Laura Chapman recounts the failed efforts to predict the jobs of the future:
In 2004, Achieve,Inc, the Education Trust, and Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, and William and Flora Hewett Foundation started marketing the myth that specific high school requirements would provide the necessary “college and career readiness” for “high-performance, high- growth jobs.”
The report: Ready or Not: Creating a High School Diploma that Counts was designed to say that American education had one main mission, preparing students for those jobs—projected to “ support a family well above the poverty level, provide benefits, and offer clear pathways for career advancement through further education and training. (p. 105).”
The writers relied on the 2002–03, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, and course taking patterns and transcripts of a cohort of students who graduated from high schools in 1992 in order to make absurd claims about the “proper curriculum content” for entry into high-growth, well-paying jobs.
This effort, called the American Diploma Project, morphed into the Common Core State Standards, with math and ELA the be-all and end-all of education and the meme of “college and career readiness” implanted as if the only thing that mattered in education.
There was not an ounce of reliable information in that report. The economy tanked in 2008. It has not yet recovered.
Now the tech industry is pushing computer everything into school. Here is a recent account of who is doing this and how well. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/27/technology/education-partovi-computer-science-coding-apple-microsoft.html
Here are the Bureau of Labor statistics job projections for the next 10 years 2014-2014. These projections are modified every two years. A typical US worker has held 11 jobs before the age 44.
People who say that career planning should begin in pre-school and kindergarten are really doing damage to education. The “college and career” meme has been marketed as if there is nothing more that matters, and that these two emphases will guarantee a great future for students and the economy. NOT, NOT, NOT.
FASTEST GROWING OCCUPATIONS
Bachelors degree or higher required
Number of new jobs in thousands and median salary
Physical therapists 71.8 $85,000
Nurse practioners 44.7 $100,900
Physician assistants 28.7 $101,480
Statisticians 10.1 $80,500
Operations researcher analyst 27.8 $78,300
SOME POSTSECONDARY EDUCATION REQUIRED
Web developer 39.5 $ 66,310
Physical therapy assistants 31.9 $56,610
Occupational therapy assistants 14.1 $59,010
Commercial drivers 1.6 $49,090
FASTEST GROWING JOBS OVERALL
Home health aides 348.4 $22,600
Physical therapy assistants 31.9 $56,610
Occupational therapy assistants 14.1 $59,010
Physical therapy aides 19.5 $25,680
Wind turbine service technicians 4.8 $52,260
OCCUPATIONS WITH THE MOST JOBS
Personal care aides 458.1 $21,920
Registered nurses 439.3 $68,450
Home health aides 348.3 $22,600
Food services, fast food 343.5 $19,440
Retail sales 314.2 $22,680
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“THINK TANKS” are really UN-THINK tanks. It’s as bad as “Thought Leaders.”
Both terms are OXYMORONS.
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Gee, I’m sure glad that they want to prepare pre-schoolers and kindergartners for future jobs as……..fast food workers and sales clerks.
Oy!
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OMG. This is confirmation of what I have only recently internalized. Denver Public Schools has gone from an educational institution to a job training institution. The second “C” in PARCC is about job training, but not high the high paying jobs. It is for technicians, aides, assistants. And THOSE students are pigeonholed at an early age. More business influences into public education but not to educate, rather to train. Very classist and racist.
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“not to educate, rather to train”
Bingo, bangle, boingo! We have a winner! Give that fine young lady a Kewpie Doll.
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Ah, Yesterday’s Tomorrow… Just as invalid as the current policy prescriptions of so-called reformers, which are Today’s Relics…
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“yesterday’s tomorrow” –what a wonderful, insightful phrase!!! I plan to use that in the future–with attribution, of course!!!
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When you allow business people and tech people to determine policy, you will get the alternate reality of what is necessary and important. The tech people want to sell more products so we have Gates, Zukerberg, and Powell-Jobs telling us we need more tech people. They just want to cheapen the labor market so they get to pick and choose workers for less. One of the first items on Silicon Valley’s agenda when they met with Trump was their “need” for H1-Bs. They do not need H-1Bs as there are already lots of trained Americans in tech looking for work. They want them to increase their profitability.
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PERFECTLY exposing the entire test-score school “reform” game: “They just want to cheapen the labor market so they get to pick and choose workers for less…”
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Those jobs! Clearly it is not Winter that is coming … but the Baby Boomers! Buy stocks in companies making walkers and medical scooters, and digestive aids, now!
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“. . . digestive aids. . .”
By that may I presume to you to mean buy stocks in beer companies. . . or White Castle?
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My son works in tech and we were wondering when it was they all became so horrible- because they weren’t always like this. They were sort of innocent- people who didn’t fit in to other fields who found a kind of refuge in computers.
He thinks it’s the money. They got SO wealthy they lost the qualities that people liked and became one more monied interest throwing their weight around and buying politicians.
