Rising to Greatness

Coming from one of the most affluent and highest-scoring school districts in Illinois and growing up assuming that was the norm, I never thought of test scores as a real problem until fairly recently when I entered the College of Education. Admittedly, I did not know much about the state of Iowa's education - or the steps that should be taken to right the wrongs - until after reading this article.

"The world has moved beyond the industrial age and information age and is now in the innovation age. Students must be armed not only with knowledge, but also with skills and insights needed to critically analyze and innovate. The pressing problems and grand opportunities the world faces require that many more people contribute as innovators and problem solvers, not order takers and implementers. Innovators will prosper. Order takers will stagnate. The days of an abundance of low-skill jobs have come to an end."

This passage was striking to me, and I felt it very closely resembled my philosophy about teaching students how to think (as I mentioned in the blog post "Diffendoofer Day"). The article, while it goes on to list a number of problems in the Iowa education system (the achievement gap between majority and minority students, the flat-lining of math scores, the stress on college preparedness), summed up what I feel is the most important problem in that paragraph. Yes, I understood that low test scores are indicative of a state whose educational focus needs to shift or whose system for assessment preparation must change.

But the world at large, with its constant and sometimes unpredictable growth and change, was by and large off my radar. I am aware that the low-skill jobs that were so common a few decades ago are slowly shifting to jobs that require specialized skills or certain degrees of education - but the way it was phrased ("innovators will prosper") really caught my attention. And, of course, it ties in with that educational philosophy of constructivism that gives knowledge to students through innovation itself.

As a pre-service teacher, this information and this way of looking at education is extremely useful to me. Understanding state goals is important - but understanding the driving forces and reasoning behind those goals is even more so. My classroom will not be a self-contained environment and the students I teach will not be confined to just school forever; I need to prepare them for the real world, a world that is experiencing a huge focal shift in this time of constant change.