An official projection of the new jobs that will be available, from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, from 2014-2024.
Notice how few require any post secondary education. Notice that you don’t need a high test score or the Common Core for most of them.
Education raises wages and prospects for the future. But most new jobs are low-wage, low education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
But you can’t get parents to understand this….because parents are brainwashed to believe that their child will be a computer scientist (etc) able to earn lots of money. It’s all about the money. It’s all about using their own children to display their wealth. Nothing has been added to the drinking water to make all these children smarter than children 20-30 yrs ago. It’s all about marketing the parents into paying for bigger, better schooling for bragging rights about their children. Parents placing children in competition with other children for education/prestige….it’s so Hunger Games like.
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Lisa,
So true! Makes me ill. This STEM crisis is another manufactured one.
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As I quote from a blogger who called herself the “Homeless Adjunct”
“Parents \ Students have been sold on the idea that no amount of money can be too much to spend for ticket for their children’s future . In reality that was a Lottery Ticket ” or something close
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Homeless is a HE
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Not our/your blogger
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So all our students will be pushed into getting a degree, only to find that they are over qualified. No one hires an over qualified person. OR they are not hired because they have no experience. The usual mantra.
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The job market for college grads collapsed in 1972 and never recovered despite the “Education Gospel” which is the official story promoting higher education as the road to the American Dream. Kids from the 1% receive privileged sheltered k-12 in private schools or lavishly funded suburban ones plus huge investments by their affluent parents in private lessons, tutoring, mentoring, training, sports, arts, and travel to insure they grow up with the cultural capital of highest value. Kids from the bottom 80% get little yet they must graduate HS and must go to college if they are to compete against other kids in the bottom 80% for the few good jobs still available to this class of people. Parents are not stupid in bankrupting themselves for their kids–they have no choice–we have to spend every dollar we can so our little angels have some chance against the little angels next door. This is the world capitalism has built for us and our kids.
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“private schools” not “pet schools”
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The CCSS on the Common [sic] Core [sic] and education as stairmastery:
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I like pet schools better.
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Kids differ. They differ a lot in their propensities and abilities and interests, and this is a good thing. Kids need, within their schools, paths appropriate to them, and a complex, extremely diverse society and economy needs students who have been variously guided, not identically milled by a monolithic standards-and-testing and high-school certification machine.
Many students will become cosmetologists. Some few–very few–will become cosmologists. And that’s not only OK but entirely appropriate. In this country, we give lip service to the value of labor, but then we run schools that treat an adult career in labor as what happens when you have failed. As Ken Robinson says, we run schools that seem to be assuming that every kid is supposed to become a college professor, whom Robinson defines as a person who thinks of his or her body as a means for transport for his or her head–a way of getting his or her head to meetings.
K12 schools should provide a great many options–they should be cultural gardens with many differing paths within them but also certain heights from which one can view (though not necessarily master) the whole landscape. Those heights could be a few broad humanities survey courses that have as their primary objective turning kids on to just how delightful literature and philosophy and music and art and history can be.
So, how does one get there? Well, first, you take a sledgehammer to the monolithic standards-and-testing machine. That’s key to ensuring that options will flourish. Second, you create VARIOUS high-school certification options to replace the invariant current graduation requirements. That’s extremely important. Third, you don’t divert massive resources away from public schools because they need a lot MORE resources (and a lot more freedom from detailed, invariant centralized planning by federal and state departments of education) in order to create those options.
Our current one-size-fits all approach wrenches the lives of our young people away from courses of rational development for them. Or, to change the metaphor: after all that hacking at students to make them fit a Procrustean bed, most emerge psychologically crippled, thinking of themselves as failures, because that’s what they have been taught that they are, and then they go to college and get a degree in Communications because that’s what they’ve been prepared to do. After dropping out (a quarter of them do) or squeaking through college, having accrued $60 K in student loan debt, they go back and live in their parents’ basement because they haven’t been prepared for an actual, available path for them in the adult world, and after several years of doing that, they figure out that they need get away from the video game console for a while and take classes at the local tech school or community college so that they can then do something that people will actually pay them for.
All that is terribly, terribly wasteful of time and treasure and of the curiosity and spirits and energies and time of most of those young people.
Kids differ. They are not machine parts to be identically milled. If we do that to them, then they’re screwed.
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Those invariant state standards [sic] need to be replaced by broad and flexible frameworks consisting of a few (no more than four or five) general principles.
The standards [sic] themselves need to be replaced by a NON-MANDATORY, open-source Wiki of varied AND COMPETING curriculum guidelines and curriculum maps and standards for particular courses or parts of courses, continuously vetted and added to and modified by classroom practitioners, subject-area specialists, and researchers.
And local principals and teachers need to have the autonomy to choose from among those.
That’s how you get competition and innovation and a variety of paths for students appropriate to an extremely complex, diverse, pluralistic society and economy.
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Bob Shepherd for Secretary of Education, the anti-Devos. I agree with Bob’s policy reforms for k-12. My eyes start at a slightly different place. First–lower class size especially from the bottom up. Second–house the hundreds of thousands of homeless kids now attending public schools. Third–base k-12 curriculum in project methods–building things, going places, writing about what we build and where we go–fill every classroom with take-home libraries, every school with f/t nurses, counselors, librarians, and asst. tchrs in every classroom(like Geoffrey Canada did at his HCZ schools using Wall St money to subsidize the pp allocation of NYC). Schools good for kids and for the nation can’t be good until they solve the material inequality infecting them.
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“the hundreds of thousands of homeless kids now attending public schools”
Priority 1.
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“Those invariant state standards [sic] need to be replaced by broad and flexible frameworks consisting of a few (no more than four or five) general principles.”
And what should those four or five general principles be grounded in/based upon?
