What will our world look like when our youngest students graduate? Will they be navigating a dystopic reality where robots rule supreme, water has overrun once-populated urban centers, and nuclear warheads fly through the sky? Or will they feel secure, knowing that they'll be able to provide for themselves and their families, that violent conflicts between nations and ethnic groups are declining, and technology is being harnessed to protect the planet's environment and natural resources? The jobs, climate, and international alliances in our not-so-distant-future are anyone's guess.
What does all of this have to do with schools?
Everything.
Society writ large has long seen schools as vital institutions for preparing students for citizenship and careers. Education historian David Labaree (1997) wrote that schools occupy "the intersection between what we hope society will become and what we think it really is" (p. 41). In the early years of the United States, public schools were forged as spaces for political socialization for democratic participation in a republican government and for creating a national culture and sense of patriotism in a country with diverse religious, ethnic, racial, religious, and political groups. Over the years, schools have also been seen as a silver bullet for improving society's many ailments and as economic engines that bolster the human capital of nations and increase competitiveness for jobs and wealth in a global economy (Labaree, 1997; Spring, 2010; Tichnor-Wagner & Socol, 2016). The exact goals of school may be contested—a way to socialize youth for democratic citizenship, bolster economic growth by creating a knowledgeable and well-trained workforce, or provide individuals with a chance to compete for jobs in a competitive marketplace. But there is agreement that education should equip students with the requisite knowledge and skills for the world outside the schoolhouse doors as engaged citizens and productive workers.
Nevertheless, in many ways, how students experience school has not caught up with the world in which we currently live. One-fifth of the way through the 21st century, our system of schooling is still locked in early 20th-century thinking. Issues that people everywhere face—climate change, spread of diseases, food insecurity—require interdisciplinary solutions. Yet schools are predominately organized by single-subject courses and high-stakes tests that emphasize core subject areas of reading, math, and science. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 65.5 million residents speak a language other than English at home. Yet schools in the United States are predominately monolingual. Researchers estimate that only 3 percent of elementary school students are enrolled in some form of bilingual education (Goldenberg & Wagner, 2015). Even foreign language courses are in short supply. Only 20 percent of U.S. students are enrolled in foreign language programs, and only 15 percent of public schools offer them (American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2017).
As education historians David Tyack and Larry Cuban (1995) argue, "Change where it counts the most—in the daily interactions of teachers and students—is the hardest to achieve and the most important" (p.10). With that in mind, what should teaching and learning look like to remain relevant and engaging and to truly prepare students for the world? And how can educators lead the necessary changes to make that vision a reality?
A 21st Century Education Grounded in Our World
A Crisis of Relevancy
Schools today face a crisis of relevancy. There is a disconnect between the skills and knowledge students feel they need to navigate and shape the current realities in which they live and what schools are currently offering. The result is, inevitably, student disengagement. A 2015 Gallup Poll found that only half of adolescents felt engaged in school, and one in five reported that they were actively disengaged (Gallup Inc., 2015). This disengagement, in turn, can lead to lower academic performance and higher dropout rates.
On Friday, March 15, 2019, millions of students skipped school in order to protest for action around climate change. That same day, Terry Godwaldt, the director of the Centre for Global Education in Edmonton, Canada, spoke to a group of educators at a global leadership summit at ASCD's annual Empower conference and asked a simple yet profound question: "Why do students have to step out the classroom to make change?"
The answer is simple. Schools are not doing enough to address the realities that students face in their current and future lives. The following section delineates some of the economic, social, and environmental realities that swirl around schools yet deeply affect the everyday lives of youth.
Economic Realities
When students graduate, they will compete for jobs in a global, knowledge-based economy. As Linda Darling-Hammond (2010) illustrates, "Globalization is changing everything about how we work, how we communicate, and ultimately, how we live. Employers can distribute their activities around the entire globe, based on the costs and skills of workers in nearly any nation that has built an infrastructure for transportation and communications. Customers in the United States buy their clothes from China and the Philippines and have their questions about the new computer they bought answered by workers in India" (p. 4).
One in five jobs in the United States is tied to international trade. From 1992 until 2016, trade-dependent jobs increased by 148 percent, covering a wide range of industries from agriculture to manufacturing to financial services to higher education (Baughman & Francois, 2018). Products we consume as part of our everyday lives—the fruit in our refrigerators, the phones in our pockets, the cars we drive to work—depend on global supply chains. As automation and artificial intelligence take over manual jobs once performed by people, the need for schools to focus on what makes us uniquely human—emotional intelligence, storytelling, the arts—becomes more acute.
Cultural Pluralism
Migration is as old as humankind. Today, of course, it is happening at a far faster rate than with our ancestors, who took tens of thousands of years to traverse continents by foot. Globally, over 244 million people live in a country different from where they were born. The push-and-pull factors that drive people to move across boundaries are complex, though many migrants are driven by prospects of work. Global displacement has also hit record numbers, with the number of refugees displaced by war, persecution, a profound lack of economic security and opportunity, environmental degradation, and natural disasters topping over 22 million (International Organization for Migration, 2017). As people migrate, they carry with them their languages, religions, values, foods, and other cultural signifiers, therefore adding new richness to the diversity of already pluralistic societies.
In the United States, about one in four children under the age of 18 are first- or second-generation immigrants (Child Trends, 2018), and nearly one in four public school students speak a language other than English at home (Zeigler & Camarota, 2018). Shifting migration patterns over the past few decades have resulted in an increase in immigrant populations—and from a greater diversity of places—in previously homogenous states, cities, and towns. For example, historically speaking, a majority of immigrants ultimately settled in only a handful of states (California, New York, Florida, Texas, New Jersey, Illinois, and Massachusetts). However, since 2000, immigrants have increasingly moved to the central and southeast regions of the country, where immigration rates rose by double the national average (Terrazas, 2011). In these communities, schools have suddenly become microcosms of newly diversified communities.
What "diversity" looks like over time has also changed. The first European colonizers who arrived to what is now the United States in the 17th and 18th centuries mainly spoke English, German, French, Dutch, and Spanish, and they brought with them enslaved Africans with rich and varied cultures and languages that survived through the