Education for the 21st Century: Massachusetts in the Context of U.S. Educational Reform

• In Event: 46.047 - Education for the 21st Century: A Six-Country Examination of National Curricular Frameworks and Priorities

Abstract

Purpose
This paper examines the recent reform efforts that the United States, and in particular, Massachusetts, has taken in its education system to prepare students for the 21st century. It focuses on the key policies, standards, independent initiatives, and strategies implemented in key sectors of the education system to develop students’ 21st century competencies, including an analysis of the Common Core standards as they were adopted in Massachusetts, vis-à-vis a summary report commissioned by the National Research Council about 21st Century competencies. The paper ends by discussing current and future opportunities and challenges.

Perspectives
Scholarly works from various perspectives have underscored the growing importance of competencies beyond the basic literacies, emphasizing the importance of expert thinking, of skills that cannot be automated, of non-cognitive skills and of character and civic education (García Bedolla, 2005; Levine, 2013; Murnane & Levy, 1996; Suárez-Orozco, 2007). For example, the National Academy of Sciences (Pellegrino & Hilton, 2012) has identified a broad classification scheme for sorting variously identified 21st century skills – the cognitive, intrapersonal, and interpersonal domains.

Method and data
This is a descriptive study and analysis of the recent policies and initiatives in the Massachusetts education system regarding 21st century competencies. Major data sources include relevant literature review, an analysis of the Massachusetts state standards in the context of the larger Common Core movement in the United States and the three major classification schemes about teaching and learning for the 21st century introduced by the National Research Council (Pellegrino & Hilton, 2012), and interviews with key stakeholders.

Results and conclusions
Recent state and federal reform movements have focused on standardization, accountability, and assessments, specifically those driven by the No Child Left Behind Act and the Common Core. These newly instituted and discussed assessments and standardization have largely driven the content and curriculum, at the expense of a coherent and more expansive curricular vision; also missing is a concentrated effort to build capacity among teachers. These efforts are necessarily narrow in focus, and understandably, other stakeholders have emerged in the non-governmental sector -- among business leaders, in nonprofit sectors, and in charter schools -- to broaden the curricular focus – for example, in global education, in social-emotional learning, in project-based STEM education, and in vocational education.

Significance
While there is an emerging consensus that a broader range of skills than are currently taught in schools are necessary in order to face economic, environmental, technological, political and social challenges of our time, the question of how specifically to develop such skills and of how to translate those aspirational frameworks into specific pedagogies, curriculum and other instructional supports has received considerably less attention (Wagner, 2010). This study contributes to answering this question by documenting the kinds of skills the current standards and initiatives in Massachusetts and the United States emphasize and how they compare to the 21st century competencies discussed in research literature.

Authors

• Connie Kyung-Hwa Chung, Harvard University

• Fernando M. Reimers, Harvard University