Category Archives: Employers

Gallup Poll’s 2013 State of America Schools report

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Since the early 1970s, Gallup has reported the results on their annual survey of American education. This year’s report includes findings from:

  • more than 600,000 5th- to 12th-grade students participated in the survey
  • results from Gallup’s decade-long study of exceptional teachers and principals are included

Here are the highlights of the 2013 survey and report.

  • Just 33% (1 in 3)  students scored highly on all three factors linked to success at school and beyond: hope, engagement, and well being.
  • Emotional engagement is the heartbeat of the education (learning) process.
  • Less than half of students strongly agree that they get to do what they do best every day, leading to boredom and frustration as their greatest talents go undeveloped.
  • Within the first five years on the job, between 40% and 50% of teachers leave the profession. A lack of autonomy needed to effectively use their talents plays a significant role in these turnover rates.
  • Nearly 70% of teachers are not engaged in their work. While teachers compare favorably to other U.S. workers in agreeing they are able to do what they do best every day – they are last among 12 occupational groups studied when it comes to feeling their opinions count at work.
  • Just 19% of Americans agree that the country’s high school graduates are ready for college, and only 17% say graduates are prepared to join the labor force.
  • Just as exceptional teachers help students stay emotionally invested in the learning process, great principals provide the support that teachers and other staff members need to achieve high levels of performance.
  • Many U.S. school districts struggle with a lack of adequate school board leadership; only 37% of superintendents strongly agree that their districts are well-governed at the board level.
  • Young adults who say they had frequent opportunities in their last year of school to develop real-world problem-solving skills are about twice as likely as those who disagree to report higher-quality work lives.
  • Securing three simple rights for students can change the trajectory of their lives:
    1. They feel they have someone who cares about their development;
    2. They are able to do what they like to do each day;
    3. They are able to do what they do best every day.

You can download the entire 47-page report  here.

I am struck with how tightly this couples with M. Night Shyamalan’s findings in his excellent book, I Got Schooled. By clicking on that title in the tags below, you can find summaries of his five practices that lead to success in the classroom.

How Increasing Income Inequality Is Dampening U.S. Economic Growth, And Possible Ways To Change The Tide

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Here is an overview from recent Standard & Poor’s economic research describing the importance of education to our country’s well-being:

  • At extreme levels, income inequality can harm sustained economic growth over long periods. The U.S. is approaching that threshold.
  • Standard & Poor’s sees extreme income inequality as a drag on long-run economic growth. We’ve reduced our 10-year U.S. growth forecast to a 2.5% rate. We expected 2.8% five years ago.
  • With wages of a college graduate double that of a high school graduate, increasing educational attainment is an effective way to bring income inequality back to healthy levels.
  • It also helps the U.S economy. Over the next five years, if the American workforce completed just one more year of school, the resulting productivity gains could add about $525 billion, or 2.4%, to the level of GDP, relative to the baseline.
  • A cautious approach to reducing inequality would benefit the economy, but extreme policy measures could backfire.

You can read the whole, lengthy article  here.

Here are the top 10 skills for the future

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Want to know what the ‘experts’ say about the world kids are heading into, and what skills they will need to succeed? Here they are:

  • Sense-making (or seeing what things are connected, and how)
  • Social intelligence
  • Novel and adaptive thinking
  • Cross-cultural competencies
  • Computational thinking – seeing trends and patterns
  • New media literacy
  • “Transdisciplinarity,” or generalization
  • Design mindset
  • Cognitive load management – what to not pay attention to
  • Virtual collaboration – effectively employing technology

You can read the whole article here.

Evidence that you can’t lure entrepreneurs with tax cuts

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Mission: Graduate, ABC Community School Partnership, and Early Childhood Accountability Partnership (ECAP) are putting us on the right track to growth, both short- and long-term.

