Harvard's Graduate School of Education released today?a report, Pathways to Prosperity, which, to judge by the heft of those who contributed to the document's ?Advance Praise? page (e.g., Joel Klein, Phil Bredesen) and by the U.S. Secretary of Education's presence at the report's Washington, D.C., unveiling, is a big-ish deal. So what does?the thing?say? That the ?college for all? goal, pushed most recently and publicly by President Obama, is unreachable and also,?in establishing, deliberately or otherwise, college completion as the singularly desirable educational outcome, harmful.
Our current system places far too much emphasis on a single pathway to success: attending and graduating from a four-year college after completing an academic program of study in high school. Yet as we've seen, only 30 percent of young adults successfully complete this preferred pathway, despite decades of efforts to raise the numbers. And too many of them graduate from college without a clear conception of the career they want to pursue, let alone a pathway for getting there.
These are not original thoughts. Nonetheless they are thoughts worth repeating, and the report one worth reading. Among?its virtues?is that it is a silo of relevant facts, including details about how other countries have built career and technical education programs, for better and worse. Amending America's educational system and especially its high schools such that pupils who are not enlivened by Shakespeare or Euclid can still flourish seems sensible; and unlike other proposed adjustments to the K-12 system it is not opposed by hoards of intransigent foes. There is real room here to make real?change.
?Liam Julian, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow