this will continue to be the case. And, the arguments for universal public education apply just as strongly to assuring that all children have the chance to learn important competences that usually are acquired outside of school. I consider educational disparities and make some suggestions about how the out-of-school part of becoming a competent adult can be assured for every child. Finally, I discuss how a technology might evolve for assessing society’s progress toward an education system that provides an adequate apprenticeship for life in the age of smart machines. Because of the complexity and difficulty of what children need to learn to thrive in the age of smart machines, one key principle introduced through this book is the need for more than schooling in an effective education system. Just as we accept the need for redundant systems for other critical situations, such as flight safety, I argue for the need for such redundancy in education as well. That conflicts with a long-standing public policy focus on efficiency and controlling the cost of public education, but I think it is essential. Further, I hopefully make clear that between parenting, schooling, and out-of-school activities, resources must not only be redundant but also be only loosely coupled, connected by broad assessment data but not through a unified and singular design. What I end up calling for may seem unachievable. At the same time, it needs to become the prize toward which we educators work, so the next few generations can have a pleasant and productive life.

Note 1 The history of this cycle of automation destroying and then prompting the creation of jobs is outlined by Sarah Kessler (2017).

Reference Jackson, P. W. (1990). Life in Classrooms. New York: Teachers College Press. Kessler, S. (2017). The future of work, a timeline. Quartz. Available online at https://qz.com/ 1019145/weve-been-worrying-about-the-end-of-work-for-500-years/ (retrieved July 10, 2017).

2 HUMAN LIFE IN THE AGE OF SMART MACHINES

For much of human history, there has been a substantial division between routine work and work requiring more skill. And, because acquiring skill requires a lot of practice (Ericsson, et al., 2006), it has been valued highly. People with needed skills were given deference in early societies and have received higher pay in recent centuries. Today, special rewards come to those with cognitive skills, often even greater rewards than for those with physical skills. People who can make good decisions in complex situations have been rewarded especially. Good decisions require a combination of skill in reasoning and the ability to quickly recognize and understand the deeper meaning of emergent situations along with a strong moral compass to constrain decisions to those that are ethically defensible. The premium in earnings for people with good cognitive reasoning skills and the ability to make principled decisions on a large scale has become quite large, perhaps even pathologically so. There are companies in which the CEO gets paid hundreds or even a thousand times what low-skill workers doing routine tasks get paid. The first decades of the computer era resulted in machines replacing a lot of jobs that involved routine cognitive activity or repetitive mechanical skills. Since the Industrial Revolution, a goodly number of jobs consisted largely of controlling physical actions that were carried out by machines. For example, a welder in a car plant would know where to make the needed welds, would guide a welding tool to the right spot, and then would push a button on the tool to tack one piece of metal to another. While welding had to be practiced, the concept of the assembly line allowed the creation of many jobs in which someone who might not have deep understanding or reasoning skills could still earn a good living operating a machine in the same way day after day. This provided a large part of the adult population with decent employment even if they were not strong students while in school. In parts of the US, unions became strong and could assure that those using machines to do routine work were paid a living wage and that those who needed

6 Human Life in the Age of Smart Machines

to acquire significant physical and cognitive skills to do their work – the trades – were paid even better. What the ubiquity of computers brought about was a dramatic reduction of roles for humans in making routine decisions and doing routine processing of information. The accumulation of changes from the various technological revolutions has resulted in a real shift in how work is done and what work is paid for. Consider how one bought a shirt at various times in the past. A century or two ago, if you didn’t make your own shirt or have it made by a family member, it was acquired by finding a tailor. That skilled person measured you, acquired the needed material, made the shirt, and sold it to you. If that process took say half a day, then the tailor needed to charge enough for the shirt to cover the materials used, the cost of living for that half day, and the cost of a share of days not worked (often Sundays). Prices could, of course, reflect demand, with exceptionally talented tailors earning a bit more. By the twentieth century, though, my parents could buy a shirt by going to a department store, getting measured by a salesperson or trying on a few shirts to converge on the right size, paying a cashier, and going home with a new shirt. The age of the assembly line and Taylor’s (1919) concept of scientific design and management of work allowed the shirt to be made more cheaply. The salespeople doing measurements did not need to know how to make the shirt they sold. The shirt got made in a factory, where each step was a simple routine that a worker could learn through being drilled over and over on it: one person sewed the sleeves, another added the cuffs, another made the body of the shirt, another connected sleeves to body, and another dealt with button holes and buttons. A clever invention even automated the button-hole making process. Now several people worked on the shirt, but each did a piece of the work faster (and with less skill required) than the skilled tailor of the past. Because a lot of shirts were made in one factory, economies of scale in acquiring cloth, sewing machines, and other needs were possible. As a result, the shirt could cost less. The new “scientific” approach had to be significantly more efficient, since it now required paying managers to keep the process running smoothly and clerks to handle the sales transactions. Transportation costs also were higher, at least for the finished product. The savings were sufficient to cover all of that, since each piece of work was done by rote by a worker who did not need years of training and thus could be paid less. Improved tools also boosted productivity of workers. Because the scale of sales was greater, extra steps were required to keep the financial activity safely controlled. My parents would pay a cashier who would put a sales slip and the money received in a cylinder that was transmitted via compressed air to a large room where change would be made and details of the transaction recorded in a ledger. The change then was sent back via the compressed air tube. After a while, various factors made it more lucrative for the sales slip to include a customer’s charge account number, so less money needed to be stored at a cashier station or on the bookkeeping floor. Again, the economies of scale provided enough money to pay the people who handled the store charge cards, account billing, and payment processing.1

Human Life in the Age of Smart Machines

7

The department store model did require some skilled workers, too. Departments needed to be managed. Managers needed to assure that customers felt well served, that as many shirts as possible were being sold, and that the integrity of financial functions was maintained. A top-level salesperson often became very skilled at finding customers what they wanted and would pay for, something that required cognitive and social skills. When the computer arrived, the large floor full of bookkeepers and cash handlers on the other end of the compressed air tubes could be replaced by a computer and some electronic data systems. So, a lot of jobs were lost. Some remained, though. The better-paid buyer who decided what shirts the store should sell still was needed, as were people to operate and program the computers. Fewer sales clerks were needed, since the shirts were now folded and bagged by machines. Human effort still was needed to put all the shirts out on counters for display. At the right price point, it was still worth paying a sales person to help customers find the shirts they really wanted. Generally, there remained a small number of jobs for people to unpack cartons of shirts, arrange them, and carry them to the right shelves. While in high school, unpacking suits in a men’s clothing store was one of my summer jobs; it involved little skill and little pay. There were jobs for people with the social skills needed to serve customers well enough to get them to pay more, for those who decided which shirts to have on the shelves,2 for those who designed and programmed the various machines and data systems, and for those who oversaw the process. A core principle of the scientific management approach was economy of scale. Instead of each shirt fitting a specific customer’s size and shape, a small number of standard sizes were produced. Customers could buy the standard size that fit them best. If they had non-standard bodies, they might have to choose between sleeves a bit too long and neck a bit too tight. Or, at a much higher price, they could seek out a custom tailor who would do the shirt making as the tailor of a century or two back did, except for having more wide-ranging and efficient access to materials from which to make it. The trend of making a product more efficiently and offering fewer options to the customer leads to ever-lower prices for goods but often lower quality. On the other hand, because the custom-made alternatives still require the same labor as before, they become more expensive in the sense that the cost of getting the custom product is an amount that can now buy more (mass-produced) alternatives than before.3 The lesson here is that continued automation and innovation tends to replace mid-priced goods with both cheaper goods that are not quite as desirable and very expensive custom goods. The “middle class” of goods disappears, with the lower-quality, massproduced goods competing on price and the custom goods becoming more expensive, relatively, than in the past. The middle class of jobs also tends to disappear, since many of those jobs were linked to the middle level of product. However, increased automation also can lead to product improvement as well as improvement in the shopping experience. Consider how I might buy a shirt today. It occurs to me that I need a shirt. If I don’t want to take the time to go shopping for one, I might turn to Amazon instead. Amazon has automated most of the transaction and

8 Human Life in the Age of Smart Machines

transportation required to buy things, so it often can offer competitive prices (it also has become expert at knowing when it can charge a little more than other sources). No physical store could afford to carry as many kinds of shirts as Amazon does. Amazon has introduced the level of choices that previously required going through a tailor’s swatch book4 and then waiting for the tailor to order and receive the fabric and make the shirt. Because there are many shirt makers around the world producing the various kinds of shirts from different fabrics, choice now comes to me via the computer screen rather than the swatch book. So, automation eventually has restored part of the “middle class” of shirt choices, at least for choice of material and pattern.5 There are just beginning to be Internet-based services that automate parts of the process of turning personal measurements into a custom shirt, lowering the cost by automating the process of turning measurements into a pattern and cutting cloth to that pattern. As artificial intelligence becomes more common, we can expect more of this kind of “improvement,” where relatively custom goods and services are enabled at lower prices by automating out parts of human work that previously were considered to require skills and professional experience. What will be lost are decent jobs for people who barely made their way through our schools in hopes of getting a middle-skill job. To recap this brief discussion of shirts, consider what happened from the consumer’s standpoint. Complex system design allowed customers to access goods they previously could not afford to buy as frequently if at all. The cost of the changes to the consumer was an erosion of the “middle class” of goods. By accepting regimentation and a lowering of choices, goods could be had much more cheaply. At the same time, the custom goods of the past became more expensive relatively. As machines are getting smarter, portions of that “middle class” of goods at middle level prices are being restored through online customization processes, but even those depend, so far, on the consumer to do work that not all people can do, such as measuring themselves accurately and recording the correct measurements into a web form. From the standpoint of workers, things look a little different. The advent of the department store eventually led to the disappearance of most skilled trade opportunities for tailors and eliminated the customer contact and transactions that broke up the tailor’s day, leaving boring and repetitive factory tailoring jobs that required only rote learning of a small piece of the tailoring trade. Someone who might have made a complete shirt for my grandfather might have been stuck making only button holes for my father’s shirt, at a low wage. Between my parents’ generation and mine, scientific management6 and basic automation led to the elimination of many of the backroom jobs handling cash and recording sales transactions. The advent of the Internet and further development of computer support allowed elimination of additional routine jobs while also eroding the low end of custom tailoring work as artificial intelligence began to allow automated production of custom patterns in response to information submitted online. Overall, most of the tailoring jobs were lost. Those still present either involve only dull routine or require the very best professional tailoring skills and human interaction skills (Savile Row is doing just fine, but there are only a small number of jobs there, and their suits now cost 10–25 times what most men pay for

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mass-produced suits). In wealthier areas, a few tailors make a living adjusting massproduced clothes for relatively modest fees. Moreover, the impacts of artificial intelligence are just beginning to be seen, and AI eventually will lead to a further loss of middle-level jobs. Artificial intelligence has reached a major inflection point in its growth as a force in our economy. If this book had been written 20 years ago, or even ten, it likely would have said that routine work will be taken over by machines but that work requiring planning or other deeper cognitive skills would be safe. It would have echoed Robert Reich’s assertion that all our children need to be trained in coding or systems analysis (Reich, 1990). Even today, parents insist that their children learn coding skills, hoping that the jobs of computer programmers, at least, will be safe from the advances of the computing and information sciences. However, much code now is itself generated by machines, and the trend will be for routine programing jobs to go the way of routine calculation jobs, and for less-routine coding to be supported substantially by intelligent job aids. We next consider what it is that distinguishes professionals from lay people, since professional jobs will be harder to replace completely, though AI may cover parts of professional roles, leaving fewer professionals needed and less variety in their daily work lives. Often, a professional will be described as having extensive experience and judgment. Indeed, the psychology of expertise (Eriksson, et al., 2006; , et al., 1988) tells us that experts accumulate breadth, speed, and agility of judgment from thousands of hours of purposeful practice. However, with the maturing of work on machine learning, we see many situations in which machine judgments are as good as human judgments, sometimes better because of their consistency. A simple example is the approval of consumer loans or the screening of credit card transactions for possible fraud. Both tasks are generally done today by intelligent systems that have “mined” data to learn how to make judgments that often are better than those of the experienced bank officers they displaced. In addition, machines easily talk to one another. Consider a simple process in my university – the hiring of a new employee. Until recently, that process involved multiple paper documents that were sent from office to office, with human roles involved in filling out the paper forms, in approving them, and in simply getting them from one place to another. Various people gathered data on a prospective employee and various people approved the hire. Even if the decisions continue to be made by humans, most jobs involved in moving that paper around have been eliminated. As more information flows via databases and automated handoffs of data from one part of the process to another, mail carriers and secretaries have less to do. When all that routine automation of information flow accumulates, it results in the loss of some number of secretarial jobs. Today, for example, an academic department in a university might have only one or a few administrative assistants, where once there might have been a secretary for every two or three faculty. The same is true for administrative support in many businesses. Considering only administrative/secretarial jobs and retail banking, thousands of jobs that previously would have been secure for life have disappeared, and many

10 Human Life in the Age of Smart Machines

more disappearances are expected. I have entered a bank office only once in the last ten years, and the one thing I had to do in person that time now can be done online – with no bank employee involved. There are still human roles in retail banking, but many jobs are either gone or under threat. Machines do more than everyday intelligent work, though. For example, not only is analyzing a person’s genes or inserting different genetic code into cells done by machines, it is done more reliably and cheaply. The same is true for routine health screening. As I first drafted this section, I paused to have an online system appraise my cardiovascular fitness. After answering some questions – five years from now it is likely that my phone or a wristband will be able to provide the answers to those questions and save me typing – the website7 gave me my rather low probability that I will have a heart attack in the next ten years along with personally tailored suggestions on how to be even healthier. Even two years ago (and still today in many cases), it is likely that the question-asking would have been done by a nurse educator with a master’s degree – in the few sites that could afford to do this assessment. Intelligent tools also facilitate human roles. For example, in my last annual physical, my doctor was prompted by an automated system to raise certain points with me, based upon data in my electronic medical record, and to gather and evaluate certain information. A common occurrence: life gets better via automated medical assessment while a job disappears, in this case a job that likely required a master’s degree, or a professional process becomes more effective or efficient because of intelligent support. In economic terms, new value is created that can be monetized while cost for that newly valued service drops. The economy goes up, but the former fitness educator loses a job, or at least needs to shift from providing expert advice on how to live to motivating people actually to live that way. This pattern is repeated for many different parts of our economy. In every case, there is economic gain but loss or dramatic change of jobs. This has been happening a lot, and it now happens in situations that imperil not only less-skilled jobs but also skilled and even professional work. However, economists generally believe that if new profit is generated, people eventually will find new ways to spend the money, and those new ways will require new jobs for making the thing or delivering the human service that has become affordable by more people. The key word in that prediction is eventually. Old jobs will be lost before new ones are created. Let’s look a bit further at how the job scene is changing today. A few days before I started writing this section of the book, President Obama and his White House staff convened a conference on frontiers of science at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. At this event, the President met Nathan Copeland, a quadriplegic who has been trying out an intelligent artificial arm. Here’s what President Obama said about this meeting when he spoke later at the conference: I had the chance to meet an extraordinary young man named Nathan Copeland. … [B]ack in 2004, Nathan was a freshman in college … and he was in a car accident that left him paralyzed. For years, Nathan could not move his arms, couldn’t move

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his legs – needed help with day-to-day tasks .… But one day, he was contacted by a research team at Pitt, and they asked if he wanted to be involved in an experimental trial …. Nathan readily agreed. So they implanted four microelectrode arrays into his brain, each about the size of half a button. And those implants connect neurons in his brain with a robotic arm, so that today, he can move that arm the same way you and I do – just by thinking about it. But that’s just the beginning. Nathan is also the first person in human history who can feel with his prosthetic fingers.8 Mr. Copeland’s prosthetic arm displays some important properties of the world we are entering. A range of brain-like activity takes place in a computer system. That system can sense aspects of the world, can act in the world, and can interact with a human who can accomplish things with the system that were not possible without it. Mr. Copeland’s intelligent computer helper amplifies his capabilities. Very often today, though, a computer system replaces humans in doing economically productive work rather than simply helping them. Here are some examples of current machine replacements of humans. In the past, when I would travel outside the US, especially when going to a place far away geographically and economically, I would need to contact the issuer of any credit card I planned to use there, so that they could have some confidence, when processing charges to that card from the foreign location, that my credit card (or the information on it) had not been stolen. Recently, though, on a trip to Botswana, I did not have to call American Express to tell them I would be using my card there. In fact, a week or so before my trip, a computer system at American Express emailed me to say that it knew from the pattern of my spending in the past year that I was about to go to Africa and did not need to hear from me about that. From the pattern of air fares paid almost a year before and the level of certain other expenses that could be inferred to be related to the trip, the computer could know not only when and where I would be in Africa but also a lot about the kinds and amounts of expenses for which I was likely to use the card. In the past, humans would need to have a look at large charges in strange places and evaluate, with minimal evidence, whether they were likely to be legitimate. Today, that is done by machine and done more accurately. Several years ago, recognizing the future implications of our advancing age, my wife and I decided to move from a multistory house to a condominium that was very accessible. While certain parts of the transaction, such as the appraisal needed by the mortgage bank, were done by humans, other needed activities, such as the assessment of creditworthiness, were done by intelligent machines. The last time I bought a car, a computer system could work from my driver’s license number and a few other facts to assess my creditworthiness – on a Sunday afternoon and without human involvement.9 Many jobs in the banking industry have been displaced by intelligent machines. At first, it was just ATMs replacing tellers, but now many of the “officers” at banks have been displaced by computer systems. At the grocery store, it has long been the case that checkout cashiers need no arithmetic skills. Now, though, we are starting to see automated checkout lanes10 where there is no cashier. The early versions of these needed a lot of human

12 Human Life in the Age of Smart Machines

backup, and customer honesty remains an issue, but systems are getting smarter continually, and it is likely that many of the routine jobs in grocery stores will continue to disappear. The automated warehouse capabilities of places like Amazon also will keep improving – Amazon already has tens of thousands of robots. Indeed, the very concept of going to a physical grocery also may be less common down the road; the job site will disappear with the jobs. For a while, as noted earlier, the prevailing view was that intelligent machines would displace routine jobs but that the top end jobs would not be as much affected. Today, that is not so clear. The banking examples mentioned above are one example of whitecollar jobs being displaced, and there are many others. A lot of high-end human work will be taken over by machines. One goal of this book is to make some guesses about what kinds of human roles will survive or even be invented and which will be displaced by machine intelligence. Because of this rapid and continuing change, one important principle is that schools should focus less on what is needed to do specific jobs today and more on how to prepare students for a life in which almost any job might disappear and almost all people may need to reinvent themselves periodically.11 No one can be certain about the future, but we can make some good guesses, and we can realize what has happened already. Over the course of this book, I consider several possible futures and the educational implications of each. Here are some of the possibilities: 





Machines continue to displace middle and even upper-class jobs, leading to an economy in which most people receive a guaranteed income from government. This is not likely in the long term, but it could be a transition state through which our society passes – in fact, some countries do it today. Machines displace most current roles, but we invent new things to do for each other and thus preserve the notion of jobs, entrepreneurship, and earnings. This is likely, though there may be tougher times as a new economy evolves. Further, without the security of a predictable lifetime of work, people will need better financial self-management skills and will have to be able to use automated services that will help them decide how much to spend and how much to save for the periods when they are temporarily without income and may have extra expenses to retrain for a new job. And, of course, they may need a different skill set to do, or even to learn, the newly created jobs. Things become unpredictable for a generation or two, requiring our children and grandchildren continually to adapt to a changing world. This probably is assured regardless of what other trends arise. Moreover, because of the political volatility created by this uncertainty, there is a good chance that maintaining a democracy and not falling prey to an authoritarian ruler will require some major educational efforts that currently are not the primary goals of our schools.

Another way to think optimistically about life in the age of smart machines is that human roles will be shifted by machines. This argument has been made by several scholars, by researchers in industry-related think tanks, and by the more

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13

analytic news media (e.g., Benedikt Frey, et al., 2013; Manyika, Chui, et al., 2017; Edwards & Edwards, 2018). We do not know how this will play out, but one likely scenario is that certain key sectors will thrive but make new demands on workers, while in other sectors, jobs will be transformed dramatically, needing fewer workers who will need to know how to use intelligent tools to leverage their performance. Table 2.1 lists one set of areas predicted to do well in the age of smart machines. Overall, what is continuing to happen and accelerating in pace is a very wild ride. While we cannot predict how long a time, if at all, there will be too few jobs for people,12 we can predict that many, perhaps most job roles will be disrupted, and the competences discussed below will be needed to successfully pass through the period of disruption that is inevitable. In later parts of the book, I look at what we might know about preparing people for a wild ride. The basic structure of what follows is first to consider what the new hidden curriculum for education needs to be. Then, I look at the forces that currently shape curriculum and the actual events of the classroom. Then, the possible futures listed above are explored with consideration of what might need to happen in school to prepare children for such a future. Finally, there is consideration of some of the changes that will be needed for our society to pursue the paths that the future may require. In all of this, one thing should be kept in mind. The schools attended by children from wealthy families are much closer to providing effective education for the future than are public and charter schools in less wealthy areas. To provide good prospects for those whose parents cannot afford top private schools or public schools in wealthy suburbs, our less wealthy public and charter systems will need to move in the direction of their private and wealthy public counterparts. Currently, little of that is happening even in the (slightly) more entrepreneurial world of charter schools, parochial schools, and online resources for home schooling. So, it is likely that some of the learning needed to be successful in the world we have entered will not, at least in the short term, happen in school and might best happen in other settings – museums, after-school clubs, sports teams, familytype settings, libraries, or new settings we can invent. Schools are already burdened with many tasks, and they may not be able to produce all of the now-needed learning. TABLE 2.1 Areas predicted to thrive in the age of smart machines

People: This includes jobs that rely on strong interpersonal skills like chief executives, school psychologists, social work teachers, and supervisors of a variety of trades. Numbers: These are jobs that apply math to business problems, like economists, management analysts, and treasurers. Bugs and bad things: This includes human health-related jobs, like allergists, immunologists, and microbiologists and other environmentally-oriented professions such as toxicology. Spaces and structures: These are jobs that manage the physical world, like engineers and environmental scientists. (Edwards & Edwards, 2018. This text was originally published on the website QZ.com and is excerpted here with Quartz’s permission)

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Notes 1 When I was a child, some stores in Milwaukee where I lived banded together to provide a single charge card that could be used at multiple stores, each of which did its own billing. That meant a shopper needed only one “charge plate” (it was a metal plate that had the user’s address and account number impressed into it so those could be stamped onto sales slips). The advent of the bank credit card allowed a single billing process for all the stores a customer might visit and got the money to those stores more quickly. 2 Increasingly, decisions by expert buyers are being replaced by decisions based upon continual analysis of sales patterns. If production can be shifted quickly enough, then mass market stores can be stocked with the clothing that sold especially well in custom shops even a few weeks ago. While someone still must decide to produce a novel item, mass production of that item often can be started in response to early information about sales at a higher price point. This is just another instance of a skilled job being replaced by a smaller number of positions for the most skilled practitioners combined with extensive data processing to leverage initial expert decisions. 3 Actually, smart machines are entering the custom tailoring market, too. At least one company’s intelligent software uses images from a person’s phone to infer appropriate measurements and to generate custom patterns for clothes. See www.mtailor.com (retrieved February 13, 2018). 4 A collection of small samples of the different materials various cloth sellers have available. 5 The phenomenon of having many options available online has had unintended consequences, of course. A whole industry of reverse logistics has developed to help online companies better handle the cost of customers ordering multiple items and then returning all but the one they like best. 6 One could quarrel with the term “scientific management” (Taylor, 1919), since specific practices often are not based in any empirical science, but it is the term most often used. 7 www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/heart-disease/in-depth/heart-disease-risk/ itt-20084942 (retrieved January 25, 2017). 8 www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/10/13/remarks-president-opening-rema rks-and-panel-discussion-white-house (retrieved January 17, 2017). 9 At the same time, the new potential for cybercrime has created some new jobs. Because I have an ID theft alert with credit reporting agencies, when I switched phone carriers, I needed to speak with a person who needed skill and judgement in order to determine that I was the real me. Her job came because of technology, sadly. Technology both replaces jobs and creates jobs, but not always gracefully. 10 Self-service checkout has not always worked well. However, there are other ways to automate the payment transaction. Amazon, as of this writing, is starting to experiment with stores that recognize customers and note, via camera surveillance, what items they remove from grocery shelves, thus eliminating the whole notion of “checkout.” The model is that you enter the store, are recognized using a combination of credit card and facial recognition, grab what you need, and just leave, with your credit card account being charged for what you took. Of course, Amazon may end up limiting who can enter their stores if they experience problems with shoplifting and credit fraud. 11 I do not believe that job-specific training is inappropriate in our schools but only that it should, at least until the last year or two of high school, not be a primary focus. All current students will need to reinvent themselves over their careers, while only a smaller portion will need special training to be job-ready upon graduation. 12 Actually, in many parts of the US, there are jobs going unfilled even as some seek work, because of a mismatch between the skills the open positions require and the skill sets of applicants.

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References Benedikt Frey, C., Osborne, M. A., Armstrong, S., Bostrom, N., Chinellato, E., Cummins, M., & Shanahan, M. (2013). The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs To Computerisation? Available online at www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_ Future_of_Employment.pdf (retrieved January 26, 2018). Chi, M. T., Glaser, R., & Farr, M. J. (2014). The Nature of Expertise. New York and London: Psychology Press. Edwards, H., & Edwards, D. (2018). How many jobs will AI destroy? How the experts make the calculation, Quartz. Available online at https://qz.com/1090176/howto-think-about-job-automation-studies/?mc_cid=4399aac1fa&mc_eid=aec7da68aa (retrieved January 26, 2018). Ericsson, K. A., Charness, N., Feltovich, P. J., & Hoffman, R. R. (Eds). (2006). The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511816796 Manyika, J., Chui, M., Miremadi, M., Bughin, J., George, K., Willmott, P., & Dewhurst, M. (2017). A Future that Works: Automation, Employment, and Productivity. McKinsey Global Institute. Reich, R. (1990). Redefining Good Education: Preparing Students for Tomorrow. Education Reform: Making Sense of It All. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Taylor, F. W. (1919). The Principles of Scientific Management. New York and London: Harper & Brothers.

3 COMPETENCE NEEDED FOR WORK IN THE AGE OF SMART MACHINES

So, what are the new skills for the modern hidden curriculum? Many people have thought about what workers will need to be employable in the age of smart machines. The Partnership for 21st Century Learning (2017) has made a strong case that schooling should build competence in what they call the “4 Cs,” which are critical thinking in complex situations, collaboration, communication, and creativity. These competences seem essential for two reasons. First, the roles that cannot easily be filled by smart machines will likely be those that need more expertise than one person is able to provide. They will tend to be new roles for which no one has years of complete preparation. So, people with very different expertise will need to collaborate and to share their knowledge to invent the expertise no one of them already has fully mastered. Jobs of the future also are likely to involve deep and critical thinking and creativity. Some educators will respond to the 4 Cs by saying that they are only needed by a small group of elite workers, while most workers will be working in low wage jobs that require learning only what schools have always taught: showing up, working hard, and following orders. At any moment in the coming years, there will be some low-end jobs, maybe even many of them. However, those jobs will be prime targets for automation, so those who hold them will need to be equipped to quickly retread themselves for a different job when their current job disappears – and they will need the financial literacy to set aside some current earnings to cover the time needed to prepare for their next job. Other routine jobs will remain human because people are willing to pay to interact with a person rather than just a machine. Those jobs will likely pay more than current low-wage work. More important, they will require good social skills and a strong ethic, since people will not pay a premium except to be helped by someone who is pleasant, socially adept, competent, and honest. Schools, which focus almost exclusively on highly visible in-class work because they don’t trust

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students, will need to change if they are to play a role in producing graduates who are pleasant, socially adept, competent, and trustworthy. The current lesson in too many schools is that the key thing is not to get caught. But, eventually, most dishonesty is detected in the real world, so this school strategy will not produce the ethical grounding needed to gain personal assistant jobs or other positions of trust. Finally, while we cannot predict how the evolution of smart machines will proceed, it is safe to predict that the jobs available to today’s school students when they reach adulthood will keep changing. People will need to be prepared to retool themselves quickly for new roles as old ones disappear because of automation or the economic disruptions that are inevitable in a time of rapid change. Overall, then, schools would do well to prepare their students in the 4 Cs but also to provide the needed skills and dispositions that will allow them to:   

retool themselves quickly for different jobs if the ones they have disappear, be the kinds of people that other people want to associate with and to hire for personal services, and handle a life that will have periodic disruptions both of routine and of income as jobs come and go.

Below, we briefly consider each of these new learning needs. First, the skills and attitudes needed to reinvent oneself will be critical. Anyone with a job for which there are standard education and training paths (such as job-specific community college programs) can expect that the more secure and lucrative that job seems, the more likely that it will be taken over eventually by smart machines. When a job pays well, it is a bigger target for automation, since displacing the humans doing that job will save more money. When there is a clear path to prepare people to do the job, it is easier to automate. The steps to writing a program so a machine can do a job are remarkably close to the steps for developing effective training programs to teach the job to humans. If we can reliably and quickly teach a job to students with less academic achievement, we most likely can automate it! So, everyone will need to be prepared to learn new capabilities and to “up their game.” Sometimes machines will take over part of a job, thus reducing the total number of people needed to do the parts not yet automated. To keep such a job, a worker will need to become exceptionally competent at the parts remaining, since partial automation of a job leads to needing fewer but more-skilled people than before. Part of the new skill in such jobs will involve using the new automation tools that were built to shrink the number of workers needed. Sometimes machines will completely replace humans in a role, requiring workers to learn to fill entirely different work roles. Those who can retrain most quickly and most deeply will enjoy the best access to new opportunities. Our traditional model of preparation for professional work is front-loaded. It assumes that a person spends years becoming an expert in a discipline and then practices that discipline for the rest of their career using the accumulated expertise. Increasingly, though, existing jobs will be taken over by smart machines, and new

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work roles will arise. These new roles will emerge faster than anyone can master them and become an expert. The substitute for having an expert when such a role emerges will likely be a team of people with varying expertises who work together to solve problems that require merging their different competences. The old model was one of years of practice – perhaps 10,000 hours (Glaser, et al., 1988) – to become an expert. The new model will be just-in-time assembly of a team who, working together, can address emergent problems. The ability to collaborate as a team player, therefore, will be a highly-valued capability, as will the ability to learn quickly, sometimes from a collaborator at a work site. Collaboration on expert teams will require more than simple social skills, although those too are important. Taking turns, listening, and all the other skills often claimed to be taught by good kindergarten teachers will be essential, of course. Beyond that, though, there are some special aspects of the kind of expert collaboration that will become more important in the age of smart machines. One reason that a given work area will not be automated (yet) is that it involves different bodies of expertise that rest partly on different underlying ontologies.1 Let’s consider a simple example that occurs even today. Someone has pain that they ascribe to the area of their lower back, and their primary care physician has not been able to identify and treat a cause. It might be a muscular or skeletal problem. After all, a high proportion of people have back muscle pain at times. It also could be a gastroenterological problem like Crohn’s Disease or an irritable bowel. Another possibility is that a major blood vessel in the lower abdomen could have an aneurism. When a team of doctors is called to assess such a problem, each not only will have different knowledge but also will have a different underlying basis for that knowledge. The gastroenterologist sees the lower abdomen as part of the digestive system. The orthopod sees it as a collection of bones, connective tissue, and muscles. The cardiologist sees it as a collection of blood vessels that constitute an energy transport system. To work together and diagnose a hard case of unexplained lower back pain, the three specialists not only need to be able to collaborate in their interactions and in finding a path to a problem solution. They also need to be able to jump back and forth between a view of the patient that reflects their specific expertise and a more general and integrated view that has, for any one of them, aspects they understand deeply and other aspects about which they know a lot, but not nearly as much as their colleague in that specialty. Many of the professional roles in the age of smart machines will involve this kind of collaboration across different areas of expertise. In addition to being able to collaborate with people who have different knowledge and possibly even differences in the ontologies for that knowledge, collaborating experts will need expertise that is flexible and can stretch to deal with truly emergent situations. Their collaborations will address problems that are complex and that require deep, critical, and disciplined thinking. For example, even one of the earliest internal medicine diagnosis systems could do as well as or better than human physicians in diagnosing cases where a patient had two different diseases and where symptoms of one of them countered or masked symptoms of the other. But,

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humans continue, so far, to do the best job of shaping strategies for dealing with truly emergent medical problems, such as the birth defects associated with the Zika virus, because so many different bodies of knowledge are potentially relevant to solving the Zika problem, and it would not have been possible to predict in advance which bodies of knowledge are most critical (humans still need to clearly represent an emergent problem, although they then might use machine intelligence to speed the search for pieces of a solution). In collaborating to solve complex problems, team members will need exceptional communication skills. There is little distance between being expert at communicating and having deep skills of teaching and learning. Not only must workers dealing with complexity be able to integrate what colleagues tell them into their own representation of a problem situation, they also need to be able to convey aspects of their expertise to colleagues whose expertise is different and to understand how those colleagues are representing that situation. This suggests that schools should give students a lot of practice in communicating their ideas to people with different knowledge and who live perhaps in different subcultures.2 And, they also should provide practice in learning from and interacting with people possessing different background knowledge. Even if they do not plan to become entrepreneurs, the opportunities seen in universities today to give “elevator talks” to venture capitalists are, if nothing else, practice in conveying one’s personal knowledge to others who come from different backgrounds. Not only does this kind of practice prepare people for work in collaborative teams, it also will help with another problem to be addressed below, preparing to be part of a multicultural society. The 4th C is creativity. At one level, the future won’t be that different from the past. Most problems will have solutions that can be inferred easily from what we already know. It may be necessary to integrate what two different kinds of specialists know, but it still may not be a huge stretch. However, a rapidly changing economy will generate opportunities for creative people to develop productive innovations. And, there likely will be new problems in many sectors of the economy and even in everyday life that are best addressed with creativity, the ability to develop and test ideas that are different from past efforts on related problems. Most extant tests of creativity focus on the novelty and unpredictability of solutions produced to solve novel problems. That certainly is a piece of being creative. However, being productively creative involves more than just coming up with novel ideas. It combines being willing to try new approaches with being rigorous in evaluating those approaches. Disciplined creativity is going to be important in the future, which means that either schools need to learn how to teach it or we need to find out-of-school opportunities to learn it that are accessible to all students. Beyond the 4 Cs, humans will continue to be especially valued when socioemotional skills are needed. We likely will never get to a situation in which machines do all the support work for a soldier who has lost a limb (though service robots may supplement the supply of service animals), a child who has lost a parent, or an adult who has become addicted to opiates. Nor will machines always be valued over humans in supportive care for the elderly or early childhood education. In all those tasks, skilled

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humans may leverage new machine intelligence, but human roles will remain. In fact, jobs requiring socioemotional skills are likely to increase as the efficiencies of the age of automation produce new levels of income that can be spent on personalized services and care. In addition, certain socioemotional and related cognitive skills will be required to participate in powerful team activity, which will be a key part of work in the age of smart machines (Hess & Ludwig, 2017). The trend will continue that even when a task is automated, wealthier people will pay a premium for human-delivered high-end versions of a product or service. Our mobile phones automatically also provide the time, for example, but wealthy folks still pay a lot for complex mechanical watches produced with a lot of human labor. High-end products are sold with access to efficient and pleasant humans for support while lower-cost products often have nothing but an online forum where other users of the product can share what they have figured out without help from the manufacturer. The high end of consumer products and services often includes 24/7 access to a human “concierge” who needs strong social skills. It is very unlikely that those who graduate from high school with poorly developed social skills will be successful in this kind of competitive and quickly changing job world. The needed socioemotional skills overlap the skills of collaboration. Recent research has looked at collaboration in developing deeper understanding of a problem or situation. For example, Borge, Ong, and Rosé (2018) identified several things that had to happen if collaborations in understanding a situation are to work effectively. These include assuring that all group members have a chance to have their ideas heard, assuring that each member’s contribution is truly understood by the entire team, building on each other’s contributions, considering alternative viewpoints, being driven by the level of factual support for claims, and signaling respect and value of each other. This suggests that some of the needed socioemotional skills are also core cognitive competences for our times. Beyond readiness for work roles, if we are to continue to have a democracy, future generations will need to learn how to do their share and fulfill civic responsibilities. And, if we are to have a civil society, our children will need to learn to get along with others and to care for one another. This is the social side of the collaboration skill, and it is increasingly necessary to the preservation of American society. As multiple cultures grow in the US, getting along and valuing each other will require more practice and at least some teaching by example. Beyond that, the same collaboration skills that might make someone more valuable as an employee also will be important in preserving democracy in a world where both individual needs and individual views on how those needs can be met will vary widely. We live in a world of ubiquitous information. Increasingly, each person gets his “news,” his sense of what is going on in the world and how social problems might be solved, from a small subset of available media sources, often only looking at those sources that match his prior beliefs. Without some ability to test claims, people will be prone to living in an artificial world that provides reinforcement of one’s fantasy rather than empirically grounded information. This is especially the case now that not only images but also audio recordings can be “photoshopped” to

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produce “evidence” that did not come from a real situation.3 Currently, students do very poorly in evaluating the credibility of information they access (Wineburg, 2016; Wineburg & The Stanford History Education Group, 2016). Success in life, including in getting a good job but also including having a decent society in which to live, will require not only the ability to seek out information but also the ability to evaluate its credibility. As I write these words, American society is confronting the fact that it is too easy to gain political advantage when many citizens lack the skills needed to test the accuracy and validity of information they encounter. At one end of a spectrum there are claims that are just plain empirically false, and society will work better if citizens have learned how to test such claims. An example might be a claim about what percentage of the American populace has health insurance. At the other end of the spectrum are claims whose validity rests upon assumptions that may not be evident immediately. An example of viewpoint-based claims might be a claim that most people will do better with medical insurance provided as an entitlement by the government. The skills needed to assess claims grounded in particular viewpoints will overlap but not be identical to those needed to decide that something is just plain not true. Because smart machines will be developed whenever we understand a role well enough to invest in machine intelligence, most people in the future will need to be able to reinvent themselves, as discussed above. Part of that is skill in learning, but another aspect is being able to manage personal finances well enough to allow a healthy life during periods of reinvention and lack of earnings. Too often, currently, the primary method for dealing with a financial setback is to use money previously reserved for retirement or for the education of one’s children. Sometimes, this may be necessary, but few in our society understand that the cost of not rebuilding savings is quite high. Indeed, recent estimates of shortfalls in retirement savings are in the hundreds of trillions of dollars, far eclipsing any likely future level of government debt. Yet, implicit in current school curriculum is the belief that people have continuous and steady income. We are not educating our children for the “gig economy.”4 Several levels of understanding are required here. First, there is the need to understand how to decide how much to save and when one can afford goods and services that friends have but that might not be absolute necessities. In addition, effective civic participation will need to include support of one or another plan for the role of social safety nets to supplement what personal savings can provide and perhaps to reinterpret savings as self-taxation that is required in better times. Schools should not teach that one approach to the safety net issue is the right one, but they probably do need to give students practice in thinking through possible choices and their costs and benefits. Golinkoff and Hirsh-Pasek (2016) have suggested one further competence that is needed: confidence. Unfortunately, as we discuss below, much of schooling currently is organized around exposing students to stress and to experiences of partial failure – with a focus on failure avoidance. From an early age, students learn not to persist until they have mastered a situation but rather to aim for being 80% or 90%

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successful. Indeed, a hidden message of schooling for all students is that no one can be assured of success on a task. For students who struggle, the message is even stronger. As a result, many students leave formal education believing that they cannot succeed in situations that seem like school. Such students may decide not to get retraining when a job is threatened, or they may not take certain jobs because the demand for consistent success scares them. Schooling for our times requires helping students learn how to be confident but not cocky about success and to learn to persist in the face of failures. Several of the goals for schooling listed above are more likely when one has a healthy lifestyle. Students who are unfit physically generally perform less well mentally (London & Castrechini, 2011). Moreover, students who are unfit physically are less likely to have high self-confidence, since at least some experiences that build confidence require a certain level of fitness – the leader of a soccer team must be healthy enough to play soccer. In addition, an area of mental fitness currently going under the label of mindfulness also supports dealing confidently with situations that initially might trigger doubts about one’s confidence. The paths to mindfulness are varied, and different communities will take different paths, but children who get some practice in mindfulness are likely to do better in school, cause fewer disruptions and thus get into less trouble, and be more prepared to tackle novel and challenging problems (e.g., Diamond & Lee, 2011).

Summary So, overall, schools that prepare people for life in the age of smart machines need to teach:        

the ability to learn efficiently and quickly, socioemotional skills, skills of civic participation, ability to evaluate information, facility in collaborative activity, including the 4 Cs (dealing with complexity, communication, collaboration, and creativity), management of personal finances and some basic economics, confidence, and physical and mental fitness.

As we begin to explore these various curricular needs, it is worth reflecting on certain current views about education. For example, driven by experience in business, many argue that schools will only improve outcomes that can be measured. This may well be the case. However, if it is, then it is worth noting that today we only seriously measure success in learning a very few key parts of the traditional curriculum. Nothing measured and debated in discussions of how to improve education directly addresses the eight goals stated above. One can argue that mastery of reading and mathematics will facilitate some of the eight competences, but what schools currently measure is insufficient to drive

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attainment of these new goals. As we consider each of these goals, we need to keep in mind that we likely will need to learn how to measure our progress toward it. Such measurement is possible, but it will require some changes in how we decide on testing strategies for our schools. Issues of assessment are discussed below in Chapter 13.

