KARCHER STAFF BLOG
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Kudos
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- Thank you to all staff involved in Outdoor Education!!! It was such a success! Though it was cold students were very engaged throughout their time at Camp Timberlee. It is always nice to see the relationship building that goes on along with the skill development the students gain. Great job to everyone!!!
- Thank you Mike Yopp for all of your work and efforts for the few 8th grade students who did not attend ODE. The work and curriculum provided to those who did not attend was engaging as well!
- Thank you to your special education aides for your flexibility this past week and for all the encouragement you gave to all of our students either at school or at Outdoor Education! We appreciate all of your support!!!
- And... thank you to all of our staff for your dedication to our students as they transitioned back to school after Winter Break. We didn't miss a beat!
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Reminders
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- MAP Testing starts this week!!!
- Math will be on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week - taking place in student's math classes.
- Reading will be on Thursday and Friday of this week - taking place in student's science classes.
- Language Arts will be next week Monday/Tuesday - taking place in student's ELA classes.
- Please be cognizant of the testing environment and limit students in the hallways for the next two weeks.
- Make-up testing will occur in the library with Marian and our ISS support.
- Monday, January 9 - BLT Meeting in the conference room starting at 2:40.
- Wednesday, January 11 - Literacy Google Document PLC
- Please remember to sign up for your SQIDVPAC literacy strategy prior to Wednesday. What you sign up for is the strategy and work you are planning to infuse within your classroom in the next two weeks.
- January 24 - Full Day In-service (8:00 - 4:00 workday)
- 8:00 - starting in the BHS auditorium
- Special Music Performance
- Longevity Awards
- State of the District Update
- Safety in our schools
- 9:30 - 10:30 - Technology Session
- 10:45 - 11:45 - Technology Session
- For these sessions you will have the ability to select where you want to go. Scott will be sending something out to staff for this...
- 11:45 - 12:45
- BASD Chili Cook off Throwdown!!!
- Here at Karcher we need to have a minimum of 2 chilis represented for the chili cook-off competition.
- Please email me if you are willing to make a chili for the BASD staff. The amount needed is a crockpot size portion of chili...
- Each school will have a minimum of 2 chilis brought to the commons. BASD staff will then vote on the best one and the winner will have the trophy for the year!
- Sides will all be taken care of and covered by the district.
- 12:45 - 4:00 - Classroom Preparation Time
- January 27 - Our next Friday Night Live!!!
- Please email Mike Jones and/or Donna Sturdevant if you are able to assist as a chaperone.
Coming up...
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Pictures from the week
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Article of the week:
December 2016 | Volume 74 | Number 4
The Global-Ready Student Pages 83-84
The Global-Ready Student Pages 83-84
Research Matters / What Skills Do Students Really Need for a Global Economy?
We may have a skills gap—but not the one we think.
After spending time in a competitive, crowded, and climate change-ravaged world, writer Thomas Friedman (2005) found himself telling his daughters, "Finish your homework—people in China and India are starving for your jobs." Dire warnings from Friedman and others, coupled with a rash of test score data showing that U.S. students are falling behind their international peers, have led business groups to sound the alarm about a "skills gap"—largely in STEM fields, where they project a shortfall of 5 million workers by 2020.
Business leaders largely blame the K–12 education system for failing to prepare students for the realities of a hypercompetitive global economy (Business Roundtable, 2014). So we're now awash in STEM-focused initiatives, such as the Obama administration's Educate to Innovate program and Alaska Airlines's $1 million donation to a science and engineering program to educate Alaskan schoolchildren (Ossola, 2014).
Recently, however, critics have begun to question whether pushing STEM on U.S. kids is warranted. After all, some countries that outperform us in math and science have done so while placing little specific emphasis on STEM. Moreover, as political scientist Andrew Hacker (2012) has observed, given that only 5 percent of entry-level jobs require proficiency in algebra, by making algebra mandatory for students, we're overemphasizing needless skills—and creating a barrier for students who might otherwise finish school and contribute to the global economy.
Skills Gap—Myth or Reality?
So do we have a skills gap? And if so, what should we do about it?
Economist Paul Krugman (2014) has blasted the skills gap notion as "a zombie idea … that should have been killed by evidence, but refuses to die" (p. A21). He notes that the current ratio of unfilled jobs to unemployed workers is "far below normal." Moreover, an analysis conducted by the Economic Policy Institute (Shierholz, 2014) found that unemployment rates have spiked for workers at all levels of education, which refutes the idea that unemployment rates might go down if workers' education levels went up.
