Global Achievement Gap Summary

In 2008, Tony Wagner’s book, The Global Achievement Gap, provided a wakeup call to educationalists, especially in the US. A Harvard education professor, Wagner’s view is that schools should be turning out adolescents who are ‘jury ready’. By that, he means able to reason their way through conflicting arguments, weigh evidence, detect bias and come to an informed conclusion. His informed conclusion is that secondary education – at least in the US – is failing miserably. In order to resolve the problems, he suggests that the education system needs serious reform and a step back from preparing students to pass standard tests and towards training them in seven skills which will prepare them for today’s fast-paced global knowledge economy.

Because of the ‘No Child Left Behind’ act in the States, the pressure on teachers is to prepare students to take multiple-choice type tests, spending valuable lesson time on practice questions, test strategies and rote learning of facts. But life is not a series of MCQs and nor is the workplace. Students need to understand that there are a lot more than four possible choices in life and that each has implications. Graduates need to have leadership skills, yet demonstrate they can also work collaboratively. Many projects in the workplace are team based, but children in schools do the majority of preparation work and assignments on their own. Another of Wagner’s seven skills he calls ‘Agility and Adaptability’. The days of having a job for life (or even a year) are gone. So are the one-time-solutions. The word is simply moving too fast. While there may be only one correct answer at school or on a standard test, there is no one correct answer in business, and if a solution is perfect for now, it is out of date one minute later. Children need to learn that tablets of stone belong to the past and that flexibility (of thought and attitude) is essential in today’s busy world. Initiative and entrepreneurialism are similarly discouraged in schools. The model is the teacher as the boss in a hierarchical structure that does not reflect today’s corporations. This also has an impact on students’

Students have limited access to data in schools and rarely have to source information for themselves. In the real word, we are awash with information. Picking the most accurate, reliable and current is a skill students need to learn. In the workplace, nobody is going to hand them a set of lecture notes and a reading list. Finally, Wagner’s research concluded that the number one skill employers now demand is the ability to ask good questions. Students need to demonstrate they have both curiosity and imagination. No innovation, discovery or invention was ever found without these particular skills. In short, in 2008 Wagner laid out a road map for bridging the global achievement gap. By focusing on the mental processes students need – on the journey, rather than the outcome, the skill rather than the content – he believed that future graduates would have the skills we will need as the world continues to develop at a faster and faster rate. While educators and parents across the globe praised the book for its new approach and its open criticism of a test-based educational culture, little, if anything has changed.

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