One common reaction to such changes in the working world is the fear that we are going to run out of jobs. Many people believe that there are only a certain number of jobs to go around, and if some of these jobs are destroyed, then there will not be enough work for everyone. This is an incorrect, albeit common, belief. Despite the millions of jobs that were lost in manufacturing, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are more people working in the United States than at any time in its history—160 million as of May 2017 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2017).
Interestingly, many of the new jobs being created do not demand much in the way of educational qualifications. In 2013, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projected that between 2012 and 2022, the U.S. economy will create just over four million new jobs for those with college degrees, but it will also create three million that require some education beyond high school but not a college degree, four million that require only a high school diploma, and another four million jobs that do not even require a high school diploma (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2013). As far as can be seen, there will be jobs for people whatever their level of education in the United States. It is therefore probably not accurate to say to young people that they need to get a good education to get a job, but it does seem that education will be important to getting a good job.
We have already seen this in the changes that have occurred since the late 1990s. The greatest job destruction has not been for the lowest-skilled workers; rather, it has been for those doing routine jobs, whatever the skill level. And because computers are simpler and less expensive than robots, things like routine office work—what economists call routine cognitive jobs—have been easier to automate than manual work (Dvorkin, 2016). We think playing chess is an amazing human achievement, but for a few dollars, you can now buy a smartphone app that will beat most humans on the planet. What employers haven’t been able to do yet is to use robots to stack shelves in Walmart in a cost-effective way, which is why humans do the job right now. But the message since the Industrial Revolution has been that as soon as a job can be done cost-effectively by a machine, it will be.
If having a valued skill no longer guarantees employment, then the only way to be sure of being employable is to be able to develop new skills, as Seymour Papert (1998) observes:
So the model that says learn while you’re at school, while you’re young, the skills that you will apply during your lifetime is no longer tenable. The skills that you can learn when you’re at school will not be applicable. They will be obsolete by the time you get into the workplace and need them, except for one skill. The one really competitive skill is the skill of being able to learn. It is the skill of being able not to give the right answer to questions about what you were taught in school, but to make the right response to situations that are outside the scope of what you were taught in school. We need to produce people who know how to act when they’re faced with situations for which they were not specifically prepared.
This is why education—as opposed to training—is so important. Not only does education confer skills, but it also produces the ability to develop new skills.
The fundamental idea that education is the engine of future economic prosperity has been understood for many years, but studies have shown just how much education increases economic growth (or, conversely, just how much economic growth is limited by low educational achievement).
The Difficulties of Raising Student Achievement
Successive governments have understood the importance of educational achievement and have sought to raise standards through a bewildering number of policy initiatives. Although most of these seemed like sensible measures at the time, the depressing reality is that the net effect of the vast majority of these measures on student achievement has been close to, if not actually, zero.
A number of reform efforts have focused on the structures of schooling. In the United States, particular attention was given to reducing school size. The logic was simple: many high schools are very large and impersonal, and so the creation of smaller high schools should create more inclusive learning communities, which should then result in better learning. Advocates for smaller high schools also pointed to evidence that in many states, the highest test scores were in small high schools. However, they forgot to look at the other end of the distribution. The lowest test scores were also in small high schools (Wainer & Zwerling, 2006). The evidence suggests that small schools aren’t any better, on average. They are just more likely to have extreme results—whether high or low—because they are small (Kahneman, 2011). The fewer students there are in a class, the greater the chance that, in a particular year, the students happen to be either very strong or very weak academically. In fact, the evidence suggests that smaller high schools are actually less effective than larger ones because teachers have to teach a range of courses, and therefore have fewer opportunities to specialize. As one high school student in Seattle summarizes, “There’s just one English teacher and one mathematics teacher. They end up teaching things they don’t really know” (Geballe, 2005).
The creation of smaller high schools can also be rather inefficient. In many cases, large high schools of around three thousand students are divided into five or six smaller high schools, each with five hundred or six hundred students but housed in the same building. Often, in such cases that I have seen, the only change is increased administrative costs, as a result of appointing six new principals for each of the small high schools and increasing the compensation of the existing principal for looking after six newly appointed junior principals.
In other cases, students have not experienced all the potential benefits of small high schools because leaders assumed the creation of small high schools was an end in itself, rather than a change in structure that would make other needed reforms easier to achieve. One benefit leaders hoped for was that smaller high schools would improve staff-student relationships, and with improved relationships, students would become more engaged in their learning. Students would interact with a smaller number of teachers, thus fostering the development of better staff-student relationships. This may well be effective, although it should be said that getting students engaged so that they can be taught something seems much less efficient than getting them engaged by teaching them something that engages them. But every student would still have a language arts teacher, a mathematics teacher, a science teacher, a social studies teacher, and so on. The size of a high school does not affect the number of teachers a student meets in a day. Staff-student relationships can grow stronger if teachers loop through with their students so that the same teacher teaches a class for more than a single semester or year; however, this requires amendments to schedules and depends on having teachers who can teach multiple grades. Large high schools could easily incorporate this system, if they considered it a priority.
Other countries are going in the opposite direction. In England, for example, high-performing schools are asking their principals to assume responsibility for less successful schools by forming federations of schools—groups of schools with a single principal—but as yet, there is no evidence that this has led to improvement.
Other reforms have involved changes to the governance of schools. The most widespread such reform in the United States has been the introduction of charter schools. According to the Education Commission of the States (2017), forty-three states and the District of Columbia now have charter laws, but the evaluations of their impact on student achievement do not allow for any easy conclusions.
There is no doubt that some charter schools are achieving notable success, but others are not, and it appears that, at least to begin with, there were more of the latter than the former. In 2009, the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University reported that across fifteen states and the District of Columbia, approximately one-half of charter schools obtain similar results to traditional public schools, one-third get worse results, and one-sixth get better results (CREDO, 2009). For the first twenty years of their operation, the net effect of charter schools was to lower student achievement rather than increase it, although this may well have been partly because most charters get less money per student (Miron & Urschel, 2010). Some charter schools, such as those that the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) operate, are