How to learn
Wisdom from the Field #34
When the economy collapses, is education the answer?
This is one of the questions Amy Goldstein explores in Janesville: An American Story. A staff writer for The Washington Post, Goldstein spent time in this Wisconsin community as it suffered through the shutdown of a General Motors (GM) plant, and the Great Recession in general. She tells the story of four different families responding to the crisis when it began in 2008.
When laid off, the car plant workers were faced with essentially three choices:
Take a job in Indiana at another GM plant.
Go back to school, such as at the area technical college, and retrain in another industry.
Do not go back to school and find employment elsewhere.
This proved to be a natural experiment.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison studied the financial outcomes of laid off workers who did and did not go back to school.
On average, they found that workers who went back to school:
were less likely to have a job after they retrained than those who had not gone to school,
had less steady work than those who did not retrain, and
made less money than those who did not retrain.
Older workers - ages 45 and up - experienced the worst of the impact, seeing drops in their earnings by $6000-$7000 a year.
One possible reason: some of the careers that the technical school was preparing students for were no longer in high demand or well paid.
Steering the ship
Finishing my 6th year in my second school as a principal, I can attest to how difficult it can be to shape a school’s culture.
One of the most pressing challenges is responding to the changing nature of work and society in general. There are jobs today that didn’t exist ten years ago. By the time a school examines and renews a curriculum to address the needs of the present economy, whole new occupations and fields will have been invented.
I’ve described this experience like steering a large ship.
How can schools respond more effectively?
It’s becoming more apparent that we need to be teaching students how to learn. This incluces, for example, embedding content and skills in today’s context using modern tools. For example, if we ask kids to read critically and write to inform, are print-only texts and the five paragraph essay going to cut it? How will kids know that they are making an impact on readers, beyond their peers, such as by studying the data for their social/online posts? Do they care about what they are consuming and creating?
What hasn’t changed, and is more important than ever, is a knowledgeable and responsive teacher.
Wisdom from the Field is also a feature in my book, Leading Like a C.O.A.C.H.
