Common core, to a large extent, is premised on linking education to economic opportunity to democracy and based on assumptions of a 20th century school to work model. But that is not the world we live in today.
Digital tools have fundamentally transformed the workplace, connecting the most obscure regions into global circulation where capital, labor, information and commodities move more freely across national boundaries. The new economic realities have established a new historical context for industry, work and education challenging the fundamental premise of a national education strategy behind common core.
The data support the basic premise of common core that our education system is not keeping pace enough to prepare the American workforce to compete for jobs in a modern, globalized economy. A report recently published by Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance found that “6 percent of U.S. students were found to be performing at the advanced level in mathematics, a percentage lower than those attained by 30 other countries. Nor is the problem limited to top-performing students. Only 32 percent of 8th graders in the United States are proficient in mathematics, placing the United States 32nd when ranked among the participating international jurisdictions.”
Even more troubling, globalized industry is finding it difficult to find newly minted U.S. high school and college graduates with the requisite skills. The Broad Foundation published excerpts from business studies on their website that echoes, even more so, the thinking behind the common core concluding, “despite sustained unemployment, employers are finding it difficult to hire Americans with the skills their jobs require.” And, “many expect this problem to intensify all the while more than 75 percent of employers report that new employees with four-year college degrees lacked ‘excellent’ basic knowledge and applied skills.”
To close the impending skills gap, nearly 46 states, at last count, have adopted the doctrine of common core in a move to address this challenge, but a compendium of mounting evidence that the labor market is rapidly being impacted by modern technology. Two recent contributions have shined a bright light on the changes taking place in the labor market. Martin Ford, a software engineer and author of the book The Lights at the End of the Tunnel, has written that technology is being adopted by industry so quickly that it is destroying jobs faster than industry can create jobs. This claim is supported by MIT professors Erik Brynjolfsson’s and coauthor Andrew McAfee, authors of Rage Against the Machine, that support Ford’s thesis and are quoted in an article that appeared in the MIT Technology Review that “Productivity is at record levels, innovation has never been faster, and yet at the same time, we have a falling median income and we have fewer jobs. People are falling behind because technology is advancing so fast and our skills and organizations aren’t keeping up.”
If you dismiss the thesis that technology is rapidly replacing human labor, there is growing evidence that education is not as big a factor in providing a pathway out of poverty as once believed. The assumptions that underlie common core advance the idea that education lifts all boats and that a supply of educated workers will lead to greater opportunity across incomes and social strata yet, the most current data contradict this thinking.