Notes 1 By ontology, I mean the key concepts and relationships in the core knowledge that underlies a particular discipline. So, for example, a medical bill may have at least three related ontologies. One is the set of bill-paying experiences and experiences with medical practices that a consumer has. Another is the basic physiology, anatomy, and disease causes that underlie a health care professional’s work. The third is an insurance company’s understanding of specific medical procedures in terms of likelihood of occurrence, possible alternatives, cost, and insurance risk. 2 Therefore, attending a school with a culturally diverse population will be highly adaptive. 3 In a world of 140-character communications, the immediate problem isn’t faked evidence but rather claims made with no evidence at all. 4 The term gig economy refers to a life experience of getting periodic bursts of employment possibility, whether as a paid employee or as a private contractor, and having no income the rest of the time. To survive times of no income, one must be able to save part of what is earned on a paid “gig” for use when no income is on the immediate horizon. In the kind of consumer economy we have had, everyone receives a lot of messages about ways to spend their money but little input on how much to put aside for periods of no income.

References Borge, M., Ong, Y. S., & Rosé, C. P. (2018). Learning to Monitor and Regulate Collective Thinking Processes. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 13, 61–92. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11412-018-9270-5 Chi, M. T., Glaser, R., & Farr, M. J. (2014). The Nature of Expertise. New York and London: Psychology Press. Diamond, A., & Lee, K. (2011). Interventions shown to aid executive function development in children 4 to 12 years old. Science, 333(6045), 959–964. Glaser, R., Chi, M. T. H., & Farr, M. J. (Eds) (1988). The Nature of Expertise. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Golinkoff, R. M., & Hirsh-Pasek, K. (2016). Becoming Brilliant: What science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Hess, E. D., & Ludwig, K. (2017). Humility Is the New Smart: Rethinking Human Excellence in the Smart Machine Age. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. London, R. A., & Castrechini, S. (2011). A longitudinal examination of the link between youth physical fitness and academic achievement. Journal of School Health, 81(7), 400–408. Partnership for Twenty-First Century Skills (n.d.). Available online at www.p21.org/ (retrieved December 19, 2017). Wineburg, S. (2016). Why historical thinking is not about history. Available online at https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:yy383km0067/Wineburg%20Hist.%20Thinking% 20is%20not%20about%20history.pdf (retrieved January 25, 2017). Wineburg, S. and the Stanford History Education Group. (2016). Evaluating information: The cornerstone of civic online reasoning. Available online at https://sheg.stanford.edu/ upload/V3LessonPlans/Executive%20Summary%2011.21.16.pdf (retrieved January 25, 2017).

4 PUBLIC SCHOOLS TODAY AND WHAT IS MISSING

Introduction In recent years, there has been a substantial effort to improve education in the United States. This effort is well motivated, even if it partly neglects the learning requirements just listed. The public-school system is being asked to do more than in the past and to do that under harder conditions, and some things generally are not going well. In comparative terms anchored in traditional schooling goals, US students do not score as well as those from many competitor countries (Berliner, 2011). At the same time, our economy is less forgiving of failure to succeed in school. We have seen the rapid disappearance of many of the decent-paying jobs that were available to those who were reliable and hardworking but who might not have learned all that much in school. Companies filling jobs set higher education requirements today than they used to, and at least a little of that change is justified.1 In addition, there has been a widening of the gap between the well-paid and the poorly-paid portions of our society, with the well-paid portion generally exhibiting a higher level of education. Further, in many urban areas, a flight of affluent students from the public-school system to suburbs or to private schools has left urban systems demoralized, with a high proportion of low-income students from struggling families, and without some of the better-performing students who might have made the overall average performance less troubling and who might have helped their less able peers. We can, of course, quarrel with any of the specific assumptions behind the widely-shared desire to improve schooling. Many who complete years of education successfully still struggle to find jobs. There is uncertainty over whether the number of jobs available for well educated people will match the numbers who seek them. By some measures, schools are doing at least as well today as they ever did, since a high level of learning by all students was not a critical matter until quite

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recently. Still, overall, there is a case to be made that we need to teach our children more and to successfully teach all our children, rather than 50–80% of them, if they are to fare well in later life. In addition, if our only measures of school performance are success in teaching the traditional curriculum, the best we can hope for is better performance in the traditional subject matters, leaving the competences listed at the end of the last chapter largely unaddressed. It is possible to address some of the eight goals through traditional curriculum, at least partly. For example, the mathematics curriculum could include problems that fit the math goals but that also showed the value of long-term savings or even considered what percentage of salary must be saved each year to assure retirement income of say 70% of current income. While pieces of the financial literacy goal thus can fit into the math curriculum, what will not get taught in the mathematics curriculum as things now stand are the broad dispositions related to financial wellbeing or how to recover from financial setbacks. Moreover, it is unlikely given current practice that any explicit attempt would be made to assess financial literacy goals that range well beyond what schools can insert into the math curriculum. One primary effort to improve US schooling in recent years was the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The act required school districts to give tests developed by the states, to report the proportion of students reaching a threshold of proficiency (set by each state), and to break down reports to show whether protected subgroups (racial and ethnic minorities, but not lower-income neighborhoods per se) are faring adequately. The Act mandated annual progress in school improvement. Each year, there were progressively higher proportions of each subgroup and of the overall student population that had to exceed state-specified thresholds. School districts that failed to meet the minimum proportions were publicly identified and sometimes subject to sanctions. The whole approach assumed that states, school districts, and individual teachers know what good schooling is and merely need incentives for better performance, and it assumed that the goals set for each core academic subject by subject-matter experts were the right goals for schooling. The basic model was that states should invest more in education and hold districts accountable, districts should hold teachers accountable, and teachers should work harder and stay focused on teaching the content we all know is important. Briefly, this model has failed, and it never even addressed the new curriculum requirements listed at the end of Chapter 3. It failed for many reasons, but perhaps the most important is that it failed to reflect the complex system that is education. As Mitroff and his colleagues have argued (Mitroff, et al., 2013), no single change to one aspect of the education system will produce overall, scalable, and sustainable improvement. Below, I discuss some of the implications of this systems view, and the reader is encouraged also to see the thoughts of Mitroff and his colleagues. To start with, the fundamental premise – that all the relevant actors in the education system know what schools need to do – is fundamentally flawed. I suggest that, in fact, there is no widely shared public understanding of what is needed for schooling to be adequate preparation for life in our times. There is,

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instead, a strong entrenchment of the traditional school curriculum, backed up by the experiences of everyday citizens who succeeded in the past through success in that curriculum, and further supported by strong groups of educators in each subject-matter area. The people who develop state curriculum requirements are, by and large, teachers and professors of the specific subject matters. Those people did in fact succeed in their lives because of their effective study in school, so it is not surprising that they believe that all who master the curriculum they favor will do well in life. The key message of this book is that they may be wrong in this assessment, that the eight goals stated above must become an explicit part of our national strategy for education. The tests used by states to comply with NCLB, while being good predictors of a wider range of schooling-related capabilities, send poor signals about how children who are not learning adequately might achieve the full set of competences they really need. The current efforts may yield modestly improved test scores for some of our children. However, these efforts are putting many children on a path that will not prepare them for successful life and that may divert them from learning opportunities that could allow them to grow needed competences. The newer Every Child Succeeds Act (ESSA) has superseded NCLB, but it too remains focused on the traditional core subject-matter curriculum. In fact, NCLB and ESSA probably moved public schools away from any engagement with the capabilities listed at the end of Chapter 3. The belief that schools simply needed incentives led to no consideration of whether the current goals for schooling are adequate and ignored the range of competence found in the current corps of teachers. Indeed, the strong political allergy to federal involvement in curriculum meant that specifics could not be considered. Mathematics and literacy were taken as the first goals that had to be attained, so high-stakes tests were focused on basic literacy and numeracy. Implicit was a decision that once schools were uniformly good at those two competences, decisions could be made on whether to push for additional outcomes. This had the immediate effect of moving all school resources toward a focus on just literacy and numeracy. Many schools deleted art and music class time and teachers so that they could afford reading and math coaches for both students and their teachers. Physical activity, never the province of any but the physical education teachers, also was slighted as funds shifted from such teachers to more support for reading and mathematics. What evidence there is tends to show that physical activity, art, and music contribute to better overall academic performance, but the narrow focus produced by NCLB was on pushing for what turned out to be tiny improvements in mean reading and math test scores. There were other pathologies as well. Consider, for example, the bubble strategy. This strategy responded to the NCLB focus on moving students from lower into higher categories of adequacy. Instead of focusing on overall improvements in achievement test scores, the approach used was to set a threshold score level that would be deemed basic competence and to set all incentives and penalties based on whether the percentage of students in a school who scored at least at the threshold

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kept increasing from year to year. This prompted a strategy of considering which students were most likely to make it across the threshold – the ones who were almost at that level – and focusing all extra effort on those students. Considering the overall distribution of scores on the achievement tests, if the only goal of a school is to get more students over threshold, then all effort should focus on the “bubble” of those students who are just below the threshold. With respect to the penalties and incentives of NCLB, effort invested in a truly struggling child that might move him or her halfway to the threshold was a waste, as was any focus on children already scoring above what generally was a very low threshold or on those needing too much special education to be likely to reach the threshold. While only minimal progress was made toward the NCLB goals in terms of higher test scores, principals whose bonuses or even jobs depended on higher proportions of students scoring over threshold each year and school boards who did not want to have their schools listed as out of compliance often withdrew time and financial support from subjects that can help teach social skills and confidence and invested instead to drill students on reading and math basics in hopes that this would lead to better public reports of their schools. A major loss was time in kindergarten spent on socialization and on teaching children basic behavior patterns needed in a civil society. Time previously spent on social development often was allocated instead to a generally unsuccessful effort to start reading instruction earlier, in hopes of getting more students to threshold by the first high stakes test. A second casualty was any attention to students’ health and physical fitness. All the goals listed at the end of Chapter 2 except basic literacy and numeracy were sacrificed in hopes of slight and inconsequential (for the children’s future, but not always for teachers’ and principals’ economic security) improvements on test scores. So, basically, NCLB had the following unintended consequences:   

Resources were removed from subjects not tested, including those closest to some of the eight goals discussed in Chapter 3. Resources were shifted away from students most challenged by the curriculum and from students who already had reached the low and inadequate levels of performance labeled politically as “proficient.” Because of the nature of the tests in many states, the form of instruction shifted in the direction of unending drill rather than stimulating students to apply what they learned to novel and complex tasks.

The other side of the principle that you can’t improve what you don’t measure is that excessive focus on inadequate measures leads to inadequate outcomes. The problem of schooling quality also is complex economically. The naïve view is that the economy will signal what skills are needed and that schools will respond to these signals. That is, by observing where there are labor shortages and tuning the school curriculum to alleviate those shortages, it is believed that curriculum will automatically remain relevant and perhaps optimal. In a simpler world, this could

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work. Today, though, there are three barriers to any simple economic signaling mechanism. First, in an entrepreneurial society, people find ways to make money with the labor that is available. We can see this in the proliferation of service roles that pay minimum wage. If there is a shortage of labor with strong skills and competences but plenty of unskilled labor, businesses will find ways to make money from unskilled and low-paid labor rather than bid up the price of talent that could drive other enterprises. Fast food businesses, for example, can deliver food cheaply by paying minimum wage to low-skill workers. Since we see sectors in the economy that are stalled because of a lack of skilled work force, low overall unemployment rates may not by themselves be good signals of school adequacy, and school boards may not be equipped to dig deep enough to find out what capabilities could trigger better jobs for their graduates.2 The second problem is that even when businesses struggle to find competent and higher-skill workers, the very language we use to discuss this problem often is insufficient to drive effective schooling improvement. That language itself is stuck in the past. Remember that schools divide their work by subject area, and the core topics of the curriculum for a subject change slowly. When what is missing is orthogonal to subject matters – applying well-learned content to novel problems, dealing with complexity, being creative, working in teams, communicating effectively, basic social interaction skills, confidence, and healthy lifestyle – no existing subject-matter group takes responsibility for that missing content. However, these existing groups collectively own the curriculum and the school day and generally will not give up the time they “own” to permit other educational goals to be addressed.3 The Common Core State Standards are the strongest move away from traditional curriculum, but even they are couched in terms of goals for each traditional subject.4 The third barrier to any simple signaling between the work world and the school world is the rate of change of jobs. In a time of ever-smarter machines, jobs keep getting displaced.5 In a time of instant, world-wide communications, many kinds of businesses can suddenly spring up or suddenly fold. Often, a business disappears or moves before its struggle to find adequate workforce can trigger any thinking about curricular needs. To summarize, our educational systems are complex and highly resistant to change, because educators who are focused on the traditional curriculum “own” parts of the school day, have devoted their lives to functioning in their curricular niche, and may not know how to stretch to take on new roles, especially when society’s education needs are changing quickly. Collectively, the stakeholders in our education systems lack even the vocabulary to work together to effect improvements, and they sometimes lack the underlying understanding that could support a more effective vocabulary for the needed discussion. Overall, society needs to engage in some difficult reflection to make enduring change. Considerable altruism will be needed to sustain that reflection and to pursue needed changes in ways that are fair not only to students but also to

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teachers and others who have devoted their lives to making schools do what we historically have asked of them. Generally, promoting the needed levels of altruism requires effective leaders who themselves have a clear vision of what changes are needed. That’s a tall order overall, but I believe it is what will be needed to produce schools that are paths to a good life for all or almost all our children. I suggest in a later chapter that focusing solely on schools as the place for learning may not be the only way or even the best way to meet some of the new demands. The potential for rapid evolution of new approaches to teaching and learning may be greater in after-school and summer programs than in current schools. But, schools – all schools – will need to be as good as we can make them and will need to serve all students, even those who believe, perhaps accurately based on experiences in their community, that hard work in school currently does not pay off.

Goals of Education in the Past Born just prior to the beginning of the baby boom, I attended schools that knew what they were supposed to teach (almost exactly what they taught to my parents) and did a reasonably good job of teaching it – to students who were from the same cultural background as their teachers and who, in general, had no serious learning problems. All of us – teachers, students, and parents – lived in a culture that believed that schooling was important, necessary to later success, and that going to school was what “good” children did each day. People who had done well in school, as a group, did well in later life. While it was not unusual for a top achiever to have done only mediocre work in school, even in such cases, the person likely finished high school successfully and probably made it through some or all of college. It is worth considering briefly both what it is that schools were trying to do back then and why they were successful at it. Jackson (1990) coined the term hidden curriculum to refer to the goals of schooling that were not explicitly represented in tested subject matter. Schools, for folks my age, had a very clear hidden curriculum. Part of it was citizenship. To this day, we see trappings of this element – almost every US public-school classroom has a pledge to the US flag as part of the beginning of each day. Moreover, the content of social studies curriculum clearly reflects a parochial canon of history that is part of the shared view that binds together the US citizenry.6 Another aspect of the hidden curriculum was preparation for work. The view of work in the years I attended school was clearly one of a large cadre of workers who followed the instructions set out for them by a small set of business leaders and shop foremen. To carry out one’s work orders, several things were needed. One had to be reliable, to show up on time, and diligently to carry out the instructions given by supervisors, even during periods one was not being watched. Homework was structured in large part to be preparation for the worker role. There were lots of worksheets. Even though these do little in the way of promoting learning of content (although teachers did believe they were important for

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that, too), they do provide practice in following instructions and producing work to someone else’s schedule (and they may increase facility in doing tasks that one understands already automatically). They also train students to keep working on boring, repetitive tasks. As one progressed through school, assignments became longer. Grades on such assignments reflected more than achievement of learning goals. Neatness counted. Spelling counted.7 Work had to be in the exact format that the teacher instructed and turned in by a deadline. One could quarrel over whether all this nitpicking was needed for learning success, but there was no question that it was good preparation for the work world. Even today, many young people need to be instructed in preparation of a résumé because they don’t realize that employers check these documents for signs of being a reliable and conscientious worker and not just for information about past accomplishments. Moreover, explicit and implicit compliance with directions clearly was part of the curriculum in many ways. Tardiness, for example, was treated seriously. Society expected that by the time they completed school, children would have learned to show up on time. It also was important for students to leave school with the “basic skills.” First, students needed to be able to receive instructions. Supervisors could not always be present at each work station, so written instructions were important. This meant that students needed to learn to read (reading also facilitated learning in class and following the instructions of teachers). Second, before electronic computers, human workers did any needed mathematical calculations. Large businesses had huge rooms full of people working at desks with calculators carrying out the routine numerical work needed to keep the business functioning.8 If students could do algebra, they could get a wider range of jobs, since algebraic calculations were needed to estimate costs for a job, order materials, work out mortgage payments, etc. A bit of trigonometry facilitated work as a machinist. Knowing formulas for computing various derivable quantities also was important, since some of the schools’ graduates would, as adult workers, later need to estimate the amount of paint needed to cover a room’s ceiling and walls or figure out the monthly payment for a car loan or determine how long a trip of a given distance would take at a given speed. A smaller group of students was expected to go further, to be prepared for college. Partly, readiness for college was indicated by general verbal facility and by acquisition of basic knowledge taught throughout the curriculum. College entrance tests were developed to measure this. It is important to note that they were designed originally as aptitude tests, not achievement tests. They reliably measured the basic capabilities that predicted first-year college grades, which often were determined by successful memorization of substantial amounts of information. Good test scores signaled not only a readiness for college but also a readiness for later participation in a work world where the top players shared verbal facility and high levels of routine skills. There also was an element of shared cultural knowledge in school curriculum content, aptitude tests, and college teaching. For example, one aptitude test9 that commonly was used as a gatekeeper into some professions for my generation

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included items such as “Napoleon is to brandy as Caesar is to ??.” While such items measured the verbal facility needed to search memory for analogical possibilities, they also obviously required a certain body of cultural knowledge. That knowledge was not essential to the professional tasks that would be performed by someone once they passed the test, completed college, and completed professional education, but it did index membership in the social/intellectual culture for which colleges were adapted. A student from a wealthy family would regularly get to restaurants, see Caesar salad on the menu, and perhaps even ask parents what it was. That student also might be likely to see a picture of Napoleon on a brandy bottle. A poor student would likely not see Napoleon’s picture on the bottle nor see Caesar salad on a dinner table. So, people that “didn’t fit in” were effectively screened and thus not a challenge for college instructors. As a result, there were fewer complaints about “unprepared students” than if the college population was more varied socioeconomically.10 So, there was both an explicit canon and an implicit canon for children’s learning. Those who completed schooling successfully were prepared with the basic skills they would need for later success, proven to be of high verbal facility, and well-grounded in a cultural base that would make it possible for them to interact easily with others who would work with them in more demanding professional roles. The latter was possible because almost all students attended schools that served only or almost entirely other students from the same socioeconomic and ethnic/racial background. As schooling operated, success in school signaled compatibility with other people from the dominant cultural group. While perpetuating racism – and that is a major shortcoming – this situation was relatively optimal for achieving the goals of those families most likely to be influential with policy makers, though it amounted to discrimination based on cultural membership and family socioeconomic status. Indeed, throughout most of history, there has been a complete blurring of any distinction between schooling in needed work skills and schooling as assimilation into the majority culture. If one advanced in formal education, future employers could be certain that one was fully grounded in the culture as well as specifically educated for a range of professional and work roles. Only a small proportion of students made it to the end of the educational path, but generally, all who made it through secondary education had good prospects for life. However, there always have been, at least implicitly, multiple school systems, each one preparing students for the expected life of the socioeconomic class their part of the system served. Once we set the societal goal of giving everyone a fair chance at life success, the approach of the past becomes inadequate.

Goals for Education in the Future Today, society’s goals for education have changed. In a country the size of the US with instant and ubiquitous communication, a multicultural society is inevitable unless one cultural group subjugates the others, as has happened in our history but is hopefully not in our education future. In a world of smart machines, trying to keep society dependent on the skills a group of people have after machines have

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accumulated those same skills can easily become unsustainable rent seeking. Change is rapid, and to have a comfortable and secure life, one must be able to interact with people from many different sociocultural and disciplinary backgrounds. Moreover, the high correlation of race and ethnicity with socioeconomic class means that the old system of different kinds of schools for different economic levels is not defensible today and probably never was. Further, to serve all students in our multicultural society, schools need to find ways to be perceived as important by all students, regardless of their cultural and economic background. Today, that is not the case. Geography too often bounds opportunity in our schools. Consider a student in one of the impacted neighborhoods in Pittsburgh, the city where I live. Geographers have shown that the size of one’s perceived world decreases as one’s family economic status decreases (Banerjee & Baer, 2013). When poor children are asked to draw a sketch of where they live, they tend to draw only a few blocks, while wealthier children will draw much larger spaces, sometimes even the whole country or the whole planet. What this means, to a large extent, is that poor children do out-of-school learning in a smaller world than rich children. If a child lives in a perceived world of several blocks, the experiences in those several blocks may not provide the same learning that is available to children who perceive themselves to live in a world that covers the earth. The first child may know no one who did well in life because of hard work in school, for example. The child living in the wealthier larger world may perceive multiple paths to adult life success. Many of those paths will require hard work in school, and this will be evident to that child. There also are substantial differences in the amount of verbal experience children get before starting school. At one extreme, privileged children have parents or other caregivers who spend substantial amounts of time engaged in verbal interactions with them, who read to them a lot, and who arrange other experiences, including skilled preschool opportunities. At the other extreme, single parents work multiple jobs to earn enough to feed their families, struggle with long trips to and from work on inadequate transportation systems, cannot afford skilled caretakers for their children, and have little time left after work and commuting for extended verbal interactions with them. Looking only at reading, consider the difference that 20 minutes a day of verbal interaction might make in a preschool child’s life. In the first five years of life, there are a little over 1800 days. Twenty minutes a day amounts to a total of over 36,000 minutes. Even at the slower speed of conversations between adults and young children, there likely are at least 60 words per minute (normal conversation among adults is around 120 words per minute). That means a total of over 2 million words of conversation (36,000  60 = 2,160,000) in those extra 20 minutes per day. Reading depends upon prior experience hearing words, and 2 million extra wordhearing opportunities can make a big difference in how ready a child is to learn to read when entering school! Television can help provide verbal experience, but it doesn’t produce the same level of opportunity to reflect on what just was heard and often is “tuned out.” A similar argument can be made that less wealthy

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students receive much less grounding in basic number concepts that underpin arithmetic and mathematics. The context in which a child spends days and nights means a lot, yet our school curricula are almost never explicitly adjusted for that context and often there is little implicit adjustment either, except perhaps in the cases where a teacher does not believe that a child from a particular neighborhood can learn what is being taught, which is not a positive adjustment. In our multicultural society, schools need to take account of the reality that different children, through learning outside of school, have different answers to the question of whether it is important to work hard at learning in school (Carroll Massey, et al., 1975). They also will differ in their perceptions of how hard they are working relative to their peers who may live in different life contexts. In an urban setting, it is quite possible for students doing poorly in school to perceive that they spend more time on homework than those doing well, when exactly the opposite is the case (Carroll Massey, et al., 1975). All of us feel that a task is harder when it does not appear to be related to any good outcome for us down the road or when we see that the task is easier for others who have a more privileged life. Tailoring motivation messages and other incentives to what students already know is essential. One way for this to get started is the practice in some districts of having teachers visit the families of their students before school begins in the fall or soon thereafter. This allows students and their parents to see teachers and the school as being tuned to their background and needs. There also is starting to be a good research literature on how to motivate students to do more and deeper academic work.11 Much of teaching depends on what students already know, and good teachers attend to student prior knowledge. However, students from different backgrounds may have different prior experiences to draw on, and schooling must be sensitive to that. A classic example (Nardi, 1995) was given a while ago by Lucy Suchman, an anthropologist. She was looking at people carrying out portioning tasks in a Weight Watchers program. One participant wanting to eat ¾ of the daily allocation of ⅔ cup of cottage cheese dealt with the task by measuring ⅔ cup with a measuring cup, patting the measured cottage cheese on a cutting board into a circle, and then portioning off ¾ of the circle. That worked perfectly for that participant, but other participants may have had no experience with rolling out dough or otherwise envisioning a three-dimensional mass as also being able to become a surface to be measured. In a middle school classroom, some students might have experience with cottage cheese and others may not. For some other student, weighing out a ⅔-pound slice of bologna and then cutting a quarter wedge away from the weighed piece might work while the mathematically equivalent cottage cheese measurement might not. For still others, lack of experience with both cottage cheese and bologna might make them unable to measure odd amounts of either unless they had mastered multiplication of fractions. Ability to use math depends on what experiences one has had. Generally, without explicit efforts to understand the lives of children from different parts of a community, there is real risk of cultural inequity in providing

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effective instruction. A major task in preparing teachers for our multicultural student population will be to give them enough experience with enough different student backgrounds that they become able to design effective ways of helping each student learn. Part of what they might then learn is how to work with a child to better understand their out-of-school life. Having colleagues from many different cultural backgrounds also would be very helpful. Some of the solutions to experiential differences will require specific training, since they are not obvious. For example, recent research has shown that phonemic awareness (noticing and perceiving the individual sounds in words), which is generally a prerequisite for learning to associate those sounds with letters, can be improved in school through exercises in sounding out entire words and matching letters to them. These “decoding” or phonics exercises not only help struggling readers but also produce increased phonemic awareness (McCandliss, et al., 2003). So, simply replicating helpful experiences some children get at home may not be the only way to reduce achievement gaps and even may not be always the best way! To summarize, in addition to the eight goals outlined earlier, there is a different kind of goal for schools that is important. Schools must be able to teach children who come from significantly different backgrounds. While honoring those backgrounds, schools also should make it possible for children to pursue roles that may not have been evident in the context in which they were raised. Missed experiences important to effective schooling need to be replaced or compensated for. To do less than this is to countenance discrimination in education based upon the cultural and socioeconomic context from which a child comes.

Notes 1 Employers do sometimes substitute grade and degree requirements for tests of specific needed skills and thus create artificial requirements for school success. Sometimes, this is rational, because surviving school successfully is evidence of certain skills and dispositions that might be needed in the workplace. Sometimes, though, education requirements function to discriminate against the poor or minorities who, for a variety of reasons, are less well served by our current education system but who may still have the needed skills and dispositions. 2 The Department of Labor publishes detailed information about the requirements for emerging jobs, and this information is addressed in many articles in the press and research journals, but such information seldom is on the table in school board deliberations. What occasionally is discussed is how to produce graduates who, while lacking certain competences, have been pretrained for certain jobs in locally influential businesses. 3 I can illustrate this with an experience I had when designing systems to teach people to repair complex equipment for a major government entity. That department had schools that taught a lot of potentially relevant content, but they were not effectively teaching people to confront unpredictable failures in their complex equipment. At one level, top executives realized they needed to add training in handling novel system failures. The training department, though, kept asking me what part of their existing curriculum I would take responsibility for if they gave me some of the total training hours, even though the existing curriculum was not doing the job. In the end, I demonstrated that content they thought they had taught was not retained and that hence I could have some of the hours previously used to teach that content inadequately.

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4 The earlier New Standards Project (1998) did include an additional curriculum element called Applied Learning Skills, which was a stronger step toward goals for the age of smart machines. That element either disappeared from each state’s codification of its schooling requirements or had its components partially stuck under the four traditional mandated curriculum elements of math, science, English/language arts, and social studies. 5 There is some disagreement among economists about the extent to which automation and the rise of smart machines is resulting in the loss of jobs. The arguments are technical, but they tend to ignore the main purpose of this book, which is to clarify what competences will be needed by current children as they reach adulthood in the age of smart machines. To see a bit of the economists’ argument please see Mishel and Bivens, 2017; Acemoglu and Restrepo, 2017. 6 Compare US and Canadian texts in their discussion of the War of 1812 if you have any doubts about this. 7 My geometry teacher gave spelling tests on geometry terms, but always included his last name as one of the words to be spelled! 8 These people were often called computers. When machines appeared that could do the same calculations, they were called electronic computers to distinguish them from the human variety. With time, the qualifier electronic disappeared. 9 The item mentioned was on the Miller Analogies Test when I took it in 1970 prior to admission to graduate school. 10 At least, there were fewer valid complaints. Complaining about inadequately prepared and lazy students goes back at least to Roman and Greek times. 11 For a quick introduction, see the articles in the April 2016 issue of Journal of Educational Psychology (Volume 108, Issue 3).

References Acemoglu, D., & Restrepo, P. (2017). Robots and jobs: Evidence from US labor markets (Working Papers No. 23285). Cambridge, MA. Available online at www.nber.org/pap ers/w23285.pdf (retrieved March 30, 2017). Banerjee, T., & Baer, W. C. (2013). Beyond the Neighborhood Unit: Residential Environments and Public Policy. Springer Science & Business Media. Berliner, DavidC. (2011). The context for interpreting PISA results in the USA. In M. A. Pereyra, H. G. Kotthoff, & R. Cowen (Eds). PISA Under Examination (pp. 1–14). Rotterdam, Boston and Taipei: Sense Publishers. Jackson, P. W. (1990). Life in Classrooms. New York: Teachers College Press. Carroll Massey, G., Vaughn Scott, M., & Dornbusch, S. M. (1975). Racism without racists: Institutional racism in urban schools. The Black Scholar, 7(3), 10–19. McCandliss, B., Beck, I. L., Sandak, R., & Perfetti, C. (2003). Focusing attention on decoding for children with poor reading skills: Design and preliminary tests of the word building intervention. Scientific Studies of Reading, 7(1), 75–104. doi: https://doi.org/10. 1207/S1532799XSSR0701_05 Mishel, L., & Bivens, J. (2017). The zombie robot argument lurches on. Available online at www.epi.org/files/pdf/126750.pdf (retrieved August 22, 2017). Mitroff, I., Hill, L., & Alpaslan, C. (2013). Rethinking the Education Mess: A Systems Approach to Education Reform. New York: Springer. Nardi, B. A. (Ed.). (1996). Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human-Computer Interaction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. New Standards Project (1998). Available online at http://ncee.org/publications/archi ved-publications/new-standards-2/ (retrieved November 4, 2018).

5 SCHOOLING Curriculum and How It Should Change

So, where are schools today in terms of overall curriculum issues, and where do we need education to go? Currently, schools follow a curriculum that is dominated by the subject matters – mathematics, science, social studies, language arts, perhaps a foreign language, and a usually a little bit of the arts and physical education. While major curriculum reform efforts occur from time to time – such as the Common Core State Standards (National Governors Association, 2010) – teachers and school leaders in general see the curriculum areas as remarkably stable. After all, that is what they know how to teach. Moreover, each subject area is, in its specification, dominated by researchers and specialists who are committed to that subject and its importance. Change comes slowly, and it comes, almost always, within the silos of the individual subjects. Curriculum-related research focuses mostly on improving how traditional content of each subject is taught. Assessments and accountability focus on how much of the traditional content has been mastered. Content often is presented rather abstractly or only in terms of other curricular content, especially on tests, because use of any specific real-life context is believed to unfairly privilege students who happen to be more familiar with that context. New goals for schooling that build on multiple subjects fare poorly, as do proposals for adding content that does not fit one of the existing subject-matter silos. When new content is added, it generally is added as an extra, sometimes not even taught within the core school day. The current emergence of “maker” activity is an example of new content that often is available after school but less often as part of the standard school day1 unless it replaces a study hall or some other elective period. Maker activity is activity in which students work to create something new. It is the one area in some schools where students can be creative, and it often is highly motivating. Examples of maker projects include making devices to solve social problems, such as helpful tools for physically challenged people, making computer games, and even, in one school I observed, making a

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functional guitar (see, for example, Halverson & Sheridan, 2014). Not surprisingly, it usually occurs outside the normal school day (unless an enterprising teacher with a flexible principal decides to include it in subject-matter teaching), since the subject matters own the regular class time. There are several reasons why there is so much resistance to rethinking the school day? Let’s unpack each of them. First, professional development is not part of public education in any substantial way, even if people say it is. Compare teachers to physicians. If a new treatment for a disease is discovered and proves much better than current practice, eventually it becomes a standard of care. If a physician refuses to learn how to diagnose and administer the new treatment, they will, at a minimum, lose business to other physicians who get the needed professional development. They also risk being sued if they stick to the old treatment and it fails to work for a patient. In fact, state licensing laws often require health professionals to pursue professional development on their own and at their own expense to maintain a license to practice their profession. My son is a nurse, and he regularly gets paid time for training in new processes. New nurses, who already received months of in-hospital training in college before being licensed, must spend many additional weeks being mentored and supervised by someone as experienced as him before being put on their own. If a new bit of content is shown to be important for children to learn, teachers expect school systems to provide the needed training and to pay them to participate in it, just as happens with nurses. However, school systems, being pressed for cash, almost always skimp on such training if they provide it at all. Teachers, in turn, often being treated as low-status workers, use what power they have – unions and professional organizations – to resist any effort to hold them accountable for teaching content that they have not been trained to teach. Moreover, while the standard subject content is universally accepted, any new content becomes a political issue, both because teachers feel they are not prepared to teach it and because one or another interest group may feel threatened by the content (environmental sustainability is an example of a content area that gets challenged both because it is hard to teach and because it requires some new approaches, and some groups object to the topic being taught at all). The Common Core State Standards (National Governors Association, 2010) provide a good example of how this plays out. The standards went beyond current content goals, not in the specific content to be taught but in how deeply it was to be engaged in school and learned and how extensively it was to be practiced in ways that come closer to the skills needed to survive in the age of smart machines. Initially, the Common Core was adopted by almost all the state governors and supported by almost all the chief state school officers. This reflected shared understanding of how much the new content would be needed by the children now in school. Soon, though, it became clear that teachers were not getting the help they needed to become able to teach the new curriculum. Even worse, as state tests began to include the new content, mean scores fell, and teachers and schools were accused of falling down on the job. While these new tests were developed to hold

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teachers accountable for the new content, generally little investment was made in preparing teachers to teach it. Teachers then resisted the Common Core and especially the assertion that all children could learn it. Their unions began to resist accountability requirements related to the Common Core, and political groups, some supported by teachers, began to resist aspects of it. But the political scene was not dominated by a party that had supported teacher unions, so the teachers and their unions needed to find a way to resist the Common Core in places where conservative groups held sway. The answer was to emphasize the federal role in promoting the Common Core, since the conservative right strongly resists federal involvement in setting curriculum for schools. Soon, every time the federal government tried to support the Common Core, the right resisted and called it an example of federal overreach. This happened even though the push for the Common Core came substantially from the business world and the state governors, many of whom were conservatives. Today, we are in a holding pattern in which the goals and much of the substance of the Common Core are still widely supported, especially by the business world, but the label Common Core and key actions needed to implement it successfully are widely resisted. The second force that is a barrier to changing the goals of schooling is assessment, as noted already above. We live in a time when we search for and value simple indicators of outcomes. When it comes to education, news media and political groups focus attention on standardized achievement tests. While assessment is important, the current way in which we assess how well schooling is serving our children is dangerously inadequate. The media need for simple sound-bite statements about how well our schools are functioning prevails over any effort to measure the subtle differences among those who can pass standardized tests between those equipped for life in the age of smart machines and those schooled but not prepared for that life. It is interesting to compare educational assessment to medical assessment. Some aspects of medical assessment are a bit uncomfortable, such as blood tests and, for some, even being weighed. However, people who do medical testing are trained to make the experience as positive as possible and to minimize patient stress. When a procedure can be made more pleasant, it often is modified to be so. Many people pick doctors who make the testing process less uncomfortable. In contrast, there often is effort invested in making educational assessments more stressful. Teachers and principals tell students that poor performance could lead to not getting into college or their teachers being fired or their principal not getting a bonus. Parents obsess about the standardized tests used for college admission decisions and how they stress their children. Even worse, we send our children many signals that not all students can do well on achievement tests. Reports of average test scores for schools often are made in ways that suggest that inadequate performance is due to one or another characteristic of the students in those schools. The message to children – and to the communities in which they live – is that school usually fails to educate many students. Even worse, the thresholds for being labeled proficient often are set partly politically, leaving it unlikely that even someone who gets a score labeled as proficient is

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in fact well prepared for life. When a school moves from having 15% of its students labeled proficient (and the cutoff for “proficiency” generally is a low threshold itself) to having 20% “proficient,” this is treated as a major accomplishment. In such a situation, all too common, we have declared victory when at least 80% of the children still are not learning anything close to what they need.

Transition: Living in Two School Worlds at Once In many ways, rapid changes in human roles lead to instabilities. We can expect to live for a while in two worlds at once. In one world, changes like the Common Core are attacked as unfair and politically unacceptable. In another, we know down deep that education needs to change to prepare our children for a world of smart machines. We live in both these worlds at the same time! Even as the Common Core is attacked because of the accountability schemes related to it, schools are trying to add needed learning opportunities that provide some of the newly needed content. Recent maker activities (Halverson & Sheridan, 2014) in schools are a good example. Many of our best schools have added, usually as an option, places and times during which students can make something real. Often, what they make is partly automated, so they need to learn to write the program code to operate what they have made. Sometimes, particularly gifted students make amazing things. As noted above, I met a student a while ago whose maker project was to build a guitar from scratch; the result was a guitar that was exceptionally good looking and completely functional. Often, maker activity takes place at least partly in newly found time, such as after school. Each subject area owns its own part of the school day, and no area gives up its time without a major fight. So, for example, coding is introduced during maker projects but far less often in math class or science class, even though students could extend their ability to use math and science as envisioned by the Common Core if they could do modest levels of coding. So, why are schools all introducing little bits of coding in “maker” workshops and similar setups while resisting the Common Core? Basically, it’s because our education system is both living in the past and desperate to be relevant to the future. Our policies, especially for education, reflect the belief that getting to college is the goal for all students, and the curriculum is whatever colleges currently say they want – more properly, what we think they want. HR departments are currently screening job applicants by looking at their education levels, preserving the dominance of traditional curricular goals, since college entry tests are based on them. Identifiable groups of people are failing to get jobs because they didn’t complete high school, college, or some other post-high-school education. So, we push schools to boost the test scores of their students on the traditional curriculum; if all students are eligible for post-high school education, then the K-12 school world can feel that it has done its job, independent of how prepared students are for life in the age of smart machines. If current tests are part of the path to college and consideration for decent jobs, schools will teach to those tests!

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However, even as the world of the industrial economy continues and drives school policy, the world of smart machines is taking off. We are in that world, too. The smart machine economy is starting to take hold, but we simultaneously also remain in the world of the industrial economy. Today, the industrial economy still is driving school policy, even though the smart machine economy already is a stronger force with respect to employment. As the smart machine economy comes to dominate, schooling needs to change more completely, so it addresses the opportunities today’s students, rather than their teachers’ generation, will see. The very best private schools (and a few top public schools) have progressed toward the needed change, but almost all public schools and most private ones lag substantially. Even now, companies well established in the smart machine economy are looking for other indicators of job readiness, since school success is proving less predictive of job success. This is why we are seeing the rise of various “badge” schemes, arrangements where organizations offer a variety of learning experiences relevant to the age of smart machines and then certify people who have successfully completed those learning experiences. And, we even see occasional cases of successful people arguing that it is better to drop out than to stay on the path through college. Research continues to get produced showing that college education in its relatively traditional form still matters for job and income security, and in the past completing traditional education certainly did matter. Simultaneously, many colleges are rethinking how they operate and providing education that suits the age of smart machines. Unfortunately, though, most schemes to get more students to and through college do not involve those more forward-thinking colleges, nor, generally, do those colleges completely ignore achievement tests based upon traditional curriculum. As noted above, the biggest effort to transition schooling from the traditional model to one that fits the age of smart machines has been the Common Core State Standards (National Governors Association, 2010). The basic idea of the Common Core is that machines are better than people at recalling simple facts and doing routine processes. People still have the advantage when deep analysis of ideas and deep thinking are required.2 That would suggest that schooling should focus more on learning how to tackle bigger tasks that require thinking hard, trying out ideas for understanding, and working until a situation is well understood. That’s what the Common Core is generally about. The transition from the industrial age of education to the smart-machines age likely will be complex for any given societal aspect or industry, with some institutions perseverating within the old model while others are jumping even now to a new model better suited to where our world is headed. Note also that this schizophrenic situation, where some aspects of our daily lives are driven by one world while a different and incompatible world drives other aspects, is very stressful to many people. The assumptions of the old world are failing them. They lose their jobs or can’t find one in the first place. They follow suggestions from authorities and it doesn’t help. They see others doing quite well and assume that this is because they have special privileges in our society. In this, those who are suffering

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are partly right, but they generally guess poorly about what they need that they didn’t get. When this kind of abrupt transition occurs, where society’s beliefs about what it takes to be successful are suddenly shattered, several things happen. First, there is a retreat to the past. Things used to work. We don’t understand what is failing today, but perhaps if we would just go back to an earlier time, it would all be better. Or, we decide that we have all the right structures in our society but people in some roles are not doing what they are supposed to do. The No Child Left Behind Act and the continuing focus on tracking down and eliminating bad teachers reflects that kind of view. At a broader level, the theme of malfeasance also infects politics. If only we stopped government from some of what it does or fired many teachers or kept out immigrants or punished more bankers, everything would be okay, we think. A key message of this book is that many of the structures of our society, and especially the structures and content of our public education systems, need to change substantially and qualitatively to help assure that our children will thrive in the age of smart machines. Education is not failing simply because not all teachers do their jobs or because the federal government is setting curriculum. School systems are failing because they don’t provide all the learning needed for students to thrive in the age of smart machines. Contributing to the causes of failure are the myriad ways in which income and class are correlated with immunity from changes in valued human roles. Factory workers simply lose their jobs when their roles are taken over by machines. Many educators and government officials have substantial job protection whether or not they act to help assure less displacement of blue-collar workers. I do not present here a formula that will magically solve the problems our schools face. Rather, my purpose is to gather, in one place, several bodies of relevant knowledge that may not be on the table together when educational policy is discussed. This will allow a more careful consideration, perhaps, of some of the policy solutions that dominate political fights over education and may help provide a basis for a more productive set of public discussions of where we need to go. I next consider each of the categories of learning that are discussed earlier in this book, with a view toward starting discussions about how that category can be implemented effectively.

