Who should read it: educators, parents and commercial/social entrepreneurs. Author: Tony Wagner.
Global Achievement Gap is an excellent book on the challenges and potential solutions in today’s education system. Tony Wagner sees a major gap between what students are being taught, and the skills they need to master to succeed in the 21st century economy.
Unlike many that complain about the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, he favors testing, but believes that it should be about ability to acquire critical skills needed by the market place, not just recalling content. His diagnosis is that the primary challenge facing education is in the way educators manage themselves: where, unlike other professions there is little peer review. Without a way for teachers to assess themselves, they will be challenged to improve their practice and student outcomes.
He also recognizes that to motivate students in today’s digital media environment we need to change how we teach them – with more media, interactivity, peer interaction, rapid metric-based feedback, real world projects and success coaching. There is massive technology-based innovation disrupting the Education sector, and that will create significant opportunities for social and commercial entrepreneurs offering solutions that cost-effectively improve results. This book highlights several social entrepreneurs doing exactly that: improving results while also teaching success skills most schools don’t address. His insights are enlightening for educators, parents and commercial/social entrepreneurs seeking opportunities to improve education.
Why should we listen to the author?
Tony Wagner has spent his career accumulating insights and research that underpin the lessons in this book. He was a full time English teacher for ten years, 2 years as a principal, and received his doctorate in Education from Harvard. He has since spent sixteen years as a university professor responsible for teacher training and leading/working with several non-profits focused on improving education efficacy and leadership. He also recognizes how slowly the profession is adopting change – this is why change is likely to be driven by disruptive forces outside the current education value chain, and why this is a ripe market for entrepreneurs to create value.
The Big Ideas:
The author’s vision is expansive and he sees a number of big issues and opportunities to be addressed.
- Teach More Success Skills and Less Content – The current market for work has changed. This is a theme echoed in a number of books from Free by Chris Anderson to Tom Friedman’s ‘The World is Flat’ (post coming). In the last 20 years we have transitioned rapidly to a knowledge economy and most repetitive tasks are being outsourced overseas or automated by computers. Graduates need to hit college and the job market with the skills required by this new environment and its newly available information resources. Frighteningly, the by-product of NCLB and content-based testing is less focus on skill development: we are going in the wrong direction. Based on researching the commercial sector, and illustrated with enlightening stories from the field, he presents these “Survival Skills” in the book as:
Critical Thinking and Problem Solving – Ask good questions. Organizations today are less hierarchical and more team based, with teams varied by project so there is less training and more on-the-fly learning. Continuous learning and improvement is the model, with less direction by management.
Collaboration across Networks/ Leading by Influence – Teamwork/team leadership with virtual, dispersed teams is the norm. In this environment you lead by influence, not authority.
Agility and Adaptability – Change is rapid and accelerating with an ever-increasing stream of information. Being flexible, dealing with ambiguity and continued life-long learning is mandatory.
Initiative and Entrepreneurism – With less hierarchy and a rapidly-changing environment, employees need to be self-starters and achievement-oriented. They need to create growth opportunities, solve problems and improve outcomes.
Oral and Written Communications – with more emails, conference calls and web presentations – communications skills are critical yet are often the most deficient for new graduates. They need to create “focus, energy and passion” (it’s much more than grammar!)
Accessing and Analyzing Information – With so much information available – it is critical to know where to find what is important and distill it to support a decision.
Curiosity and Imagination – Employees need curiosity to deconstruct problems and creativity and imagination to create out-of-the-box solutions
- Our current system focuses on content acquisition for standardized testing, rather than on skill development, largely because that is cost effective. Tony Wagner is proposing a radical shift. He doesn’t disagree with testing but proposes that we test for the right things – e.g. less focus on grammar and more on ability to communicate persuasively. Moreover, schools have migrated to “teaching to the test” and this is now the major focus of classrooms, crowding out other objectives like skill acquisition.
- The most mind-blowing insight was how little consensus teachers share in what constitutes an effective lesson or class. In a well-documented exercise across the country, the author outlines that if you show 30 teachers a video tape of a class and ask them to rate the effectiveness, you will get a wide range of scores from A to F (even in the best schools). The teachers don’t agree on what an effective class is. Why? The reason is that, unlike other professions like Law and Medicine, there is little peer review. Almost all teachers spend their careers unobserved by, or debriefing with other teachers. As a test, ask your kids how often other teachers sit in the back of their class to observe. The answer is probably less than once a year, maybe never. In the commercial sector, peer reviews are critical because they create a learning process (see Talent is Overrated for more insight on this point.) You need data (see Supercrunchers) to access results and then collaborative peer evaluation to deliver consistent process improvement. One of my favorite business maxims: You can’t manage what you can’t measure.
The author poses significant challenges to the current education model. We lack agreement on what to teach (so we default to content), and how to teach it, and we are not working collaboratively to improve performance metrics (whatever they are). It is important to note that this is true in most of the best public and private schools.
- Student motivation and engagement is also a major challenge/opportunity for teachers today. Outside of class, students are hyper-connected multi-taskers, stimulated through games, video, music and pictures in ways we never were. The gap in experience and knowledge acquisition outside of class and in class is widening rapidly. Students want to implement what they learn and understand its relevancy – they want to make an impact today. To engage students, classes need to embrace technology, implement more student lead initiatives, student peer reviews and offer internships where they can apply what they learn in meaningful ways. Teachers need to do less “broadcasting” (i.e. lectures) and more one-on-one coaching to help students achieve success. This is a major transformation in how the classroom operates and represents a disruptive opportunity for entrepreneurs.
- The author highlights a handful of schools with innovative curriculums that address these challenges: High Tech High in San Diego for example – a public charter school with excellent results 100% of graduates accepted to college, 80% to four year colleges (many top schools) – all for $6,200 per student/year. Another is the Met, started in Rhode Island as a public/private partnership in 1996 with excellent results. These schools offer a radically different learning experience relative to traditional approaches.
Applied
The author’s comments on skills that graduates need for the new work environment match my experience with new hires. Graduates need to arrive with skills that allow them to create value more quickly than ever before. Lucky for them, the massive digital divide between the over 30 and under 30 executives (see Free) being created by new technologies and web services (social networking, blogging, web video) means there is a large need for net-savvy graduates. Key is their ability to be self starters and have the seven skills highlighted above. As an example, our most recent entry hire has literally transformed how we do our relationship management and many of our most important marketing activities with innovative solutions he has developed – we initially had no training program for him. The lessons here apply to teachers, students and employers.
I see the above changes creating a large number of entrepreneurial opportunities including for profit and non-profit schools like the ones mentioned above, educational services, online courses and educational technologies/software. The market size and coming pace of change is enormous. We are actively investing in this area and already have successful investments in K12 and higher education markets. Entrepreneurs interested in this area stand to capitalize on a major transformation in how education is delivered.
“Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource”. John F. Kennedy
Javier Rojas is a managing director at Kennet Partners, a private equity firm that invests in growth companies in Europe and North America. He has been reviewing the best business books for awhile, posting summaries of the authors’ big ideas on his blog and also monthly on Entrepreneur Corner at VentureBeat.
