The Research Subcommittee met yesterday, March 6, and agreed that we should pursue a process of expanding our research in our community. You all may know that I interviewed 17 successful persons about their ideas on skills that associate with success in today’s economy, with a view to perhaps evolving a Vision Statement that would include empowering our students with the skills they need to succeed at life. We would like to extend this process to include more persons. We could begin with small groups of 3 or 4 persons meeting at Starbucks or some similar location, move up to groups of 6 or 8 meeting in the board room of a bank, and then possibly groups of 10-15 meeting at Westbank Library, or some similar location. We would like to coordinate with you all, and I was commissioned to contact you, but I don’t actually know any names of persons on your subcommittee, so this blog seemed like a good place to start. Please contact me, either by return blog, or by phone (263-5368) or by email (lshultz@austin.rr.com) and we can plan together about how we can productively involve some more folks from our community in our conversations about a new vision for Westlake High School.

Funny how things converge! I posted a similar study on the 21st century schools site–

http://trends.edublogs.org/2006/11/16/future-graduate-study/

This study (I don’t think it’s the same one?) had similar findings.

They added the element of ethics and oral and written communication to their concerns, among other things.

I was reading a bit of The World is Flat recently and Thomas Freidman also talks about the skills that twenty first century students need–and they seem to center around collaboration, passion for learning, life long learning, and right brained skills. It concerns me that it seems like the current emphasis is on more left brained skills.

I read a study about college admissions yesterday and it said that colleges are starting to look for students that are deeply engaged in one extracurricular, rather than a lot of them, because of that “passion” element, I think.

Anyway, it’s very interesting how all these ideas are converging!

Carolyn

Their InBrief section is titled “Employers Say US Grads Don’t Have What It Takes”. Its a summary report from a collaboration between The Collaboration Board (http://www.conference-board.org), Corporate Voices for Working Families (http://www.cvworkingfamilies.org), the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (http://www.21stcenturyskilss.org), and the Society for Human Resource Management (http://www.shrm.org). The report is titled “Are They Really Ready to Work? – Employers’ Perspectives on the Basic Knowledge and Applied Skills of New Entrants to the 21st Century Workforce”.

The study comes from the survey of 431 human resource officials and other senior executives conducted during April and May of this year.

The good news is that the majority of respondants said that high school graduates are sufficiently prepared for the workforce in the areas of technology, teamwork, and diversity.

The areas that mainly reflect employers’ frustration is in the lack of development in more basic areas: personal accountability and effective work habits. Employers also reported that recent graduates lack basic reading comprehension, writing, and problem-solving skills.

81% of those surveyed said high school graduates lack good written communication skills.

The full report is available online at http://www.conference-board.org.