The Ability to Learn Efficiently and Quickly People may disagree about exactly what competences will be needed in the age of smart machines. One thing on which there should be agreement, though, is that we are in a period of rapid change, which means that for some time to come, almost everyone will need periodically to acquire new knowledge and competence. This has been the case for a while, at least for professionals, but it is becoming a universal reality. Part of the need for continual learning and cognitive retreading comes from changes in how different jobs are done. For example, the phone in my office was quite stable in its demands for decades. Suddenly, this past summer, it was replaced by an integrated system of communication that lives partly in a machine that looks

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like my old phone, partly in the cloud, and partly on my desktop computer. It displays a lot of information and can let me signal to the phone system when I can’t be interrupted (which transfers calls to voice mail). But I also can look up a person in a directory maintained on the University network and automatically have my phone contact that person. Or, while talking to someone, I can display something from my computer onto their computer screen. Going further, conference calls can be programmed through the system, video calls can be set up, instant messages can be sent to someone via my computer or even my cell phone, and I can have office calls ring on my cell phone if I wish. While everyone in our society knows how to make phone calls – the knowledge is embedded in our culture – I needed to do some self-managed learning to become able to make good use of all the added capabilities of the new phone system. I am a fast and skilled learner, so this can happen quickly. If I were not so practiced in learning new things, my organization would need to invest in detailed and expensive training before the advantages of the new technology could be realized. And, in fact, I hear some co-workers grumbling about how their phones don’t work well while I personally have not experienced any problems. Perhaps my ability to learn how to use the new phones is a bit better than theirs. So, how do we teach children to be good at self-managed learning? First, we need to remove implicit school messages to children that learning cannot be accomplished except through extensive and teacher-managed direct instruction. Children need to know that part of schooling is learning to learn and to manage one’s own learning. Techniques children often use for self-learning, such as “Googling,” need to be described as part of self-learning, though students also need to learn how to do that well and how to avoid learning and believing content that may not be accurate. School should be full of practice opportunities for children to undertake projects that require self-learning. That self-learning needs to be scaffolded by teachers and peers. Scaffolding is an important concept that is central to building a successful new schooling curriculum. The idea of scaffolding originated with Vygotsky’s (1997) view of the social foundations of learning. Vygotsky suggested that the progression to mastery of some competence runs from initial lack of awareness of the competence to watching others exercise the competence to being able to exhibit the competence when helped (scaffolded) by others to full mastery and ability to demonstrate the competence oneself when it is appropriate. From this, it follows that an important way to help students gain self-sufficiency in a competence is to provide scaffolding that supports their ability to act appropriately, removing this scaffolding as the student’s mastery increases (Greenfield, 1984; Wood, et al., 1976). Donato (1994, citing Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976) has listed six key characteristics of effective scaffolding, ways in which a teacher can support a student’s initial efforts to exercise a particular competence:  

building the student’s interest in the task, simplifying the task (by doing part of the task for the student while they work on other parts or by providing hints or suggestions),

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keeping the student focused on the task goal, making critical features and discrepancies between what has been produced and the ideal solution salient, countering frustration during problem solving, and allowing the student to compare their task performance to an expert version.

These six kinds of scaffolding can be applied to the skill of self-management of learning. Teachers can enact specific learning themselves, thinking aloud as they carry out a task of seeking out and mastering new knowledge. They also can let the student do the knowledge seeking and absorbing (with support), so students can absorb key steps in acquiring new knowledge and can see how those steps are carried out. While much of classroom teaching historically has been didactic, medicine has tended to use scaffolding as a primary form of physician training. A rather extensive analysis (Gadd, 1995; Evans & Gadd, 1989; Gadd & Pople, 1990) has been done of transcripts of medical rounds, and the following description seems consistent with that data and my own observations. A more senior physician will do “rounding” with medical students and newly graduated MDs, visiting patients on a medical service in a hospital. Depending on the level of competence already achieved by those junior doctors, the senior doctor will provide appropriate scaffolding. So, a resident who is further along in mastery might be asked to make a diagnosis of a patient and justify it. Someone not as far along might be asked just to summarize the relevant data (history, signs and symptoms, physical exam, labs, etc.). Moreover, rounds often are structured to encourage peer scaffolding, where one resident helps another resident work up a case. Also, the scaffolding exists at multiple levels, with the expert mentor sometimes intervening to shift the resident’s diagnostic activity from a holistic view to reflection on a specific sign or symptom. This approach is discussed further below, in the section entitled Ability to Evaluate Information. Self-management of learning is only one place where scaffolding can be a useful way to encourage learning. The approach has wide applicability. Equally important, it demonstrates an important aspect of learning often forgotten in our focus on the teacher as the one actor trying to teach a classroom of students. Teachers can teach partly by giving students big tasks and scaffolding their performance. They also can help groups of students learn to do more peer scaffolding of learning. Group student projects, with the right mentoring of the groups, are one way to transform education into the kind of social support and assimilation activity that Vygotsky (1997) described. To someone with a more traditional view of schooling, peer scaffolding may seem ill advised – the blind leading the blind. However, my own experience developing intelligent tutoring systems for technical jobs revealed that more than half the time that trainees needed scaffolding, all they needed was help keeping track of what all they were doing (Gott & Lesgold, 2000; Lesgold & Nahemow, 2001); they knew what to do but lacked the ability to handle the mental load imposed by just barely knowing what to do. Peer scaffolding often involves sharing the mental load across peers so that a difficult task becomes possible to complete.

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When extra brain power rather than new knowledge is what is needed to solve a problem, peer scaffolding can work very well. Student projects are another way to help students develop the ability to manage self-learning. Often projects require students to seek out information, figure something out, and then explain it to other students. This creates natural opportunities for self-learning. With appropriate monitoring by a teacher or parent and careful evaluation of a sequence of intermediate outcomes of the project, it becomes possible to understand what the student knows or does not know about managing the learning process. Teachers and parents also can, by asking appropriate questions, exemplify self-managed learning (e.g., “Gee, I’m not sure I understand this topic myself. How might I find out more?”)3 Project-based learning is beginning to have a wider following. It had been avoided to some extent because too often student success with projects depends upon parent support, and not all children have such support. However, it is possible to make projects a primary activity during the school day, and that is one way to get around the differential availability of scaffolding at home. It also is possible to coordinate school with a collection of after-school activities, and that too might provide more support for project-based learning. A few schools are starting to appear that have project work as the primary daily school activity. One example is the New Tech Network of schools (2018). It will be important to move the project-based approach into urban multi-cultural settings to assess whether the approach depends upon contexts that not all school children can access. Initial successes at that have been reported (Spillane, et al., 2016).

Socioemotional Skills There are multiple ways to look at the importance of socioemotional skills for future employment. First, the general trends in automation of job tasks is that cognitive and analytic tasks are being automated more rapidly and more successfully than tasks requiring social and emotional skills (Gershon, 2017). However, research is underway leading to preliminary robot products that have some ability to sense the emotional state of people with whom they are interacting. Significant venture capital is being invested in developing “sensitive” home health care robots (Fan, 2017; Softbank Robotics, 2017). Still, the increased wealth created by intelligent robotics will likely be spent partly on new human jobs that require emotional intelligence. Overall, jobs requiring STEM skills, other analytic and reflective competence, and socioemotional skills are becoming more prevalent overall while jobs with low cognitive/analytic content and low social and empathic skills are becoming less common. Moreover, the most positive scene with respect to job availability is for jobs requiring social skills. Deming (2017) has a particularly interesting simulation model to account for the increased value of socioemotional skill. Specifically, he suggests that complex work is done by teams and that teams are more efficient when they can split up work so that each team member does the tasks for which they have the greatest level of skill. Negotiating this task distribution, argues

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Deming (2017), requires socioemotional skills. In addition to the business world, as the proportion of people who are elderly increases and fewer workers must support more retirees, there will be demand for both emotionally competent robots and human workers with high socioemotional competence. In addition, the nature of our multicultural society is such that to serve all customers/clients, workers often will need to rely on broad socioemotional intelligence when their specific acquaintance with the cultural background of a client is incomplete. The range of work roles that requires socioemotional intelligence and perception includes caregivers, such as home healthcare aides and a variety of people involved in health care and in providing social services, as well as people providing customer service such as flight attendants. Often such workers are successful only to the extent that they can persuade people to act in certain ways, as when a personal trainer gets someone to exercise more substantially or when a flight attendant induces a passenger to conform to social expectations regarding speech or other interactions with fellow passengers or when a nurse educator can connect with a patient well enough to change eating habits. Going further, calls by employers for better work force availability often include a demand for people with “soft skills,” which, when probed further, tends to mean people who get along with colleagues and leaders, who interact well with customers, and who easily participate in tasks requiring teamwork. Especially in the age of Twitter, one inept interaction with a customer can produce huge losses for a company, so employers need to be able to count on their workers to be skilled enough to interact well even with difficult customers. A recent review of studies looking at the links between socioemotional skills developed in young children and their success in later life as adults supports the view that these skills are important (Goodman et al., 2015). These studies indicate that self-regulation skills measured at age 10 relate positively to many outcomes in adult mid-life, including income, best job to date, employment, college degrees, wellbeing, life satisfaction, and even not requiring publicly-supported housing. Other socioemotional skills also showed a positive connection with good outcomes as an adult. The studies found that measures of self-awareness and self-perception (related to confidence, another of our eight goals) also predicted a similar range of positive outcomes. Both self-control and self-awareness also predicted lesser levels of obesity, smoking, and drinking problems. While these results were found in the UK, there is no reason to believe that they would not be found in the US. There are a few ways in which schools can promote the development of socioemotional skills. One is to emphasize team sports in physical education classes and at recess in elementary schools. This can be a problem for the student who is not very talented physically, but sometimes it is possible to create environments where social interactions are not exclusively for purposes of physical excellence. One example at my own university is the emphasis in our student orientation on responsibility for others. There is a lot of traffic into and out of student dormitories, and students learn by the first day of classes that Pitt is a place where you always hold the door open for the person behind you. This is just one small way in which

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our students learn to be decent and caring people. This kind of small step can be taken at any level of education. There are always ways to be helpful to others and to signal that the people around you all matter and that all are important in your eyes. Another viewpoint on socioemotional intelligence has been provided by Hess and Ludwig (2017). They argue that to truly excel at the higher-level thinking and emotional engagement underlying the [skills for the age of smart machines] requires us to engage in four key behaviors: Quieting Ego; Managing Self (one’s thinking and emotions); Reflective Listening; and Otherness (emotionally connecting and relating to others). Underlying their view is the belief that high performance organizations in the age of smart machines will involve people who work as a team in an ego-free manner, challenging and deepening their ideas together. For that to work, they argue, people need to be able to focus on collective tasks rather than individual gain and more generally to manage their thinking and behavior. They also need to develop sensitivity to what others think and feel, since that allows the level of trust that ego-free cognitive interactions require. And, of course, they need to be disposed to think deeply and to keep challenging their own views. While there is a shortage of efficacy research on methods for teaching the socioemotional skills needed for work and for civic life, there are a solid range of supportive laboratory studies and of arguments for the importance of such skills in modern life. It will be worthwhile for school systems to try various approaches to teaching socioemotional competence. A possibly redundant variety of efforts likely will pay off. One important matter to keep in mind is that some students will gravitate to opportunities to enhance their socioemotional competence – the “born athletes,” “natural leaders,” and those who share cultural background with socioemotional leaders who emerge in the school environment. What will be difficult and yet essential is for school systems to focus their efforts on the students who need to be won over to taking learning opportunities for socioemotional competence seriously. Again, a redundant set of options may prove useful. In addition, parents and neighborhood groups might usefully contribute by providing additional activities where socioemotional competence can be cultivated.4 Recently, I received an email from a travel agency trying to attract my business. It included the content shown in Table 5.1. As you read the rest of this book, keep in mind the challenge of deciding how and where the dispositions and skills needed to provide the service described in that table might be learned. Whether for entertaining those more well to do or providing life-supporting help to the elderly, many people in the age of smart machines will do well if they have the abilities described in the table. While much of the core self-control skills and dispositions can be acquired in preschool or even before, there is good reason also to deploy further efforts during the high school years, both to reinforce what already is learned and to rescue adolescents

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who have yet to acquire adequate self-control skills (Moffitt, et al., 2017). Like most skills, the more practice, the higher the level of skill and the greater the resistance to depletion of the skill over time or under stress.

Skills of Civic Participation Much educational discussion has been focused on preparing children to become skilled workers when they are adults. Indeed, the beginning of this book is mostly about what it will take to be valued economically in the age of smart machines. Historically, though, school has first been preparation for full membership in society, which includes readiness for service to society, adherence to laws and social expectations, understanding of civic obligations such as voting, jury duty, and sometimes military service, and immersion in the culture(s) that compose our society. Our current society – and the likely societies of the age of smart machines – will require citizens to have certain key dispositions, competences, and knowledge if they are to work well. Part of what is required will also be needed to be a valued worker. Just as paid work in the age of smart machines will require skill at addressing emergent problems as part of a team, the same skill will be needed to engage with and vote on solutions to societal problems. TABLE 5.1 Portion of email received 4 August 2017 from Tauck. Reproduced with their

permission Great Service is…  Doing the right thing. Even if it costs money. It will pay dividends over time with trust and loyalty.  Treating customers as individuals. Travelers should not feel like they are treated as a group. Each person should be addressed by name and treated no differently than if they were traveling independently.  Authentic personal interaction. Communications should be from one individual to another. Not from a company, but from a person you can get to know. A letter should not sound like it’s written by a marketing department.  Attention to detail. Excellence sets companies apart and it takes a lot of hard work. It comes down to getting it right and being able to do that time and time again. Consistency is part and parcel of attention to detail.  Anticipating needs. Nothing is more pleasing than not having to ask for something, but having it anticipated and provided. This could be anything from an umbrella to a bottle of water.  Surprise and delight. They make a huge difference. It’s those little unexpected things, whether it’s a book on your bed as a turndown present or an unexpected access behind the scenes.  Consistent standard of quality. People do not want you to spend their money needlessly. Sometimes an inexpensive meal, like a lobster at a picnic table on a dock with a bottle of beer, can be just as satisfying as a five-star restaurant. What’s important is that there’s a standard based on the value of the experience, not necessarily the cost of the experience.

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Consider, for example, the emergent problem of global warming. As a society, we will need to develop shared understanding of what is happening as well as strategies that we will accept and execute to halt and reverse trends that exacerbate the problem. This is not too different from an auto company confronting the need to develop more efficient cars to meet consumer demand and government regulation. In both cases, various participants will see the problem differently, requiring an effort to achieve consensus. Even when the problem is agreed upon, there will be alternative plans for solution that need to be reconciled. Emergent problems, whether in a business or in society, require many of the competences in our list of eight. Civic participation and a civil society require more than that, however. Most notably, it requires a willingness to control one’s behavior in certain ways. Whether through the Ten Commandments, a related set of Quranic injunctions (Nigosian, 2004), Confucian ethics (Cai & Bruya, 2018), or other ways of understanding our world, a civil society requires adherence to a set of laws and customs. Much of what is required is in short supply today. A decent society in the age of smart machines will be difficult to achieve unless we have more uniform mechanisms for socializing basic ethical and social behaviors. Consider a trivial example. To avoid injuries and inconvenience, we expect others to adhere to certain laws and customs for sharing space as we move around. When driving, we expect other drivers to stop at stop signs and red lights. While walking, we expect that if other people are walking toward us, it will be least awkward if all parties keep to the right as they walk (in the US and continental Europe at least; in some other places, people keep left). When driving, this is an even bigger requirement. In crowded areas and times, traffic moves better if pedestrians obey traffic signals. Compared to the early years of my life, we see a general decline in universal adherence to these laws and customs that allow everyday life to proceed safely and comfortably. Regions that can restore this kind of social convention likely will be perceived as better places to live. It is possible that the age of smart machines will be one in which societies are willing to invest in much greater numbers of police, and perhaps stiff penalties will keep things in good order. Even now, one reason that many people don’t ignore traffic lights is that there are substantial costs if doing so results in an accident or if one is observed by a police officer. But there are not enough police officers to enforce simple rules of politeness and personal responsibility. Life is more pleasant if people follow social conventions of right-of-way and queueing even when there is no enforcer to penalize those who commit antisocial acts. While the wealthy can continue to retreat behind the fences of gated communities, life will be better for everyone if we work on ways to afford all children the opportunity to develop basic ethical and social competence.5 Throughout most of history, schools have been, in part, minicommunities in which children learned and practiced basic social conventions. For example, in a good kindergarten classroom, students get practice in moving in an orderly way from one place to another. Kindergartens sometimes even have had little miniature street layouts, so children could practice waiting for the WALK signal at a traffic

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light, crossing in crosswalks, and keeping to the right. Schools often help children learn to queue in an orderly way when waiting for an activity that can only handle a certain number of people at a time, such as a lunch buffet. These kinds of schemes work to the extent that children see school as an opportunity to practice everyday life. When that is not the case, several things can happen. First, children can decide that what they do in school need not be done elsewhere; instead of trying to fit in, perhaps they’re trying to keep from getting hurt or to be socially invisible. School teaches children to follow certain norms within the school community, but if the child doesn’t see the outside world as being tied to the school community, then the patterns and knowledge learned in school may not apply to life on the outside. Sometimes, children may see civility in school as not being reciprocated externally. Schools, in turn, may react to cross-cultural disconnects of this sort by moving from school as socialization to school as punitive of deviation. One way or another, cultural conflict outside school can make socialization and civic education inside school not transfer to the rest of life. And, of course, if the socialization does not occur in school, there is nothing from there to transfer. Another kind of problem arises when the practice opportunities in school are necessarily incomplete and need to be augmented by additional learning opportunities at home or in other out-of-school settings. Not all parents or other caregivers are equipped to provide this support. They may not know or may be unable to find ways to learn what patterns are being taught in school and hence may not know what patterns to reinforce. Resource issues may make it less likely that parents can reinforce some in-school lessons. A simple example is basic rules of the road for driving. If parents do not have a car, then they can’t provide the same practice opportunities that are available to students from wealthier families. If they work multiple minimum wage jobs, they may not have time to engage in many activities with their children, and they may be less able to arrange opportunities to practice yielding the right of way or keeping right or waiting in line to get an ice cream cone. Children from less wealthy situations may get less practice than other children whose parents are more able to spend extra time with them and are not so worn out from long work hours that they can’t pursue social learning opportunities with the needed patience. In the same way that school can provide opportunities to practice socially appropriate behaviors, it also can provide opportunities to practice various aspects of participatory democracy. Most schools have student councils, and some offer events like a mock United Nations General Assembly. Moreover, public events such as elections provide opportunities for learning more about the electoral process, and courtrooms and city council chambers generally can be visited. In some schools, students decide upon issues they want to pursue and may even engage in public lobbying for support for a cause they favor, such as sustainability efforts. Regrettably, even inside of school, many learning opportunities are available more often for wealthier children than for less wealthy. Urban schools and rural schools are especially short of public funds for such things as field trips. Parents of children in private schools and in some wealthy school districts may be able to

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provide extra funds for field trips, while districts serving the less wealthy do not have that resource. As a result, school for the less wealthy often is a bubble with minimal connection to the rest of the environment in which children live. Many social and civic skills may be learned through sports and other school activities. It remains the case that what is learned in play supports successful group response to big challenges – the Battle of Waterloo may have been won on the playing fields of Eton, a British “public” school.6 Nonetheless, because standardized tests focus on literacy and mathematics primarily, when funds get tight, school systems eliminate not only field trips to see democracy in action but also sports, physical education, art, and music, all of which provide opportunities to acquire some of the dispositions and disciplines needed to be a contributing and positive member of a civil society. While school may not be enough, and we may need much stronger out-of-school programs even when parents cannot afford to pay for them, schools should be funded and held accountable to prepare students to be good citizens.

Ability to Evaluate Information Another competence that is important both for productive work and for civic participation is the ability to evaluate information. There is good evidence that students, even at the college level, do not pay sufficient attention to whether information they encounter is reliable (Bråten & Braasch, 2017). My own experience in 46 years of university teaching was that, even at the graduate level, relevance to an issue at hand seemed to trump evidence about information reliability for many students. Further, in many cases, students simply lack the ability to evaluate claims and arguments. One anecdote from early in my career illustrates this. I had assigned to students the writing of a short paper presenting the most important things they had just been taught about a particular topic. After I announced this assignment, one student approached me very concerned. He indicated that he knew that he should be collecting claims from books and the Internet, but he didn’t know what to do if he couldn’t find exactly three points in favor of a claim and three against. That is, he had learned a template for evaluating information but without grasping how that template might be applied. Current political turmoil as I write this section suggests that the problem is widespread and is having negative effects on civic discourse. In areas of disagreement, each side cites everything from newspaper articles to TV shows to Twitter Tweets, making little differentiation for likely truth among the data that they encounter. While statistically, there are times that past knowledge should bias decisions about what is likely to be true, what we see too often today is that information, regardless of its source and plausible reliability, is accepted if it supports one’s biases and rejected as “fake news” if it does not. To restore any semblance of effective democratic process, whether locally or nationally, it will be necessary to educate the next generations to evaluate information and, more generally, to enact the self-regulatory and reflective processes that support effective use of information for important decisions.

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Especially important is to create opportunities to practice integrating different information sources that may partly conflict or may be grounded in different assumptions. The good news is that research is getting done on how to teach the needed competences (see, for example, Shanahan, et al., 2016; Goldman, et al., 2016). Teachers are starting to get both useful materials and approaches to providing students the chance to practice evaluating information. Many tools also are available to help students evaluate more complex claims and to understand them more deeply. My colleagues and I developed one such tool many years ago (CavalliSforza & Lesgold, 1995; Cavalli-Sforza, et al., 1995; Suthers, et al., 2001), and others have appeared since. Cognitive mapping tools also have been used successfully to help students learn to evaluate claims.7 However, evaluating information goes beyond deciding whether it is accurate. A special human role in the age of smart machines is to diagnose a situation, to evaluate the available information, gather more if necessary, decide what is going on, and decide how to deal with it. Many kinds of people do this kind of work. Physicians learn about a patient and must decide if there is something that should be treated, get enough data to gain confidence in a diagnosis, provide treatment, and evaluate whether the treatment is effective and whether the initial diagnosis is still the most likely to be correct. On a more everyday level, any time one gets a large bill in the mail that seems strange, the same general kinds of evaluation are needed. The information numbers that people call about billing problems, credit problems, or other issues in a relationship with a business need to be staffed by people who can figure out the caller’s situation and provide an acceptable solution. When a service desk worker does not provide a good solution to a situation where people later think the solution was clear, there can be heavy costs to a company’s reputation and sometimes to its finances. Evaluating information is part of a larger cluster of diagnosis, evaluation, and assessment that will be an increasing part of being human in the age of smart machines.8 Both from focused research and from decades of experience, we know a lot about how to foster the thinking needed to evaluate and respond to different situations. Literacy instructors know how to push students to engage texts more deeply when reading and to self-critique in a more disciplined way when writing. Teaching physicians know how to take an MD who knows all the facts and processes of medicine and teach her to diagnose and treat people effectively. To provide just a sense of approaches that are well known, but likely not adequately exercised in many schools, I next present an example of effective mentoring of a diagnostic process.9 The example (see transcript in Table 5.2) shows a medical student being given support while making a diagnosis. Dr. Jack Myers, who was an expert diagnostician and highly regarded clinical teacher, can be seen in the transcript to intervene at critical moments. Sometimes, he guides the student to think differently, as in line 8. Sometimes, he pushes the student to reason more deeply, as in lines 4 and 6. Sometimes, he quickly does some of the work because his learning goals for the student have been met, as in line 20, but other times, based on his assessment of what the student is capable of, he pushes the student to

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TABLE 5.2 Example transcript of medical teaching rounds

[1] S1: His complaints are those of dysphagia, which is marked by sticking in the low retrosternal area, and a dull pain in that area. He also gives a history of drinking fluids and then when he lies down, if he turns on his side, sometimes the fluid will come up to his mouth and then he swallows it again…. incidentally he’s had a cough. [2] M: ls it incidental? [3] S1: I think so. It’s incidental to the complaint for which he’s here. [4] M: I ask that question very seriously. Well let’s hear about it. [5] S1: He’s had a four-day-old cough. He denies morning cough or sputum production. [6] M: So, l suppose it is incidental then. I was concerned. Why? [7] S1: Well, maybe some irritation, a nerve irritation. [8] M: No. [9] S1: Well, I would certainly wonder, if he had a chronic cough, from what reason. [10] M: Well if he has a chronic cough, I can predict what he has it from. You told us this man has retention of fluid, at least in his esophagus. When he lies down, it comes up. And it’s very frequent that those people will aspirate some of it. So, aspiration disease, if you want to call it that. Bronchitis, even bouts of aspiration pneumonia, sometimes even bronchiectasis, are associated with esophageal obstruction. That’s the reason my ears pricked up when you said cough. Well, the best explanation for his cough is what? [11] S1: Bronchitis. [12] M: But there are many kinds of bronchitis. That’s the problem. [13] S1: Your choices would be viral or bacterial. [14] M: What’s your choice? [15] S1: Well he’s got a very low grade fever this morning 38.2 [degrees Celsius]. I would go with the viral. [16] M: Well, unfortunately there are hundreds of viruses. What’s your explanation for it? [17] S1: Influenza. [18] M: Sure. He’s got influenza. He’s febrile. It’s a fresh cough. He had a sore throat. And it’s been a comparatively mild illness this year. [19] S1: And he’s a heavy cigarette smoker. [20] M: That predisposes him to it. I think that I agree with you that it’s incidental. As long as he doesn’t get sicker than this, we’re not gonna’ worry much about it. (Gadd & Pople, 1990)

go further, as in line 17. What is clear is that the student is getting the chance to practice diagnosis in a real situation, is protected from dangerous errors, and is pushed to grow his skills further. The same kinds of opportunities present themselves in classrooms and in such activities as “maker” projects. In the current era of intentional spreading of disinformation using social media and other broadcast capabilities, children also need to learn that not all information can be trusted. Sometimes, reliable people pass on disinformation that they, for whatever reason, believe is true. More generally, people initially accept claims they encounter and must invest effort to evaluate and potentially discard them (Southwell, et al., 2017).

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Without practice in information evaluation, the required effort may simply be more than a person is ready or able to invest. For this reason, if no other, the competence of information evaluation has become much more important today and may be critical to preserving our democracy.

Facility in Collaborative Activity There is a long history of research on people working together to solve problems. The story of when groups do better than individuals is a bit complex (Laughlin, 2011), but there certainly are many situations in which collaboration is essential. A simple case is in hospitals. If someone needs to go to an emergency room, they likely will be seen first by a triage nurse, who will make a preliminary decision about what kind of care is needed and how urgent the situation is. After that, resident physicians and a more senior attending physician will work together on a diagnosis. Treatments, depending on their complexity, may be provided by nurses, technicians, and specialist physicians. If the patient stays overnight, nurses on each shift will need to communicate with each other and with on-call residents and the senior attending physician. These people work as a team, and they need teamwork skills to do that. There are many other teams – indeed implicit teams are involved in almost every complex activity in which we engage. Buying a car will likely involve interaction with at least two people and often several more. First, the buyer considers options with a salesperson. If there is a car to be traded in, another person, perhaps the body shop manager or someone with experience using online pricing systems, is involved. A financial manager handles the actual business transaction. Behind the scenes, one or more people in the service department prepare the car. The experience is positive to the extent that all the people involved communicate with each other and present a consistent picture to the customer that is sensitive to the customer’s needs. Other experiences with health care also involve many people. When I have my annual physical, I see a front-desk person who does several things, including preparing the electronic documentation for any needed lab work that is already ordered. An aide gets my vital signs, height, and weight. There is, of course, the physician. Lab technicians may be involved for blood draws, etc. If a flu shot is ordered, a nurse will need to provide it. And, of course, someone needs to do the record keeping related to health insurance. Again, my experience is most positive when these people form an implicit team dedicated to making my health care effective and not frustrating. Teamwork makes a huge difference in customer experiences, in good outcomes from transactions with customers and sometimes in broader good outcomes like public health. So, how do people become good team members? One can speak of the intelligence or the competence of a team, and people used to think that teams were successful primarily because each team member was smart or was especially possessed of the knowledge needed to solve the problems the team faced. Over time, though, it has become clear that a group’s “intelligence” does not come solely from the intelligence of its members. Indeed, one advantage of a team is that gaps

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in each team member’s knowledge and skill can be covered by other team members who happen to be more competent in peers’ gap areas. Not surprisingly, though, team effectiveness does depend on certain competences of team members. For a long time, social psychologists thought that team work was simply the integration of the intelligences of individual team members. But, there is evidence now that the collective intelligence of a team is not very related to the individual intelligence of its members. In one study, for example, the correlation between team intelligence and average individual team member intelligence was statistically insignificant. In fact, even the intelligence of the individual team member with the highest IQ was not statistically correlated with overall team intelligence (Woolley, et al., 2010). What is related to group intelligence (i.e., groups’ ability to solve problems together) is something called “Theory of Mind” (Apperly, 2012). Theory of mind10 is the ability to reason about the mental states of other people. For a team to work together well, team members need to know a bit about what other team members are thinking and feeling. For example, if I explain something to another team member as we tackle a problem together, it is helpful if I can assess whether they understand what I said and whether there are any doubts about my explanation. At a more superficial but still important level, if I am acting in a way that annoys a team colleague, the team will perform better if I detect that annoyance on my own and change course. When team members have better developed theory of mind, the team’s performance is stronger (Woolley, et al., 2010). It is likely that capabilities we call theory of mind are best learned through practice on teams, perhaps with coaching that is sensitive to this need. Some relevant research on this topic has been done recently, and it is quite revealing. It has been shown that results of a test called “reading the mind in the eyes” (RME – Baron-Cohen, et al., 2001) predicts group performance (Engel, et al., 2014). The RME test involves people looking at pictures of other people where only the eyes are shown and then guessing the emotional state of those people. The idea is that to be able to know what another person is thinking you need to develop some ability to “read their face.” Now, you might think that the ability to read faces is only relevant to group work when the group is meeting in person and people can see each other’s faces. However, the same study showed that RME performance also predicts group success in problem solving when the group is working remotely using online text communications to interact. This lends confidence to the belief that there is a broad capability around theory of mind and that having more of that capability is important to working in a group. To “read the mind in the eyes,” one must both have some ability to consider what another person is thinking and have the inclination to focus on possible signals of that thinking. The signals might be in the eyes when the other person can be seen and perhaps subtly in wording when only text communication is occurring. The essential point is that practice, probably coached, in working as part of a group, can be very helpful in preparing students for productive lives once tasks easily done by a single person are taken over by smart machines. We will need people who can work together, pooling knowledge that no one of them possesses

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completely, to address emergent problems collectively, including social problems for which no smart machine has been prepared. When teams have a client, as in the examples just discussed above, then it is also important for team members to have a theory of the customer’s mind that they share. More broadly, another aspect of being a good team member is to have the skills needed to understand the team’s goals fully and deeply. The self-management of learning competences discussed in the section above entitled The Ability to Learn Efficiently and Quickly are also important to this aspect of team work. Deeply understanding a task situation requires the same disciplined probing and cognitive modeling that is involved in all self-managed learning.

Management of Personal Finances In periods of technological disruption, personal financial circumstances often change from time to time. We can see this in the current stresses on people who are, or at least were, in the middle class. A very few of us are fortunate, having tenured positions or positions in government that are secure. Many others, though, who thought they were financially safe for life are ending up losing jobs or having their effective earnings decreased. Most of our children likely will need to be sufficiently on top of their finances to be able to handle periods of unemployment and to save for long-term needs such as housing, college costs, and retirement. The literature on financial competence paints a pessimistic picture. Here are just a few examples of inadequate personal financial management that have been detected in past research: paying interest rates much higher than necessary by making poor choices for credit, paying excessive fees for financial advice, and failure to put funds into a retirement account and thereby losing matching contributions from an employer (examples taken from Hastings, et al., 2013). Government reports regularly discuss current savings rates and median accumulated retirement savings, and that data also show that people generally are not prepared for any interruption in current earnings. For example, the median level of retirement savings found in a recent report of the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank is $1,100, and 35% of US households do not participate in any retirement plan (Chien & Morris, 2018). Because social security stipends are linked to earnings levels, it is likely that those with no retirement savings also will receive the lowest level of social security payment. And, of course, if one has only $1,100 in savings, any loss of income can be catastrophic. It has not proven easy to educate people sufficiently to change their savings behaviors. For example, it generally has been found that specific lessons on financial matters tend to be forgotten quickly and thus not to influence behavior. Just-in-time delivery of financial knowledge seems to be the best way to provide specific information and to train specific financial competences (Fernandes, et al., 2014). Some of the other capabilities in our list of eight may provide the foundation for good management of personal finances, including socioemotional skills and the ability to analyze complex information. In

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addition, certain mathematical understanding is needed to take account of compounding of earnings and of the cost of borrowing. To help develop financial literacy, the school curriculum should include many opportunities to use mathematics and other knowledge and skill to address financial management issues. Without such practice, relevant school subject content, even when mastered, remains what Alfred North Whitehead called “inert knowledge.” Whitehead discussed, in an address given in 1916 and published multiple times later (e.g., Whitehead, 1929), the problem that the skills learned abstractly in school are seldom recalled and used when they become relevant in real life. Opportunities to use new knowledge and skill to address commonly arising personal management problems is a way to begin addressing the problem Whitehead identified. Given the likelihood that current students will have periods of unemployment, practice opportunities related to financial prudence and wellbeing seem especially important. It would not be difficult to create simulation games that afford opportunities to test financial decision-making skills and learn from the simulated experience. Recent research also suggests that people who have control of their finances will be better employees. A recent study (Meuris & Leana, 2018) looking at truck drivers found that those who had more worries about their finances were more likely to have a preventable accident in the eight-month period for which data were obtained. The general finding in this work was that financial worries decrease cognitive capacity which in turn results in less competent on-the-job performance. Those who get their finances under control are likely to be better workers and hence would be expected to do better in situations where automation decreases the number of jobs of the kind they were trained for.

Confidence “The difference between students who succeed and those who do not may be the confidence to persevere” (Golinkoff & Hirsh-Pasek, 2016). Golinkoff and HirshPasek have included confidence as one of the basic components of successful learning and development, and they make a good case. The tasks left for humans in the age of smart machines generally are challenging. If we know clearly what to do in a situation, a smart machine can do it for us. So, productive human life in the future often will require confidence that persisting in an effort is worthwhile even if it does not immediately produce the desired outcome and even if we are uncertain about whether our efforts will eventually succeed. Certainly, the popular focus on entrepreneurship and failing early and often suggests that confidence in the face of frustration is becoming more highly valued. In their book, Golinkoff and Hirsch-Pasek (2016) suggest that the needed confidence has two aspects, willingness to try to solve a problem and persistence in problem solving efforts even if first actions do not pay off. Angela Duckworth (Duckworth, et al., 2007) has referred to the required persistence as grit. Confidence building is perhaps more difficult in the western world now than it may have been in the past. Today’s children have tended to have very protective

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parents, and the “protection” from frustration they have received may result in them being less confident when facing difficult tasks, including learning tasks. For example, many students find their initial learning efforts in college science courses to be challenging, and some of them give up rather than persisting in the face of difficulties. Xiaodong Lin-Siegler found that such students may become more confident and persistent after being exposed to stories about how hard famous scientists needed to struggle before they achieved scientific breakthroughs (Lin-Siegler, et al., 2016). On the other hand, when “helicopter parents” do some of the hard school tasks for their children instead of scaffolding their children’s efforts, those children may end up deciding that they can’t do such work on their own (Golinkoff & Hirsh-Pasek, 2016). Interestingly, when students are given more of a chance to periodically fail at school tasks, they end up being more confident and persistent, especially if the message at home is to reward persistence and not to react negatively to failure. Part of confidence is social. This point was made to me around 1990, when I attended a talk given by Corps Commander11 Rolf Binder, then the senior general of the Swiss army. General Binder was, at the time, in the process of reshaping the Swiss army to focus more on collaboration rather than simply drilling each individual soldier to carry out scripts decided in advance. It is, of course, scarier to be responsible for working with colleagues to prevail in a conflict than to simply have an assigned and spelled out duty. General Binder spoke of a statement he attributed to General Lord Acton12 who, asked whether his troops were ready for the Normandy invasion, replied that they were, that they would fight hard, not so much for king and country but rather for their peers fighting next to them. General Binder suggested that teamwork needed to be practiced, and that military training needed to be modified to assure sufficient practice of team skills in combat situations. Often, our apparent confidence comes less from being sure of ourselves than from not wanting to let colleagues down. If this is the case, then experience in cohesive groups where people take responsibility for each other may be part of an adequate education for the age of smart machines. Just like armies of old, unfortunately, US schools too often are structured around fixed responsibilities of individual students that are not connected to the overall welfare of the student body. One might conjecture that the kind of confidence needed to thrive in the age of smart machines might be built up by being part of teams given hard collective tasks and by learning to bear one’s share of responsibility for overall team success or failure. Currently, this is most likely to happen on athletic teams and sometimes in business simulations in university schools of business. With a little design effort, it could happen many more places in school and in out-of-school settings. Given what we are learning about confidence and the importance of valuing effort over aptitude (Dweck, 1986), it is worth reflecting on a basic element of schooling, the giving of tests. For many students, testing in school conveys a sense that there is a limit on how well they can perform cognitive tasks. Suppose that a teacher gives B’s to any student who gets at least 85% of the questions right on tests. Students learn a lot from such policies. First, they become practiced in not

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addressing the toughest cognitive tasks. After all, 85% is enough for a B. Second, they learn that different students perform differently: there are A students as well as B and C students. Even for A students, getting everything done correctly on a test is beyond what is expected. Standardized tests contribute further to a norm-referenced sense of self. Students decide that “I’m a B student,” or “I’m an A student,” or “I’m not able to succeed in school.” Tests give information about how well a student should expect to perform. If one holds norm-referenced (Glaser & Nitko, 1971) views about competence, one sees standardized tests as means for deciding whether a given student does better or worse than the norm. Students see themselves in terms of these norms, too. Going further, psychometricians have developed a technology called computerized adaptive testing. This approach carefully selects test items for each student based on its best current model of that student’s competence. As the student gets individual items right or wrong, future items are selected to home in on the student’s current competence level. Thus, every student has the same experience – getting a mix of items right or wrong. Given that success on such tests requires careful time management, the tests give students practice in giving up. If you can’t solve a problem quickly, it’s better to skip on to the next item. In real life, that is less often the case. The challenges of life are not adapted to each person’s capabilities. Ideally, in the age of smart machines, persisting in trying to understand and solve a tough problem will be an important skill. Thirteen years of schooling in which the best policy when being tested is to skip problems that seem hard and not likely to be solved quickly will not help in preparing students to be confident and persistent. Rather, hard project tasks where progress periodically is reviewed and the task then attacked again may be a better way to build persistence and confidence. Recently developed “high stakes” tests may tell us a little about how well teachers drill their students, but they also teach students to avoid “wasting” their time on tasks that initially seem beyond them.

Physical and Mental Fitness Given the general lack of physical fitness among many American youth, it is unfortunate that one effect of the No Child Left Behind legislation was to prompt schools to cut back on physical education classes to free up more time and money for drill and practice in reading and math. This turns out to have been an unwise decision. There is clear evidence that taking time for physical education does not lower achievement test scores, and in fact it may result in better test performance (Strong, et al., 2005; Trudeau & Shephard, 2008). More broadly, students who are more physically fit tend to do better in school (Chomitz, et al., 2009). This seems to be true even when socioeconomic status and body mass index are controlled for, so it is not simply that wealthy kids get more opportunities to stay in shape and are more privileged with respect to learning opportunities or that fat kids are not as smart. Kids in good condition learn better. In fact, adding physical activity to subject matter classes can improve both health and academic achievement (Donnelly, et al., 2009).

