MANY WAYS TO GET THERE

Earlier this month, the Pathways to Prosperity Project at Harvard Graduate School of Education urged  the development of a comprehensive pathways network to serve young people in high school and beyond. The current strategy for school improvement, the report asserts, is “too narrowly focused on an academic, classroom-based approach.” http://www.aypf.org/events/pathways020211.htm

I agree with the arguments and proposals in the new report and devoted a chapter to the need for multiple pathways in my book just published by ASCD: Wasting Minds: Why Our Education System Is Failing and What We Can Do about It, by Ron Wolk. http://shop.ascd.org/ProductDetail/tabid/55/ProductId/5054383/Subsystem/INV/ProductCode/111015/Default.aspx

Pathways make a case for its recommendations by reciting the litany of failures that has led to the current crisis in education. The report asserts:“After 20 years of effort, and billions of dollars of expenditures, the time has come for an honest assessment. The underlying assumption has been that an academic, classroom-based approach is capable of preparing nearly all adolescents and young adults

for success in the 21st century. While there have been marginal gains, the bottom line measure of success is college completion. And on that score, we have still been unable to get more than 30 percent of young adults to earn a bachelor’s degree by their mid-20s.”

This pathways system would be based on three essential elements. The first is the development of a broader vision of school reform that embraces multiple pathways to help young people successfully navigate the journey from adolescence to adulthood.

Second, the report argues that we need to ask our nation's employers to play a greatly expanded role in supporting the pathways system, and in providing more opportunities for young adults to participate in work-based learning and actual jobs related to their programs of study.

Third, the report contends that we need to develop a new social compact between society and our young people. The compact's central goal would be that by the time they reach their mid-20s, every young adult will be equipped with the education and experience he or she needs to lead a successful life as an adult. Achieving this goal would require far bigger contributions from the nation's employers and governments.

"We are the only developed nation that depends so exclusively on its higher education system as the sole institutional vehicle to help young people transition from secondary school to careers, and from adolescence to adulthood," says Robert Schwartz, academic dean and professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who heads the Pathways to Prosperity Project.

As the first president of Achieve, Schwartz has been a key supporter of the need to raise expectations and academic standards for all young people. But in recent years, he has become increasingly concerned about the "college for all" movement, especially as that movement has led states to allow the admissions requirements of four-year colleges and universities to become the default curriculum for all high school students.

State policy makers and business leaders across the nation should read and discuss The Pathways report as a blueprint for much overdue action on this issue.

One slightly sour note:

I wish the report had gone further in making explicit the failure of standards-based accountability as the nation’s dominant school improvement strategy. But that would alienate the opinion leaders and policy makers whose support is essential if this important report is to have the effect it should.

I firmly believe that the concentration on standards and testing has worsened the crisis. I urge you to read Christopher H. Tienken’s essay (“Common Core State Standards: “An Example of Data-less Decision Making”) in the AASA’s Winter 2011 issue of the Journal of Scholarship and Practice . http://www.aasa.org/jsp.aspx

It is the most persuasive critique article I’ve ever read of standards-based accountability.