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I’m dreading the big “reinvent high school” push planned for after Labor Day.
I am so, so sick of these professionally-planned marketing blitzes run by private companies and philanthropies. It is all SO slick and manipulative.
Apparently the powers that be want us to go along with “reinventing high school” so you can bet it will be portrayed as a “crisis!” of epic proportions and it will be sold using fear of “falling behind”,just like they sold Common Core using fear.
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So are you saying that creating coal will not create the demand for that coal . Gee Rick Perry could have been Secretary of Education if he could have remember the names of the 3 departments, he wanted to eliminate.
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OMG II. This just appeared in my fb feed.
http://www.5280.com/2017/08/new-school/
Be sure to click on the CareerWise link and explore partners. COLORADO SUCCEEDS: Great Schools are Good Business. Denver’s “leaders” do data that supports their predetermined goals. Denver’s “leaders” do not do data that is real.
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From the article:
“A 2012 study of apprenticeship programs in 10 states, for example, estimated that young people who participated earned an average of $240,037 more over their careers than their peers who did not take part.”
Hmmm. . . .$240,000 divided by 40 = $6,000 per year divided by 12 equals $500 per month. Times that by .7 (take home pay at best) and one gets $350 per month to spend. Hey, at least they can drive a nice new car with that kind of extra money. (of course one has to believe that stat of $240Gs to begin with)
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As you note, Duane, $240,000 over a lifetime of work strikes me as very little. And I don’t concur with the idea that $35,000 per year in Denver gets you a middle class life style. Many other factors to be accounted for.
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$35k isn’t close to what it takes to support a middle-class lifestyle.
“The American middle class is shrinking and the median income of those considered middle class is decreasing.
“Nationally, the median income of middle-income households decreased from $77,898 in 1999 to $72,919 in 2014, a loss of 6%,” reports Pew Research Center.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/24/heres-how-much-money-middle-class-families-earn-in-every-us-state.html
If you click on that link and scroll through the list of states and what it takes to support a middle-class family, it is always more than $70k annually. I didn’t see one state on that list below $70k.
That means if you have a married couple both working and earning $35k each, that combined income isn’t enough to make it into the middle class, but it’s close depending on the state.
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apprenticeship programs
As usual everything in data can be manipulated . What are these Apprenticeship programs . Overwhelming they were used in the Construction trades and perhaps a few large Machinist locals and UAW locals like auto mechanics. Not exactly what is being called for by those who do not choose to invest in training their employees and would prefer to have the state pick up the tab.
As such, where and when you have your data points can be critical . A state with a high union density NY might have that Apprentice making almost 50,000 more a year than a non union worker. But here is the interesting thing .
The non union contractors who have taken a very substantial market share of residential high rise construction in NYC,a less skilled sector of the construction industry, are fighting a City Council bill that would require them to provide Apprentice training . The bill was a response to the near forty deaths , almost exclusively on non union construction sites in 2 years . All this while the Business Roundtable created open shop ABC Contractors Association ,created to break the hold that the construction trade unions had on Commercial and industrial construction. (the Roundtable itself was created for that purpose ), . pushes the myth that there is a shortage of skilled labor and asks states to do the training for them in HS or community college. . There has never been a shortage . The term journeyman has its derivation in the practice of traveling from jurisdiction to jurisdiction following the job market. Local shortages were filled by travelers. Never a national shortage.
As with the rest of the skills shortage myth. “Having a shortage of diamonds is not being able to buy diamonds at any price . Not not being able to buy them at the price you would like to pay” (Peter Cappelli, Wharton) Our Tech sector chieftains lay off workers in the 1000s instead of retraining, while they bemoan a shortage and the failure of education in the STEM fields . I would bet that an unemployed Petro Chemical engineer or a bio chemist , would would make a fine programmer, it they paid for his retraining. .
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Here’s the bizarre, unusual thing about Laura Chapman: she does her homework before spouting off.
As always, a pleasure to read what she produces.
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You have that right, Bob!
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The best way to educate children for the future is to encourage and teach them to love reading for pleasure. Reading to learn is important but should take a backseat to pleasure reading. In addition, teach children to become problem solvers and critical thinkers.
In other words a liberal education instead of a limited education that dumbs people down.
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¡Sí señor!
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yes
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It recently occurred to me that “critical thinker” means different things to different people. To me it means “skeptical, free thinker”. To some Leftists it seems to mean, “orthodox application of PC lens” –i.e. critical of the patriarchy, etc., but definitely not critical of PC sacred cows. To the business community it means “sharp analytical, problem solving mind for hire”.
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Then people should learn what it means to be a critical thinker because thinking with confirmation bias is not critical thinking.
crit·i·cal think·ing
noun
noun: critical thinking
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Public universities, of course, are forced to keep up with this artificially inflated influx of students and they create “inventive” majors for those students who’d be much happier doing something with their hands in manufacturing or repair.
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