After synthesizing several key reports, Peter Capelli of the Wharton School of Business (2014) concluded that there's no evidence of serious skills gaps in the workforce. On the contrary, average workers may actually be more educated than their job requires. Employers who complain they cannot attract talent might simply not be paying enough. Both Capelli and Krugman assert that there may be an ulterior motive when business groups sound this alarm: keeping visas for migrant workers high and wages for skilled workers low.
Yet there may be a more nuanced kind of gap. Many employers are already quietly paying more for top talent, as evidenced by the rise in wages for the top 10 percent of workers in key fields while average wages in those fields have stagnated (Bessen, 2014). For example, while pay remains flat overall for graphic designers, it has risen steadily for designers with web and mobile platform skills. The same pattern holds true for software programmers. In a global economy, the requirements of jobs may change so quickly that the real shortage may be in, as economist James Bessen puts it, "non-cognitive skills that allow people to excel at learning on the job."
A survey of 343 executives of U.S. companies (Labi, 2014) found that the skill deemed most important for new hires was "critical thinking and problem-solving" (identified by 72 percent of executives), followed by collaboration and teamwork (63 percent), and communication (54 percent). The skill least valued? Applied mathematics. These data bolster Hacker's claims that we're overemphasizing algebra and teaching students the wrong kind of mathematics at the expense of ensuring that they master computational and problem-solving skills they will need.
A Gap in How STEM Is Taught?
Interestingly, a 2016 study by Logue, Watanabe-Rose, and Douglas found that college kids who were slated to be placed in remedial mathematics fared better when placed in more challenging statistics courses. Researchers presumed that the remedial courses forced students to repeat the same sort of disconnected-from-reality instruction that failed them in high school, whereas statistics, although more complex, is more practical and engaging.
Likewise, a trend in urban and high-tech enclaves across the United States—where a new generation of extracurricular math programs and competitions are producing world-class high school mathematicians—demonstrates that kids are capable of understanding dizzying levels of mathematics when they access that learning in a different way (Tyre, 2016). These programs use a problem-solving approach similar to that used in elite colleges like MIT. Teachers challenge students with open-ended, multifaceted situations that can be solved through different approaches.
That approach contrasts sharply with the teaching methods prevalent in U.S. classrooms. Video comparisons with other countries find that American teachers commonly downgrade complex, heuristic-type problems into simplistic, algorithmic tasks, turning intriguing challenges—like figuring out how to calculate the area of a triangle—into spoon-fed formulas (Stigler & Hiebert, 2004).
A Key Pivot
In the end, arguments over skills gaps, math myths, and the like may present a sucker's choice: To succeed in a global world, students likely need basic and applied knowledge, computational andcreative thinking, and hard and soft skills. But perhaps the most important pivot we might make (with all due respect to Friedman) is to fret less about how our kids will compete in a flat, hot, and crowded world and more about how they can contribute to that world by solving complex problems. We might start by telling our kids to do their homework because their neighbors—locally and globally—are counting on them.
References
Bessen, J. (2014). Employers aren't whining—the "skills gap" is real. Retrieved from Harvard Business Review at https://hbr.org/2014/08/employers-arent-just-whining-the-skills-gap-is-real
Business Roundtable. (2014). Closing America's skills gap. Washington, DC: Author.
Capelli, P. (2014). Skill gaps, skill shortages, and skill mismatches: Evidence for the U.S. (NBER Working Paper 20382). Washington, DC: National Bureau of Economic Research.
Friedman, T. L. (2005, April 3). It's a flat world, after all. Retrieved from New York Times at www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/magazine/its-a-flat-world-after-all.html
Hacker, A. (2012, July 29). Is algebra necessary? Retrieved from New York Times at www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/opinion/sunday/is-algebra-necessary.html
Krugman, P. (2014, March 31). Jobs and skills and zombies. Retrieved from New York Times at www.nytimes.com/2014/03/31/opinion/krugman-jobs-and-skills-and-zombies.html
Labi, A. (2014). Closing the skills gap: Companies and colleges collaborating for change. Retrieved from www.luminafoundation.org/files/publications/Closing_the_skills_gap.pdf
Logue, A. W., Watanabe-Rose, M., & Douglas, D. (2016). Should students assessed as needing remedial mathematics take college-level quantitative courses instead? A randomized controlled trial. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 38(3), 578–598.
Ossola, A. (2014). Is the U.S. focusing too much on STEM? Retrieved from The Atlantic at www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/12/is-the-us-focusing-too-much-on-stem/383353
Shierholz, H. (2014). Is there really a shortage of skilled workers? Retrieved from www.epi.org/publication/shortage-skilled-workers
Stigler, J. W., & Hiebert, J. (2004). Improving mathematics teaching. Educational Leadership, 61(5), 12–17.
Tyre, P. (2016). The math revolution. Retrieved from The Atlantic at www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/03/the-math-revolution/426855