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The Physical Activity Across the Curriculum (PAAC) project (Donnelly, Greene et al., 2009) taught teachers how to use physical activity as part of the subject matter instruction. That is, instead of the children just sitting in class for six hours a day – plus time sitting on school buses – teachers used patterns of physical activity to teach. A simple example in a math class is using how far students can jump or how long a person takes to complete a race as the basis for arithmetic or statistics problems. Students in schools where the PAAC curriculum was used did better on achievement tests afterwards and stayed healthier. While their body mass index increased slightly, on average (regrettably, that is currently a common developmental occurrence), the students in the PAAC classrooms showed less of an increase than control classroom students. Increasing opportunities for physical activity does not create any problems for traditional academic learning. Indeed, it probably helps acquisition of the traditional school subjects. But, being healthier has other benefits as well. Students in good health are more able to persist in hard cognitive activity, and it may be that they also are more motivated to persist. Complex thinking requires the body to be delivering more energy and oxygen to the brain, and that happens more successfully in healthy people than in those whose physical condition is not as good. And, the same physical fitness that supports learning also supports the kinds of performances that are valuable in the age of smart machines. It is not an accident that many of the highest performing hightech companies have fitness centers as part of their office campuses. And, it is not an accident that some companies, such as the Asian car manufacturers, have group exercise activities as part of the working day for their employees. Beyond the performance side of readiness for the age of smart machines, there is another benefit of physical fitness for society. We live in a time and place where health costs are out of control. There just are not enough people of working age to provide the earnings needed to fund our health care system. So, many people do not get adequate health care, and we fight over how to change our health care systems because we can’t afford to keep everyone healthy as things are currently. But, if physical fitness increased, health problems would decrease, and the whole health care problem might become a lot more manageable. So, even if physical fitness had no connection with academic success or with ability to perform well in valued human roles, it would be a worthy goal for education just to help tame the health care cost situation. Along with physical fitness, mental fitness has become a bigger focus in the world of education. Notably, mindfulness training has become popular in some schools, both for teachers and for students. And, there is at least a little preliminary evidence that it does some good, from a meta-analysis of studies done through 2012 (Zenner, et al., 2014). While studies done in school contexts had all sorts of issues related to student absences, sessions being lost to school administrative needs, etc., there appears to be a positive effect of mindfulness training on cognitive performance and smaller effects on emotional wellbeing, stress, and resilience. Studies varied in whether they used meditation, yoga, or tai chi approaches, but all involved systematic efforts to train students to focus their attention, have increased attentional capacity, and increased breadth of focus.

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Life in our times has become very stressful for many students and their teachers. For this reason alone, mindfulness programs have been worth exploring, since they seem to be able to reduce stress. Beyond stress, though, in the age of sound bites, tweets, and pop-up messages, being able to control and focus attention may help students become more able to manage living in a world of ubiquitous and often intrusive messages. While the jury is still out, mindfulness shows promise as an approach to mental conditioning that can complement physical conditioning. It is most prominent in schools serving wealthier and more privileged children, and it seems worth pursuing for all children. Having looked at some evidence for the importance of the eight competences, we turn now to the question of how we can assure that all children acquire them.

Notes 1 This may be changing, slowly. Various media sites for teachers do now sometimes talk about maker activities to support specific subject-matter goals in the curriculum. 2 However, machines are doing some amazing things, such as becoming the world champion in the game of Go, which is generally believed to be the most complex game currently played. Still, it is easier to develop automated devices and systems to do the more routine parts of any given job, so the mundane remains the primary target for industryscale automation. However, when the force for automation is great enough economically or politically, very complex thinking can be automated. In the process, sometimes the automated approach ends up being more effective than the prior human approach. 3 The reader might be concerned that some of what is proposed in this book requires a lot of support from a teacher or someone else in the student’s life. In part, this is true. The Vygotskyan notions of learning see learning as the entering of a community, with the members of that community initially providing scaffolding but eventually coming to treat the student as a full and independent member. Later in this book, I discuss the issues raised when fostering the needed learning requires more than is explicitly authorized and paid for (e.g., a teacher) but where the additional community supports either are insufficient or are not adequately addressed by the school system. 4 Later in this book, I discuss a key problem of education, which is that it implicitly relies upon experiences outside of school that not all parents and other caregivers are able to provide. Ways to get around this will be considered at that point. 5 I acknowledge that wealth disparity increases the range of concerns related to honesty, but presently, we are failing to do our best to provide civic and ethical grounding for many of our children. The push to do better is appropriate even if achieving perfection is impossible. 6 This claim is attributed to the Duke of Wellington, but Wellington probably never said this (see https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arthur_Wellesley,_1st_Duke_of_Wellington). Still, the core idea is widely accepted. For example, on July 10, 2017, an email blast from [email protected] included the following quotation attributed to Clara Miller, CEO of the F. B. Heron Foundation: “We’ve got to put sports and arts and all of those other things that seem like you’re not learning anything back into the mix, because those are the places where people learn all the things that make it possible for them to care enough to want to think critically.” 7 A currently free tool that has been used widely for cognitive mapping is available from http://cmap.ihmc.us. 8 This does not mean that machines will have no role in such problem solving but rather that novel situations keep emerging. In the first sentence of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy observes that while happy marriages are all alike, each unhappy marriage is somewhat unique. Similarly, when things are going predictably, machines can readily handle the

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9

10

11 12

situation, but often humans are needed for the unique situations – the symphony player who must have his cello in the next seat over from him on an airplane, the homeowner who incurs a unique kind of damage to his house, the person whose unique body characteristics cause a disease to manifest itself in a way that usually indicates a different disorder. The transcript is from teaching rounds by the late Jack Myers, who was a master diagnostician and teacher. In it, he is at bedside with a person preparing to be an independent physician – let’s just call the person a student. The transcript is taken from Gadd and Pople (1990). Dr. Myers’ comments are denoted by M: and the student’s comments by S1:. Sometimes, the term “intersubjectivity” is used to refer to the ability of one person to know what another person they are engaged with is thinking or, more often, what the two of them share in their thinking. Our ability to interact with one another depends upon some level of intersubjectivity. Equivalent to lieutenant general. I have never been able to find the source of this quotation, which appears without attribution in many places.

References Apperly, I. A. (2012). What is “theory of mind”? Concepts, cognitive processes and individual differences. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 65(5), 825–839. Baron-Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., Hill, J., Raste, Y., & Plumb, I. (2001). The “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” Test revised version: a study with normal adults, and adults with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism. The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines, 42(2), 241–251. Bråten, I., & Braasch, J. L. G. (2017). Key Issues in Research on Students’ Critical Reading and Learning in the 21st Century Information Society. In C. Ng & B. Bartlett (Eds), Improving Reading and Reading Engagement in the 21st Century (pp. 77–98). New York: Springer. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4331-4_4 Cavalli-Sforza, V., & Lesgold, A. (1995). Intelligent learning by doing tools for technical and dialectical knowledge. In C. Zucchermaglio, S. Bagnara, & S. Stucky (Eds), Organizational Learning and Technological Change (NATO ASI Series F: Computer and Systems Sciences, Vol 141). Berlin: Springer-Verlag. Cavalli‐Sforza, V., A.W. Weiner, & A.M. Lesgold. Software Support for Students Engaging in Scientific Activity and Scientific Controversy. Science Education, 78(6), (1994). doi: https:// doi.org/10.1002/sce.3730780604. Chien, Y., & Morris, P. (2018). Many Americans Still Lack Retirement Savings. St. Louis Fed. Available online at www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/first-qua rter-2018/many-americans-still-lack-retirement-savings (retrieved August 30, 2018). Chomitz, V. R., Slining, M. M., McGowan, R. J., Mitchell, S. E., Dawson, G. F., & Hacker, K. A. (2009). Is there a relationship between physical fitness and academic achievement? Positive results from public school children in the northeastern United States. Journal of School Health, 79(1), 30–37. Cai, Z., & Bruya, B. (2018). Confucius, The Analects. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Deming, D. J. (2017). The growing importance of social skills in the labor market. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 132(4), 1593–1640. Donato, R. (1994). Collective scaffolding in second language learning. Vygotskian approaches to second language research. In J. P. Lantolf and G. Appel (Eds), Vygostskian Approaches to Second Language Research (pp. 33–56). New York: Ablex Publishing Corporation. Donnelly, J. E., Greene, J. L., Gibson, C. A., Smith, B. K., Washburn, R. A., Sullivan, D. K., … & Jacobsen, D. J. (2009). Physical Activity Across the Curriculum (PAAC): a

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randomized controlled trial to promote physical activity and diminish overweight and obesity in elementary school children. Preventive Medicine, 49(4), 336–341. Duckworth, A. L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M. D., & Kelly, D. R. (2007). Grit: perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(6), 1087. Dweck, C. S. (1986). Motivational processes affecting learning. American Psychologist, 41(10), 1040. Engel, D., Woolley, A. W., Jing, L. X., Chabris, C. F., & Malone, T. W. (2014). Reading the Mind in the Eyes or Reading between the Lines? Theory of Mind Predicts Collective Intelligence Equally Well Online and Face-To-Face. PLoS ONE, 9(12), e115212. doi: http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0115212 Evans, D. A., & Gadd, C. S. (1989). Managing coherence and context in medical problemsolving discourse. In D. A. Evans, & V. L. Patel (Eds), Cognitive Science in Medicine: Biomedical Modelling (pp. 211–256). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fan, F. (2017). Will artificial companions be our best friend in the future? Chinadaily.com. cn. Available online at http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2017-01/27/content_ 28066773.htm (retrieved January 27, 2017). Fernandes, D., Lynch, J. G., & Netemeyer, R. G. (2014). Financial Literacy, Financial Education, and Downstream Financial Behaviors. Management Science, 60(8), 1861–1883. Available online at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2013.1849 Gadd, C. D. S. (1995). Ruminate: A Model of the Multiple Roles of Diagnosis in the Communication and Evaluation of Expertise. PhD dissertation. University of Pittsburgh. Gadd, C. S., & Pople Jr, H. E. (1990). Evidence from internal medicine teaching rounds of the multiple roles of diagnosis in the transmission and testing of medical expertise. In N. Frederiksen (Ed.), Diagnostic Monitoring of Skill and Knowledge Acquisition (pp. 89–112). Hillsdale: Erlbaum Associates. Gershon, L. (2017). The Future is Emotional. Available online at https://aeon.co/essays/ the-key-to-jobs-in-the-future-is-not-college-but-compassion (retrieved June 26, 2017). Glaser, R., & Nitko, A. J. (1971). Measurement in learning and instruction. In R. L. Thorndike, Educational Measurement 2nd ed. (pp. 625–670). Washington, DC: American Council on Education. Goldman, S. R., Britt, M. A., Brown, W., Cribb, G., George, M., Greenleaf, C., Lee, C. D., Shanahan, C., & Project READI. (2016). Disciplinary Literacies and Learning to Read for Understanding: A Conceptual Framework for Disciplinary Literacy. Educational Psychologist, 51(2), 219–246. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2016.1168741. Golinkoff, R. M., & Hirsh-Pasek, K. (2016). Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Available online at https://books.google.com/books/about/Becoming_Brilliant. html?id=3BkjjwEACAAJ Goodman, A., Joshi, H., Nasim, B., & Tyler, C. (2015). Social and Emotional Skills in Childhood and Their Long-Term Effects on Adult Life: A Review for the Early Intervention Foundation. Available online at www.eif.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/ EIF-Strand-1-Report-FINAL1.pdf (retrieved July 6, 2018). Gott, S. P., & Lesgold, A. M. (2000). Competence in the Workplace: How Cognitive Performance Models and Situated Instruction Can Accelerate Skill Acquisition. In R. Glaser (Ed.), Advances in Instructional Psychology. Hillsdale: Erlbaum. Greenfield, P.M. (1984). A theory of the teacher in the learning activities of everyday life. In B. Rogoff & J. Lave (Eds), Everyday Cognition (pp. 117–138). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Halverson, E., & Sheridan, K. (2014). The maker movement in education. Harvard Educational Review, 84(4), 495–504.

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Hastings, J. S., Madrian, B. C., & Skimmyhorn, W. L. (2013). Financial Literacy, Financial Education and Economic Outcomes. Annual Review of Economics, 5, 347–373. doi: https:// doi.org/10.1146/annurev-economics-082312-125807 Hess, E. D., & Ludwig, K. (2017). Humility Is the New Smart: Rethinking Human Excellence in the Smart Machine Age. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. Laughlin, P. R. (2011). Group Problem Solving. Harvard: Princeton University Press. Lesgold, A., & Nahemow, M. (2001). Tools to assist learning by doing: Achieving and assessing efficient technology for learning. In D. Klahr & S. Carver (Eds), Cognition and Instruction: Twenty-five Years of Progress. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Lin-Siegler, X., Ahn, J. N., Chen, J., Fang, F. F. A., & Luna-Lucero, M. (2016). Even Einstein struggled: Effects of learning about great scientists’ struggles on high school students’ motivation to learn science. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108(3), 314. Meuris, J., & Leana, C. (2018). The price of financial precarity: Organizational costs of employees’ financial concerns. Organization Science, 29(3), 398–417. Moffitt, T. E., Arseneault, L., Belsky, D., Dickson, N., Hancox, R. J., Harrington, H., … Caspi, A. (2011). A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108(7), 2693–2698. doi: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1010076108 National Governors Association (NGA). (2010). Common Core State Standards. Washington, DC: National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers. Available online at www.corestandards.org (retrieved August 23, 2017). New Standards Project (1998). Available online at http://ncee.org/publications/archived-p ublications/new-standards-2/ New Tech Network (2018). Transforming teaching and learning New Tech Network. Available online at https://newtechnetwork.org/ (retrieved July 6, 2018). Nigosian, S. A. (2004). Islam: Its History, Teaching, and Practices. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Shanahan, C., Bolz, M. J., Cribb, G., Goldman, S. R., Heppeler, J., & Manderino, M. (2016). Deepening What it Means to Read (and Write) Like a Historian: Progressions of Instruction Across a School Year in an Eleventh Grade U.S. History Class. The History Teacher, 49(2), 241–270. Available online at www.projectreadi.org/wp-content/uploads/ 2016/05/F16-Shanahan-et-al-AUTHOR-PROOF1.pdf Softbank Robotics (2017). Pepper robot: characteristics. Aldebaran. Available online at www.ald.softbankrobotics.com/en/cool-robots/pepper/find-out-more-about-pepper (retrieved July 11, 2017). Southwell, B. G., Thorson, E. A., & Sheble, L. (2017). The Persistence and Peril of Misinformation. American Scientist, 105(6), 372–375. Spillane, N. K., Lynch, S. J., & Ford, M. R. (2016). Inclusive STEM high schools increase opportunities for underrepresented students. Phi Delta Kappan, 97(8), 54. Strong, W. B., Malina, R. M., Blimkie, C. J., Daniels, S. R., Dishman, R. K., Gutin, B., … & Rowland, T. (2005). Evidence based physical activity for school-age youth. The Journal of Pediatrics, 146(6), 732–737. Suthers, D., Connelly, J., Lesgold, A., Paolucci, M., Erdosne Toth, E., Toth, J., Weiner, A. (2001). Representational and advisory guidance for students learning scientific inquiry. In K. Forbus and P. Feltovich (Eds), Smart Machines in Education. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press. Trudeau, F., & Shephard, R. J. (2008). Physical education, school physical activity, school sports and academic performance. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, 5(1), 10. Vygotsky, L. S. (1997) Interaction between learning and development. In M. Gauvain, & G. M. Cole (Eds), Readings on the Development of Children, second edition (pp. 29–36). New

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York: W. H. Freeman. Available online at www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/archive/full texts/3928.html (retrieved July 7, 2017). Whitehead, Alfred North. (1929). The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: The Free Press. Wood, D, Bruner, J.S., & Ross, G. (1976). The role of tutoring in problem solving. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 17, 89–100. Woolley, A. W., Chabris, C. F., Pentland, A., Hashmi, N., & Malone, T. W. (2010). Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups. Science, 330 (6004), 686–688. Zenner, C., Herrnleben-Kurz, S., & Walach, H. (2014). Mindfulness-based interventions in schools – a systematic review and meta-analysis. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 603. doi: https:// doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00603

6 WHERE CAN CHILDREN LEARN ALL THIS?

In an earlier time when communities were more homogeneous – and even today in some smaller and some wealthier communities – school, home, and the broader community were all implicitly part of a system that provided some of the eight learning needs highlighted in this book. Students might be given long-term projects to complete outside of school, with parents and sometimes others in the community supporting completion of those projects. Outside clubs and other organizations and events provided opportunities to acquire some of the skills of collaboration and citizenship. Summer camps and religious organizations helped with socioemotional intelligence. Today, this still happens in some sheltered enclaves. It happens in the laboratory school of my university, and it happens in some of the small and cohesive suburbs near me that are relatively wealthy. But, for many children, including those in many urban public-school systems, it does not happen, or at least nowhere near enough. Moreover, some of the alternative schools favored by parents who see the shortcomings of our urban schools may actively try to “protect” students from learning experiences that could foster some of the eight core learning needs, such as the ability to work effectively with people from backgrounds different from one’s own. There are partial exceptions to this picture. Sometimes school systems find their way into special relationships with businesses or other parts of the community, yielding a partnership that can achieve much of the needed learning for many students (see, for example, Berdik, 2017). These special arrangements have not been studied very extensively, nor is there a clear sense that they can be achieved by every currently constituted school system. New systemic approaches will be needed if the eight competences are to be taught universally. For that reason, much of the rest of this book is an examination of how schools work and of possible paths that might allow every community to have public education systems (more

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than the schools alone) that provide adequate opportunities for all their students to master all eight competences. A major challenge that I try to define in this book, but for which I do not have a complete solution, is where the eight competences should be taught and practiced. While schools do adapt over time, it seems unlikely that the eight competencies can be developed solely and completely within the school day. We still need much of the subject-matter curriculum to be taught, and schools, unable to get their subject-matter goals achieved within the school day, already tend to use the full school day plus out-of-school homework to accomplish subject-matter learning. While it is possible to transform subject-matter instruction to provide more opportunities for practice of the eight competences, it still seems unlikely that schools can do the complete job any time soon. If nothing else, almost every teacher will need substantial professional development opportunities to master all eight competences and to learn how to foster them. Even with subject-matter learning, schools with very high success rates at teaching the core curriculum heavily leverage out-of-school learning. Any school serving children whose pre-kindergarten development did not include rich verbal experience will struggle to get all its students proficient in reading, and a similar pattern is starting to be seen as well in mathematics, where students whose early years included a lot of experience with numbers tend to do well while those who arrive at kindergarten with no practiced number sense tend to struggle (Libertus, et al., 2011). For these reasons, I believe that every child needs an education system that includes both a strong school and interconnected out-of-school activity in the home or in the community. Wide-ranging community education systems can work very well when the school and the external resources it leverages are articulated consistently. This happens reasonably often in wealthy communities but less frequently in regions that are less wealthy. In regions with economic diversity, it is not unusual that schools effectively serve students from wealthier families but fail to educate students from less wealthy backgrounds completely. Moreover, creating effective school-community partnerships will require educating the community on how important those partnerships and the richer education they enable are to sustaining those communities in the age of smart machines. When schools fail to serve less wealthy students, a common public response is to attribute blame. Some people blame public schools and argue that charter schools are the answer. Some blame teachers and argue for firing of imperfect teachers. Some blame parents for not “doing their part.” It would be more productive to think of the school and the other places in the community where experiences that help develop the eight competences occur as one large educational system (see Kania & Kramer, 2011). We might then attribute educational failures to inadequate understanding of all the system’s components, insufficient development of each component’s value in promoting the eight competences, and insufficient flexibility and redundancy of components to provide all the learning opportunities needed. In such a system view, for example, if we discovered that the local school seems unable to build adequate confidence in children from a certain cultural background,

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we might consider not only improvements at the school but also whether an afterschool opportunity in the neighborhood might more readily stretch to provide confidence-building opportunities. Or, if a neighborhood has few opportunities for team sports that are not highly selective for physical talent, we might decide to help a few community organizations create team opportunities outside the world of athletics. Maker teams are one of many examples of this. If we accept the system-breakdown explanation for much of educational failure, then we need to consider how it might change. It seems unlikely that the needed changes can come simply from forcing schools to change, since schools are complex systems with many forces assuring that they remain remarkably stable over time and hence resistant to change (Mitroff, et al., 2013). This does not mean that schools cannot change at all. Rather, change in schools is slow and costly, with long periods in which backsliding is likely. Similarly, efforts to “improve” parenting, even if motivated by the advantage that students enjoy when entering kindergarten from homes that provided substantial verbal and numerical experience, are unlikely to succeed on their own. Providing more opportunities for parents to learn how to help their children learn may be a significant part of an overall solution, but more is needed. To be significant parts of an education system for their children, parents need to know how to support their children in extended project activity and other learning, they need to have a reasonable level of the eight competences themselves, and they need to have time free from work and family care responsibilities to play their parts. As these requirements are not universally met and probably will not be in the foreseeable future, other organizations, mass media, and computational affordances will be needed to create an adequate overall learning system for each child. An example of mass media support for learning is the series of educational programs produced by the public television system, including Sesame Street (e.g., Salomon, 1977) and Electric Company (e.g., Ball, 1974). While these programs have had some positive influence on children’s school learning, there remain important differences in how children of different socioeconomic levels are exposed to and supported in building upon what they see on television and even in whether they have sufficient access to effective programming. In a time when people have access to hundreds of television channels, effective television programming for children’s learning tends to serve a niche market and not to be very visible to families who are not public television fans. When Sesame Street started, almost everyone had a TV set and the few available channels were accessed via broadcast, which was, in the US, essentially free. Today, access often requires a cable subscription, which has a monthly cost. In between our public schools and the role of parents and family in providing initial verbal and numerical experience, there are supplementary societal efforts such as Head Start and Early Head Start. Overall, these programs show positive effects for many of the eight competences, but they show variable and not always positive effects on standardized achievement tests of core subject matters (see, for example, Barnett, 1998; Love, et al., 2005; Barnett, 2002). This is not surprising,

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but it highlights a major problem in developing improved ways to assure that all children have a chance to learn the eight competences. Existing standardized tests are not designed to measure the eight competences, which means that public accountability for teaching them is difficult to develop. Without that measurable accountability, securing consistent public support for investments in developing the eight competences in every child will be difficult, especially if public investment beyond current schools’ budgets is required.

The Importance of Redundancy As discussed earlier, no one element in an overall community education system can be counted on to do the whole job of supporting learning of the eight competences. This is especially the case currently, when there is no societal focus on those competences while there remain rewards for even tiny improvements in mean achievement test scores. Certainly, there will be some teachers who manage to inculcate some of the eight competences in their students, but universal learning of broad competences, whether our eight competences or more traditional school subject matters, depends on more than just one or a few teachers. For a single student, it is possible that one teacher might dramatically change that student’s learning success. And, with extensive and effective teacher training, a teacher might become the transforming influence for many students. However, a careful look at how privileged students acquire the eight competences tends to reveal a much more redundant system, where out-of-school opportunities, home influences, and schooling combine to produce learning success. Each element is important – school, family, community – but for learning to happen reliably, there must be enough redundancy to assure that breakdowns of any one component are not fatal to learning success. As will be discussed at the end of this book, that redundancy may need to be coordinated explicitly. One way to understand this is to compare education to flight safety. Our society has decided that every flight should be safe. We don’t rate airlines by the proportion of their flights that arrive safely. Rather, we put in place redundant systems that assure 100% reliability. Commercial planes have multiple engines and are designed to work successfully if only one of those engines is working. So, an engine failure does not mean the plane will crash. Similarly, there is redundancy in the tools for steering the plane – a rudder and multiple trim flaps that can be used in differing combinations to turn the plane or to change altitude. In the cockpit, there are two pilots, each with a full set of controls. Multiple redundant indicators of critical information, such as air speed indicators and displays that show the angle of wings with respect to the ground, assure that the pilots have accurate information even if some displays fail. It is important to note, too, that all this redundancy has been maintained even during a period of major downward pressure on the prices of plane flights. Compare that to how we deal with education. Any time the number of adults in a school grows relative to the number of children, critics charge that there is waste.

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Adequate record keeping systems that might allow tracking of children’s longerterm learning trajectories are considered wasteful or invasive of privacy. Technology purchasing and maintenance is inefficient compared to the business world and results in poor technology in the schools even after substantial expenditures. Use of computer systems to supplement teacher-lead learning is considered a luxury. Extracurricular activities are a frill that we wish we could support but this year budgets are tight. Professional development opportunities are desirable, but we just can’t afford everything that would be nice. Overall, our society has decided that successful learning for life is not so important that we are willing to provide the redundancy needed to assure that it happens for every child. Moreover, even if we provided redundancy at the level of schools, reliable education for all children would likely also require both parent training and redundant out-of-school opportunities. Not every teacher is great. Not every child’s home is a supportive and nurturing learning environment. Not every outof-school activity fosters optimal learning of the eight competences. So far, we have not been willing as a society to provide enough redundancy in each area – school, parenting, community – to assure that every child receives a solid preparation for life in the age of smart machines. A way to think about what is needed for education to serve every child reliably and adequately is to think about education failures the way experts have thought about failures in other areas, such as flight safety or hospital safety. A plane or a hospital system is safe because when some elements function less than optimally, other elements make up for their inadequacy. James Reason (2000) at the University of Manchester provided a nice way to think about redundancy and reliability. Suppose that each part of the education system is like a slice of Swiss cheese:1   

one slice for each teacher a child has, one or more slices for the home scene, a slice for each out-of-school community activity the child might participate in.

An educational failure can be thought of as being like a hole in the cheese slice. Every slice has some holes, but once a bunch of slices are stacked, there might be no hole that goes all the way through. The trick in making sure you can’t see through the entire stack of slices is to have multiple slices that aren’t all from the same chunk of cheese – as long as the holes do not line up, redundancy prevents a child from slipping all the way through the stack. We can consider each teacher the child has to be like a cheese slice. If they are all regimented and forced to teach the same way, they will be like slices of cheese that have the same holes in the same places. Many children will fall through no holes, but some children will fall through some holes. Redundancy means that falling through one hole will not be fatal, because another “slice” of learning opportunity will block the failure represented by the first slice’s hole. Currently, in our society, the children most likely to fall through the holes are those who are

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from poor families and especially poor families of color. But, if parents are helped to become stronger sources of learning and if out-of-school organizations work hard to support learning by all students, there will be no holes that go all the way through the stack of learning opportunities. This will more likely be the case if there is not a tight regimentation of each learning opportunity. Redundancy and variation in learning opportunities is the key to making sure that every child is assured of the opportunity to learn. This may seem slightly counterintuitive. Usually, we think that one person should lead an overall design effort so that it is coherent and efficient. But a complete system designed by one person or one company or one school of education may not be as reliable as one that combines several differently designed elements. The single-designer system will have elements that are like cheese slices with holes in the same place, while a system that has less coordinated elements will be like cheese slices with holes that are different on each slice. A single designer can produce a system that is reliable for the range of students she or he can imagine. If no one instructional designer really understands the full range of students and families, then redundancy through multiple designers might be better. However, for the less-coordinated approach to work, there must be a shared understanding of the goals the overall redundant system is designed to achieve. Ideally, though this would require a major change in current privacy laws,2 the different elements in such a system – parents, teachers, organizations – would share access to data indicating which competences the child needs more help acquiring. I discuss this a bit further in the final chapter. What I am suggesting is a tall order. It goes against long-standing beliefs about controlling the cost of education, about ownership of information, and about educational privacy. Still, it would work best if the sources of learning support could share basic data about each child’s learning strengths. It may require more constraints on goals for each provider of learning opportunities than currently is the case. But it can also achieve something not currently possible – the eight competences being available to just about every child. Here is a simple, small anecdote of how a redundant but communicating system can work. To preserve necessary anonymity, I have been vague about the entities involved. Some years ago, I visited a facility in another country that did afterschool work with children from less supportive home environments. There I met, in addition to the staff and other children, a middle school girl from a cultural minority. As we approached her, she suddenly ran up to the agency director and gave him a hug. She felt safe and had a positive self-image in this place. It was very clear that the agency provided her with an opportunity to develop confidence that she could do complex cognitive tasks. They cooperated with the girl’s school. Each day, the schoolteacher would send the day’s homework assignments to the agency, and a counselor there knew just what was needed to help the girl stay on top of the school curriculum. The agency also knew, from other sources, that the girl had gone through a troubled period of running away to engage in prostitution in order to afford clothing that the other children around her wore; her mother had other

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priorities and was neglectful. Because they knew enough about the girl’s situation, they could tailor mentored activity after school to fill in gaps in the child’s development, mostly gaps that involved the eight competences. The school or the agency could have done what too often happens elsewhere. They could have blamed the family. The single mother was a piece of work, so this would have been easy. For example, she refused to attend the girl’s graduation unless the agency sent a limousine to take her there (public transportation in their country is cheap and pervasive, so it was not that the mother could not get to the graduation). It would have been easy to just attribute blame and be done with this girl. Instead, though, a redundant set of entities shared the necessary information, and she had a much better chance of acquiring the competences for successful adult life. I hope that someday every child will receive coordinated support and learning opportunities, regardless of why they need a bit more support and a bit more redundancy in opportunities to prepare for life in the age of smart machines. Before going further, the next chapter includes a brief personal reflection on how I received an education that included the eight competences. I grew up in circumstances that may not exist today, but it still may be useful to look at some examples of systems that have worked. In the next chapter, I provide one example, and I hope this book will stimulate others to provide additional ideas. One recent effort by John Merrow (2017) to sketch a path to an improved education system, while not focusing explicitly on the eight competences, contains complementary ideas also worth considering. After the personal reflections in the following chapter, I next look at how schools became what they are and at a possible path toward more effective overall community education systems. Then, I briefly consider how we might measure progress toward serving students better and more completely.

Notes 1 The Swiss cheese metaphor, introduced by Reason in discussions of accident prevention, is further elaborated in Chapter 14. 2 In many ways, school privacy laws serve to protect students from public knowledge of how educational systems have failed them. However, these protections also limit the extent to which multiple organizations can work together to assure that every student succeeds in preparing for life in the age of smart machines.

References Ball, S. (1974). Reading with Television: A Follow-Up Evaluation of the Electric Company. Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service. Available online at https://files.eric.ed.gov/full text/ED073178.pdf Barnett, W. S. (1998). Long-term effects on cognitive development and school success. In W. S. Barnett, & S. S. Boocock (Eds), Early Care and Education for Children In Poverty (pp. 11–44). Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Barnett, W. S. (2002). The battle over Head Start: What the research shows. Presentation at a Science and Public Policy Briefing Sponsored by the Federation of Behavioral, Psychological, and Cognitive Sciences. Available online at www.researchgate.net/profile/

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William_Barnett6/publication/247789953_The_Battle_Over_Head_Start_What_the_Research_ Shows/links/02e7e529c8bf531f14000000.pdf(retrieved October 9, 2017). Berdik, C. (2017). How Student Internships Saved a Chicago School. The Atlantic. Available online at www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/08/how-student-internship s-saved-a-chicago-school/537642/ (retrieved August 24, 2017). Kania, J., & Kramer, M. (2011). Collective Impact. Stanford Social Innovation Review, 9(1), 36–41. Libertus, M. E., Feigenson, L., & Halberda, J. (2011). Preschool acuity of the approximate number system correlates with school math ability. Developmental Science, 14(6), 1292–1300. Love, J. M., Kisker, E. E., Ross, C., Raikes, H., Constantine, J, Boller, K., … & Fuligni, A. S. (2005). The effectiveness of early head start for 3-year-old children and their parents: lessons for policy and programs. Developmental Psychology, 41(6), 885. Merrow, J. (2017). Addicted to Reform: A 12-step Program to Rescue Public Education. New York: The New Press. Mitroff, I., Hill, L., & Alpaslan, C. (2013). Rethinking the Education Mess: A Systems Approach to Education Reform. New York: Springer. Reason, J. (2000). Human error: models and management. BMJ, 320(7237), 768–770. doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/BMJ.320.7237.768 Salomon, G. (1977). Effects of encouraging Israeli mothers to co-observe “Sesame Street” with their five-year-olds. Child Development, 48(3), 1146–1151.

7 SOME PERSONAL REFLECTIONS

Being in education myself, I sometimes reflect on how I got the opportunities that I have had over my life (see Lesgold, 2016, for a more extended discussion; portions of this chapter that are in quotation marks are taken from that source). Partly, it had to do with where and when I grew up. The community around me shaped my understanding of life and of how to live. Partly, it came from school. Partly, it came from wonderful mentors and, of course, my parents. In addition, there was some luck involved. I grew up in a working and middle-class neighborhood of Milwaukee, where I lived from birth at the end of 1945 until I left for college in 1963. It was almost entirely white.1 I was a third-generation American, and so were many classmates, although some were second generation (with parents who migrated from Europe). My grandparents immigrated from what is now western Ukraine (then it was part of the Russian Empire), and my parents encountered the Great Depression when they were eight and nine years old and World War II when they were 19 and 20. At home, there was both a belief in endless opportunity for those who worked hard and a financial conservatism that was bred by the depression. While Milwaukee had been a hotbed for Nazi sympathizers until the US entered World War II, I myself encountered virtually no anti-Semitism, although there certainly were Christian activities embedded in the public schools I attended. Milwaukee, until shortly before I left for college, was a socialist city with a socialist mayor. This influenced the learning opportunities it afforded. For example, I attended two years of public school kindergarten. If I remember correctly, fouryear-olds came in the afternoon while five-year-olds came in the morning. Most of the kindergarten curriculum consisted of social skill development. Fulghum’s (2003) famous book accurately conveys a lot about the goals of my kindergarten experience. There was a modest amount of pre-literacy and pre-numeracy activity, but in kindergarten we mostly learned how to behave in school and in the

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community. There were simulated streets where we learned to watch for traffic and cross with the light, and more generally we learned to fit into the community by doing what it was thought that good community members did. There were boxes of sand and ashes (many people still had coal furnaces) on street corners, with shovels in them. On icy days, people were expected, if they encountered a slick spot, to get out of their cars and shovel a little grit to protect their neighbors…. The idea that everyone in the community is responsible for making life work for everyone else was regularly reinforced in kindergarten, in experiences in the street, [when] listening to the radio, and essentially throughout daily life. (Lesgold, 2016) I know, from my own life experience, that part of the apprenticeship for life needs to involve the community in which one lives. A caring community provides life lessons that schools only partly can provide. While each child’s home life may be different, and some may be extremely challenging, a community that sends signals about people caring for each other is a critical part of apprenticeship for life. A community that helps shape people to be prepared for life in the age of smart machines can perhaps be the result of government, but it need not be. Churches, foundations, and private social groups also can make such communities happen. In the best of all worlds, a partnership of government, the nonprofit private sector, and the business world might be especially effective. “My father was the first person in his family to attend college, and he struggled at first. He worked more than full time while also in school full time, and that did not work out. So, he had to leave school for a year.… But, he returned to school and graduated in 1948 from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in electrical engineering.” I was partly aware of this at the time and was told about it regularly as I grew older, generally by my mother. The idea that sometimes there are personal failures but that it was good to keep trying also was part of everyday life. “My parents were very nurturing, provided considerable intellectual stimulation, and … were fully committed to public education. When I was offered a full scholarship to the best private high school in the region, they refused to send me there because they didn’t see us as being among the privileged wealthy [whose children attended such schools]. They did send me to a variety of extracurricular opportunities that broadened my formation substantially.” This was in addition to the many extracurricular activities available after school and even during the day. “So, I learned to play the clarinet (the city provided lessons on Saturdays for $4/ year and rented instruments to students for another $3/year!) and was in both the marching band and the orchestra. Those provided many experiences of initially failing and eventually mastering difficult music. I was in the photography club and became able to take pretty good photos at athletic events; one even led to my first national recognition, in a contest for high school students funded by Kodak. Boy Scouts provided camping experiences that taught me a lot. Even the occasion

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when a classmate played with matches at the wrong moment and started a [small] forest fire provided the opportunity to learn that a bunch of people working together can put one out, that the first aid learned from books could be used when needed, and that safety instructions should not be ignored.” Local companies provided enriching experiences that implicitly taught me that I was part of the broader world and that I had the potential to be useful in it. An event arranged for high school students by the electronics division of General Motors sticks especially in my mind. I recall “hearing a presentation on peaceful uses of nuclear energy by Edward Teller at which he showed movies to support his call for use of nuclear devices to dig a bigger canal across Central America” to upgrade and replace the Panama Canal. “As I saw the side of a mountain rippling during a buried nuclear test, I remember thinking of the line from Psalm 114: ‘the mountains danced like rams.’ While uneasy about Teller’s specific goal, I certainly grew up thinking that science and engineering could be extremely powerful forces for improving our lives.” The summer before my senior year, “I attended an NSF program at Oregon State University. My parents had no concerns about me flying alone to Corvallis and being in that program for a few weeks, over 2000 miles from home, because daily life back then assumed that people took care of one another, including strangers.” Of course, that meant that I too learned to prudently count on decent behavior from fellow citizens. The NSF program taught me calculus and a little computer science, and it “was the first of several lucky breaks that set the stage for me to use information technology throughout my career and later to teach myself something about artificial intelligence.”2 It is important to contrast my experiences with those of many students today. For too many students, school is a place where one is regimented, drilled on dull basics, and exposed to being treated as a criminal for even small deviations from directed behavior. Too many students find school an opportunity to learn mainly that no one can be trusted and that innovative behaviors lead to serious punishment. Instead of getting a positive social development experience from kindergarten, too many students experience a relatively negative introduction to a world of order-following, punishments for deviance, and minimal opportunity to develop personal strengths. Surely that is the wrong preparation for life in the age of smart machines. When I started at Michigan State University, I was admitted to their Honors College. “This allowed me to take a mix of graduate and undergraduate courses, skip such things as introductory psychology as I pursued a psychology major, and otherwise learn a lot in a more rigorous environment. It also probably [enabled] me to seek a student job that had better prospects for affording learning opportunities than the first on-campus job that I had.” “Knowing that I had two younger brothers and that college costs were a strain for my parents, I worked throughout my undergraduate years. Initially, MSU provided a job in the dormitory food service. It was my privilege to operate the world’s largest garbage disposal. For this work, I was paid 95 cents per hour.… One day, though, I was reading the student newspaper and saw a small ad placed

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by Prof. Charles Wrigley, a political psychologist who had formed the Computer Institute for Social Science Research [with Louis McQuitty]. The ad indicated that there were jobs for Honors College students in which they would be trained to do computer programming. Moreover, these jobs paid $2.50 per hour.” So, the altruistic actions of a professor afforded me the opportunity both to earn more of the costs of my education and to become one of the first students to learn computer programming. The work involved writing programs to do multivariate statistics; it was before stat packages like SPSS and SAS existed, so we had to write our own programs as they were needed. The ones I helped write were used for analyzing large data sets, including those of the US Census. For computers back then, this was a daunting task, and it meant that the programs needed to efficiently manage data access from magnetic tape as well as to do the actual computations. So, by the time I graduated, I knew almost all the statistics needed to get a PhD in psychology and knew how to write software. Because of the scale of the tasks we programmed for, I learned as well that with sustained effort and help from others, one could accomplish some big tasks that initially looked impossible. Years later, when I completed my first intelligent tutoring system at roughly the same time that a professorial colleague in computer science published a theorem that suggested it was impossible to build such tutors, I realized that the job at MSU taught me even more about life than it did about the computational sciences: many things that cannot be done perfectly can be done well enough to do some good. I have benefited from about a dozen mentors over my career. Each one of them helped me tackle a project that I otherwise might have feared. At the same time, their collective help taught me that I could stretch beyond performances I was confident about to do things that seemed initially to be daunting. Surely, that learning is even more important today when people regularly must reinvent themselves after a job for which they prepared with a lot of effort suddenly disappears. I have had many real but protected opportunities initially to not be sure if I could succeed at something and then, with encouragement from others, discovering that I could. My goal in writing this book is to introduce a view of education for all that includes this kind of protected opportunity to learn by doing. Some of that may need to take place in real work environments and other societal roles for students. Some of it, though, can take place in simulations. Ideally, every student would have the kind of wonderful mentors I have had, but increasingly, some day to day mentoring can be provided by intelligent machines, though human contact often is critical when confidence and motivation need bolstering. It is only fair that if people are having to keep reinventing themselves in the age of smart machines, those machines also should help them do that retreading. Machines alone won’t do the job. As one of my teachers noted (Festinger, 1954), we humans learn a lot about how to behave by comparing our own behavior to that of others. Part of helping students acquire the eight competences must be for their teachers and others they interact with also to exhibit those competences or to be in the process of acquiring them.

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To summarize the lessons I draw from my own experience, acquiring the eight competences is supported by living in an environment where respected others and peers also exhibit those competences or are in the process of learning them and where multiple aspects of everyday life are an apprenticeship in those competences. In the next chapter, I consider aspects of school systems and how they and those who are part of them can change.

Notes 1 Shortly after I left Milwaukee, I learned that a few African American families who lived near the fringes of my high school’s catchment area had been told, when asking to enroll their children, that they would find my high school too rigorous and might do better in one of the others. In my view, while there were many privileges afforded to my school’s white population, intellectual rigor was not among them, nor was the chance to develop in a diverse environment. To get that, I had to go beyond school – I personally needed the very redundancy that I argue for in this book. 2 Recently, I learned from Edward Reingold, who attended the Oregon State program with me, that at least seven attendees that year became either professors or scientists in research institutes (some attendees could not be located after over 50 years, so the total could be higher).

References Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117–140. Fulghum, R. (2003). All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten: Reconsidered, Revised & Expanded with Twenty-five New Essays. Random House Digital, Inc. Lesgold, A. (2016). It Takes a Village of Mentors. Education Review [Reseñas Educativas], 23. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/er.v23.2139

8 HOW DO SCHOOLS EVOLVE?

To understand what may be needed to change what children learn in the US, it is important to understand how schools got to be the way they are today and what forces produce changes in educational practice. For that reason, it is helpful to explore a bit about how organizations and individual minds evolve over time. Over the past couple of centuries, several scholars have suggested that ideas exhibit evolution just as organisms do, and more recently it has been suggested that organizations do as well (Mokyr, 2016; Ridley, 2015). It can be helpful to think of school curriculum and practice as similarly undergoing evolution. School as it happens today is different from school in the past, and not all the differences were designed by an explicit public policy process. This is especially the case in the United States, which has restrictions on the extent to which higher levels of government can set policies for individual schools and districts. Moreover, in recent years, there has been considerable effort to let individual schools and principals make many decisions on what happens from day to day. So, how do schools change? An evolutionary point of view focuses on forces that might trigger spontaneous changes in school practice and what challenges determine which specific changes survive. So, two different kinds of forces are involved. One is the set of forces that produce new ideas and especially new ideas about what should happen in schools. The other is the set of forces that determine what kinds of schools survive. Geneticists refer to these forces as mutation and natural selection. A simple example might be the evolution of “maker” activity in schools at the end of the school day. Teachers and principals – and sometimes school district leaders – hear about maker projects. They might see them on TV, read of them in teacher magazines, hear about them at a professional conference, or hear about them from a parent or friend. What they read and hear might prompt a specific maker activity in a specific school. Each school invents its own brand of maker activity. That is the mutation part of evolution.

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Next, the natural selection part comes into play. A maker activity after school could fail because children can’t stay late. Maybe the bus system is inflexible, or maybe too many students must go home and babysit younger siblings so parents can work. An activity also could fail because supplies cannot be accessed on a continuing basis. Perhaps the initial supplies came out of a teacher’s attic and now the attic is pretty cleaned out. Or, maybe they were donated but now the novelty has worn off and donations are harder to get. Maybe the energetic teacher who started the project is retiring. And, of course, there also are positive forces. Perhaps the project got attention on the local news hour or a write-up in a magazine a lot of local parents read. Perhaps a company donated useful equipment or supplies. Each potential kind of change will arise from different mutation forces and will survive or not based on different selection forces, but the same basic evolutionary pattern is likely for any educational change. And, there are more forces involved than those just mentioned. Consider the forces acting on school practice. There are, of course, national forces. Federal funds may be tied to certain practices, such as the menus for school lunch programs and the services to which students with special challenges are entitled. Federal grant programs may favor certain forms of instruction or certain instructional goals. States may require certain achievement tests and may set other requirements. At the district and school level, depending on demographics, schools may have access to teachers with differing training and even differing goals for schooling. These forces shape what kinds of practices evolve in each school. In addition, ecological niches evolve that further shape what happens in each school. For example, if a school has a teacher who decides to develop after-school maker activities, it is likely over time that the school will form connections with other schools offering maker activities. That in turn will change community perceptions of the school and thus the community pressures on the school. This two-way process, in which characteristics of school practice shape the forces acting on the school which in turn shape future school practices, may eventually land the school in an ecological niche that supports its current practice or may shape the practice so that it better fits such a niche. Unfortunately, ecological forces also can land schools in ecological niches that support evolution of practice that does not help students prepare for twenty-first century life. For example, teachers may arrive at an inner-city school and find that they do not have the skills to help their students focus on learning and contribute positively to maintaining a school environment conducive to learning. They may struggle to build relationships with their students. They may lack any sense of the forces in those children’s lives. Failing to connect with their students, they may experience a growth in disruptive behaviors in their classrooms. The occasional teacher in such a school environment who develops new programming, such as maker activities, will be under pressure to conform and is less likely to persist in that school than innovative teachers in more supportive school environments. Over time, a school environment lacking opportunities to safely practice the eight competences may generate pressures to adopt certain disciplinary practices,

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such as liberal use of suspensions, which remove students from the classroom when the teacher cannot “manage” their behavior. Teacher unions, to the extent that they represent teachers lacking appropriate classroom management skills, may push for more suspensions. Parents of suspended students may focus their involvement with the school on changing the suspension rate. External forces that would shape curriculum more adequate for preparing students for life in our times may be eclipsed by fights over suspension policies, use of police in schools, and even such matters as dress codes. No one may be insisting that all teachers in the school deeply believe that all children can learn. Not only do ecological niches evolve and influence the evolution of classroom activity, but they also shape the evolution of schools and school districts as organizations. For example, the No Child Left Behind Act and related federal activities resulted in virtually every major school district in the country building a staff focused on increasing standardized test scores. In many cases, that had the evolutionary effect of pushing out of the school day any content that was not going to be tested, since it was thought to divert teacher and student effort from a complete focus on learning whatever produces higher test scores. It also, in many cases, led to testing situations that were more stressful than before, since teaching and central staff jobs sometimes depended on changes in student scores, and students probably do less well when they believe their performance may hurt their teachers. In a few cases, the excessive focus on testing fostered a culture of dishonesty in testing that likely also impacted students (Porter, 2015). What we call “high-stakes tests” become stressful for students as they get implicit and sometimes explicit messages that their performance is responsible for the fate of their teachers. For minority or special students, knowing that scores for their subgroup will be separately reported also can produce less adequate performance; stress makes them less able to do their best (Steele & Aronson, 1995). Combined with a national tendency to cut back on physical education, this had the result of increasing a major stress source while decreasing physical activity, which can be a stress reducer. School systems evolved under NCLB to be more stressful for students. I do not mean to imply that there are no significant positive evolutionary forces. There certainly are. However, looking at the ways schooling has evolved and at the kind of learning that will better prepare students for life in our times, it strikes me that efforts to improve the situation will need to be sensitive to the environmental forces that shape the availability and attractiveness of learning opportunities for children. Joel Klein (2015) has said, “I’ve always believed that schools should serve the needs of children rather than the needs of adults.” Unfortunately, sometimes forces evolved to protect teachers are stronger than those that benefit students. Moreover, it seems likely that negative evolutionary forces are more likely to be present in schools that serve less wealthy students, partly because their parents have less time themselves to be a positive force on their children’s schools and partly because of greater stresses the schools face. Another entity that evolves, in a sense, is the human mind. Minds do not stay static, and the way in which they change is pretty much like evolution as well. We

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acquire new knowledge and new skill, and it evolves as a function of our experiences. We can look at this evolution at two levels of scale. First, we can look at how our knowledge, skills, and attitudes change from day to day. Then, we also can look at minds as developing over formative years into entities that have varying ability to deal with environmental changes later. Schools today still deal mostly with learning of specific knowledge, skills, and attitudes. They present information, demand practice and sometimes memorization as well as other performances such as writing papers, and then they test to see if the target content has been learned. Seldom does the testing look at the ability to compose collections of knowledge to address new problems or issues not previously taught in school. In fact, most testing today does not reveal much if anything about mastery of the eight competences I believe are critical. As Alfred North Whitehead noted in 1916, In training a child to activity of thought, above all things we must beware of what I will call “inert ideas” – that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilised, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.1 Whitehead, a century ago, saw that school does not give students practice in using what they have learned to become more successful and valuable socially and economically in later life. This concern about school has not changed. What has changed is that machines have at least the capability of Whitehead’s mind full of inert ideas. Knowledge and competence that can be completely stated in advance can be programmed into an intelligent computer system. People become valuable exactly because they can do more than use specifically practiced skills and recall well-drilled facts. That additional capability can be taught, and it can be measured. For learning, all that is required is to provide extended and scaffolded practice2 in addressing emergent problems. I saw this myself when Marty Nahemow and I built an intelligent coached apprenticeship system to train technicians at Intel (Lesgold & Nahemow, 2001). Those technicians regularly confronted failures in chip making equipment that had never occurred before. They had only two years of technical training past high school. Yet, with scaffolded practice, they became able to solve novel and emergent troubleshooting problems much more efficiently. We had the sense, though, partly because of how negatively traditional training departments reacted to our work, that the kind of practice our systems provided was not often part of technical training, even though it made a huge difference in the extent to which technicians remained valuable to Intel and were not displaced by intelligent systems. Whether through “maker” tasks or problem solving with scaffolding from teachers or problem solving with support from a machine or peers, it is possible for students to leave school with more than “inert ideas.” However, almost all current high-stakes achievement testing is driven mostly by a focus on content that Whitehead would have deemed likely to remain inert. One goal for schools that really prepare students for life in our times must be to afford plenty of opportunities to tackle novel tasks that

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call upon school knowledge but that require the hard work of searching one’s memory for which knowledge might be helpful to the task at hand and then adapting that knowledge to the current problem situation. It is that kind of practice that permits a child’s mind to evolve toward the capabilities needed in today’s world of smart machines. The lesson to be learned from viewing schools as evolving organizations is that it is not enough simply to set good goals for schools, though that is an important step. Rather, it is important as well to study the forces that promote or oppose desired changes and find ways to assure that positive evolutionary forces are created and sustained so that the learning goals that are set have a good chance to be realized. Those forces may not be the same everywhere. In some communities, existing forces may assure student engagement in school activity while often it will remain important to push for new and deeper levels of student engagement with complex tasks. In other communities, the first order of business may need to be creating positive forces that make it more likely that students will see effort in school – and especially effort to dig deeper into reading, writing, and other tasks – as likely to pay off in the future and as what students who are full and valued members of their communities do. Schools also will differ in the extent to which their teachers imaginatively develop new ways to stimulate and support practice of the eight competences.

Dealing with the History of American Education The eight competences around which this book is organized will represent a substantial departure, not only from where schools have been for the last 60–75 years but also from the entire history of public education in the United States. It is worth considering some of that history briefly and examining how it bears on the potential for an education system that addresses the eight competences. Public education in the US did not become anything close to universal until the middle of the nineteenth century.3 At the beginning of European settlement in North America, schooling was seen as something families needed to provide. As concentrations of white people arose on the continent, it was realized quickly that not every family was up to the task of moral education of children and teaching of enough literacy to follow scripture. In Massachusetts, the Law of 1642 enjoined the leaders of each municipality to ascertain whether parents were doing their duty to educate their children, either by themselves or through hired tutors, and to fine parents who failed in that duty. By five years later, it was clear that in areas of concentrated population, it made sense to have schools that provided education for those children whose parents could not adequately teach them. This was needed, the statute of 1647 said, because the “deluder Satan” pursued his ends whenever people were unable to read scripture. Over time, the influences of England, which had free schools for pauper children but assumed that parents with means would seek out and pay for their children’s schooling, assured that pauper schools became relatively universal in the US.

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The concept of universal public education, however, took quite a while to get established, since we had inherited from Europe the notion that education should be available according the social class of families, with most families buying their own from their choice of provider and pauper schools provided at public expense for those who were not able to buy schooling. Church schools, of course, were an intermediate option, whether completely free or partly family-supported. In addition, free school societies arose in places like New York to provide schooling for those unable to pay. One example of this evolution was Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania constitution of 1790 provided for a state system of pauper schools, though one was not even started until 1802. Philadelphia, in 1816, was permitted to organize a public school system, though the state did not contribute then to the cost of maintaining it. In 1834, the Free-School Law was passed. This provided that every municipality should vote on whether to have a free school system and allowed those that voted in favor to collect taxes to maintain one. Only 502 of the 987 governing units in the state voted to have free public schools at that time. More generally, certain aspects of public education that we often assume are well established actually have only existed for several decades, and the notion that different classes and religions would set their own school arrangements with some sort of backup for those not able to do this is a thread through the entire history of the United States. Only in the period since the civil rights struggles of the middle of the twentieth century has there been anything close to a shared sense that universal education in a single school system was important to the economy and the democratic character of the United States. Even then, it was entirely accepted that children from wealthy families and those preferring religious school education could do their own thing with little if any accountability to the state for meeting any specific educational goals.

Schooling in the Age of Smart Machines Today, public support for schooling is eroding. As in many past times, the wealthy are paying for private schooling, and the public system increasingly is seen as something close to government aid to the poor rather than as essential to assuring that all citizens have the understanding and skills needed to contribute positively to our society and to have a pleasant life. Further, various forces have combined to channel some public support to a range of charter institutions. Charter schools generally are no more effective at serving children lacking redundant sources for learning (school, home, and after-school organizations) than public schools. Results vary by region and other demographics, but there is no uniform pattern favoring charters over public schools (Davis & Raymond, 2012; Zimmer, et al., 2012). Individual charter schools too often fail to do better for their students. What seems to have the greatest survival value in the charter world are larger-scale charter management organizations. While they too have a mixed record of accomplishment, they do at least provide economies of scale and thus

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hold up better in a difficult financial environment. Some of these organizations operate for profit and thus face a conflict between spending more and showing a greater educational return on investment. However, even though there is no general advantage for charter schools, some charter schools and many private schools do a pretty solid job. Often, they serve a smaller socioeconomic range and thus can be more focused on assuring that every enrolled child can learn. Also, regions differ in their treatment of charter schools in multiple ways. In some regions, charters can collaborate with the public system and even share some extracurricular activities with nearby public schools. In other regions, the relationship is more adversarial. Regions vary also in what must be demonstrated to open a charter school and in what level of performance is required to keep the charter school operating. Further, there are always selection biases involved in determining who gets into a charter school in the first place; parents generally must take extra steps for their children to be in a charter school. Our society nonetheless has great faith in charter schools as a means of assuring a higher level of success in educating all our children. This may, at first look, seem justified. After all, using the Swiss cheese model (Reason, 2000) we can imagine that the schools in a public system have their “holes in the cheese slice” in about the same places, whereas charter schools, simply by having a different management and goal structure, may have some of their holes in different places. A parent with complete information could in principle check on which school happens to have its holes where their child won’t be affected. In practice, the information is seldom available or all that understandable. Regrettably, the simplistic school-choice view is unlikely to lead to strong and positive results. First, parents get virtually no information about where the holes in the public versus charter slices might be. Almost no school publishes data showing which of its students do well and which do poorly. The most that is generally possible – and not always – is a sequential strategy of starting one’s child in one school and moving them to another if things don’t go well initially. Even that assumes that parents will have an accurate sense of their children’s learning progress, which may not always be the case. The public effort to enable charter schools is grounded in a belief that likely is true, namely that having a redundant range of schools can better serve all children than having only one variety. Unfortunately, public and charter schools are not sufficiently different to provide the failure-reducing variety discussed above. The needed redundancy is more likely to come when children have learning opportunities not only in school but also in some mix of home and out-of-school environments. Replacing a single slice with a different single slice that comes from the same cheese will likely not be as effective as putting multiple slices from different cheeses into the educational sandwich. One way to think about this is to consider each of the eight competences, as well as core subject-matter skills separately for each child. Thus, each child is not a single path through layers of Swiss cheese but rather one path for each competence or skill area. Two children will differ in their paths for the same competence, and

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each child will differ in their paths for different competences. Just as children differ in their paths toward each competence and, in comparison to one another, learning environments (schools, home, after-school) each differ in the patterns of their holes. It is unlikely that anyone can cobble together the perfect combination of home activity at various ages, schools attended, and experiences afforded by various nonschool organizations to perfectly serve a given child. So, the best way to assure each child’s success is to have redundant learning opportunities available and for children to partake of several of them. If one layers enough slices of cheese from different batches, holes passing through the entire stack will be very unlikely. Many parents, especially those with greater wealth and more free time, do this instinctively by signing their children up for a lot of different outside activities. However, given the range of family structures, the fact that some activities are costly, and the range of strengths and weaknesses of different children, society needs to have ways to assure that all children, not just a privileged subgroup, have access to a productively redundant set of learning opportunities. I will return to this point in Chapter 13 below on assessment and in the conclusion chapter. First, though, it is worth looking at some types of learning opportunities that may be especially helpful in fostering learning of the eight competences.

Notes 1 Whitehead (1929; original essay 1916) was writing about Harvard’s curriculum, but his ideas apply well to public education in general. 2 By scaffolded practice, I mean opportunities to solve problems in circumstances where a teacher or intelligent system provides as much support as is necessary to not be completely overwhelmed. Our systems (Lesgold & Nahemow, 2001) provided different levels of help, and they were engineered to nudge technicians to ask for the least amount of help that would allow them to keep working on solving the problem. 3 The historical facts in this section are taken from Cubberley (1922). I thank the University of Pittsburgh library for making available an original edition of that work.

References Cubberley, E. (1922). A Brief History of Education. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin. Diamond, A., & Lee, K. (2011). Interventions shown to aid executive function development in children 4 to 12 years old. Science, 333(6045), 959–964. doi: https://doi.org/10.1126/ science.1204529 Davis, D. H., & Raymond, M. E. (2012). Choices for studying choice: Assessing charter school effectiveness using two quasi-experimental methods. Economics of Education Review, 31(2), 225–236. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/J.ECONEDUREV.2011.08.012 Klein, J. (2015). Education Secretary Arne Duncan Put Students First. US News. Available online at www.usnews.com/opinion/knowledge-bank/articles/2015-12-17/education-se cretary-arne-duncan-put-students-first (retrieved August 25, 2017). Lesgold, A., & Nahemow, M. (2001). Tools to assist learning by doing: Achieving and assessing efficient technology for learning. In D. Klahr, & S. Carver (Eds), Cognition and Instruction: Twenty-five years of Progress. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

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Mokyr, J. (2016). A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy. Cambridge, MA: Princeton University Press. Porter, E. (2015). Grading Teachers by the Test. The New York Times. Available online at www.nytimes.com/2015/03/25/business/economy/grading-teachers-by-the-test.html (retrieved September 4, 2018). Reason, J. (2000). Human error: models and management. BMJ (Clinical Research Ed.), 320 (7237), 768–770. doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/BMJ.320.7237.768 Ridley, M. (2015). The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge. New York: HarperCollins. Steele, C. M., & Aronson, J. (1995). Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69(5), 797–811. Whitehead, A. N. (1929). The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: The Free Press. Zimmer, R., Gill, B., Booker, K., Lavertu, S., & Witte, J. (2012). Examining charter student achievement effects across seven states. Economics of Education Review, 31(2), 213–224. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/J.ECONEDUREV.2011.05.005

9 APPRENTICESHIPS AND SIMILAR EXPERIENCES

Broad competences often are best acquired through learning by doing.1 This is especially the case when a competence must be exercised consciously with attention to the unique circumstance in which it is appropriate. For professional and craft competences, our society generally supports their learning through apprenticeships. Physicians, for example, have extensive clinical apprenticeships that include at least the last two years of mentored clinical experience in medical school as well as residencies that can be anywhere from three to six years, sometimes followed by additional fellowships. Teachers increasingly must have extensive classroom experience (with mentoring) as part of their initial preparation. When my son became a nurse, he had extensive clinical experience while in nursing school and then additional mentored experience for many weeks at the hospital that hired him before he was permitted to work independently. Apprenticeship is perhaps the most effective way to acquire many competences, likely including the eight competences on which this book focuses. As I write this book, there has been a lot of discussion about apprenticeship in the media. This has happened before. Most notably, it occurred near the beginning of the Bill Clinton presidency, when a substantial school-to-work office was set up and a lot of planning done on the role of apprenticeship. The interest started building up a few years before President Clinton took office, in fact. A year or two earlier, Martin Nahemow and I, with Commonwealth of Pennsylvania funding, developed a high school curriculum that articulated with apprenticeship in the machine tool industry. In fact, the use of our materials in Williamsport, Pennsylvania was described in a Smithsonian magazine article (Kiester, 1993). Our experience in getting our materials to be used anticipated the Clinton administration’s experiences in working to connect schooling to later apprenticeship. Only one school district out of about 500 in Pennsylvania would touch the curriculum. Superintendents told me it made sense, but they felt that they would

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lose their jobs if they publicly promoted any activity that suggested that not all children were on track to go to college. Apprenticeship was seen as diversion of children to the non-college career and technical education track. President Clinton’s pollsters reported to him the same basic finding – visibly connecting schooling to apprenticeship was political suicide. As a result, the new school-to-work office that was set up to pursue more apprenticeship and related strategies collapsed only months after it started. Today, this has changed, but perhaps not as much as we may think. The big new factor is the high cost of college. This creates a political window to represent apprenticeship somewhat differently than as a fixed activity on a career path that rules out a four-year college degree. Moreover, if you believe my argument that school needs to do much more than it historically has been charged with and note also that schools themselves probably can’t do this all on their own, then new possibilities for apprenticeship or pre-apprenticeship work-embedded activity start to make more sense. In the sections that follow, I briefly describe traditional apprenticeships, after which I explore the possibilities for porous career paths in which a student might benefit from work-embedded experience while still ending up pursuing college alternatives.2 Finally, I sketch a possible direction for coupling high school with work-embedded experiences, building on my experience with Martin Nahemow (Lesgold & Nahemow, 2001) in designing one approach to doing that.

Traditional Apprenticeships Apprenticeship has a long history. When the United States was getting started, apprenticeship was independent of any school system. It was a contract in which a person, usually preteen or teen, agreed (or had their parents agree) that they would work for a master tradesperson for some number of years. In the eighteenth century (Goodman et al., 2017), the basic contract was for the apprentice to agree to work for the master, stay out of trouble, not marry, and fulfill the expectations of integrity for any employee (e.g., not stealing), and for the master to agree to provide enough training in the “art and mysteries” of his trade that upon completion of the indenture, the apprentice was ready to work as a journeyman in the trade.3 There was no involvement of school in apprenticeship back then, with the modest exception that many apprenticeship indentures required the master to permit the apprentice to attend school for brief periods specifically outlined in the agreement. Generally, the apprentice was fed, housed, and clothed but not paid, although occasionally they were given a small sum and perhaps a suit of clothes upon completion of the apprenticeship. The relationship was like slavery, except that there was the requirement that the master pass on his trade and the term of indenture was limited. Sometimes, it was assumed that everyone knew what the specifics of apprenticeship meant, and sometimes a few specifics were listed. Over time, apprenticeship has evolved. Today, apprentices generally are paid, although in recent years the concept of an unpaid internship (without the protection of a written agreement in many cases) has become more prevalent. For many

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skilled trades, the curriculum for apprenticeship has become more standardized, and often trade unions run the apprentice programs for their trades. That aspect of apprenticeship has become more like school, although continual worksite experience provides concrete experiential knowledge that gives concrete meaning to the terms used in formal classes. On the other hand, apprentices now are responsible generally for getting themselves fed, housed, and clothed, whether or not they receive any payment for the apprenticeship work. There also are starting to be arrangements in which students, while attending a high school, also have internship or apprentice-like experiences in a business. Sometimes, these arrangements have produced substantial change in the overall effectiveness of those high schools, even with respect to their traditional curriculum. If nothing else, they provide students with a clear sense of what kinds of jobs are possible if they persist in learning (Berdik, 2017). In addition, they may provide socially-mediated learning opportunities for acquiring the eight competences needed for the age of smart machines.

Porous Career Paths While there have been some school-based opportunities for exposure to real-world work roles in the past (e. g., job shadowing by middle and high school students), in recent years a new approach, which is sometimes called apprenticeship, has emerged in some school systems. In this new approach, students work part time as informal or formal apprentices in a company while also attending high school and/ or community college. The work in the company is sometimes what Lave and Wenger (1991) called legitimate peripheral participation. The students work as part of teams in the company, initially doing relatively unskilled tasks and gradually becoming able to function closer to the level of regular employees. In the best of circumstances, the progression from peripheral to central involvement in productive work is managed well and in interaction with the school, so that school lessons sometimes become more meaningful due to being relevant to work tasks. Of course, there are some pathologies as well, although the cost to companies of paying apprentices is high enough to be an incentive for the apprenticeship experience to be productive – in terms of making the student ready for a job in the sponsoring company. Still, some apprenticeship time is wasted when apprentices are used as domestic servants. Fetching coffee, without opportunities to do real trade work, does not prepare one for a trade. The problem of unproductive apprenticeships is ameliorated in countries where apprenticeship programs are supervised in part by trade associations or the government. After all, treating apprentices as dumb slaves may have short-term yield to a manager or a company, but the long-term socially-valued outcome is readiness for work in an industry. Readiness for work in a company and willingness to stay there is a bonus for that company, while industry or government incentives and sanctions can make the broader goal of readiness for work in an industry more salient.

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The experience that Nahemow and I had developing high school curriculum to articulate with apprenticeship in the machine tool industry (Kiester, 1993; some related ideas are embedded in Lesgold & Nahemow, 2001) suggests some ways in which a coupled combination of high school or community college schooling with apprenticeship in a company might work. What we did was to look at the curriculum for each subject area. So, for example, science content was built whenever possible on specific concrete experiences in machining or, if necessary, curriculum was annotated with comments about how to make a topic relevant to machining, such as addressing the question: “why do you need to know this?” Math problems were developed that addressed issues and experiences in the machining of objects. Social studies topics were, when possible, illustrated with texts that related to the history of machining or to sociocultural factors of relevance to machinists. Writing and reading assignments also were linked to machining and its earlier forms. The connections were not perfect for any topic, but they were substantial. Nahemow and I had an easy task: to connect curriculum to one job area. If schooling had to be linked to all the different jobs to which different students might aspire, the approach we took would overwhelm teachers. Curricula can’t be completely different for every student in a high school where a teacher might, over the course of the day, have 120–180 students to teach. However, there have been some very positive situations in which a single business or business sector has “adopted” a school, and in those cases, deeper links between an apprenticeship experience and the curriculum for school subjects are certainly possible. Such concreteness will likely help develop the eight competences even if most of the students end up in other lines of work than they experienced in the business involvement. When a given school or class places its students in a range of very different apprentice-like experiences, those experiences can still function as opportunities for acquiring some or all the eight competences for the age of smart machines. For this to work well, of course, key people in the apprenticeship environment may need some amount of professional development, so they better understand how the range of possible apprenticeship experiences can provide learning opportunities for the eight core competences. They also may need to know about the day-to-day learning experiences of their apprentices during their school hours.

Learning the Eight Competences In and Out of School Many children have parents who already provide learning opportunities that support some or all of the eight competences. Outside the home, many children have other experiences, such as summer camps, church youth groups, sports teams, performance groups (e.g., bands), etc., that also provide such opportunities. Such opportunities may already be substantial, but some social settings for youth would be more productive for learning the eight competences if leaders received professional development that addressed these competences. And, of course, some students currently do not have enough out-of-school learning opportunities, so schools may need to work to assure that each student has a rich and redundant set

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of opportunities to master the eight competences. Out-of-school opportunities are important both because schools are already overloaded with learning goals and because of the need for redundancy of such opportunities. In many if not most cases, some external learning opportunities will be needed to provide optimal acquisition of the eight competences. I envision a societal approach to learning for the age of smart machines that has the following components: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Subject matter curriculum in schools is regularly reviewed, and teachers are provided professional development that focuses partly on how existing subject-matter curriculum also can support learning of the eight competences. These competences do not directly become new accountability requirements for already-overloaded teachers, but with efforts like the Common Core State Standards, curriculum moves toward being optimized to support learning the eight competences. State, regional, or school district leaders build a directory of social settings in which learning opportunities for the eight competences can arise. Counselors or other professional staff in schools review each child’s situation and, when appropriate, help children join groups or experiences that are convenient to where the child lives. Leaders and key staff in the social settings listed in a region’s directory get opportunities for professional development so they can become more skilled and more conscious of the learning opportunities that could be enabled by the group or activity they lead. Assessment strategies are developed that allow for continual improvement in the effectiveness of the various settings for supporting learning of the eight competences. The strategies may include direct outcomes measurement, analysis of the proportion of time the activity directly supports learning of the competences, and consideration of the extent to which key staff in the activity have taken advantage of the professional development that can make them more effective. Some form of shared database is developed that records, for each child, the extent to which each of the learning settings has produced increased mastery of the eight competences.4

While this seems like a lot to ask, we are starting to see aspects of it for at least one or two of the competences. For example, the United Way of Allegheny County5 has a program that provides the missing glue to make more activities in which children participate supportive of better physical fitness. The next two sections consider the components just listed.

Deepening the Subject-Matter Curriculum In many respects, curricular reforms like the Common Core State Standards (National Governors Association, 2010) aimed to introduce at least some of the

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eight competences into the subject matter curricula. In some cases, this can be rather straightforward. So, for example, teachers can organize team projects in mathematics that develop solutions for complex problems. With some design care, such projects also can provide opportunities to practice many of the eight competences: learning efficiently, skills of civic participation (with the right projects assignments), evaluating information, collaboration, managing personal finances (with some projects), confidence, and perhaps even physical and mental fitness. Even socioemotional skills might be enhanced if there is enough focus on some of the softer skills of teamwork. In general, though, the pushback against the Common Core State Standards by those who know what they are has been driven at least in part by the reality that teachers often have received no training in how to teach to this depth or how, more generally, to address the eight competences. Visiting schools, I generally have seen signs of emphasis on how the Common Core is tested but little if any evidence that the hidden curriculum of the eight competences is being encouraged or supported. Given that the subject matters own the school day and that every curriculum reform struggles to free up school time for learning beyond the subject-matter goals, it will require major teacher professional development opportunities before we can expect the eight competences to be addressed. That will not be easy to achieve. The alternative, of course, is to decide that schools already have enough to do and that a major part of the new hidden curriculum of the eight competences should be addressed outside of school. This too is easier said than done. In the section below on out-of-school learning, this issue is addressed. It should be noted that many of us, especially those who are old enough, learned some of the eight competences outside of school.

An Example of In-School Focus on the Eight Competences While there already has been a lot of work published on teaching the Common Core and at least some of that work addresses the eight competences implicitly, it is worth using a little space in this book to provide a sketch of how those competences might be addressed more substantially. Suppose that a math teacher and a health and fitness teacher asked a class to work as a team on ways to address the problem of childhood obesity. Between medical information, civics information, mathematical issues, and the likelihood that individual students may differ in their own feelings about their weight, it would be possible in principle for all eight competences to be addressed. With some guidance from a teacher, students would quickly discover that there is a huge amount of potentially relevant information on childhood obesity. Simply finding their way into it would give students practice on learning efficiently, and the teacher might well be able to provide further support for students who are struggling with the task of evaluating and integrating information from multiple sources.

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Evaluating and integrating information from different sources is an important but difficult task. A quick web search turned up, among others, the following alleged causes of childhood obesity: diet, exercise, genetics, psychological issues, socioeconomic issues, urban sprawl, societal sin, loss of school recess, sugar-containing drinks, cell phones, and video games. Considerable competence would be needed by children to understand and evaluate each of these possibilities. Moreover, evaluating some of these alleged causes (e.g., societal sin) might be hard for a public-school teacher to scaffold. In the end, developing the causal argument and mechanism for each reason and determining its likelihood of being a real cause will require considerable practice in evaluating and understanding information. Because of the size and complexity of the initial task of researching possible causes, teamwork would likely be necessary, along with the ability to present to an audience of peers the results of one’s assigned efforts. Socioemotional skills as well as self-management skills might easily become necessary as teams develop and present their results for this task. After all, some of the children will likely be obese while others may have self-image issues that cause them to think they are obese. Peers will need to understand and be supportive of children who find the discussion painful. Even if that is handled extremely well, there will be issues with protective parents, too, some of whom may themselves have anxieties about their own weight. Once teams get to the point of developing recommended solutions to the problem, they will confront many issues of civic life. Do we just try to persuade, or do we enact some changes not all may enjoy? Can a legislator vote to ban the sale of certain beverages and get re-elected? Will the ban actually work? Is it “fair” to penalize people who do not take available measures to become less obese? Can employers legally not hire people who are obese? Lots of opportunities for discussions of civics can present themselves if a teacher stages things to support that. Management of personal finances may not seem like it is an issue with this learning task, but in fact it is. Eating healthy requires either moderate wealth (many poor people live in food deserts) or a combination of financial sophistication and learning about lower cost healthy alternatives. Budgeting skills can be exercised if students are asked to develop a budget for eating healthier for a hypothetical person or two. And, of course, since physical fitness is somewhat of a mediating factor in weight control, there is room for a teacher to address some fitness issues, too. An outcome of this kind of team exercise is increased confidence in students who learn that they can handle this kind of big task. The scale of the problem can be big enough to be daunting for every student. However, a skilled teacher can assure that each team member is supported to do a piece of the task that is big enough so that successfully completing it helps a student to feel more confident about doing substantial cognitive work. This has been a very quick sketch, and I do not suggest that it will be easy for teachers to teach using these kinds of meaty problems. In fact, it will take a lot of professional development and practice. However, it is possible. Existing curricular

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reforms like the Common Core afford the opportunity to teach the eight competences.6 It will take substantial societal resolve to assure that this opportunity is real. Teachers need further training. Relationships must be built with children so that they are willing to expose themselves by taking on big tasks and are able to sustain effort to engage with them. When children have constraints on when and how effectively they can do work outside of school, additional skill may be needed to fit big projects into the school day. Information processing tools and network connectivity may be needed to support such classroom work. Parents will need opportunities to learn why such project work is so important, since parents tend to struggle when their children’s schooling looks different from what they experienced when they themselves were children. In addition, many of the eight competences are acquired only with practice. Teachers will need to learn to scaffold such practice, and they may need to enlist aides or volunteers to help with that. Many of us see some of the needed scaffolding and motivation skills when we work with personal trainers. While there are exceptions (I am not one of them) who are always motivated to keep pushing and not to give up when muscles start to complain, many of us use personal trainers partly for their exercise physiology expertise and partly to scaffold our motivation. As we work out regularly, we may come to need less-continual motivational scaffolding, but we go through occasional periods of backsliding when the motivational skills of a personal trainer are needed or at least helpful. In addition, the regular experience of being scaffolded in staying motivated for exercise can produce metamotivational skills – we can learn to scaffold ourselves. I suggest that regularly being pushed a bit and scaffolded to undertake hard school tasks is another way to grow metamotivational skills that allow children and adults to deal with the days when initial motivation is inadequate. Moreover, the acquired metamotivational skills also will increase job opportunities for children when they become adults, as well as opportunities to attend post-secondary institutions that are more supportive of later life success.

Out-of-School Opportunities for Every Child As schools are currently constituted, some of the learning opportunities for the eight competences may need to come from environments other than school. I take no position on whether schools could, in principle, be redesigned sufficiently to assure the eight competences in addition to needed subject-matter learning, but at least in the short term, it is safe to assume that schools will not change enough for this to happen. The problem with going beyond school is that life outside of school presently does not support extra learning opportunities for every child. Looking only at one school near where I live, this reality becomes evident immediately. Some students in that school must go home right after school to babysit younger siblings so that parents or other caregivers can work longer hours. We could, as a society, decide that universal child care is the answer to this problem, but it is unlikely that this will happen anytime soon. Some children need to

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get home right after school to work at jobs themselves. Again, there are policy solutions that might assure that children never need to work for their families to eat and have shelter, but this too is unlikely to happen soon. Some students have no permanent home but “couch surf” at relatives or friends. In addition to transportation issues, such children may need both food assistance at school and a place to do laundry – we hear from some students that they are embarrassed to come to school because their clothes are dirty or smelly (see also Langegger & Koester, 2016). Breakfast, lunch, and extra food in the backpack for the weekend, plus washers and dryers at school and even extra clothing, might remove many learning barriers for some children. One good piece of news is that as the eight competences develop more universally, we can expect some of the economic constraints that limit children’s access to out-of-school learning opportunities to decrease. After all, children who possess the competence of self-control are more likely as adults to have better jobs and to build homes that have two parents present (Goodman et al., 2015). That, in turn, means that their children will be less likely to need to work for pay or babysit right after school and will be less likely to lack consistent caregivers. Even though access will not immediately be universal, it is important to recruit non-school institutions to help with the development of children’s eight competences. After all, in times and socioeconomic strata where the eight competences have been most likely to be developed, there have been an abundance of relevant learning opportunities: scouts, summer camps, church groups, municipal athletic and other programs, extracurricular clubs and athletics, etc. While we must work to make substantial learning opportunities for the eight competences available to all, there is no reason to cut back on the current resources that seem to work. Existing “Third Places” may need to be transformed or supplemented, but they are a starting point. Out-of-school learning is addressed further in Chapter 10.

Notes 1 There is a large literature on learning by doing. One of the earliest articles was by Anzai and Simon (1979). 2 I am aware that many, perhaps most, apprenticeship programs today are connected with community colleges and that some include a two-year degree. Still, the question remains whether being “tracked” into an academic program that includes apprenticeship experiences means being “tracked” away from preparation for four-year college entrance requirements. 3 Here’s an example of an apprenticeship indenture from 1741 (Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, n.d.) The text below faithfully reflects the original handwritten script, including spelling and abbreviations that might not be seen today: “THIS Indenture Witnesseth, that John Reid of freedhold in the County of Monnmouth Jersey by and with the Consent of his father John Riad of Sd place hath put himself, and by these Presents doth voluntarily, and of his own free Will and Accord put himself an Apprentice to Robert Livingston Jun of New York with him to live, and (after the Manner of an Apprentice) to Serve from the first Day of Novembr: Anno Domini, One Thousand Seven Hundred and Forty two till the full Term of five years be compleat and ended. During all which Term the said Apprentice his said Master faithfully shall serve, his Secrets keep, his lawfull Commands gladly every where obey: he shall do no Damage to His said

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Master nor see to be done by others without letting or giving Notice to his said master he shall not waste his said Masters Goods, nor lend them unlawfully to any, he shall not commit Fornication, nor contract Matrimony within the said Term. At Cards, Dice or any other unlawful Game, he shall not play, whereby his said Master may have Damage with his own Goods, nor the Goods of others within the said Term, without Lisence [sic] from his said Master, he shall neither buy not [sic] sell, he shall not absent himself Day nor Night from his said Masters Service without his Leave, nor haunt AleHouses, Taverns or Play-Houses; but in all Things as a faithful Apprentice he shall behave himself to his said Master and all his during the said Term. And the said Master during the said Term shall by the best Means or Method that he can, Teach or cause the said Apprentice to be Taught the Art and Mystery of a Marchent [sic] And also shall find an provide unto the said Apprentice sufficient meat Drink and Lodging. For the true Perfomance of all and every the said Covenants and Agreements, either of the said Parties bind themselves unto the other by these Presents.” 4 While such record keeping may violate current law and will certainly draw objections, I note that society seems to tolerate much more extensive shadowing. I just got my monthly email from Google that showed me where I had been all month, how long I spent in each location, and even how I got there (walking, driving, flying, Uber). Surely, that is more invasive than keeping track of how well an education system is serving a child, yet we have allowed such shadowing while setting extreme and counterproductive limits on educational data sharing. 5 See fitUnited, United Way of Southwestern Pennsylvania (n. d.). https://uwswpa.org/itunited 6 Some resources are available from two organizations that have been active in developing assessments for the Common Core, PARCC and Smarter Balanced (Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, 2017; Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career, 2017).

References Anzai, Y., & Simon, H. A. (1979). The theory of learning by doing. Psychological Review, 86(2), 124. Berdik, C. (2017). How Student Internships Saved a Chicago School. The Atlantic. Available online at www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/08/how-student-internship s-saved-a-chicago-school/537642/ (retrieved August 24, 2017). Goodman, A., Joshi, H., Nasim, B., & Tyler, C. (2015). Social and Emotional Skills in Childhood and Their Long-Term Effects on Adult Life: A Review for the Early Intervention Foundation Social and Emotional Skills in Childhood and Their Long-Term Effects on Adult Life. Available online at www.eif.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/EIF-Strand-1-Report-FINAL1. pdf (retrieved July 6, 2018). Goodman, P. S. (2017). The Robots Are Coming, and Sweden Is Fine. Available online at www.nytimes.com/2017/12/27/business/the-robots-are-coming-and-sweden-is-fine. html?_r=0 (retrieved January 8, 2018). Kiester, Jr., E. (1993). Germany prepares kids for good jobs; we were preparing ours for Wendy’s. Smithsonian, 23(12), 44. Langegger, S., & Koester, S. (2016). Invisible homelessness: anonymity, exposure, and the right to the city. Urban Geography, 37(7), 1030–1048. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/ 02723638.2016.1147755 Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lesgold, A., & Nahemow, M. (2001). Tools to assist learning by doing: Achieving and assessing efficient technology for learning. In D. Klahr & S. Carver (Eds), Cognition and Instruction: Twenty-five Years of Progress. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

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National Governors Association (NGA). (2010). Common Core State Standards. Washington, DC: National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers. www.corestandards.org (retrieved August 23, 2017). Partnership for Twenty-First Century Skills. (2017). www.p21.org/ (retrieved December 19, 2017). Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. (2017). Home page. www.smarterbalanced.org/ (retrieved October 9, 2017).