150 executives surveyed by Endeavor Insight, a research firm that examines how entrepreneurs contribute to job creation and long-term economic growth, said a skilled workforce and high quality of life were the main reasons why they founded their companies where they did; taxes weren’t a significant factor.  This suggests that states that cut taxes and then address the revenue loss by letting their schools, parks, roads, and public safety deteriorate will become less attractive to the kinds of people who found high-growth companies.  (Hat tip to urbanologist Richard Florida for calling attention to the study.)

Rock on Mission: Graduate, ABC Community School Partnership, and Early Childhood Accountability Partnership (ECAP)!

You can read the entire article here.

Your Job Taught to Machines Puts Half U.S. Work at Risk

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This from recent Bloomberg News

Who needs an army of lawyers when you have a computer?

When Minneapolis attorney William Greene faced the task of combing through 1.3 million electronic documents in a recent case, he turned to a so-called smart computer program. Three associates selected relevant documents from a smaller sample, “teaching” their reasoning to the computer. The software’s algorithms then sorted the remaining material by importance.

“We were able to get the information we needed after reviewing only 2.3 percent of the documents,” said Greene, a Minneapolis-based partner at law firm Stinson Leonard Street LLP.

Full Coverage: Technology and the Economy

Artificial intelligence has arrived in the American workplace, spawning tools that replicate human judgments that were too complicated and subtle to distill into instructions for a computer. Algorithms that “learn” from past examples relieve engineers of the need to write out every command.

The advances, coupled with mobile robots wired with this intelligence, make it likely that occupations employing almost half of today’s U.S. workers, ranging from loan officers to cab drivers and real estate agents, become possible to automate in the next decade or two, according to a study done at the University of Oxford in the U.K.

“These transitions have happened before,” said Carl Benedikt Frey, co-author of the study and a research fellow at the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology. “What’s different this time is that technological change is happening even faster, and it may affect a greater variety of jobs.”

To read the full article and see the neat graphic, click here.

LEADERSHIP – What Does It Take [TED Talk]

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“Leadership” is the Shyamalan Foundation’s #2 practice, and I’ve blogged and emailed the summary details in the recent past. Here is a TED talk on the subject that both sounds supportive and extends some important examples.

There are many leadership programs available today, from 1-day workshops to corporate training programs. But chances are, these won’t really help. In this clear, candid talk, Roselinde Torres describes 25 years observing truly great leaders at work, and shares the three simple but crucial questions would-be company chiefs need to ask to thrive in the future.

Roselinde Torres: What it takes to be a great leader –   October 2013, San Francisco

Bring 21st Century Into High Schools

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Here’s a quick summary of, and link to, a June USNews article about bringing the 21st Century into the High School classroom.

A recent Gallup research program interviewed 1,014 people ages 18-35 with varying levels of education, asking them to recall their last year of school.

They found that about 1 out of 2  or  2 out of 3 individuals were NOT presented with collaboration, real-world problem solving and critical thinking opportunities in their high school experience.

While students were techno-savvy, only 3 percent had used discussion boards, video conferencing, Skype or other collaborative tools in the classroom.

Students tasked with regularly using these 21st century tools were more likely to say they excelled at their jobs, and that these tools were crucial in today’s workplace.

The Common Core State Standards adopted by most states require teachers to incorporate collaboration, problem solving and critical thinking into their lessons.

Cull current events: Look at what is dominating the news cycle and think about how it can apply to lessons. Use severe weather outbreaks and environmental disasters to illustrate everything from climate patterns to the logistics of coordinating relief efforts. Use the never-ending campaign season to teach students about statistics, social studies, finance and big data.

Tap industry experts: Getting a CEO into a classroom can be a logistical nightmare. Getting them on a Skype call – now that’s another story.

Free online tools can open up a wellspring of opportunity for getting experts in front of students. Educators can set up a call or join one hosted by someone else, using resources such as Skype in the Classroom. Teachers can also turn the tables and have students present a project or pitch an idea to industry leaders,

Read the complete article    here.