The answer lies in the various state constitutions. After reviewing all 50 state constitutions in order to come up with a common rationale here is what I propose in Ch 1 of my book:
“The purpose of public education is to promote the welfare of the individual so that each person may savor the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the fruits of their own industry.”
Any educational practice that is shown to hinder, block and/or otherwise cause an individual to not be able to indulge in any aspect of his/her rights as stated has to be considered as harmful and unjust not only to the individual but also to society and therefore must rightly be condemned as educational malpractice and ought to be immediately discontinued. Trampled rights are rights that are non-existent and the educational malpractice that tramples any right is unjust and as noted in Alabama’s constitution “is usurpation and oppression” and as Missouri’s declares “. . . when government does not confer this security, it fails in its chief design.”
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“Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislatures and magistrates, in all future periods of this commonwealth, to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them; especially the university at Cambridge, public schools, and grammar-schools in the towns.”
Constitution of Massachusetts 5:2, 1780
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Duane
What happened to Noel Wilson after he wrote his dissertation?
Was he “disappeared”?
Or did he take on a new identity ? (Duane Swacker)
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Senor Swacker, I imagine that most readers of this blog who are going to do so have by now read Wilson’s provocative, unusual paper. You could probably at this point simply post: “Noel.” I’ll concede this much to Noel Wilson: Testing is always an exercise of power, and sometimes, it does violence. The latter is indeed the case in standardized testing as it is carried out today by our states. Someone once suggested to the Harvard Shakespeare scholar George Lyman Kittredge, who had only a Master’s degree, that he should sit for the PhD exam because he would fly through it. “And which of you,” said Kittredge, “will presume to test me?”
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“Well, first, you take a sledgehammer to the monolithic standards-and-testing machine”
That’s exactly what Noel Wilson has done in his 1997 dissertation “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
But the powers that be know that any serious questioning of their tactics must be assiduously ignored for time will pass and the critique will blow into the dustbin of history. (not if I can help it with Wilson’s work!)
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You will not find much information about labor markets circulated among the pushers of STEM, the Common Core, or the pushers of “college and careers.”
You will not find this information either: Many workers start out in low wage jobs and move up or laterally in terms of pay but most never have a long-term position with a single employer. This report looks at the not-so-fabulous work histories of baby boomers. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/nlsoy.pdf
The supporters of ALEC and the US Chamber of Commerce are quite happy to kill collective bargaining and prevent workers from securing decent pay. In a recent case, the state of Missouri rolled back the minimum wage in St. Louis, which was “too high.” https://it-it.facebook.com/RBReich/posts/1691948517484404
• This move was in perfect alignment with the agenda of ALEC—the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council.
According to ALEC:
• “Minimum wage laws have been a matter of great debate in our nation. Most scholars on federalism would agree that if a minimum wage was necessary, it would be the responsibility of the states to enact such a law. This resolution upholds the belief that local governments do not have the authority to set a minimum wages for their citizens and if necessary should be managed by the state.”
• That is a summary of ALEC’s draft of model legislation, June 22, 2016. That same model was put into the hopper as model legislation for “baby ALEC” —the American City County Exchange. That way cities, counties, and smaller administrative units in a state are enlisted to support state legislation.
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Laura,
“Cradle to career education pipeline”. Sounds totalitarian?
You have posted about the little brother of ALEC, American City and County Exchange. I doubt that it’s a coincidence that the Chamber of Commerce also has an ACCE which is the Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives. Ohio’s Mason Deerfield Chamber President is going to join 20 other chamber employees across the nation “to study
education attainment and workforce development”. The quote at the beginning describes the Chamber’s ed. program. The Chamber boasts of its role “being in the trenches fighting for prosperity,”
in other words, strangling growth by further concentrating wealth among the richest 0.1%. Six Walton heirs have wealth equivalent to 40% of Americans combined and Bill Gates’ wealth is equivalent to the amount of 750,000,000 people combined. The Chamber played a significant role in that statistic and the disastrous outcome that will result.
Guess who gives the Chamber president praise? Mason City School’s Chief Innovation Officer.
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Unfortunately many of the job categories that will see the largest increase do not pay a livable wage. Something will need to be done by the Federal, State and Local governments to make up this failure of our economic system as it is now structured.
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Looking at the salary table of those jobs of the future, I saw that few of them could afford homeownership or a way to get beyond a paycheck-to-paycheck existence, certainly, if the wages had to support a family. Beyond the educational implications, I think we need to ask why these salaries are predicted to be so low when I am sure the profits and CEOs of the various industries will have a rosier outlook and the wage gap will continue its trajectory,to the point where democracy is unsustainable.
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Teachers don’t make that list because they can easily be replaced by iPhone apps. Any Ed Deformer can mansplain that to you.
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And before someone leaps onto this thread to ‘splain to me, yes, I did see that this was a list of jobs with the most GROWTH between now and 2024. Student population sizes will rise only slightly during that time.
And as any Ed Deformer can ‘splain to you, you can put a thousand prole children in a room with their Surface tablets and one proctor because . . . computer adaptive software, centralized state databases of scores, standardized testing, and the Common [sic] Core [sic].
But, as the table tells you, there will be a significant demand for people to clean the floors and toilets of the lords of the new feudal order.
Something else your kids can look forward to.
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As commenter jmay06 notes, in the broader picture, it is clear that if we ever hope to restore middle class jobs we need to increase the minimum wage. If the minimum wage for a 40 hour per week job was increased to $15 per hour the average annual wage would be $31,200…. and 11 of the jobs on this list are forecast to earn less than that figure in 2024. How will we ever reduce poverty unless we pay more for the “jobs of the future” that will be needed no matter how much STEM education we provide in schools?
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