10 CREATING A “THIRD PLACE”

Oldenburg and Brissett (1982) observed over 35 years ago that in addition to the home and the place where one is engaged much of the day (work or school), a “third place” also is very important. In the home, deep interpersonal relationships drive activity, and those who dwell in a home interact there primarily with people they know well. Similarly, at school and at work, one also interacts mostly with a restricted and familiar range of people, often under the direction of specific and relatively fixed leadership. Further, those in the school or work environment generally share a vocabulary and underlying understanding of work tasks, so one gets relatively little practice in collaborating with newly met people who may not share the same ontology (underlying context for understanding)1 that they have. In a “third place,” one simultaneously can relax and let one’s guard down while also interacting, at least in many cases, with a diverse range of people. This, at least, is the ideal third place, somewhere to practice interacting with people from different backgrounds, building the ability to engage a variety of people effectively and to interact with them. The third place also is a place, ideally, where one can learn from failures and sometimes through trial and error. Two examples of such third places historically were the church and the local tavern. Today, church attendance is in decline, and other organizations that served similar roles also are less universally attended (Putnam, 2000). Neighborhood bars also are less prevalent. While there are a few more recently established places that come close to serving as third places today (Butler & Diaz, 2016), all too often, today’s third places are virtual. While some virtual interactions can be deep and strongly interpersonal, many, such as Twitter posts, are not. And, in the impulsive and unconstrained world of virtual interaction, mistakes sometimes can be punished painfully. In general, and especially when trying to master interpersonal skills such as collaboration, in-person interactions teach more than distant or virtual ones,

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partly because in addition to verbal exchanges, there are social cues that come from observing the person one is interacting with. I conclude after some reflection that part of education for the age of smart machines will be the cultivation of a range of “third places” that can be the loci for learning opportunities not as readily attained in home or school. Wealthy students tend to have this. They attend specialized summer camps that stretch their interaction and collaboration skills. They get whisked from music lessons to ballet classes to various sports practices and to other “third places” that are likely to afford many helpful learning opportunities. It may not be a public responsibility to provide exactly the same “third places” for less wealthy students, but it probably will be necessary to create some that are available and accessible regardless of wealth or ethnicity. Some of these “third places” can be attached to schools. For example, many schools now have “maker spaces” (Dougherty, 2012; Peppler, et al., 2016) where students can work together on extended projects that involve designing and making artifacts that may be useful, artistic, or otherwise socially stimulating. Schools also have bands, athletic teams, and often a variety of clubs.2 To adequately serve all students, efforts would be needed to assure strong professional development for the people who arrange and support such “third places” (teachers, in many cases, but also aides and volunteers), and barriers to access will need to be overcome. Professional development will be essential and is addressed further in Chapter 12. The goal must be to assure that each “third place” affords opportunities to practice the eight competences. This is not assured. For example, one can imagine a school band in which students simply sit in their chairs and follow the teacher/conductor’s demands. Such a band will do little to support learning the eight competences. On the other hand, one also can imagine a band in which a committee of students learns to use computer tools to develop formations for football halftime shows and where each section elects a classmate to do the things a principal player in a professional orchestra would do to help all players the section play well together. Similarly, one could imagine a football team where the coach makes all the decisions. Students would still learn some of the eight competences to some extent, but not as strongly as on a team where the coach guides team members to consider and possibly adopt new formations and new ways to coordinate multiplayer plays, i.e., to write the playbook together rather than just being drilled on it. The issue of barriers may be harder to address. For some students, time is the ultimate barrier. They have important family duties that preclude staying after school for an activity. For example, they may have to babysit a younger sibling so that parents can work enough hours at their low-wage jobs to pay the rent and feed their families. Or, in some cases, they may lack adequate clothing or means for keeping their clothing clean, making it harder socially to engage in added group activities. Homeless children face additional constraints as they couch surf, sometimes moving around quite regularly. As noted in the previous chapter, colleagues working in an urban high school nearby concluded that one reason some children were not making it to school was that the couch surfing that usually, but not always, gave them a place to stay each

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night did not always include access to laundry facilities. My colleagues are exploring the possibility of adding washers and dryers to the school to overcome this barrier. Compared to the amounts invested by local foundations and the school itself on programs to improve attendance rates, a few washers and dryers and the needed detergent would be a relatively small price to pay to overcome this barrier.3 Schools in many areas have overcome another attendance barrier by incorporating early childhood centers into high schools. Not only do these allow teenage mothers to stay in school, they also can provide a place where those overly-young parents can learn how better to take care of their children. By extending the hours and age range of such facilities, it might be possible to provide a place for younger siblings of students who currently cannot stay late because of babysitting responsibilities. As with the infant centers for teenage mothers, centers accommodating a wider age range might well afford additional opportunities for some students to gain practice as caregivers as part of an extended school day. Of course, parents will need to trust such child care facilities, and that will require extensive and honest discussions with those parents. Many will argue that the ideas just put forward are far too costly and just “pie in the sky.” They certainly are not in terms of the long-term costs and benefits of assuring that each child acquires the eight competences and is not a cost to society down the road, but our political system is not able at present to consider long-term costs and focuses on what something will cost this year. After all, the ability to manage personal finances for a lifetime is one of our eight competences, and it currently is far from universal in individual people and pretty much lacking in the body politic. Rather than considering the short-term focus of our society as an insurmountable barrier, though, perhaps we can make more progress if communities organize local citizen teams to find best solutions. With the right design, older students might provide much of the work force for child care centers on the school campus. There would need to be safeguards, including police checks and mental health screening, but both the “clientele” of such child centers and the students who work in them would learn a lot if they were operated well. In the end, the biggest barrier to assuring that every child has opportunities to master the eight competences is trust. We have organized everything about schooling to avoid ever having to trust anyone. This is the most significant barrier to an effective system for supporting learning of the eight competences. Any such system must, as it is being built, earn the trust of parents, students, and the professionals who participate in it. In the present climate, foundations, and especially coalitions of foundations, may best be able to bootstrap the development of third places and even some needed changes in schools to allow effective learning of the eight competences by all children. I have no illusions about how hard this might be. However, as I write this, there is a good chance that the final eradication of polio from our planet may take place the year this book is published. That, too, was a huge goal. Governments repeatedly failed at it. In the end, Rotary International, the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation, and some other beneficent actors have persisted to approach

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final victory. Even if a case or two still arises next year, the overall goal has been achieved substantially with huge public benefit. If we can lick polio, we can teach the eight competences universally!

Notes 1 See Note 1 of Chapter 3. 2 The pretty average high school I attended in Milwaukee over 50 years ago had a large variety of clubs, including three different debating societies. The school served a range of working and middle-class families, very few of which were wealthy. Today, the school website lists only six clubs altogether. See Chapter 7 for more on how a few pockets in the US used to do a pretty good job of providing a wide-ranging education. 3 The Whirlpool Corporation has been providing laundry equipment to some schools and has found that it improves attendance. See www.whirlpoolcorp.com/care-countsschool-laundry-program-exposes-link-between-clean-clothes-and-attendance/

References Butler, S. M., & Diaz, C. (2016). “Third places” as community builders. Available online at www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2016/09/14/third-places-as-community-builders/ (retrieved November 2, 2017). Dougherty, D. (2012). The maker movement. Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization, 7(3), 11–14. Available online at https://muse.jhu.edu/article/499244 (retrieved November 14, 2017). Oldenburg, R., & Brissett, D. (1982). The third place. Qualitative Sociology, 5(4), 265–284. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00986754 Peppler, K., Halverson, E. R., & Kafai, Y. B. (2016). Makeology: Makerspaces as Learning Environments, Vol. 1. New York: Routledge. Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster.

11 A FEW POSSIBLE WAYS TO ADDRESS THE EIGHT COMPETENCES

There is insufficient space in this book to provide extended information about how to support learning of the eight competences. However, it seems important at least to discuss briefly some key approaches that are likely to be productive. That is the purpose of this chapter. The approaches described briefly below are likely to be useful in supporting learning of the eight competences. Note that I have avoided referring to the “teaching” of the competences. This is intentional. It is important to understand that these competences are more like skills than like the knowledge of concepts and facts. They are in the space of wisdom that cannot be told (see Gragg, 1940, for the initial use of that concept). Rather, these competences are acquired mostly through practice in using them. Certainly, there are underlying concepts that may require deep understanding, but much of that understanding, if the concepts are not to be inert (Whitehead, 1929), must itself come from the experience of practice. For this reason, when I talk about inculcating the competences in the next generation, I refer to supporting of learning opportunities rather than to direct instruction. I realize that good teachers do more than straight didactic, but a focus on depth of engagement and repeated practice exercising competence is enough different from how many people think about teaching that it seems best to use the more specifically descriptive ideas like supporting learning and scaffolding performance. But there are other approaches as well, including the telling of stories.

Stories Storytelling (see, for example, Schank, 1995) is a common form of teaching, especially in informal education. Parents read stories to their children, and authors write stories to help children understand various ideas. A common format for a narrative is that a protagonist encounters a problem, after which a set of

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experiences and actions of that protagonist and others results in the resolution of the problem, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. A story is a vicarious experience, and it can be helpful any time the kind of experience it relates is likely to be relevant to future problems one might encounter. When we think of a story as an opportunity to have an experience vicariously, this immediately suggests some properties that an effective story might have and some ways in which a teacher can amplify the story’s effectiveness in supporting mastery of a competence. Clearly, a story is more useful if it is an account of an experience that someone has in which one of the competences must be exercised. Moreover, the exercise of that competence must not be too obvious or simplistic, or it will not be as useful in supporting enhancement of that competence. However, some stories can be useful if they raise a question about whether the protagonist might not have fared better had they better mastered a competence. It also is important for the student to be actively engaged with the story, perhaps as part of a small group of students who are prompted to do some thinking in advance of each major story revelation. A simple example might be a story in which the protagonist ends up impoverished. While the story does not itself convey financial literacy, a good teacher might, during a deep reading exercise, prompt students to think of aspects of financial wisdom that could have prevented the financial tragedy. In the past, fables were written to help support the inculcation of virtues or competences. While today we struggle with the scariness of some fables, it is worth bearing in mind that they were written partly to prompt those who heard them to know immediately what the protagonist should have done to avoid a bad outcome. In the hands of good teachers, stories need not be as extreme and painful to read, since the teacher is there to guide discussion of what really is going on and how it can be understood better. Good teaching using stories also can allow opportunities for the teacher to model the competence of evaluating information. Some stories can prompt a student to rethink a prior belief. For example, as I wrote this section, news broadcasts were pointing out an unintended consequence of a new tax law just passed. Schemes inserted into the law to entice companies to bring jobs back into the country turn out to have the opposite effect with respect to Puerto Rico. Because Puerto Rico is treated as offshore under parts of our tax laws, companies would be penalized as much for moving enterprises to Puerto Rico as they would for moving them completely outside of US territory. The news accounts showed how deeper evaluation of the content of the new law might have prevented the accidental consequence of damaging the Puerto Rican economy. This kind of news story, with some teacher support, can help people learn to evaluate texts more deeply and can signal the need to think through the consequences of action plans in those texts. The utility of stories as a means of developing the eight competences depends to some extent on prior experience. For example, a story in which the subject ends up poor due to lacking some financial wisdom can be powerful to the extent that the reader has a bit of prior experience. If the reader has never found financial decisions to be difficult, the story will not have the same effect as it would for a reader with experience in the difficulty of some financial decisions or of giving up short-term

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pleasures for longer-term gain. Also, the value of a story as a support for a competence might sometimes be enhanced by having it include more explicit mention of how the protagonist did or did not exercise that competence. If such mention is not included, a teacher can help students infer what is not said explicitly, of course. A related use of stories can help students understand the level of persistence that is required to solve certain problems, overcome certain difficulties, or master certain competences. One example of this appears in a study done by Hong and LinSiegler (2012). They looked at the effect on students of hearing stories about how scientists struggled before achieving success. Hearing such stories led to students exhibiting better learning in science classes. In addition, students learned that success in science comes not just from brilliance but also and substantially from hard work (see also Lin-Siegler, et al., 2016). Such stories can substantially change motivation for learning and doing science and thus can scaffold opportunities to engage in complex team problem-solving.

Informal Apprenticeships A first goal for supporting learning of the eight competences must be to provide experiences that allow those competences to be understood and exercised. That is, students need to be immersed in life opportunities in which they can get the practice and wisdom embodied in the competences. One such opportunity that is becoming more common in schools is informal apprenticeship. Students more often are being given the chance to shadow people who fill various roles in our society. For example, students might be allowed to shadow a radiology technician, a nurse, or even a surgeon. This kind of shadowing experience serves multiple goals. One goal, probably the one responsible for more shadowing opportunities being generated these days, is to familiarize the student with a possible job to pursue. For this reason, shadowing often is tied to additional teaching about what studies are required to become eligible for the job, what the jobholder does from day to day, and even how well the job pays in some cases. To be most useful in supporting learning of the eight competences, though, informal apprenticeships need some of the same support as stories do. Following someone else through a slice of life is like reading an account of that person’s experience, except that you get to see things first hand. There still is need for scaffolding if the experience is to be most productive. Why is the worker doing what they are doing? How did they decide what to do? What were the alternatives? What would have happened if a different choice had been made of what to do? As we consider the needed scaffolding, we can see that informal apprenticeships, if limited only to watching a person do work, may have limited utility. A person doing complex work often cannot both do the work and describe it at the same time. Just as a driver cannot perform well if driving and simultaneously texting, a nurse cannot do their job as well if trying to explain their thinking and the context for that thinking at the same time.

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For this reason, a commonly used tool for getting more out of a life experience educationally is to record that experience. Then, after having the experience, a student can review it with peers, a teacher, or the person shadowed and reflect on what can be learned to become more competent in such situations. So, for example, some teachers now have portions of their classroom practice recorded so that mentors can coach them by commenting on specific moments in the recorded experience. While such recording is not always possible, it might be possible to help students learn to make more useful notes about shadowing experiences that can support subsequent scaffolded reflection on the experiences. There are, of course, limits to what can be recorded. When a job involves working with people, those people may object to being recorded. When a job involves production of a product, the leaders of the business making that product may regard some of what can be seen in the workplace as proprietary. And, of course, recording requires another person and thus makes the activity more difficult to undertake. This suggests that a combination of seeing a work role and perhaps some mentored viewing of movies of work might be the best way to proceed. While the work done day by day may be difficult to record reliably, it should be possible to plan some more limited situations in which the work observed or similar work is recorded for viewing by students who might not have been present when the videos were made. Still, overall, stories and observational experiences in the workplace, while being helpful to a larger program addressing the eight competences, are not likely to provide sufficient practice opportunities. Becoming competent for the age of smart machines also must involve considerable learning by doing real tasks.

Scaffolded Real Tasks In addition to following and watching someone else perform expertly, students also can be given opportunities to perform themselves. Obviously, a student in a middle school cannot perform heart surgery (although some students get to watch surgeons operate). But there are many tasks a student can perform with a coach available either in real time or via recordings to provide advice and feedback to the student. So, for example, students can, with some help, develop small businesses from which they can get many opportunities to practice some of the competences. From discussions with friends, I know that some students have learned crafts and eventually sold some of their artistic products via Etsy1 (Abrahams, 2008). The scale of such one-off sales is small, and the pace can be quite slow. Because of the slow pace, it is possible, in principle, for parents or other mentors to help students make the most of their “making” experience and of the details of running a small business around that activity. A coach with the appropriate expertise can help the student learn from the experience. But effective coaches are not always available. So, one student making and selling earrings on Etsy might further develop several of the eight competences while another might learn only that sometimes objects are damaged in shipping or that sometimes people who make commitments over the Internet do not keep them.

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Still, it seems quite reasonable to consider a slightly more complex structure for learning from experiences such as selling through an online platform. Suppose that some children could participate in an after-school activity in which they learn to make something others might appreciate and then learn to sell what they make online. If the after-school program included some well-prepared mentors, it could be a very valuable way to learn by doing some of the eight competences. There are obvious barriers to this, including issues of legal liability, but I suspect that a determined leader of an after-school program could make such an arrangement happen. Once it exists, it might also begin helping interested parents to learn how to support such making and selling activity for their children at home or in some other setting. None of this would be easy, but it can be done, and most likely it is happening right now in a few places. The social imperative, if it seems to work well, is to make sure such opportunities are available to all students in a region, even those whose parents need to spend too many hours working or do not have the experience needed to become strong coaches. So far I have focused on activities that might occur entirely or substantially out of school. However, there are many opportunities in some schools for practice of the eight competences, too. The most salient possibility these days is maker activities. While not universal, such activities are becoming more common in schools and, as more parents learn about them, more often demanded by communities. As with real tasks undertaken outside of school, in-school maker tasks are most productive when a teacher can provide the coaching needed to maximize the opportunities to engage and strengthen the eight competences. When students undertake major tasks, they usually go through periods of intense emotional and social challenge, for example. A good coach can both help students persist when frustrated and point out the eventual good results of persistent effort in the face of frustration. Such coaching also models the socioemotional skill of helping one’s peers through moments of doubt. An interesting example comes from my former role as dean of Pitt’s education school. We have a laboratory school2 that has been quite successful. It has always had a lot of longer-term projects as part of its curriculum, some with out-of-school opportunities, including a few days spent offsite seeing issues of sustainability firsthand. One of its annual activities is to contribute the design for the School of Education’s annual holiday cards. There are two different cards produced. The students completely make one, from design to final silkscreen production. This is the lab school’s own holiday card. The other card, sent to the School of Education’s alumni and friends, starts with a project where each student in one of the middle grades makes a design for the front of the card. The art teacher, the extremely talented Dr. Pam Krakowski, develops a theme for the card each year, and the students all develop candidate designs, usually pencil sketches. Initially, we selected the design each year that seemed most suitable. This was given to the professional artists at the university who slightly enhanced the lines in the design and then added color. In recent years, the university artists, working with Dr. Krakowski, have found ways to take elements of several students’

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designs and combine them, allowing more students the satisfaction of seeing their hard work turn into an extremely engaging holiday card that always brings a lot of positive comments from alumni and professional colleagues. Wholly producing the lab-school card certainly provided many opportunities for a good coach to enhance learning of some of the eight competences, since it allowed many students to have a role in the printing of the card even if only one or a few produced the actual design. But it still ended up looking quite a bit like a school product, though one admired greatly by the children’s parents and others. By also producing the design for the School of Education card, the students got both additional practice and a chance to see their work become a professionally polished product. With a strong art teacher and help from the University artists and printers, students had the opportunity to see the original design made in their midst, after multiple trials and errors. We also produced copies of each stage of the rest of the production process, which allowed students a chance to see how color was enhanced, how relevant text was added, and finally what the printed product looked like. This provided further evidence that an everyday object, like a greeting card, often is the result of extended collaborative work. By also showing examples of color and layout versions that were discarded along the way, the lesson was presented that multiple efforts, not all successful, are part of how good things happen in our world. I suspect that imaginative teachers and school leaders can develop a wide range of similar projects that can facilitate practice of the eight competences. Dr. Krakowski may not be replicable, but the basic concept certainly is.

Scaffolded Simulated Tasks While the lab school card was wholly produced by the students, with adults involved to keep things safe, the production of thousands of cards to send to alumni involved some steps that were not practical or safe for students, such as the running of high-volume printing presses. With the cards, my Falk School colleagues found ways to make the activity highly productive even though portions needed to be done by adults. Sometimes, though, that is harder. Both to protect students and, for activities done for or to other people, simulated tasks provide an opportunity for safe learning. Students will learn the eight competences more completely if they are exposed to many redundant activities like the card production process. Any one of the activities may not work for a given child, but if there are enough alternatives, every student can master the competences. Simulation is a way to produce many more realistic learning opportunities safely. Also, simulations can compress or expand time, thus allowing opportunities that might happen too quickly or too slowly to work as learning opportunities in real life. In adult training, simulations have become an important way to prepare workers to do tasks that can have painful consequences if not done well, to practice dealing with rare but critical situations, and to practice tasks that would be dangerous to practice for real. One example is pilot training. Every commercial airline pilot gets a chance to practice how to deal with an engine fire during flight. This is a hard

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and dangerous situation to create for real, but it is easily simulated. Indeed, today a plane manufacturer cannot sell a new plane without also making available a simulator for pilot training. The availability of such simulators has facilitated major design changes, too. For example, while planes traditionally have had a “yoke” or steering wheel as the main flight control, planes developed by Airbus have a small handgrip (joystick). Pilots adapt quickly to changing altitude by moving the handgrip forward or back rather than moving the yoke in or out, but it is helpful and probably safer for them to practice first in the simulator. Indeed, today any new assignment to a plane the pilot has not used before requires practice time in a simulator. The simulators are extremely realistic – pilots come out sweating when they have practiced dealing with a critical situation in one. And, an experienced instructor provides critical coaching both during and after the simulator experience (Katz, et al., 2003).3 Simulators can be developed for much simpler situations, including both everyday activity students might be involved in and various job tasks. For example, several health care roles involve the giving of injections. Usually, that is simple and hard to mess up, but in a few cases, the specifics of how an injection is given can be more critical. Some drugs used in critical care, for example, can save lives if injected at an appropriate rate but can kill if injected too quickly. Today, at my university and perhaps at others, nursing students can give injections to dummies, with sensors in the syringes providing feedback about the rate of delivery. Until recently, simulations were purely visual display experiences, but today they are starting to include voice interactions as well as physical activities observed by sensors or via intelligent processing of video. Moreover, we can expect the cost for developing such simulations to drop rapidly now that the computer power needed to support them is ubiquitous and cheap.

Games There are many other situations for which people are prepared initially through simulated tasks besides critical care procedures carried out by nurses and physicians. Beyond such career preparation simulations, though, there also are an increasing number of computer games, which essentially are online simulated tasks. Some of those games, if played by teams, afford opportunities for practice of collaborative problem-solving skills. Students can practice working together to solve problems even when the problems exist only in an artificial space. It is no accident that such games are popular among people whose work involves developing software, since they provide a low-cost way of acting out and practicing skills that are critical in their jobs. What is newly intriguing is that electronic games can help children practice socioemotional skills, too. For example, Sara Konrath (2017) has worked with game designers to develop a collection of games playable on a smartphone that allow children to practice doing good deeds such as acting to help someone in need. Her Random App of Kindness is proving useful in helping children become

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more empathic and thus more likely to step into situations when others are facing difficult challenges. She developed the app when her research showed that empathy among teens, part of socioemotional competence, has been decreasing over the last couple decades. An important lesson to take from this is that even when there has been a drop in some of the eight competences, apps often can be engineered to help enhance them. Also, phones that can run such apps are more widely available, while some of the other possibilities for practicing the eight competences may be differentially available only to children from wealthier families (yes, some children do not have and cannot afford smart phones, but penetration of even lower SES groups has been substantial). Providing every school child with a smart tablet is certainly not a huge budget stretch for our country, should we decide that universal access to a rich collection of learning opportunities via smartphone or tablets is a worthy goal.

Clubs and Sports Sports and clubs are perhaps the kind of activity most commonly associated with development of some of the eight competences.4 Both sports and other clubs are group activities that allow students to practice collaborative work. Sports, especially, provide opportunities to see that persistent effort pays off as well as opportunities to see that not every hard effort is successful, that success often comes from persistence in the face of failure. Clubs, and sometimes sports, also allow practice of skills related to civic participation, and some clubs address civic competence very directly by providing opportunities for club governance that essentially simulate local government in the skills they require and for which they provide practice. One problem with sports and clubs, as with the other approaches briefly sketched in this chapter, is that without careful and substantial effort, our society ends up with these opportunities only being available or being more available to students from wealthier families. It is not that there are no clubs or sports for children from poor families. Rather, they may not be as well supplied with resources, and the adults who facilitate them may have fewer opportunities to develop their skills as mentors and coaches of the eight competences. If we, as a society, want to provide opportunities for all children to develop the eight competences, then we will need to find ways to address the disparities in available resources for the less wealthy. Currently, it is my sense that we do better at assuring that every school’s teams have the same quality uniforms than assuring that they provide the same opportunities for acquiring the eight competences. Partly, this is because we do not budget for substantial training of coaches and mentors, and partly it is because sports and clubs for less wealthy children may have higher costs attached to them, such as security costs, leaving too little for the salaries to attract talented coaches to neighborhoods they otherwise may not frequent.

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Governance Structures In the previous section, we discussed the role that clubs can play in developing civic participation skills. Beyond clubs, there are additional opportunities that might be developed within our formal and informal governance structures. These range from traditional activities such as school student councils to adding students to various public advisory boards. As with every other activity described above, the key will be to assure well-trained and dedicated coaches/mentors for these activities, with resources available especially for opportunities aimed at less wealthy and minority students. Advisory boards are one promising area for more student civic engagement. Many communities and organizations have advisory boards that help shape policies for acquiring and using resources. For example, there are groups to support local parks, groups who provide advice on laying out of bike paths, groups involved in selecting supplies and other resources for schools, and groups that consider local area development efforts. Often, students bring helpful perspectives to such groups, and the chance to participate allows practice of civic participation skills as well as broader competences in collaboration, creativity, and problem solving. For such opportunities to do the most good, they may have to be organized in multiple stages. For example, a student advisory group open to all interested students might organize into teams to develop specific policy recommendations that are, in turn, presented by an elected student to a more formal advisory committee. To enact certain policies, a civic leader might ask a student civic group to take the lead on certain activities or even to work with a group of adults to jointly tackle a task. These kinds of things happen more often in small socioeconomically homogeneous towns and suburbs, but they could just as well be supported in multicultural cities, especially those organized into cohesive neighborhoods. One small example of this might arise in the development of “walking school buses” (Heelan, et al., 2008). Because many students get too little physical activity each day, some schools have organized walking groups of students who, rather than taking a school bus both ways when they live perhaps two miles from school, walk one or both ways in a group with an adult. Such activities are inherently optional, since in many states, law dictates who is entitled to busing. As a result, involvement in such groups is less than it could be. If students were recruited as an advisory group for a walking school bus project, they would certainly feel more that this was an activity they had chosen to be involved with. And, they might have some good ideas about how to involve other students who otherwise would not participate. This is one tiny example of a wide range of situations where a participatory civic group might be supported for students and yield dividends beyond the eight competences. As noted at the start of this chapter, a complete set of approaches to fostering the eight competences will require resources from many people. Those additional resources should reflect rigorous but differing views about how best to proceed. Hopefully, this chapter has laid a foundation by showing how some productive

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learning opportunities might be developed or expanded. As noted earlier in this book, it is extremely likely that schools for the wealthy will continue moving toward better support for developing the competences. Where major work is needed is in developing opportunities for students who are from minority groups, less wealthy families, or otherwise at the fringes of our education system.

Notes 1 Etsy is an Internet platform used by many craftspeople to sell what they produce. While there certainly are other outlets, I use Etsy as an example to simplify the discussion. 2 Falk Laboratory School. See falkschool.pitt.edu 3 Katz and her colleagues have shown that terse “how” advice is most useful during performance of a complex task, while “why” advice is better absorbed when reviewing the performance after the task is completed. 4 See Note 6 of Chapter 5.

References Abrahams, S. L. (2008). Handmade Online: The Crafting of Commerce, Aesthetics and Community on ETSY.COM. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Available online at https:// search.proquest.com/docview/304529757?pq-origsite=gscholar Gragg, C. I. (1940). Because Wisdom Can’t Be Told. Harvard Alumni Bulletin, (October), 78–84. Heelan, K. A., Unruh, S. A., Combs, J. H., Abbey, B. M., Sutton, S., & Donnelly, J. A. (2008). Walking to School. Journal of Physical Education, Recreation & Dance, 79(6), 36–41. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/07303084.2008.10598197 Hong, H.-Y., & Lin-Siegler, X. (2012). How learning about scientists’ struggles influences students’ interest and learning in physics. Journal of Educational Psychology, 104(2), 469–484. doi: https://doi.org/10.1037/a0026224 Katz, S., Allbritton, D., & Connelly, J. (2003). Going beyond the problem given: How human tutors use post-solution discussions to support transfer. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 13(1), 79–116. Available online at https://content.iospress. com/articles/international-journal-of-artificial-intelligence-in-education/jai13-1-07 (retrieved December 25, 2017). Konrath, S. (2017). Random App of Kindness. Available online at www.rakigame.com/#hom e (retrieved December 20, 2017). Lin-Siegler, X., Ahn, J. N., Chen, J., Fang, F. F. A., & Luna-Lucero, M. (2016). Even Einstein struggled: Effects of learning about great scientists’ struggles on high school students’ motivation to learn science. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108(3), 314. Schank, R. C. (1995). Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Whitehead, Alfred North. (1929). The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: The Free Press.

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While curricular changes have occurred regularly, the core expectations of teachers have been extremely stable with respect to what content they teach and what the hidden curriculum should be. So, while small opportunities for professional development are provided in most school districts, the general assumption has been that teachers get taught how to teach before starting their teaching careers and that they will automatically keep up with any changes in best practice or schooling goals. In fact, a variety of new demands on our schools have prompted calls for more substantial professional development. This has happened in part because of strong evidence that students of color and from less wealthy families often do not acquire the same knowledge and competence as more privileged students do and that their teachers often have less experience than teachers of the wealthy.1 A new focus on the eight competences would pose major new challenges to current teachers, who generally did not receive training focused on them. In addition, those who lead schools or school districts also need to learn how to assess and mentor the teachers whom they lead. Finally, because a successful system to provide all children the chance to master the eight competences will require more than schools, key leaders and staff in out-of-school settings will need to learn new skills. They and parents will need to develop a deep understanding of what the eight competences are and why they are so important. For multiple reasons, the needed professional and parental learning goes beyond any current approaches to teacher professional development or any public effort to shape schooling. And, if the goal is not only to teach the eight competences but to have a redundant system that assures multiple opportunities to practice and master them, a new approach to professional development and public education about schooling is needed. Efforts have been made in this direction, but they have been insufficient. Generally, when a state or school district decides to change the goals for its schools, there is a process that is undertaken. First, there is an extended effort to

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define the new goals, often as an amendment to the currently mandated curriculum. This may begin with legislation, or it may be started by political leaders. An example is the Common Core State Standards (National Governors Association, 2010). The National Governors Association’s members, the governors of the various states, commissioned efforts to develop and codify new expectations for the school curriculum. Their efforts responded to feedback from the business community about the lack of certain competences in adults entering the work force, and it included specifications for core subject matter curriculum that represented the insertion of the new demands from the world of work into the existing curriculum. The federal government, through a grant competition called Race to the Top, also commissioned the development of standardized tests to measure progress toward meeting the new curricular goals (Jochim & McGuinn, 2016). In fact, they funded two different groups2 to do the test development, allowing some amount of experimentation in deciding how to measure whether the new goals were being achieved. Beyond this assessment effort, most states inserted the Common Core State Standards into their mandated curriculum. This pattern of attempted curricular change has occurred before, and generally, things proceed moderately well through the process of mandating change. After that, several things happen. First, states prove unable to present the case for the new curriculum to the public adequately or to explain why it is important and necessary. Second, somewhere along the way, some expression of some small aspect of the change appears to conflict with values held by the public. For example, in the case of the Common Core, parents already upset by the amount of mandated high-stakes testing rebelled when they perceived the Common Core as justifying the addition of still more high-stakes tests to the school year. Third, teachers who are or expect to be held accountable for teaching the new curriculum rebel, either because they feel it requires new teaching methods they have not been taught or because they believe that the new goals are unachievable for the students they happen to teach. When parent unrest already exists, teachers, often via their unions, leverage that uneasiness to produce substantial public backlash against the new goals. In the case of the Common Core, even though the unions initially backed it, once the possibility of accountability for meeting the standards arose, that support turned into opposition, at least at the local level. Eventually, with the Common Core as with past reforms, anything labeled as related to the new goals became politically poisonous. In the process, small amounts of change did occur, but barriers also arose to substantial change. This pattern, which keeps recurring for new innovations, can play out in various ways. For example, an earlier effort to move toward some of the eight competences, the New Standards Project (1998), started out with five sets of curricular mandates, or standards. Four were for the basic subject matters – math, science, language arts, and social studies – and the fifth, which embodied most of the eight competences, was called “applied learning.” Almost every state inserted much of the New Standards curriculum into their mandated state curricular goals. However, almost no

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states ended up mandating the “applied learning” standards, even though those contained the most direct manifestation of the newly needed competences. The essential point is that our society does not accept curricular change easily when that change involves unrealistic expectations about the competence of the teachers who, in the end, must make the change happen. When the public does not understand the rationale for change, the pushback is even more substantial. To get broad and robust acceptance, new societal goals must become deeply embedded in our culture. It’s not that major change does not occur, but rather that it fails to penetrate much of the education system or to persist. Proposed changes that are well reasoned will influence teaching in relatively elite private schools but will fail to penetrate or persist substantially in our public system – including most charter schools – unless all relevant parties understand the changes and why they are critical. Generally, only schools with substantial resources and students from wealthy families end up adopting major new goals successfully, and even they often do so only incompletely. What seems to be required for major and enduring change in societal goals for education is deep embedding of those goals and of their purpose into the broader culture. This is the only way to have a widely-held belief that every child should achieve the new goals, not just a privileged elite. For this reason, simply listing what new capabilities and understanding need to be acquired by parents, teachers, and those who run extra-curricular activities is insufficient for getting new learning goals to be achieved. Any needed learning or training only will “take” if it is consistent with broadly held cultural views. Without this deep enculturation, we can expect that only superficial labels from the new mandates will endure while actual teaching practice in many schools will stay pretty much as it was before the change effort.3 The first step in preparing our educational system to pursue the eight competences as core goals must be to establish their importance clearly within the multiple cultures that make up our country. In part, that may seem easy. Business people may endorse some or all of the eight competences and express publicly that they are essential for success in the age of smart machines.4 However, they tend to discuss change in terms of relatively immediate short-term work force needs, not long-term needs of workers. Moreover, they may assume that advanced education, such as a college degree, is the path to having the needed competences, since they do not understand in any detail the various way that the competences can be gained. The public, and especially teachers, may not understand deeply why these competences are necessary, either. Extended teaching via public media and other outlets will be needed that explains each competence, why it is important, and why every person needs it. If this book is successful, it may do some of that for a segment of the public, but other expressions will be needed that reach people not used to digesting extended prose. For some people, a series of short videos with a lot of concrete examples may be more effective than any book or long magazine article, or even a wordy website. Even a series of tweets aimed at a wide audience

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may be helpful. Such efforts will need to recur periodically over an extended period if they are to produce any enduring shift. Even after much of the public has absorbed the eight competences and understands them, they will not be realized as universal educational goals unless they fit with some broad characteristics of at least some of the subcultures that make up our country. In a multicultural society as ours, in a time of dramatic division driven by erosion of the middle class, it is unlikely that one plan will get all needed participants ready to systematically build the eight competences in every child. Rather, as has always been the case in our multi-level political structure, the best we can achieve initially is for successful efforts here and there to be widely publicized so that people elsewhere can see the shorter-term good fortunes of students who acquire the eight competences and thus become disposed to push for improvements in their own communities.5 We are seeing this happen for “maker” activities currently, and perhaps we can learn from what works for that one specific method that supports learning of a few of the eight competences.6 Below, I sketch some ways in which some of the people needed to support learning of the eight competences might learn how to do that better. These suggestions are prompted partly by a realization that our education system has high inertia and is quite resilient at reversing small change efforts.

Teachers The most obvious group needing help to become enablers of activities that support learning the eight competences are teachers. The most important thing to keep in mind when planning for teacher professional development is that teachers may need to master some of the eight competences themselves before they can help their students acquire them. For this reason, a good starting point might be to offer teachers activities that build up their own levels of these competences. Such activities also might model methods that teachers can use later to support learning by their students. This kind of approach has been used in professional development for writing instruction, which is another area where teacher competence often needs to be improved (for example, see the approach described by McConachie, et al., 2006). In this regard, it is noteworthy that one does not hear often of professional development sessions that focus on teachers as makers, even when the teacher development goal is to support maker activity among students. Activities that can support learning the eight competences include assigning scaffolded teams to develop (“make”) physical solutions to real problems their school system might have. For such activities to be most productive, coaches may need to record group problem solving sessions and point to the recordings to make their feedback to teachers more concrete. Another area where developing teacher competence seems important is financial literacy. Teachers would benefit from having a more developed model in their heads of how they will transition to retirement, how much they will have to live on if they continue current saving and spending patterns, and whether they will be

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able financially to seek additional preparation if they wish to change fields or become a school or district leader. Such mentored sessions might be offered or sponsored by teacher unions, among others. Having key forces in education (such as businesses or foundations) contribute to developing the financial and other competences in teachers also is a good idea. Of course, in a world where only a few professions have assured job security, teachers will then need to learn a bit about how people in less secure roles must manage their financial wellbeing. A potentially cost-effective strategy might be to split teachers at a school into several teams, with each team first being scaffolded to develop one of the eight competences more completely and then being given the task of supporting their other fellow teachers to similarly acquire that competence. For this to work, two things are necessary. First, at least some of the time needed for such sessions needs to be part of the paid school day, since the learning will be required, not optional. Second, the concrete value of each competence needs to be visible when the professional development effort begins, so the competence is something each teacher wants. What will not work is simple didactic presentations about the competences and how to teach them. The competences are mostly in the realm of practiced skill supported by conceptual understanding, so learning by doing will be the most effective way for them to be acquired (Deans for Impact, 2016). Once teachers are up to speed and have practice teaching each other, it will be a lot easier to provide them further opportunities to practice teaching the competences to students. All of this will require time. Achieving real success in making the eight competences part of the school day either will take a long and substantial development period or will be accomplished only superficially and become yet another fad that schools and their teachers have outlasted. In some school systems, teachers form professional development communities (Wilson & Berne, 1999) in which they help each other improve their teaching incrementally. Depending on how solidly such learning communities have been developed and on what other goals they might have besides the eight competences, these groups might be able to design their own plan for acquiring expertise in the competences and developing approaches to teaching them. However, some level of outside mentoring of such learning communities will be needed to assure that they develop deep understanding and make real and sufficient changes in what and how they teach. Some states might be able to offer extended summer academies in which school leaders could learn to be the needed mentors.

Parents, Political Leaders, and Business Leaders As mentioned above, producing sufficient change toward universal teaching of the eight competences requires more than simply changing teaching. A broad cultural shift will be needed. That is, citizens and their leaders will need to believe deeply that the eight competences are necessary and that society has the will and resources to assure that every child has the chance to master them. This will be a major change.

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Currently, people tend to assess local schools by comparing what they see on school visits and what they hear from their children to their own school experience. A major curricular change will be difficult for the average citizen to understand, especially if it involves more than simply expanding the teaching of the topics schools taught in the past. This means that for students to all have an opportunity to master the eight competences, parents, policy makers, elected representatives, and business leaders must believe that this broad change is necessary and possible. Currently, much of educational policy involves an implicit belief that it may not be possible for many children to master the competences they need. This can be seen in public acceptance both of very low thresholds for proficiency and of very low proportions of children meeting those threshold levels on standardized tests. Too often, schools with only 15–20% of students reaching proficiency thresholds on state tests will have aspirational goals of perhaps raising those numbers to 75%. If we start to measure competences that all our children will need in the age of smart machines, how can we be happy aiming to provide those competences to only 75% of children? Are we ready to clean up after the 25% who cannot manage their lives successfully in the age of smart machines? We must develop a broad public understanding that a strong and positive future for our country requires essentially universal mastery of the eight competences. We can sensitively handle cases where a student’s physical and mental challenges make full mastery less likely, but we will not thrive in the age of smart machines if many people who could have mastered the competences were not given multiple opportunities to do so. Where you live or who your parents are should not determine whether you are schooled adequately to enjoy a decent life. To embed the eight competences into our culture will require a continual flow of messages pointing out why they are needed and how universal the need is. This will have to be supplemented by broad use of online learning tools to help people acquire the competences themselves. Beyond direct training, though, competences often can be acquired by just being in a culture where lots of people have and demonstrate them. The power of cultural transmission can be seen in the almost-universal mastery in our society of some skills related to new technologies, such as basic use of smartphones. Here is a simple example from my own past. My father was an engineer, and he was rather impressed with technological breakthroughs that might have widespread utility. So, when microwave ovens first appeared on the consumer market, he quickly realized how much they could change domestic life. My recollection is that he was especially impressed with how quickly a microwave oven could cook potatoes. So, he bought my mother a microwave oven.7 At the beginning of the marketing of such ovens, they were sold with free microwave usage lessons included. With the new microwave oven was a voucher for four classes teaching how to use it. My mother refused to use the oven at all until she had completed all four classes. Today, five-year-olds routinely “nuke” snacks without any formal education on how to do so, and it is difficult to imagine that anyone would avoid using a

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microwave oven because of a lack of formal training. And, of course, our children and many of us routinely use the apps on our smart phones without much, if any, formal instruction on them either. Most adults with business-related jobs use word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software without much in the way of classes on these tools. One big advantage of embedding knowledge in our culture is that often it does not need to be taught explicitly after it has been culturally absorbed. Our children will need to be taught and to have opportunities to practice the eight competences since many of those competences will be needed in their futures in ways they may not experience automatically as children. Still, if the competences are embedded in our culture, there will be much more motivation for practicing how to use them for later life. Consider some activities embedded in many of our subcultures. For example, children, especially those growing up in cities, learn about basketball. They watch basketball games and learn to play basketball with their friends. This learning is substantial and happens automatically. At the same time, they need a lot of work with coaching staffs in high school and college if they are to become solid basketball players. The knowledge of basketball they pick up from our culture provides the motivation they need to persist in practicing the higher levels of competence needed to be real players. The same thing needs to happen with the eight competences. Children will need opportunities to use them in child-centered ways when they are young, along with opportunities to master them for later life as part of schooling and general development. Part of early education in the eight competences should be to provide motivation to exercise and expand those competences later. Longitudinal studies have shown that early motivation for mastering certain kinds of content leads to greater persistence and success in achieving later mastery of much more advanced levels of that content (see, for example, Gottfried, et al., 2016). This suggests that deeply embedded cultural knowledge of the competences might then be leveraged to provide enduring levels of motivation to become a real master of those competences as schooling proceeds. This fits with the experience of many parents, who see that early literature experiences such as being read to provides much of the motivation both to master reading and then to do substantial avocational reading throughout childhood and beyond.

