Twenty-first Century Skills

In a political campaign season full of rhetoric about making American workers more competitive but almost devoid of break-through ideas, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills is keeping the heat on policy makers to do more about preparing workers beyond the basics.

The Partnership is a collaboration of the leading technology companies in the country, as well as education-related organizations. Its members include Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Intel, Oracle, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Apple, the National Education Association, and the Educational Testing Service. It has distilled worker skills that are needed beyond the basics, and for at least the last two years has been a counterforce to all of the attention on only basics and on closing the domestic achievement gap.

The Partnership contends that schools need an “NCLB-Plus agenda” that infuses 21st-century skills into the core subjects. “Increasing the number of years of schooling by the labor force boosts the economy only when increased levels of school attainment also boost cognitive skills,” it says in its most recent guide. “In other words, it is not enough simply to spend more time in school; something has to be learned there.”

The “something,” according to the Partnership, strongly emphasizes application of skills to innovation and creativity. The skills include: thinking critically and making judgments about great quantities of information; solving complex, multi-disciplinary, and open-ended problems; creativity and entrepreneurial thinking; communication and collaboration; making innovative use of knowledge, information, and opportunities to create new services, processes, and products; and taking charge of financial, health, and civic responsibilities.

In its latest statement, the Partnership focuses on dramatic changes in the workplace. The president of the Partnership, Ken Kay, formerly with the National Education Association, said the business community has a labor pool that is technically proficient. However, business leaders tell him that they lack employees who can “adequately communicate and collaborate, innovate, and think critically.”

The Partnership cites research on the increased productivity of workplaces that have switched to the new skills and points out that the economy has been shifting toward a service economy that depends on the new skills for more than 30 years. The service economy, it points out, is not all low-wage jobs, as many policy makers believe, but also includes professionals in a variety of fields. Information technology workers average $20,000 a year more in income than the traditional material services providers, according to the Partnership.

In 1967, the production of material goods (e.g., cars and equipment) and the delivery of material services (e.g., transportation and construction) accounted for 54 percent of the economic output in the United States. By 1997, information products and services had mushroomed and accounted for 63 percent of the output, a percentage that certainly has increased in the last decade.

Although the Partnership calls the reduction of the domestic achievement gap a worthwhile goal, it believes this effort has diverted attention away from the “global” achievement gap, in which even the top-performing students in this country are not competitive with those in more advanced countries. “While the global economy has been changing,” said Paige Kuni, worldwide manager of K-12 education for Intel and chair of the Partnership, “the United States has largely ignored the growing necessity of graduating students capable of filling emerging job sectors.”

Policy makers in several states are working with the Partnership’s list of skills to improve standards and outcomes. They include Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and West Virginia.

For more information on the Partnership, contact www.21stcenturyskills.org.