Artificial intelligence and other technology have high schools scrambling to keep up — with states doing an uneven job of encouraging schools to embed critical thinking skills and offering students access to internships and college courses, according to a new report cited in an article in The 74.
Today’s world “requires an entirely new kind of educational experience — one that traditional high schools were never designed to deliver,” the nonprofit XQ Institute argues in its new report The Future Is High School.
“The public launch of ChatGPT placed a powerful form of generative artificial intelligence (AI) within the reach of every American,” according to the report. “(The) stage is shifting rapidly. Our young people are growing up at a time when the economy and workforce are in constant flux. And high schools must keep pace.”
Schools need to emphasize work and early college experiences and teach interpersonal and thinking skills as much as academics, the report states.
“What do we need to know when we leave our high school doors?” asked XQ CEO Russlynn Ali. Math, English and science are still important, she says.
“But layered on top of that, we need to be critical thinkers,” Ali says. “We need to be able to collaborate. We need adaptability. We need these skills that will help us succeed in life, no matter what direction we choose after we leave high school.”
XQ wants states to encourage schools to follow the lead of Purdue Polytechnic High School in Indianapolis or the Museum High School in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where students learn academics and interpersonal skills through projects, not lectures. Another leader: Oakland, California’s Latitude High School, where every 10th grader follows an adult through a workday to learn about the job; 11th graders have month-long internships; and seniors can choose to do a longer one.
“States must be the locus of change. The have more responsibility and authority over their schools than certainly in recent memory, if not in my lifetime,” Ali says.
States are producing mixed results in how they are succeeding in meeting ten goals XQ considers key to school innovation. XQ met with school leaders across the country to create the goals — and then researched how much progress each state and Washington, D.C., has made toward them:
- 46 states have met the goal of offering work experience, such as internships, as credit toward high school diplomas.
- 38 states give every student a chance to earn college credit before graduating, by taking Advance Placement, International Baccalaureate or college classes.
- 32 states give schools the ability to award students class credit under a mastery or competency system showing they know the material, instead of just attending a class.
- 32 states have identified key skills students need to learn for the future, including non-academic skills XQ has made a major part of its work, such as teamwork, critical thinking and problem solving. States often created a “Portrait of a Graduate” spelling these out.
- Just 10 states — Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Utah and Washington — met six of the goals; and no state met all ten, though 31 met at least four. Two states — Alaska and Florida — met only two of the goals.
- Two of XQ’s goals — finding ways to measure how well students have learned interpersonal and thinking skills, then showing those on report cards — haven’t been realized by any state.
XQ plans to track changes and update the report every two years for the next decade.
“I think of these goals as a start, definitely not a finish line,” Ali says.
XQ, a nonprofit and affiliate of investing and philanthropic firm Emerson Collective, was co-founded by Ali and Laurene Powell Jobs. Powell Jobs is Emerson’s founder and president, and wife of the late Apple founder Steve Jobs.
XQ’s vision has its critics, who say it overstates how much jobs will change in the future and who are unsure if XQ’s priorities are the best way to prepare students. But school districts and several states, including Indiana, Rhode Island and Utah, agree with the approach and are open in their support.
Utah’s state superintendent Molly Hart says the state rarely adopts any national approach, but there is great overlap in what XQ promotes and the state’s push to redesign high schools, including the support of mastery teaching approaches and requiring students to earn a meaningful professional credential before graduating.
The report, and shorter reports XQ released for individual states, highlights policy changes and efforts already in place that XQ considers “beacons” for change. Among them:
Indiana: For giving schools increasing flexibility in giving students class credit for showing proficiency in a subject, rather than just sitting through a class all semester or year.
Rhode Island: For changing diploma requirements so that all students, beginning in 2028, must take the courses in math, foreign language and even art that qualify them to attend college.
Texas: For allowing students to earn 12 hours of college credit in high school, either through college, AP or International Baccalaureate classes.
Colorado: For encouraging the growth of CareerWise high school apprenticeships, the largest youth apprenticeship program in the country. Colorado also divided career preparation into three categories — Learning ABOUT Work, Learning THROUGH Work, and Learning AT Work.
Utah: For giving schools grants to train teachers how to educate students using a mastery/competency approach; and how to rate student progress. Utah also supported some schools trying out vastly different report cards – keeping the traditional A-F grade scale but also giving students a new Mastery Learning Record that shows their progress on durable skills.
Ali said XQ wanted to highlight the two goals that haven’t been met yet, but that she considers vital —and then changing student report cards to rate students on those skills.
Ali says standardized tests states use to measure student skills in math, English and science offer some sense of what students know but are outdated. There’s no clear way yet to assess how well students have mastered durable skills to ensure colleges or employers that they have those skills. And Ali said that schools tend to prioritize learning the state measures and judges them on, so schools won’t vigorously teach durable skills until they are part of report cards and school ratings.
XQ recognized 12 states for trying to develop tests and report cards to measure how well students have learned key non-academic skills; six of them for participating in a pilot project with the Educational Testing Service (ETS), the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Mastery Transcript Consortium (now part of ETS). The Skills for the Future project has been working to create tests on durable skills, starting with three — collaboration, communication and critical thinking.
The Skills for the Future team, which includes Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Nevada, Rhode Island and Wisconsin, is still working to create new tests but recently divided collaboration, communication and critical thinking skills into smaller skills as one step toward creating tests.
Communication, for example, is broken down into segments — presentation skills, making messages clearer, adapting messages for different audiences or comprehending communication of others — that are then broken down further into sub-skills.
Rhode Island Education Commissioner Angelica Infante-Green says measuring these skills will be a “game changer.”
“I think it will give employers things that they have been looking for, as well as change how we teach, what we teach, and how we incorporate (those skills) into the academic field,” she says. “It’s important. It won’t be one or the other, it’ll be both.”
Ali also stresses that just passing policy changes won’t be enough. Schools, teachers and parents need to also be on board.
“It’s not a checklist,” Ali says. “It has to be implemented in a way that is sustained and empowering and supportive of what needs to happen in the classroom.”
The 74