“Third Places” As discussed in Chapter 10, schools cannot do all the work of providing every child a chance to achieve the eight competences in strong ways that will support them in later life. We have commented above on mass media ways to begin embedding the eight competences and knowledge of their importance into the cultures that make up our country. However, beyond the implicit learning that can be triggered by media, it also will be necessary to leverage the many organizations that provide out-of-school experiences to children, both because schools cannot do the entire job themselves and because universal success in promoting mastery of the eight

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competences will require a full court press using all the contexts in which a child spends significant time. However, those organizations desiring to provide specific opportunities to children to practice the eight competences will need training in many cases. Like teachers and like all of us, organizations will tend to assimilate new concepts into their existing views and practices. In some cases, that will be helpful in providing opportunities to practice the competences, but in other cases, inadequate training will likely result in relabeling of current organization activities as serving the need to teach the eight competences, even if the organization could do much better. Historically, some of the eight competences were practiced by many children during their participation in organizations such as Boy and Girl Scouts, summer camps, religious youth groups, music organizations, team sports, and many other activities. Certain kinds of summer or after-school jobs also played a role in developing some of the competences. Opportunities to develop socioemotional skills, confidence in one’s abilities, civic participation skills, and collaboration competence often arose in such organizations. Not all of them did an equally good job, but many of them provided a lot of support for at least some of the competences. Today, though, we are in a period of low involvement in such organizations (Putnam, 2000), though that may be changing. Still, there remain many organizations that have done some good in the past and that could, with training, do even better. This is especially true in communities trying to recover from economic downturns, both in urban centers and in rural areas. While the mix of organizations to which students feel attracted may have changed, many still are powerful forces, and it is important to use them to further learning of the eight competences. Many organizations that could do some good are local and relatively small. For this reason, the “professional development day” strategies that a school district or collaboration of school districts might employ are even less likely to be effective in training the staff and volunteers of non-school organizations. For school systems, both because of their current culture and because of their resources and scale, in-person training, at least of a seed group of leaders, seems most likely to be productive and achievable, though some smaller districts may lack the resources to participate. For those less-equipped districts and for outof-school resources, web-based online training might make more sense. While there remain disparities in access to network resources, the rapid immersion of libraries into the Internet culture and the increasing ubiquity of smart phones means that participants in organizations around the country are likely to have ways to connect to online learning opportunities. Just as with helping students master the eight competences, helping out-ofschool organizations learn to provide additional learning opportunities will not be possible with the simple didactic instruction that has predominated in the online teaching world. Rather, new approaches that are much more interactive will be required. Designing and building these will be costly initially, but it is possible, and I believe it is necessary.

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Already, many educational efforts use online seminars and similar online collaboration schemes effectively, as do businesses trying to build customer awareness of their products and services. This means that it should be possible to develop online virtual groups who can master the eight competences themselves and, at least in part, help each other master competences that some of them already have. Indeed, it may be possible to build online tools to help virtual groups of teachers in rural areas teach each other the eight competences and then enhance those tools specifically to serve non-teachers in community organizations who want to help strengthen the competences in children and youth that they serve. In the next chapter, a strategy for assessing collaborative problem solving is described that might be extensible into an interactive online learning tool that allows practice of collaboration (see, for example, OECD Programme for International Student Assessment, 2017). Basically, the learner is posed a complex problem that is best solved by working with others as a team. So, a team is created online, but the learner is the only human on the team; the other two team members are virtual team members, that is, they appear to be people, but in fact they are simulated people that computer programs control. As problem solution progresses, the computer avatars produce pieces of the problem solution and the learner shares his/her progress and needs with them. In the assessment scheme for collaborative problem solving, a software computer module assesses the quality of the learner’s interactions with the simulated team members. It would not be that difficult to use the same approach but with a coach responding to the learner’s actions by providing advice on ways to interact even more successfully. In some of my past work, I have used this strategy of a computer-based coach responding to a learner’s interaction with a simulated environment quite successfully to teach both electronics troubleshooting (Gott & Lesgold, 2000) and argumentation skills (Toth, et al., 2002), and the approach is much more feasible today, with more powerful computers, than when I was doing it a couple of decades ago. Another technology-enhanced approach has been taken by Sara Konrath (2017), as noted above. Having found, in earlier work (Konrath, et al., 2011), that empathy for others – reading the signs of their emotional state – was declining in the US, Konrath asked whether smart phone apps might be created to help children improve that aspect of socioemotional competence. While data are not yet complete, it appears that the app she helped design does change socioemotional competence with respect to empathy. More data will be needed to support that conclusion, but it at least suggests that there are more possibilities for using online and smart phone applications to support learning and practice of the eight competences. Many other methods exist today to provide highly interactive online learning opportunities. It is quite possible to make opportunities to practice the eight competences online widely available. With libraries full of networked computers and continuing further diffusion of tablets and smartphones into our society, I am quite confident that if such tools for mastering the eight competences are produced and made freely available, access to them will not be limited to just wealthier families. Rather, sufficient access will be available to any who choose to take

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advantage of that access. What may be the hardest task is to convince the wider public that the eight competences are necessary preparation for life in the age of smart machines. That will require an extended messaging campaign. If such campaigns work for political issues such as gay marriage and minimum wage levels, they should eventually be able to work for the eight competences. I turn next to the question of how to assess progress in mastery of the eight competences. Such assessment is essential, especially when initial progress will be incremental and partial.

Notes 1 I have been told that some schools in a wealthy suburb of New York tell those who apply to be teachers that they must first get experience in New York City. To the extent that this kind of thing is systematic, it automatically assures that the wealthy get better prepared teachers than the poor. The opposite would make more sense. 2 Initially, there were six groups, but between mergers and drop-outs, we ended up with two: Smart Balanced and PARCC. 3 When narratives pass into a culture that contain both information consistent with the existing culture and information that is inconsistent, the inconsistent information is best remembered in the short run while eventually, only the culturally consistent information has much influence (see Varnum & Grossman, 2017; Kashima, 2000). 4 Indeed, this has already happened for half of the eight competences (see Partnership for Twenty-first Century Skills, 2017). Moreover, business groups around the country are calling for changes to career and technical education that are mapped to local workforce needs (see, for example, Allegheny Conference on Community Development, 2017). 5 The visible successes need to be very close to home, though, to have impact, and they need extended interpretation that fits various subcultures in our country, including the political left and the political right. After all, while much has been made of the lesser performance of U.S. schools in international comparisons, most subgroups in the U.S. have assimilated this information in ways not likely to produce changes relevant to observed international differences. 6 See discussion of maker activity in the section entitled Transition: Living in Two School Worlds at Once in Chapter 5. 7 In those days, in the subculture of which we were a part, women often did most or all the cooking at home. Indeed, in middle school, where my fellow female students all took home economics, we boys were placed instead in industrial arts classes.

References Allegheny Conference for Community Development. (2017). Allegheny Conference — Beyond Inflection Point. Available online at www.alleghenyconference.org/beyondin flectionpoint/ (retrieved December 19, 2017). Deans for Impact (2016). Practice with Purpose: The Emerging Science of Teacher Expertise. Austin, TX: Deans for Impact. Available online at https://deansforimpact.org/resources/p ractice-with-purpose/ Gott, S. P., & Lesgold, A. M. (2000). Competence in the Workplace: How Cognitive Performance Models and Situated Instruction Can Accelerate Skill Acquisition. In R. Glaser (Ed.), Advances in Instructional Psychology. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Gottfried, A. E., Preston, K. S. J., Gottfried, A. W., Oliver, P. H., Delany, D. E., & Ibrahim, S. M. (2016). Pathways from parental stimulation of children’s curiosity to high

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school science course accomplishments and science career interest and skill. International Journal of Science Education, 38(12), 1972–1995. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/09500693. 2016.1220690 Jochim, A., & McGuinn, P. (2016). The Politics of the Common Core Assessments: Why states are quitting the PARCC and Smarter Balanced testing consortia. Education Next. Available online at http://educationnext.org/the-politics-of-common-core-assessm ents-parcc-smarter-balanced/ (retrieved December 14, 2017). Kashima, Y. (2000). Maintaining cultural stereotypes in the serial reproduction of narratives. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26(5), 594–604. Konrath, S. (2017). Random App of Kindness. Available online at www.rakigame.com/#hom e (retrieved December 20, 2017). Konrath, S. H., O’Brien, E. H., & Hsing, C. (2011). Changes in Dispositional Empathy in American College Students over Time: A Meta-Analysis. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 15(2), 180–198. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868310377395 McConachie, S., Hall, M., Resnick, L., Ravi, A. K., Bill, V. L., Bintz, J., & Taylor, J. A. (2006). Task, Text, and Talk: Literacy for All Subjects. Educational Leadership, 64(2), 8–14. National Governors Association (NGA). (2010). Common Core State Standards. Washington, DC: National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers. Available online at www.corestandards.org (retrieved August 23, 2017). New Standards Project (1998). Available online at http://ncee.org/publications/archived-p ublications/new-standards-2/ (retrieved January 23, 2018). OECD Programme for International Student Assessment. (2017). PISA 2015 Results: Collaborative Problem Solving. OECD Publishing. doi: https://doi.org/10.1787/ 9789264285521-en Partnership for Twenty-First Century Skills. (2017). Available online at www.p21.org/ (retrieved December 19, 2017). Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Toth, E. E., Suthers, D. D., and Lesgold, A. M. (2002). Mapping to know: The effects of representational guidance and reflective assessment on scientific inquiry skills. Science Education, 86, 264–286. Varnum, M. E. W., & Grossman, I. (2017). Cultural change: The how and the why. Perspectives in Psychological Science, 12(6), 956–972. Wilson, S. M., & Berne, J. (1999). Teacher Learning and the Acquisition of Professional Knowledge: An Examination of Research on Contemporary Professional Development. Review of Research in Education, 24(1), 173–209.

13 ASSESSING LEARNING OF THE EIGHT COMPETENCES

The Tyranny of Assessments While assessments are critical to managing a strategic effort such as educational improvement, they also often foster certain pathologies, since there are pressures to “teach to the test.” Tim Harford, in his recent book (2016), takes up the issue of assessment and its problems. While his examples come from the business world and other areas, the core problem arises just as strongly in education. Whatever measure is used to assess the success of an activity converts a broad effort to carry out the activity into a very focused effort to produce a higher score on the assessment measure. A simple example is the common practice of assessing the strength and value of a company by looking at its profit each quarter. This practice produces a variety of efforts to book sales before the current quarter ends. Sometimes, this could be optimal. It just might be the case that car companies and car dealers make the most money if they aggressively market their cars heavily near the end of a quarter. On the other hand, it also could be that other factors determine whether someone is looking for a car and that all that happens is that sales that would have occurred a few weeks into the next quarter occur earlier, often at a lower price and hence lower profit. The same problem arises in education. We have just completed a national experiment in which states were required to administer standardized achievement tests and there were substantial consequences for schools where too many students scored below a set threshold. As a result, teachers felt compelled to focus all their instruction on boosting scores on the high stakes test mandated in their state. One might think this is really a good thing. Teachers stayed heavily focused on teaching the school subjects as measured by a test that seemed pretty good at assessing mastery of each subject. However, a variety of pathologies arose. First, students experienced considerable stress as the test date neared. As test days grew near, students would be hearing that their future, or their teacher’s future,

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depended on getting a high score on the test. At the same time, they did not know what they could do in the coming few days that would boost their score. So, they often became stressed, and their parents could see signs of this stress. For students of color, public discussion of lower mean scores for their group produced both further stress and lower performance (see Steele & Aronson, 1995). Parents of varying race and wealth began to withdraw their children from school on test days. In many areas, bonuses or retaining their jobs were on the line for principals, too. Not really knowing how to produce real learning in time to show up on test scores, principals began to mandate very specific focus, often involving rote memorization, on test topics as the test date neared. Volunteers wishing to provide tutoring for students with learning difficulties were pressured to work mainly during the several weeks before test day. Instead of being able to focus on fostering deep and enduring understanding, they, like teachers, were pushed to focus solely on more rote memorization.1 Sometimes, principals would refuse to allow tutors earlier in the academic year, seeing them as a distraction from drill for testing or as not yet necessary, since they realized that the last-minute drill effort could not be sustained all year and were tightly focused on getting a few points higher on the test. This tight focus on improving scores would not be bad if the tests remained valid indicators of the achievement of core goals for education amid this madness, but in fact that is not always the case. There are a variety of reasons for this. Tests are expected to be reliable, fair, honest, and valid. By reliable, we mean that the same child will get the same score regardless of which form of the test is administered and how and when it is administered, assuming a secure effort to follow administration guidelines. By fair, we mean that a given level of subject mastery will produce the same score regardless of who the student is or what group the student is from. By honest, we mean that the testing process does not permit any cheating that would produce a higher score than matches the student’s actual mastery of the subject. By valid, we mean that a student’s test score accurately indicates their mastery of the subject being tested. All four of these requirements influence how tests are developed. For testing to be honest, it generally is necessary for there to be multiple forms of the test. If there is only one form, it becomes too easy for teachers or principals to cheat, either by giving students the answers to some test questions, by altering their responses on test forms, or by encouraging advance practice of the specific items that will appear on the test. A simple example was observed by my wife Sharon Lesgold many years ago. She visited a school in which there were postings on the bulletin boards in classrooms showing how to solve specific problems that were on the high-stakes test given annually by the school system. To save money, the system reused old test forms from year to year. That made the test questions predictable, so students could be drilled specifically on them rather than being taught the overall subjects. Everyone was happy with the overall arrangement. The school system leaders could brag about saving money, and scores on the test were relatively high, because teachers found ways to prepare students for the specific items on the test. However, those

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scores no longer indicated mastery of a subject but rather practice producing very specific answers to a set of known questions. Lack of honesty led to decreased validity of the test as a measure of content mastery. Fairness is another concern. Generally, tests of competence in subjects like mathematics involve applying specific mathematical processes to real world problems. This works fairly if the problem context is equally familiar to all students. Here’s a simple example of how this could not be the case. When I applied to graduate school in late 1966 and early 1967, some university programs required a test that consisted mostly of analogy problems. Some analogies work well as fair indicators of reasoning skill. Consider, for example, “Three is to Triangle as ?? is to Pentagon.” To answer successfully, one only must know that a triangle has three sides and a pentagon has five. But, the test version I took also included the following item: “Caesar is to Salad as Napoleon is to ??.” That item does a good job of favoring people who happen to have encountered Napoleon brandy and Caesar salad in their reading or other experience and tends to put people from other than middle and upper-class cultures at a disadvantage. In my case, accidents of what I had read for recreation allowed me to answer the question. One could imagine students who would do well in graduate school but had different recreational reading tastes. One also could imagine that brandy knowledge was an indicator that a student matched the restricted subculture of graduate school back then. Today, there is a mathematical technique called differential item function analysis (Osterlind & Everson, 2009) that is used to assure that every test item is fair in not discriminating based on ethnic or socioeconomic status. Unfortunately, when test developers know that this technique will be used, they tend to make test items more abstract and thus to decrease their ability to show how well students can apply their knowledge in real life, since any situation to which knowledge might be applied is either not uniformly in every child’s experience or comes from the artificial world of school subjects. Test developers directly assess whether their tests are valid. That is, they check whether there is a direct relationship between test scores (called predictors) and performances that are deemed to be enabled by the subject mastery being tested (called criteria). Sometimes, however, it is hard to get good measures of criteria. For example, tests used to measure readiness for college (like SAT and ACT) tend to be validated by showing that they correlate highly with freshman grades. In a sense, this is reasonable validation. The higher the score on the test, the more likely a student will get good grades in college courses. However, it often is the case that the kinds of tests given in freshman courses, which tend to be large, are limited the same way that achievement tests are limited. That is, they involve lots of questions to be answered quickly that involve a lot of memorization and limited use of the memorized knowledge. It is not clear that the ability to quickly answer items that involve minimal thinking and mostly retrieval from memory is the best predictor of being able later to learn how to use one’s knowledge for real-world purposes.

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Tests That Do Good without Causing Problems There are tests that seem less prone to the problems just mentioned. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) (National Assessment of Educational Progress, n.d.) is an example. One reason NAEP seems able to measure more deeply and to be less prone to being manipulated is that the arrangements for administering NAEP have been designed to assure that it is not seen as an accountability measure. Congress intended the NAEP to be “the nation’s report card” but not a measure of how well a given teacher can teach or a given school is serving its students.2 NAEP is prohibited by law from making scores available for individual schools, classrooms, or children. In fact, since it is given to so many students, to minimize lost schooling time, each student takes only a sample of the total set of NAEP items. Another reason that NAEP is a more positive kind of test is that it has items that require more than a few seconds of thought. The usual standardized test must have many items to assure that results are not due to one or two good guesses or some other artifact. NAEP, in contrast, has each test item taken by only a subset of students. With many of the students in the US taking the NAEP tests, even if only a small percentage of students answers each item, it is possible to get an extremely accurate sense of how likely it is that students in the US can do what that item requires. Because there are fewer items for any student, students can take longer on each one and still complete their test versions in a reasonable amount of time. Because the total item pool is larger, the results remain reliable and are not distorted by one or two “bad” items. As a result, the NAEP can have items that require more extended thought. When other standardized tests must have many items in order to provide a reliable score for each individual student, each must be answerable in a very small amount of time in order for students to complete enough items in the time available for testing. This means that items mostly can measure immediate recognition, relatively rote application of simple rules or equations, or immediate recall of facts. As it turns out, the easiest things to teach computers to do are simple pattern recognition, application of simple rules, and retrieval of facts. So, most high-stakes tests tend to measure exactly the parts of school learning that machines could master just as well as people, if not better. It seems unlikely that the best preparation for a good life in the age of smart machines is to learn only to do exactly what machines can do. The problem of test superficiality arises because of the desire to get a reliable measure of student achievement on a particular day in a short amount of time. Concerns about cheating and a complete separation of learning from testing make that necessary. However, if we could bring ourselves to move beyond the most simplistic way to assure reliability and integrity, we could have better tests. Just as NAEP has different students answering different test questions as a strategy to allow for meatier items, we could choose to do such sampling within each student as well, with a few substantial performances being sampled at a time in an environment where there is no longer a strong separation between learning opportunities and periods of assessment. The next section discuses one way this might happen.

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Stealth Assessment The eight competences addressed by this book are virtually impossible to assess using standard testing methodology of the sort seen on achievement tests. Some of the competences can be assessed at least in part using the approach taken by NAEP. However, even NAEP represents an intrusion on the normal activities of schooling, so it is limited in how big a chunk of a student’s activity it can assess. It would be great if there were schemes that could operate in the background, assessing the development of the eight competences and perhaps even providing teachers with feedback on how things are going for each student. As it turns out, there may well be such a capability. Over the past couple of decades, Valerie Shute (2011) has been developing an approach she calls stealth assessment. The basic idea is that students are given tasks to do in a computer-based environment. As they work on the tasks, the system monitors the specific actions they are taking and uses them to refine its guesses about how well they have developed various competences. Using a statistical approach called Bayesian networks (Pearl, 2014), each time a student has an opportunity to use one of the competences the system has been designed to measure, the system uses everything it has learned about the student from their earlier actions to predict what they will do. The comparison of the prediction to what actually happens is used to update the system’s beliefs about the student’s competences and about how well various small performances predict the ability to do various other performances that also reflect aspects of the competence being assessed. All of this happens in the background, and the student generally is unaware that they are being assessed. In a sense, it is no different from a student realizing that the teacher can see classwork and homework continually. It is assessment, but it no longer is the same kind of stressor, since it is a normal part of daily student work. Teachers do this intuitively as they watch students doing schoolwork. Using Bayesian networks, it is possible to have an auditable trace of how an assessment was arrived at, making stealth assessment potentially more reliable than even the most astute teachers. It is impressive to see that stealth assessment can be used to measure mastery of specific subject matter. It also can be used to measure competences that come close to those on our list of eight. Specifically, Valerie Shute and her colleagues have looked at stealth assessment of conscientiousness, the extent to which students work hard, persist, and stay focused in addressing a learning task in school (Moore & Shute, 2017). They did this by embedding some assessment rules into a learning game environment called Physics Playground. As students played the game, which involved drawing items like pendulums on the screen and then using them to accomplish various movements of objects, the stealth rules tracked their actions and scored them in various ways that logically connected to their underlying model of conscientiousness. Shute and her colleagues believe that conscientiousness consists of three elements: persistence, carefulness, and perfectionism. For each of these components,

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they identified questions that the software could keep track of. For persistence, one of the questions was how long students spent on unsolved problems and whether they returned to unsolved problems later in a session or in later sessions. For carefulness, one measure was the average time spent drawing an element on the screen, and another was the number of objects drawn for a given problem (if a problem can be solved with four elements but the student created a dozen without reflecting on what really was needed, that would be classed as not too careful). For perfectionism, one measure was the number of times a student returned to a problem that had been solved in a less than ideal way, working at coming up with a better solution. The basic approach behind stealth assessment as Shute has pursued it is called evidence-centered design (Mislevy, et al., 2017; Schneider, 2017). The basic idea of evidence-centered design is to have a theoretical model of what one is trying to measure, differentiating that model to include multiple aspects of the component being targeted (such as conscientiousness), and then developing a set of performance details that can be measured that closely relate to that underlying model. What differentiates this approach from standard psychometrics is that it requires being able to explain why each measurable performance detail reflects the underlying competence being measured. Because a deeper level of linkage between the theory or model of competence and the observations being tabulated is required than is common in standardized test development, the approach can be used to measure more complex and specific competences than are captured by standardized tests. Stealth assessment also meets one requirement that has been central to standardized testing. It cannot be subverted readily for dishonest purposes. One reason standardized tests scored by machine are preferred by some policy makers over deeper instruments is that the scoring is totally objective and done by a machine. With stealth assessment, the scoring process is carried out by a machine, and the program for scoring can be examined to see whether the decisions it makes are sensible given what is being measured. The only potential drawback is that student performances must take place in a computer environment, and schools still differ greatly in the extent to which such environments are readily and continually available to support learning. If one student uses an online system to practice mathematics every day and another student only uses it on days when performance is being measured, the situations are not comparable, and once again the student attending a less-wellresourced school faces barriers to fully demonstrating competence. As time passes, though, the kinds of tablets and computers that can support stealth assessment are becoming very inexpensive. With good organizational design for a school system and good purchasing practices, the costs for such technology are manageable. As with the rest of what this book calls for, achieving such good management decision making will not be easy, but the barriers, in the end, are not financial.

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Structured Social Moderation and the Use of Rubrics While trust in public organizations is declining worldwide, it remains the case for now that in many other countries, testing is done more locally, with various social structures in place to assure that a report of a student’s competence is roughly the same regardless of where it was assessed. The process of achieving comparable assessment standards across schools in different locations is called social moderation (Linn, 1993). While moderation methods vary, social moderation is what happens when people in different places observe each other’s assessment decisions and share their reactions to each other’s approaches. A simple example of social moderation is when two fifth-grade math teachers in a school share their tests, so that each one sees how the other is assessing various bits of math knowledge. Over time, they will tend to move closer to each other in the kinds of tests they give. Partly, this is because social comparison – looking at how other people act in a situation – is a strong shaper of human behavior (Festinger, 1954). When people are not sure what to do or how hard to try, they look at the folks around them and do something similar. This happens in schools as long as teachers are open to letting each other see what they are doing. That is not always the case, of course. Further, if all the teachers in a school have low or otherwise inadequate standards for their students, then social moderation can work to assure that mediocrity. For this reason, in some countries, the ministry of education has a force of inspectors who visit schools around the country and look at how they set and measure success in meeting their standards. Those inspectors often use social moderation to bring a school into conformance with a national standard, by letting teachers and school leaders see how testing is done in other schools that meet that standard. Of course, if there are no schools or few schools attending to measurement of a particular competence, social moderation can break down. In order for it to work, there have to be a reasonable number of places doing performance assessment that meets a regional or national goal that is well embedded in the culture. Then, inspectors can use social moderation to bring underperforming schools more in line with those doing well. Social moderation also can fail if there is real disagreement on what successful demonstration of a competence might look like. For example, one school might believe that socioemotional competence is demonstrated by not being violent when frustrated, while another school might believe that it involves empathizing with people in unfortunate situations and trying to help them. Neither school will learn from the other’s measures until there is more agreement on what all needs to be measured to assess socioemotional competence. One way to get that basic agreement to occur more reliably is by developing assessment rubrics. A very simple example of a rubric for math problem solving, one that the author would refine substantially to be more specific, can be seen in Table 13.1. The rubric specifies some things to look for in a student’s solution, such as how appropriate any drawings were for attacking and solving the problem (use of visuals). For each aspect to be assessed, a score is given, and there are

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descriptions of what it takes to get each level of score. The person assessing the student’s performance would assign points for each aspect and then total those points to get a final score for the problem. Of course, a rubric is only good if it reflects the important characteristics of good performance. For example, a quick web search turned up rubrics in which a high score could be obtained by being neat and spelling key words correctly, even if the student had no idea of how to solve the problem. Still, with appropriate public discussion and social moderation, if the goals that a district or state sets for a performance are clear, it should be possible to develop rubrics for assessing how well the performance meets the agreed-upon standards and then to train teachers to use those rubrics. Notice that this sets a high standard for the eight competences if they are to be measured locally by teachers applying scoring rubrics in an environment of social moderation. What is required is for the central organization setting the competence standards to engage in extended interaction with teachers and school leaders so that there is widespread agreement on what the competence is and on how well it needs to be mastered for a student to fare well as an adult later. That is a lot of work and doing it well will be challenging. Nonetheless, the path to assuring that TABLE 13.1 Sample of simple rubric Points assigned

Problem aspects 4

3

2

1

Complete and detailed explanation Clear and detailed diagram or sketch

Solid explanation

Unclear explanation

Clear illustration

Math computation

No math errors

No serious or major errors

Understanding

Shows complete understanding of all relevant math Goes beyond stated requirements of the problem Provides counterexamples that further demonstrate understanding

Substantial understanding

Illustration unclear or inappropriate Some significant errors Some understanding

Explanation missing key points No illustration

Ability to explain Sketches, diagrams

Attending to problem details

Use of counterexamples

Fully represents problem

Barely represents problem

Major or serious flaws Major lack of understanding Seriously fails to represent problem

□ □ □ □ □

Does not provide counterexamples Total

(Based upon Davis, McClary, & Coleman, 2015)

□

□

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all students have the chance to truly master the eight competences must include such efforts. The task is further complicated by the likelihood that out-of-school opportunities to practice the competences also will be needed. It may become necessary for a school system or a community to engage trainers and assessors who can track where each child has encountered learning opportunities and assess competence in multiple settings. However, as machines displace people from traditional work roles, it will be possible, in principle, to move some people to these new roles – if we care enough to pursue them.

Simulation-Based Assessment There are a variety of reasons why some aspects of competence might be hard to measure. For example, collaborative competence should be assessed by looking at how well a student works with others. However, some people are easier to work with, and some people do not do their share of work when in group settings. It would be unfair to match different students up with teammates who are not themselves at the same levels of collaborative skill and conscientiousness. While standardization cannot be achieved by simply splitting students into groups and then observing how each student performs, it is quite possible to get good assessments of collaborative skills by having each student work occasionally with a team of computer-generated agents – simulated student peers that will behave the same way regardless of who the human member of the team happens to be. For the past few years, as noted above, the Programme for International Student Assessment3 has included tests of collaborative problem-solving capability in its multinational comparative assessment activity, using exactly this approach. Table 13.2 shows the elements of collaborative problem solving that the PISA staff identified and tried to measure. They did this using a rather interesting simulation (OECD Programme for International Student Assessment, 2017). In the simulation, the student being tested (the testee) joins two other “students” who are computer simulations (avatars). This team of the testee and two avatars is given a problem to solve. An example of such a problem is to gather answers to 12 questions (four each about the people, geography, and economy of a fictitious country). They have access to a chat window as well as other displays related to the problem statement and its solution. They can, through various actions, extract the needed information from an interactive online map of the country. As the problem solving proceeds, the testee sees simulated actions of the avatars and also the results of his/her own actions. Periodically, the testee is given a set of alternative steps and must choose one to take. Some such steps involve motivating the other “students” on the team, some involve coordinating with them, and some involve direct problem-solving actions. Over the course of a single problem-solving episode, this kind of approach can accumulate a lot of data that signals how well the testee can solve hard problems and especially how well the testee can collaborate with and sometimes lead other people on such challenging tasks.

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TABLE 13.2 Collaborative problem-solving elements from PISA

Collaborative problem-solving competences

Problem-solving processes

Establishing and maintaining shared understanding

Taking appropriate action to solve the problem

Establishing and maintaining team organization

Exploring and understanding

Discovering perspectives and abilities of team members

Understanding roles to solve the problem

Representing and formulating

Building a shared representation and negotiating the meaning of the problem Communicating with team members about actions needed or underway Monitoring and repairing the shared understanding

Discovering the type of collaborative interaction to solve the problem, along with goals Identifying and describing the tasks to be completed

Executing plans

Following agreed plans and rules

Monitoring, providing feedback, and adapting the team organization and roles

Monitoring, providing feedback, and adapting the team organization and roles

Planning and executing

Monitoring and reflecting

Describing roles, rules, and team organization

(After OECD Programme for International Student Assessment, 2017)

The approach that PISA has taken so far is quite conservative with respect to use of artificial intelligence and other computer tools. This is partly because it needs to be implementable in many different countries speaking many different languages and partly because there is sufficient tension in international comparisons of educational outcomes that the details of how scores are assigned need to stay very simple and transparent. However, the approach can easily be extended into a more elaborate stealth assessment (Shute, 2011). If students interacted over networks to solve big problems regularly over the course of the school year, then their progress in developing collaborative competence could be estimated from interactions that were real experiences – not avatars – and that provided continuing examples of stealth assessment embedded in substantial learning experiences. In some work on collaborative problem solving over networks, just such measures were made, including of things like whether a person gave collaborators any time in which to present their ideas (see, for example, Jermann & Dillenbourg, 2008).

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Perhaps not all the eight competences can be assessed using simulations and stealth methods. However, between simulation approaches and other stealth approaches, it is likely that some variant of stealth assessment, perhaps generated by students spending 15 minutes or so each day working online on tough problems, could provide a lot of useful assessment data without either producing student stress or using a lot of student time that is not tied to learning. And, if it turns out to be productive for students to spend a larger part of each school day in online learning activity, that too can be accommodated without drastically changing the assessment plan.

A Choice: Continuous Improvement for All Children or Strong Public Control The focus on preventing cheating in assessing student outcomes is one kind of strong central regulation of schooling. In some districts, there also is strong central regulation of exactly how and when specific curricular topics are taught. Given the amount of adaptation needed in current teaching practices to assure mastery of the eight competences, it is worth exploring whether such central control needs to be as substantial as it is today. Many experienced teachers argue that the curriculum has become so scripted that they no longer are able to practice their best teaching approaches nor to adjust their teaching to what they see their students doing from day to day. Indeed, there may be a serious tension between a classroom-based focus on continual improvement of teaching and learning versus substantial and wide-ranging central control of how schooling happens. Standardized testing and the mathematics behind it came into being quite reasonably.4 During World War II, there was sudden need for many pilots. As aviation had not been a major part of our society before the war, this meant that a lot of new pilots needed to be trained quickly. In those days before simulators, all pilot training was risky and expensive. As today, a lot of fuel was needed for pilot training. In addition, though, both planes and pilots were at risk, since skills could only be practiced in flight, not first in simulators.5 Moreover, the supply of instructors was low, so the amount of time a trainee could fly with an experienced pilot at his side was limited. This made it very convenient that a group of psychologists were starting to look at the art of testing and to develop a more rigorous approach to it. Selecting people who were likely to learn quickly to fly planes was important since the overall war effort stressed the limits of our economy and our military capability. Earlier, there had been some use of the mathematics of testing to standardize and make more efficient the process of mental testing of potential military recruits. Adding special tests for pilots was thus something psychologists were ready to do. The people who did testing work in the military later became both the first generation of psychometricians in academe and the experts upon which school systems relied as they became more interested in being able to knowledgeably manage their classrooms and teachers. Even before World War II, there were suggestions that the

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approaches used for selecting recruits for military roles and for training those recruits should be pushed into the schools (Claxton, 1919, cited in Schneider, 2017). Now, the technology of mass standardized testing was wholly appropriate for quickly selecting pilot trainees. Testing amounted to an informed statistical decision, necessarily made quickly, about which enlistees should be tracked to flight school and which sent to other combat arms. Statistically, those with high scores on pilot selection tests were more likely to do well in-flight training. With the war effort in high gear, making optimal decisions trumped being fair to all who wanted to fly. But, after the war, we, as a country, overused the testing idea. Public education on a universal scale was still relatively new, legislative bodies were concerned about not having measures to support control of the public education process, and the debts of the war years made budgets for education tight, reinforcing the push for more control and assessment. Further, testing seemed “scientific,” and thus was palatable for the dominant portion of society in an era where concern about whether testing was fair to minorities or immigrants was much lower than today. Today, though, given that good assessment costs more than multiple-choice testing, society faces a real choice. We can continue to measure the impact of schooling using existing instruments, or we can allow schools and teachers to experiment and to focus on getting a good enough sense of student capability that they can support curriculum that digs deeper into each subject and that, more generally, affords opportunities for practicing and mastering the eight competences. Given the level of public resistance to the testing status quo, now is a good time to be experimenting with alternative assessment approaches that are more valid, less stressful, and less wasting of time that could be spent in further learning and practice. Beyond small changes in testing and more use of social moderation and stealth assessment, the level of parent revolt against testing is a force that might be tapped to embed more about the eight competences into public activity and experience.

Transparency A critical requirement for assessment carried out using stealth techniques and simulations is transparency. That is, it should be possible for public representatives to look inside assessment tools and see what gets counted as evidence for various aspects of competence. Currently, this is not always the case. For example, there are systems now being marketed that evaluate student writing. The systems report various characteristics of the student’s written essays and can be used to provide overall writing scores. Unfortunately, it is seldom possible to look inside such systems and see how the scores are generated. Partly, this is because of the long tradition in standardized testing of keeping item and scoring specifics secret to prevent teaching to the test. However, when the assessment is relatively independent of the specific performance, as when a range of student essays are scored with an automated system, there is no danger of

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teaching to the test unless the characteristics the assessment checks for are too superficial. A second reason scoring systems for complex performances are kept secret is that the tests are produced by companies that need to sell enough copies to break even (or, if for-profit companies, to make money). They are therefore reluctant to make their methods public, lest a competitor be able to reproduce them without the front-end investment that led to their derivation in the first place. While test producers have reasons for secrecy, refocusing schooling on the eight competences is a big change. To achieve it, public understanding and confidence will be needed. That will require transparency, as will any later debate about alternative measurement approaches. If transparency decreases the economic viability of test development but is necessary to a social good, then government or major foundations will likely need to fund much of the development of new testing methods. Once the methods are produced and their computational details made public, there can still be competition among private companies to produce assessments that employ the agreed-upon approaches.

Notes 1 I thank Sharon Lesgold for relating her experiences as a tutor during the period of NCLB. 2 In recent years, this restriction has been loosened slightly, but only on a voluntary basis and with safeguards to assure that NAEP scores do not enter into the public discourse about the effectiveness of individual school systems. 3 This activity is usually referred to by its initials (PISA) and is an activity of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which is an international body to which the relatively more developed countries belong. 4 The discussion that follows, about pilot testing during World War II, reflects my recollections of many conversations with Robert Glaser about his own background and emergence as a psychologist of learning and assessment. 5 There were simple simulators to help trainees learn the basics of flying, but nothing to help them learn aerial combat except live exercises.

References Claxton, P. C. (1919). Army psychologists for city public school work. School and Society, 9(216), 203–204. Davis, T., Mcclary, M., Coleman, B., & Aiken, U. (2015). Using Rubrics to Assess Performance Tasks in Algebra. Available online at www.usca.edu/dotAsset/ 46381fde-1762-4110-82db-3212a182aa3a.pdf (retrieved December 27, 2017). Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117–140. Harford, T. (2016). Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives. New York: Riverhead Books. Jermann, P., & Dillenbourg, P. (2008). Group mirrors to support interaction regulation in collaborative problem solving. Computers & Education, 51(1), 279–296. doi: https://doi. org/10.1016/J.COMPEDU.2007.05.012

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Linn, R. L. (1993). Linking Results of Distinct Assessments. Applied Measurement in Education, 6(1), 83–102. doi: https://doi.org/10.1207/s15324818ame0601_5 Mislevy, R. J., Haertel, G., Riconscente, M., Rutstein, D. W., & Ziker, C. (2017). Assessing Model-Based Reasoning using Evidence Centered Design: A Suite of Research-Based Design Patterns. New York: Springer. Moore, G. R., & Shute, V. J. (2017). Improving Learning through Stealth Assessment of Conscientiousness. In Handbook on Digital Learning for K-12 Schools (pp. 355–368). New York: Springer International Publishing. National Assessment of Educational Progress (n.d.). Available online at http://nces.ed.gov/ nationsreportcard/ (retrieved July 17, 2017). OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (2017). PISA 2015 Results (Volume V): Collaborative Problem Solving. OECD Publishing. doi: https://doi.org/10.1787/ 9789264285521-en Osterlind, S. J., & Everson, H. T. (2009). Differential Item Functioning, vol. 161. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Pearl, J. (2014). Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Schneider, J. (2017). Beyond Test Scores: A Better Way to Measure School Quality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shute, V. J. (2011). Stealth assessment in computer-based games to support learning. Computer Games and Instruction, 55(2), 503–524. Steele, C. M., & Aronson, J. (1995). Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69(5), 797–811.

14 CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS

Preserving Democracy When I started this book, my main concern was the lack of economic prospects for students without the eight competences and the related looming shortage of the new breed of workers needed for the age of smart machines. Those concerns remain very real, and providing universal opportunities to learn and practice the eight competences remains extremely important for these economic reasons. However, recent events in Europe and the United States (even within a few blocks of my home, when a synagogue shooting occurred) have triggered my belief that there now is an even more compelling case for major efforts to assure the eight competences for all students and young adults. Our democracy may not survive without such a change (Foa & Mounk, 2016). Those who have struggled in the age of smart machines because they have lost valued roles to machines are a main source of support for authoritarian rather than democratic government. While there are differences of opinion about what it will take to restore Americans’ faith in democracy (Inglehart, 2016), there is broader agreement that the rapid loss of economic status by the middle and working classes is a major force in recent shifts toward authoritarian populism. For democracy to work, there must be a large pool of people who are competent to be leaders as well as an electorate that is practiced in the exercise of democracy. That will be much more likely if the eight competences are universal. In addition, economic security is critical in disposing societies toward democracy over authoritarian leadership (Inglehart, 2016), and the eight competences will be necessary to such security for almost everyone. I very much believe that the fate of democracy in our country rests strongly on assuring universal mastery of the eight competences, along with revival of a more functional level of civics education than is currently prevalent in our schools.

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This is a big task. Assuring that every child becomes a competent adult with the eight competences is a huge challenge. It will require shared effort by legislators of very different beliefs and by voters of differing views and differing socioeconomic level. It will be tempting for those of us who are older to assert that since we had to work hard to get where we did despite less-than-stellar public education, the next generations should have to do the same. Increasingly, though, it is evident that many of our generation who have comfortable lives got to that state with a lot of help. Peers with the same fortuitous start may not all have done as well, but those of us born of wealthy parents or residing in wealthier regions of the country have had a much better chance of a pleasant life. Even those, like myself, who were born into working-class families that were struggling to move upward economically enjoyed opportunities not available to many today who face barriers because of race, ethnicity, or poverty. Today as well, even for the privileged, working hard will not be enough. There need to be schools, after-school activities, and support for families to assure that every child has many opportunities to acquire and practice the eight competences. Currently, few communities provide the support that most children will need. When schools and communities do not provide such learning opportunities reliably, they are undermining students who choose to work hard and supporting the beliefs of disillusioned students who do not believe that working hard at learning is likely to pay off. Racism is a primary reason for that, but, in addition, our education systems simply do not focus on or adequately support learning the eight competences. If every student scored at the level labeled Proficient on standardized tests, most would still be imperiled in the age of smart machines for lack of the eight competences. A world in which most people are not equipped to have a good and secure life in the age of smart machines will not be a pleasant one, and it certainly will continue to have the kinds of divisions and intergroup antagonisms we see in our political life already. There is no magic path to building the kind of education system the next generations will need. Moreover, we cannot wait for extensive controlled studies to tell us which alternative approaches are slightly better than which others. The immediacy of need for a different kind of education in the age of smart machines is a big enough threat to the security of our populace that it requires an approach more like that of war. We need to use all the knowledge and data we can get to inform how we proceed and we need continuing high-quality research to test innovations as they are developed, but beyond that, we simply must try alternatives that seem, on reflection, to be promising. Some of the innovations that are tried by communities will not be completely effective. This means that no one school or out-of-school activity is guaranteed to produce the eight competences in all children. So, while we should try to make learning opportunities work as well as they can and we should carefully select the approaches that seem likely to work best, we must not be overly focused on picking only the one best approach. Because we do not have enough data to be sure which approaches work for which students, designing systems that achieve

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reliability through redundancy is the best way to proceed. That is, we should assume that children will need both high-quality schools and a variety of high quality out-of-school activities designed to help them practice the eight competences, with a high probability that each will help. No one institution will do the job completely.

The Value of Redundancy In a previous chapter, I introduced Reason’s Swiss cheese model (Reason, 2000) to represent how different learning opportunities can combine to cover for the weaknesses each might have in serving some students. Between the home, school, and various out-of-school activities, the gaps in what one opportunity might afford can be filled in by the strengths – for a given student – of other opportunities. As a reminder of this model, consider the cheese slices in Figure 14.1. The slices come from different cheeses, so the holes are in different locations for each of them. When combined into a stack, which is illustrated in Figure 14.2, you can’t see through them. Each slice covers some of the holes of the other slices. Similarly, a redundant and varied collection of learning opportunities each will tend to have different “holes,” with each opportunity covering for some of the gaps in others for a given student. On the other hand, if all the learning opportunities have the same design or curriculum or mandated teacher script, they will likely have the same gaps. These may differ for each student but not, for a given student, from one opportunity to the next, even if there are minor differences from one opportunity to another. This is illustrated by Figure 14.3, which shows slices that are almost identical because they all came from the same cheese. When stacked, they do not cover each other’s holes, as illustrated by Figure 14.4. The point of this cheesy metaphor is that unless we can design perfect learning opportunities that fully serve every child, we are better off with redundant collections of opportunities designed by different people or teams. Each opportunity will have its own, and often different, strong and weak points. Each opportunity will

FIGURE 14.1

Slices from several different cheeses

FIGURE 14.2

When stacked, there is no path through them

FIGURE 14.3

Several identical slices from the same cheese

FIGURE 14.4

When stacked, the holes remain

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serve certain students’ needs better while perhaps having holes for other students that are covered by those students’ redundant opportunities. Indeed, the redundancy approach depends not only on differences in design but also on assuring that each child is given a collection of learning opportunities that were not all designed by the same team or in conformance with the same exacting requirements. A second metaphor that makes the same kind of point is selection of a diet. Many diets have been shown, on average, to produce good results for some people. However, we don’t have adequate data about the range of different body types and activity profiles to be able to prescribe the perfect diet for everyone. What dietitians generally do is to give people some broad constraints such as the total number of calories that they are likely to need each day and then to suggest that they eat a varied diet. As the US Government puts it, “To obtain the nutrients and other substances needed for good health, vary the foods you eat” (United States Department of Agriculture, 2017). Similarly, to obtain overall mastery of the eight competences, one should vary the learning opportunities of which one partakes. To serve students who will be living their lives in the age of smart machines, we need to provide something like the range of food options and diet advice in our society, except that we also need to assure that all students, not just the wealthy, have true access to the more learning-productive opportunities, even though we are not yet assuring similar access to healthy food for all people. This will be difficult, but we will not move in that direction until more of the policy and legislation world and more of the general citizenry have some idea of the need. My goal in writing this book was to help bring that about. I do not offer what I think is a perfect approach to education because we do not know enough. But we do know enough to see clear goals – the eight competences – and to realize that we need redundant learning opportunities so that all children can master those competences.

The Role of Charters From the viewpoint of the Swiss cheese model, charters ideally correspond to some different flavors of cheese. They have value to the extent that they are different in design and function from public schools. However, simply replacing a year in a public school with a year in a charter adds some variability, but it does not produce a stack of redundant learning opportunities in and out of school. That is, choosing a charter independent of detailed understanding of how well it serves the student for whom the choice is made makes sense only if there is compelling evidence that its holes are not relevant to the child in question or if it is part of a large and redundant collection of learning opportunities that extend outside of school. And, many of us, and most notably many of those who favor charters, do not believe we have enough data to support the belief that we can reliably decide in advance how well any school will serve a particular child. So, opting for a more varied total set of learning experiences makes more sense than opting generically for a charter school over a public school. Even as we learn more about how to

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measure the capacity of any learning opportunity to support acquisition of the eight competences, we are unlikely to learn enough to justify focusing on selecting the right single learning opportunity for each child over having a redundant collection of opportunities. A redundancy of school choices for a child cannot make up for lack of a redundancy of learning opportunities simultaneously available to that child.

Lifelong Learning While this book calls for lifelong learning, it addresses primarily the ages when children are in school. I believe that we owe it to all children to assure that they are ready for a life that will require continual learning after they leave secondary school. Beyond the end of high school, people follow many different paths, most of which require the eight competences for success. Moreover, I believe that with sufficient effort, we can assure that every child has a good chance to acquire the eight competences by then. However, there will always be people who need further opportunities to master some or all the competences even after high school. Today, for example, only about 83% of students complete high school (as of 2014–2015, see National Center for Educational Statistics, 2017). The percentage is rising, but it will never be 100%, nor will every school be successful with every student. We already have some “recovery” options in place for students who do not complete high school. They can take GED classes at community colleges and thus become able to pass the GED exam. However, there is evidence that people passing the GED do not fare as well either in employment or in subsequent college programs as people who graduate from high school (Kautz, et al., 2014). Kautz and colleagues argue that this is because an achievement test like the GED does not capture all that is required to succeed in study or work. Put another way, like standardized tests used in schools, the GED does not measure mastery of the eight competences. There are paths that could become successful in providing make-up opportunities for mastering the eight competences. For example, there are online high schools for adults that also provide preparation for a specific occupation, and increasingly, employers of low-skill workers even will pay for their workers to participate in such programs (see, for example, Smart Horizons Career Online High School, 2018; employers like Walmart and McDonalds will pay for their employees to complete this program). While such programs, like brick-and-mortar high schools, do not fully support mastering the eight competences, they could be adapted over time to do so. And, just as this book suggests important roles for “third places” in supporting mastery of the competences, it is important also to have a range of organizations for adults that provide such opportunities. A deep exploration of adult opportunities to acquire the eight competences is beyond the scope of this book. However, schemes for achieving this seem possible, perhaps even easier than for formal education, which would have to overcome privacy law issues and other inertia to fully use out-of-school learning opportunities

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as part of a complete plan for each student. For example, libraries, which already are looking for ways to reinvent themselves, might collect information on local learning opportunities in regional organizations, and librarians might take on the counseling role for adults that school counselors take on for youth. Some librarians already do, based upon my observations when visiting my local library. This kind of second-chance system for adults will be needed, I am sure, but we will do better to first pursue adequate systems to assure mastery of the eight competences prior to high school completion. It is not easy to undertake major change if too many plans for dealing with failure are apparent in the initial design.

Needed Data Systems In recent years, there have been great advances in data mining and in searching of information sources. Almost everyone uses Internet browsers to seek out information, and the search engines used within those browsers are getting quite good at putting the information that is most relevant at the top of the long list of possible responses. We are so used to using such optimized search engines that the trade name Google is often used as a verb: “I Googled to find out more about it.” Search engines work because we have computer power sufficient to store and search the entirety of the public Internet. For many kinds of information, systems store not only the information itself but also “tags” for that information that label either who might want the information or why it might be wanted. For example, music is often stored online with tags that indicate its style and genre. That allows one to search for “symphonies written after 1950” or “private universities in New Jersey.” One could imagine tagging online entries about different learning opportunities and thus being able to search for things like “learning opportunity in Pittsburgh for enhancing socioemotional skills in 14-year-olds who struggle with being assertive and come from low-income families.” For the beyond-school, redundant approach to developing the eight competences to work, such search capability likely will be needed. This raises the question of how the tags can be generated. One approach, probably not realistic financially, would be to do extensive study of each potential learning opportunity and assign the right tags based upon experimental evidence that the opportunity serves a specific group of students well. In addition to being impractical, such an approach still would not assure that a particular student who might not match any group on which the learning opportunities had been tested would be presented with good options for further learning in or out of school. The good news is that research is starting to be done on systems that can provide the best next step for a student to follow even if no one has ever shown the prior history of successes and failures that student has had. The work to date has been done mostly on intelligent systems to provide hints to students as they attempt to solve school subject problems, especially math and science problems (see, for example, Price, et al., 2016; Rivers & Koedinger, 2017). Given enough data

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showing different patterns of prior activity, it is possible for a computer system to infer some best choices for what to do next. It seems sensible, then, to pursue a big data solution to the question of helping students (and their coaches, teachers, and parents) decide which of a redundant set of possible learning opportunities they should pursue. Existing work on intelligent hinting in online problem solving and related fields should be extended to provide online search tools, and database systems should be built up by doing just what Google does: storing information related to each search a person carries out.1 In such a way, regions could build up systems that had a record of what learning opportunities a person had tried and how well each had worked for them. Advisors could then search such for plausible choices of redundant opportunities a given student should consider. In terms of what is computationally possible and even what is affordable, such a solution makes great sense. It will, however, face major barriers. Our country has stringent laws designed to assure that no student’s school-related data is accessible to others. Such laws protect against the possibility that a student’s struggles, which could well be due to transient factors like temporary homelessness or even an inadequate teacher, do not become a permanent record that could keep that student from later opportunities for learning or employment. The laws that exist, however, are so stringent that they prevent the accumulation of information that could help students take advantage of redundant learning opportunities. The privacy laws really rest partly on a belief that schools are a onetime treatment that is uniform, so that information about how well a person did is relevant only to selection for later opportunities, not to choices of best opportunities to pursue for further learning. I believe that the need to help students select the best mix of redundant opportunities, even when many of them are outside of school, is more important than excessive privacy protection. It still would be possible to protect privacy, but it would be done the way it is (or should be) done by credit bureaus, with personally managed access controls, rather than simply by not collecting needed data. Moreover, at bottom, the push for extreme educational privacy laws rests on a belief that not all students can master the core competences needed for success. Once we assume that failures to learn in specific environments portend failures in life, privacy laws make sense. But, if the goal is to serve every student adequately, perhaps the specifics of educational privacy laws need reexamination. An approach, costly but worth considering, is to do what is being done in medicine. A study currently is underway that hopes to gather detailed health and treatment records from over 1,000,000 Americans to build exactly the kind of treatment selection system for health as is suggested above for education (National Institutes of Health, 2018). Efforts are underway in major health care systems around the country to build a database that would allow intelligent systems to infer the best course of action for a person with a health problem based upon how other people that seem most similar in their medical histories have done with various next treatments. If we can do this for health, we should also be able to do it for

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education. Given the level of disruption in our society as we encounter the age of smart machines, our democratic future may depend on this.

Investing in Learning Opportunities I hope this book has made the case that our country needs to invest in effective systems that support universal mastery of the eight competences, systems that leverage not only public schools but also other organizations in the community and perhaps even youth work sites. We know, as discussed in Chapter 12, that part of the needed public investment must be in opportunities for teachers, parents, and activity providers to learn about the eight competences and to begin to get a sense of what characterizes effective learning opportunities for acquiring them. Parents need to learn how to support those competences in their everyday efforts of family life and in choosing learning opportunities for their children. Teachers need to learn how to configure project activities and other opportunities to make them more likely to be productive. Activity providers need to learn to assess whether and how the activities they offer do or do not support learning the eight competences. Support for that professional and parental development will need to favor offerors who regularly assess the effectiveness of their programs and incrementally improve them, just as many philanthropies now require that of organizations they fund for social action. Further, regions will need to use big data and artificial intelligence approaches to build databases and query systems that provide advice about which redundant learning opportunities each child should pursue to best assure that the eight competences are well developed.

It Is Time to Act The age of smart machines is upon us. There is uncertainty about whether machines will completely replace humans in the work place or simply take over the easy parts of jobs making those jobs require higher levels of the eight competences (World Economic Forum, 2018a; 2018b). Regardless of exactly what happens, it is clear that roles requiring minimal schooling and not requiring the eight competences will either disappear or require far fewer people. Smart machines will continue to create new opportunities, but those will be only for people who have the eight competences and leverage them to quickly acquire any special skills a new role requires. A recent pair of reports to the World Economic Forum states that the availability of a work force ready to evolve quickly as technology enables new possibilities is essential not only to economic progress but also to preserving or restoring a more cohesive and democratic society (World Economic Forum, 2018a; 2018b). While the media are filled with hysterical claims about artificial intelligence, public policy seems to ignore almost everything except perhaps issues of privacy. This is very shortsighted. There is plenty of evidence that the age of smart machines will, at a minimum, disrupt the lives of working people. As has happened in the past, new jobs likely will evolve to replace those from which people have

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been displaced, but this will take time. Long lags between losing one job and finding a newly-created one will increase stress and decrease hope. That is what destroys civil societies. At a minimum, people will need to be prepared to live in tumultuous times and to engage periodically in systematic learning to remain valuable members of our society. The eight competences are a reasonable guess about what new capabilities should be part of universal education. It is time to make that happen. Even before major changes in public policy, all educational institutions – schools, technical colleges, and universities – should be rethinking curriculum right now. As Nigel Cameron put it: Every one of these institutions operates on the tacit understanding that there are no big changes on the way, that while careers are becoming more fluid and workers more flexible, their broad outlines will remain the same. In the process they are shamefully misleading young people. (2017; reproduced with permission of Polity Press) That must change if the educational establishment is to remain central to our society and honest with its students. This will be hard, and it may require public policy changes as well, but it would be derelict for any educational institution to put off preparing for the age of smart machines strongly and without self-deception. While a focus on providing every child the chance to master the eight competences will involve new costs, it also will help overcome certain current costs. Partly because of a significant retreat by government from paying the cost of college, college expenses cost a lot: in government grants, in delays before young adults earn taxable income, and in corporate expenses tied to making up for the lack of mastery of those competences. Just one example is the cost of requiring a college degree as a surrogate for the eight competences, something common in the business world (Fuller & Raman, 2017). It is easier for a company to assume that mastery of the eight competences is automatically reflected by a college degree than to test for them directly, even though many jobs do not require a full college education. Many jobs requiring the eight competences go unfilled or are filled by young people who needed a college degree to be hired simply because companies cannot count on our schools to provide the eight competences. We currently are paying a heavy price for not taking on the task of assuring that all children have a chance to master them. A look at educational planning and action in other countries reveals that some of our competitors have not made this costly mistake. While collaborative problem-solving taps only a couple of the eight competences, on that competence alone, the US lags behind Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, Korea, Canada, Estonia, Finland, Macao, New Zealand, Australia, the Republic of China, and Germany (OECD Programme for International Student Assessment, 2017). One state, though, Massachusetts, would place third in this list if it were a country, so we know that making progress on the eight competences is not beyond our ability. Hopefully, it also is not beyond our will.

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While the corporate world is pushing for changes to education, they have generally been too short-sighted in what they propose. They push career and technical education institutions to pay more attention to the exact range of jobs that need to be filled in their region. That is important, but drill on specific skills a single job needs generally will not prepare a worker for the time when that job also is transformed or eliminated because of even newer smart machines. Companies tend to push schools to change their career and technical education to match new jobs rather than to focus on making it easier to retrain workers that are no longer needed because of intelligent machines that have replaced them. They do this because their workers lack the eight competences and thus are expensive to retrain. But a stable society cannot continually throw away many of its citizens. If the eight competences were more prevalent, companies would find it beneficial to retrain workers rather than relocate jobs or refocus to need lesser talent. We are starting to see examples of a broader educational focus, as more employers of less skilled workers are providing support for further schooling that may not be needed for the employee’s current job.2 More research is needed on the economic benefits that companies may enjoy when workers have the eight competences, but they can be considerable. Still, it will likely take greater public demand before companies invest substantially in additional learning opportunities for the eight competences. It is easier for an enterprise to pursue what it can accomplish with the talent it can find than to push for education systems that prepare people adequately to make the most of the age of smart machines.

Other Countries Are Pursuing These Goals At one level, I was aware of efforts around the world to pursue variations of the eight competences in education. As discussed above, for example, the OECD PISA effort already tests for collaborative skills in the OECD participating countries (OECD Programme for International Student Assessment, 2017). Moreover, most countries have central education ministries and hence can proceed more quickly to make needed changes to schooling, so we should expect to see many examples of efforts to transform schooling partly toward a focus on the eight competences. The nature of these transformations may surprise us. For example, just as I was finishing my last pass through the manuscript for this book, I visited a school in Taiwan that seemed especially well tuned to the changes that are needed. Taiwan makes special efforts to tailor schooling to the needs of its aboriginal tribes, through efforts both to preserve tribal culture and to assure that children are prepared for modern life regardless of the economic or other circumstances from which they come. I visited Tafalong Primary School in the Hualien area of Taiwan. This school serves one of the indigenous tribes, the Amis,3 that does fishing and fish farming. On a Sunday of a holiday weekend, the school principal, Mr. Mingsheng Xie, met colleagues and me at the school to show us how they adapt to the needs of local tribal children. I was very impressed, not

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only with the effective cultural sensitivity but with the potential for addressing the eight competences. Mr. Xie is a calligrapher, and some of the teachers practice other arts. They also encourage the children to produce art that reflects their heritage. The result is a school full of art that does two things. First, it connects the children to their heritage. Second, it conveys messages supporting many of the eight competences. For example, Mr. Xie’s calligraphy contains messages supporting such competences as confidence and collaboration. The school is decorated with tribal symbols that the children have produced, and their individual artistic efforts are coordinated in ways that show them how a team can do more than any one individual. Further, the school connects with the community, with various tribal elders coming in periodically to pass on their wisdom. While technology is present substantially and the children learn to use it, it is local culture, not technology per se, that drives the opportunities to practice the eight competences. The lesson for me was clear. While artificial intelligence may be the driver creating the need for a new hidden curriculum, the resources for that curriculum can, and probably should, be anchored in existing community history and tradition. Our children will be prepared for the age of smart machines not by superficial efforts to use this year’s technology but by deep and broad focus on the eight competences and a vision of the future that is anchored in the rich cultures from which those children come.

A Possible Path toward a Transformed Educational System Throughout this book, I have suggested that assuring the eight competences for all our children will require more than just the schools we now have. Out-of-school activity will help assure the redundancy of opportunities that are essential to assuring that every child is served reliably. And, public support and demand will be needed if schools are to make major changes in curriculum and put enough resources into teacher professional development. Out-of-school organizations also will need substantial professional development. Achieving all of this will require a broad level of partnership that goes well beyond the world of schooling. It is unlikely that some simple action such as a federal budget allocation will assure that such partnerships develop, though such stimulus may be helpful. We know a bit about what makes partnerships succeed in having an impact on major public needs. Some strong hypotheses were put forward by Kania and Kramer (2011) about the kind of networks or collaborations that are needed to achieve large-scale social change. Specifically, they suggested that five conditions needed to be satisfied: a common agenda, shared measurement systems, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication, and backbone support organizations. It is worth quickly unpacking those five requirements. The first is pretty obvious. A collection of community entities cannot make major progress toward a goal unless they agree on the goal and on the path they will take to get there. That path will be revised in the face of experience, but

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forward progress is not likely when key actors are marching in different and uncoordinated directions. This does not mean that all parties must agree completely on what is needed and how that should happen. It does, though, require agreement on the key goals that are shared and commitment to the approaches decided collectively. In the business world, there is often reference to the power of ego-free collective work. Organizations have egos too, and collective impact requires them to be relatively ego-free in their joint efforts. In order to make progress toward a shared goal, organizations not only must work together. They also must agree upon how they will measure their progress. The evidence-based approach that is required need not, and probably cannot, rest only on measures that meet every statistical design requirement. Rather, there must be agreement on what evidence is worth considering and a willingness to adjust collective effort as that evidence starts to appear. Some years ago, I suggested that this is like steering one’s car (Lesgold, 1988; 2008). Moment by moment, we get a partial sense of where we are headed and make continual small adjustments to steering. If we waited for perfect information on our progress down the road, we would display the jerky and sometimes inadequate steering that new drivers display. Rather, we continually adjust based upon partial and only-partly-reliable information. A collective impact effort will need to see measurement as more like the way we steer our cars than like decisions made about which drugs can be sold for a particular ailment. The third requirement identified by Kania and Kramer (2011) is for mutually reinforcing actions. The work plan for a collective impact effort should not have every organization doing exactly the same thing. Rather, each organization needs to figure out which pieces of the overall needed effort they are best able to address and then work to do their part for the overall enterprise. They must judge their success not by whether their individual goals are achieved but rather by whether their efforts are supporting overall progress toward the collectively agreed goals strongly. Kania and Kramer also suggested that in order for a collective network of organizations to achieve impact toward a shared goal, there needs to be a backbone organization that has staff dedicated to keeping the entire enterprise together, assuring effective communication, gathering and preserving data, reporting results, and generally managing and facilitating the overall project. They also suggested that successful collective efforts require continual communication through that backbone, to build trust and to assure collective understanding of the common goal, coordination of current efforts to get to it, and adapting to what is being learned from measures being made along the way. Recent study has confirmed that these requirements are essential and has refined the original ideas by studying collective efforts in 25 community initiatives in North America (ORS Impact, 2018; Stachowiak & Gase, 2018). The results of that work confirm the importance of meeting each of the requirements set out by Kania and Kramer to overall success in achieving or making progress toward collective goals. The work also produced a more nuanced and refined understanding

150 Concluding Observations

of how the various requirements support and interact with one another. Further, the study found evidence that equity-focused effort is required if outcomes are to be achieved equitably for all who should benefit from the work. Much more research will be useful in further refining our understanding of how a collective community-wide effort can best achieve its goals, but even now we can be pretty confident that the goal of assuring the eight competences as the outcome of every child’s education will require a collective effort and that the key factors for success identified by Kania and Kramer merit very careful attention.

We Are a Society that Can Do Hard Things A key message from this book is that the eight competences are both essential for life in the age of smart machines and very difficult to assure reliably for all our children. We are a society that does as much as it thinks it can rather than all of what needs to be done. We drive on potholed roads. We only partly help children whose parents become addicts. We make important but inadequate efforts to overcome racism and to assure that no citizen is bullied or harassed. However, when the situation gets bad enough, we do better. We did so in World War II, and we did so when polio became a huge national menace. We can do so today if that is what it will take to prepare our children for life in the age of smart machines. The history of the Great Depression and World War II makes that very clear. The key to achieving systems that assure the eight competences for all students is for as many of us citizens as possible to understand the urgency of preparing our next generations for life in the age of smart machines. It will be hard, and some good people with good ideas may end up not being the leaders of the needed efforts, but if enough of us know enough to see the importance of improved educational systems, the needed leadership will arise. If enough of us recognize the need for substantially rethinking education and which institutions besides schools must play a role, we will be ready for that leadership and able to discern which leaders are up to the task. If we insist that participating organizations organize to have collective impact, success is possible – and we must succeed. It is time to get started, to catch up with competitor countries, and perhaps to surpass them. To fail in this is likely to condemn our country to the kinds of troubles that beset past governments that did not respond to the disruptions produced by automation. The revolutions in France and Russia and the problems in Ireland stand as warnings of the cost of not preparing our citizenry for the disruption of our times by smart machines. We can succeed, and we must.

Notes 1 In fact, more than search histories can and should be recorded. Currently, using information from my use of my phone and the paths I follow (tracked by Google Maps via the phone’s GPS transceiver), my phone can tell me exactly where I was over the past month. Synchronizing in Uber and other data, it even knows whether I walked or drove. So, for example, in a recent trip to New York, Google knew that I went to an event at a

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particular club, that I took the subway there, which line I took, and how long I stayed. There are no real technical barriers to similarly tracking pursuit of learning opportunities. The issues are entirely matters of balancing privacy with adequately serving each student’s needs. 2 As noted above, employers like Walmart and McDonalds will pay for their employees to complete the Smart Horizons program (Smart Horizons Career Online High School, 2018) and to earn college credits from local community colleges and other higher education institutions. 3 See www.apc.gov.tw/portal/docList.html?CID=C1F3A60A42545179 for a description of this tribe. The school’s name, Tafalong, refers to a crab that is a symbol of the tribe.

References Cameron, N. M. de S. (2017). Will Robots Take Your Job?: A Plea for Consensus. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Foa, R. S., & Mounk, Y. (2016). The danger of deconsolidation: The democratic disconnect. Journal of Democracy, 27(3), 5–17. Available online at www.journalofdemocracy. org/sites/default/files/Foa%26Mounk-27-3.pdf Fuller, J. B., & Raman, M. (2017). Dismissed by Degrees. Available online at www.hbs.edu/ faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=53502 Inglehart, R. F. (2016). How much should we worry? Journal of Democracy, 27(3), 18–23. doi: https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2016.0053 Kania, J., & Kramer, M. (2011). Collective impact. Stanford Social Innovation Review, 9(1), 36–41. Kautz, T., Heckman, J. J., Diris, R., ter Weel, B., & Borghans, L. (2014). Fostering and Measuring Skills: Improving Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Skills to Promote Lifetime Success. Paris. Available online at www.oecd.org/edu/ceri/Fostering-a nd-Measuring-Skills-Improving-Cognitive-and-Non-Cognitive-Skills-to-Promote-Li fetime-Success.pdf Lesgold, A. (1988). The integration of instruction and assessment in business/military settings. Proceedings of the 1987 ETS Invitational Conference. Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service. Lesgold, A. (2008). Assessment to steer the course of learning: Dither in testing. In E. L. Baker, J. Dickieson, W. Wulfeck, & H. O’Neil (Eds), Assessment of Problem Solving Using Simulations. New York: Erlbaum. National Center for Education Statistics (2017). The Condition of Education – Elementary and Secondary Education – Student Effort, Persistence and Progress – Public High School Graduation Rates – Indicator April. Available online at https://nces.ed.gov/programs/ coe/indicator_coi.asp (retrieved February 2, 2018). National Institutes of Health (2018). National Institutes of Health (NIH) – All of Us. Available online at https://allofus.nih.gov/ (retrieved February 23, 2018). OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (2017). PISA 2015 Results (Volume V): Collaborative Problem Solving. OECD Publishing. doi: https://doi.org/10.1787/ 9789264285521-en ORS Impact (2018). When Collective Impact Has Impact: A Cross-Site Study of 25 Collective Impact Initiatives. Seattle, WA: ORS Impact. http://orsimpact.com/DirectoryAttachments/ 10102018_33832_890_CI_Study_Report_October_2018.pdf (retrieved October 15, 2018). Price, T. W., Dong, Y., & Barnes, T. (2016). Generating Data-driven Hints for Openended Programming. Available online at www4.ncsu.edu/~twprice/website/files/ EDM 2016.pdf Reason, J. (2000). Human error: models and management. BMJ (Clinical Research Ed.), 320 (7237), 768–770. doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/BMJ.320.7237.768

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Rivers, K., & Koedinger, K. R. (2017). Data-Driven Hint Generation in Vast Solution Spaces: A Self-Improving Python Programming Tutor. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 27(1), 37–64. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40593-015-0070-z Smart Horizons Career Online High School (2018). High School Diploma – Career Certificates – SHCOHS. Available online at https://smarthorizonsonline.org/ (retrieved February 2, 2018). Stachowiak, S., & Gase, L. (2018). Does Collective Impact Really Make an Impact? Available online at https://ssir.org/articles/entry/does_collective_impact_really_make_an_impact (retrieved October 15, 2018). United States Department of Agriculture (2017). Eat a variety of foods. Available online at https://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/dga95/variety.htm (retrieved November 9, 2017). World Economic Forum (2018a). Eight Futures of Work: Scenarios and their Implications. Available online at www.weforum.org World Economic Forum (2018b). Towards a Reskilling Revolution. Available online at www.weforum.org

INDEX

Page numbers in italics denote figures, those on bold denote tables. 4 Cs 3, 16, 17, 18–19, 22; see also collaboration; communication; complexity; creativity ability to evaluate information 3, 21, 22, 43, 50–53, 92, 93, 103 ability to learn efficiently and quickly 3, 17, 22, 41–44, 92 ability to test claims 20–21, 50–53 Abrahams, S. L. 105 accountability 25, 36, 68, 113 adult learning opportunities 142–143 Apperly, I. A. 54 Applied Learning Skills 35n4, 113–114 apprentice programs 89 apprenticeship 87–90; and curriculum 90; history 88–89; informal 104–105; unproductive 89 apprenticeship for life 4, 74 aptitude tests 30–31 Aronson, J. 80, 124 art 26, 50 art activity 106–107 artificial intelligence 8–14, 43, 44, 75, 76, 81, 85, 108, 132, 143–145, 147, 148 assembly lines 5, 6 assessment 36, 38–39, 91, 123–137; driving practice 123; educational and medical assessment compared 38; fairness 124, 125; honesty 124; pathologies 123–124; reliability 124,

126; rubrics 129–130, 130; simulation-based 131–133, 134; stealth 127–128, 132, 133, 134; transparency 134–135; validity 124, 125; see also testing automation 5, 6–7, 11–12 Ball, S. 67 Barnett, W. S. 67 Baron-Cohen, S. 54 barriers: to out-of-school learning 94–95; to school attendance 99–100 Bayesian networks 127 Berdik, C. 65, 89 Berliner, D. C. 24 Berne, J. 116 Binder, R. 57 Borge, M. 20 Braasch, J. L. G. 50 Brten, I. 50 Brissett, D. 98 Bruner, J. S. 42 Bruya, B. 48 bubble strategy 26–27 building relationships 94 Butler, S. M. 98 Cai, Z. 48 Cameron, N. 146 carefulness 127, 128 Carroll Massey, G. 33

154 Index

Castrechini, S. 22 Cavalli-Sforza, V. 51 central regulation, educational cost of 133 charter schools 13, 66, 83–84, 141–142 Chien, Y. 55 child care facilities 94, 100 Chomitz, V. R. 58 church 74, 90, 95, 98 church schools 83 citizenship 29, 65 civic participation, skills of 3, 20, 22, 47–50, 92, 109, 110 civic responsibility, modeling of 74 civics education 20; for democracy 137 Claxton, P. C. 134 Clinton, Bill 87, 88 club membership 109 coaches 105, 106, 107, 109, 110 coding skills 9, 39 cognitive skills 5, 6, 20 collaboration skills 3, 16, 18–19, 20, 22, 53–55, 92, 120; assessment of 131–132; see also teamwork collective impact effort 149–150 college education 39, 40, 146 college readiness 30, 125 Common Core State Standards 28, 36, 37–38, 39, 40, 91–92, 113 communication skills 3, 16, 19, 22, 28 community education systems 66, 74 competence directory 91 complexity, dealing with 3, 16, 16–17, 22, 28 computer games 108–109 computerized adaptive testing 58 computers displacing workers 5, 6, 7, 11–12 confidence 3, 21–22, 27, 28, 45, 56–58, 66–67, 92, 93 conscientiousness 127–128 Copeland, Nathan 10–11 corporations, role of 147 creativity 3, 16, 19, 22, 28 critical thinking 16, 18–19 Cubberley, E. 85n3 cultural background 30–31, 34 cultural bias 30–31 cultural embeddedness: of competences 114–115, 116–118; of knowledge 42 curricular change: process of 112–113; resistance to 113–114 curriculum 27–28; and apprenticeship 90; hidden 1, 3, 29–30, 92; subject-matter (traditional) 25, 26, 28, 36, 66, 91–92 Davis, D. H. 83 Deans for Impact 116

Deming, D. J. 44–45 democracy 12, 20; participatory 49; preservation of 137–138 Diamond, A. 22 Diaz, C. 98 differential item function analysis 125 Dillenbourg, P. 132 disciplinary practices 75, 79–80 disruption: economic 17; social 2–3; of work patterns 2 Donato, R. 42 Donnelly, J. E. 58, 59 Dougherty, D. 99 Duckworth, A. L. 56 Dweck, C. S. 57 Early Head Start 67 ecological niches 79–80 economic disparities 31; among schools 13, 66 economic disruption 17 economic signaling 27–28 education system 25–26; redundancy 4, 68–71, 139–141, 144 educational goals: in the future 31–34; in the past 29–31 Edwards, H. & Edwards, D. 13 Electric Company 67 electronic games 108–109 emotional intelligence 44; see also socioemotional skills Engel, D. 54 Ericsson, J. A. 9 ethnic/racial background 31, 32, 138 Evans, D. A. 43 Everson, H. T. 125 Every Child Succeeds Act (ESSA) 26 evidence-based design 128 evolution of education 78–82 evolution of minds 80–81 experiential differences 32–34 expertise 9, 17, 18 external learning opportunities see out-of-school learning failure, dealing with 21–22, 57 fairness, assessment 124, 125 Fan, F. 44 Fernandes, D. 55 Festinger, L. 76, 129 field trips 49–50 financial self-management 1, 3, 12, 16, 21, 22, 25, 55–56, 92, 93, 100, 103–104 Foa, R. S. 137

Index 155

free schools 83 Frey, B. 13 Fulghum, R. 73 Fuller, J. B. 146 future jobs 13 Gadd, C. D. S. 43 games, electronic 108–109 Gase, L. 149 GED (General Educational Development) classes 142 Gershon, L. 44 gig economy 1, 21, 23n4 Glaser, R. 18 Goldman, S. R. 51 Golinkoff, R. M. 21, 56, 57 Goodman, A. 45, 88, 95 Gott, S. P. 43, 120 Gottfried, A. E. 118 governance structures, learning opportunities within 110 Gragg, C. I. 102 Greene, J. L. 59 Greenfield, P. M. 42 group intelligence 53, 54 Halverson, E. 37, 39 Harford, T. 123 Hastings, J. S. 55 Head Start 67 health care databases 144 healthy lifestyle 28 Hess, E. D. 29, 46 hidden curriculum 1, 3, 29–30, 92 high-stakes testing 26, 58, 80, 81, 113, 123 Hirsh-Pasek, K. 21, 56, 57 history of American education 82–83 honesty 17; assessment 124 Hong, H.-Y. 104 human interaction 16 industrial economy 40 inert ideas 81 informal apprenticeships 104–105 information evaluation 3, 21, 22, 43, 50–53, 92, 93, 103 information systems: importance to adequate education 143–145; problems of privacy laws 144 Inglehart, R. F. 137 international competition 146 Internet 2, 8, 143 ; see also online learning opportunities internships 88, 89 intersubjectivity 61n10

Jackson, P. W. 1, 3, 28 Jermann, P. 132 job readiness see work readiness job shadowing 89, 104–105 Jochim, A. 113 Kania, J. 66, 148, 149–150 Katz, S. 108 Kautz, T. 142 Kessler, S. 4n Kiester, Jr., E. 87, 90 kindergarten learning 27, 48–49, 73–74 Klein, J. 80 knowledge, culturally-embedded 42 Koedinger, K. R. 143 Koester, S. 95 Konrath, S. 108–109, 120 Krakowski, P. 106–107 Kramer, M. 66, 148, 149–150 Langegger, S. 95 language arts 35n4, 113 Laughlin, P. R. 53 laundry facilities 95, 100 Lave, J. 89 Leana, C. 56 learning: applied 35n4, 113–114; from art activity 106–107; efficient and quick 3, 17, 22, 41–44, 92; from community experiences 74; by doing 76, 87, 116; from games 108–109; governance structures and opportunities for 110; to learn 42; lifelong 142–143; mass media support for 67; online 119, 120, 142; parental 112, 145; project-based 44; through reflection 105; self-managed 42–44, 55; from simulations 107–108; from sports activity 109; from stories 102–104; see also out-of-school learning Lee, K. 22 legitimate peripheral participation 89 Lesgold, A. M. 43, 51, 81, 85n2, 88, 90, 120, 149 Libertus, M. E. 66 libraries 13, 143 lifelong learning 142–143 Lin-Siegler, X. 57, 104 Linn, R. L. 129 literacy 26, 27 London, R. A. 22 Love, J. M. 67 Ludwig, K. 20, 46 McCandliss, B. 34 McConachie, S. 115 McGuinn, P. 113

156 Index

machines replacing people 1, 5, 9–10, 11–12 maker activity 36–37, 39, 52, 78–79, 105–107, 115 maker spaces 99 mass media support for learning 67 mathematics 1, 25, 26, 30, 35n4, 39, 56, 66, 90, 92, 113, 143 medical assessment, and educational assessment compared 38 medical history databases 144 medical training, scaffolding in 43 mental fitness 3, 22, 59–60, 92 mentors 76, 87, 105, 109, 110 Merrow, J. 71 metamotivational skills 94 Meuris, J. 56 mindfulness 22, 59–60 Mislevy, R. J. 128 Mitroff, I. 25, 67 modeling civic responsibility 74 Moffitt, T. E. 47 Mokyr, J. 78 Moore, G. R. 127 Morris, P. 55 motivation 33, 76, 94, 104, 118 Mounk, Y. 137 multicultural society 31, 32 music 26, 50 Myers, Jack 51, 61n9 Nahemow, M. 43, 81, 85n2, 87, 88, 90 Nardi, B. A. 33 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 126, 127 National Center for Educational Statistics 142 National Governors Association 36, 37, 40, 91, 113 new human roles 3 New Standards Project 35n4, 113–114 New Tech Network 44 Nigosian, S. A. 48 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) 25, 26, 27, 41, 58, 80 norm-referenced testing 58 NSF (National Science Foundation) summer programs 75 numeracy 26 Obama, B. H. 10–11 OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 120, 131–132, 146, 147 Oldenburg, R. 98 Ong, Y. S. 20

online learning opportunities 119, 120, 142 ORS Impact 149 Osterlind, S. J. 125 out-of-school learning 4, 13, 32–33, 49–50, 65, 66, 84, 90–91, 92, 94–95, 118–121, 142–143, 148; barriers to 94–95 parental learning 112, 145 parenting 67, 145 participatory democracy 49 Partnership for 21st Century Learning 16 partnerships 74, 148; with business 74; with community 66 pauper schools 82, 83 Pearl, J. 127 peer scaffolding 43–44 Pennsylvania: Free-School Law (1834) 83; public school system 83 Peppler, K. 99 perfectionism 127, 128 persistence 21–22, 56, 57, 58, 59, 104, 118, 127, 128 personal finances see financial self-management philanthropies, role of 145 phonemic awareness 34 physical activity 26, 80, 110 Physical Activity Across the Curriculum (PAAC) project 59 physical education 50, 58, 80 physical fitness 3, 22, 27, 58–59, 92, 93 physical skills 5, 6 Physics Playground 127 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) 120, 131–132, 146, 147 Pople Jr, H. E. 43 Porter, E. 80 power of artificial intelligence 10–11 practice 102 Price, T. W. 143 privacy laws 144 private schools 13, 24, 40, 83 professional development 37–38, 90, 91, 99, 112, 115–116, 148; learning by doing 116 professional learning communities 116 project-based learning 44 protected jobs 3, 41 public education: history of 82–83; universal 4, 83 public schools 13, 24, 40 public understanding 114–115, 116–118 punishment vs. positive reinforcement 75 Putnam, R. D. 98, 119

Index 157

Race to the Top 113 race/ethnicity 31, 32, 138 racism 31, 138 Raman, M. 146 Raymond, M. E. 83 readiness for college 30, 125 readiness for work 29–30, 89 reading 30, 32, 66 “reading the mind in the eyes” (RME) test 54 Reason, J. 69, 84, 139 redundant range of schools 84 redundant resources 4 redundant systems, importance of 4, 68–71, 139–141, 144 Reich, R. 9 reinventing oneself 17, 76 relationship building 94 reliability, assessment 124, 126 religious school education 83 resistance to change 28, 67, 113–114 retraining workers 17, 147 Ridley, M. 78 Rivers, K. 143 Rosé, C. P. 20 Ross, G. 42 routine work 5, 6 rubrics, assessment 129–130, 130 Salomon, G. 67 saving, importance of 21, 55 scaffolding 42–44, 81, 85n2, 94, 104; peer 43–44; real tasks 105–107; simulated tasks 107–108 Schank, R. C. 102 Schneider, J. 128, 134 school attendance, barriers to 99–100 science 1, 35n4, 57, 90, 104, 113, 139, 143 scientific management 6, 7, 8 self-managed learning 42–44, 55 service 47 Sesame Street 67 shadowing experiences 89, 104–105 Shanahan, C. 51 Shephard, R. J. 58 Sheridan, K. 37, 39 Shute, V. J. 127–128, 132 simulated tasks 107–108 simulation-based assessment 131–133, 134 skill 5 skills, practice 5 Smart Horizons Career Online High School 142 smart phones 108–109, 120 social comparison 76, 129 social disruption 2–3

social moderation 129–131 social safety net 21 social skills 16–17, 27, 44; see also socioemotional skills social studies 35n4, 90, 113 socialization 27, 49 socioeconomic background 31, 32, 34 socioemotional skills 3, 19–20, 22, 44–47, 65, 92, 93, 108–109 Southwell, B. G. 52 Spillane, N. K. 44 sports 109 Stachowiak, S. 149 standardized tests 38, 50, 58, 67–68, 80, 113, 117, 123, 126, 128, 133–134 Stanford History Education Group 21 stealth assessment 127–128, 132, 133, 134 Steele, C. M. 80, 124 stories, learning from 102–104 stress, and testing 80, 123–124 Strong, W. B. 58 student projects 44 subject-matter (traditional) curriculum 25, 26, 28, 36, 66, 91–92 Suchman, L. 33 suspension policies 80 Suthers, D. 51 Swiss cheese model 69–70, 84–85, 139, 139, 140, 141 tablets 109, 120 Taiwan 147–148 Taylor, F. W. 6 teacher unions 37, 38, 80, 113, 116 teachers: financial self-management 115–116; as makers 115; professional development see professional development teaching to the test 39, 80, 123 teamwork 18, 20, 28, 44, 46, 53–55, 57, 93; see also collaboration skills technological revolutions 6 television 67 Teller, Edward 75 test superficiality 126 testing 25, 26, 27, 38–39, 57–58, 67–68, 81; computerized adaptive 58; dishonesty in 80, 124–125; high-stakes 26, 58, 80, 81, 113, 123; norm-referenced 58; standardized 38, 50, 58, 67–68, 80, 113, 117, 123, 126, 128, 133–134; and stress 80, 123- 124; teaching to the test 39, 80; threshold score levels 25, 26–27, 38–39, 117; see also assessment

158 Index

testing pathology 26–27 theory of mind 54–55 third places 98–101, 118–121, 142 Toth, E. E. 120 trade unions 5, 89; see also teacher unions traditional (subject-based) curriculum 25, 26, 28, 36, 66, 91–92 transparency, assessment 134–135 Trudeau, F. 58 trust 100

virtual third places 98, 120 Vygotsky, L. S. 42

universal public education 4, 83

walking school bus projects 110 Wenger, E. 89 Whitehead, A. N. 56, 81, 85n1, 102 Wilson, S. M. 116 Wineburg, S. 21 Wood, D. 42 Woolley, A. W. 54 work readiness 29–30, 89 work roles 2, 17, 18 World Economic Forum 145

validity, assessment 124, 125 verbal experience 32, 66

Zenner, C. 59 Zimmer, R. 83