Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.

Malcolm X

The school year now ending has revealed the seamy underbelly of the educational systems in many of our communities. In these communities, a generation of children has effectively lost a year of learning – and of learning how to learn. The biggest losers are those who started the year with shaky skills; their recovery from this educational disaster is problematical.

As the grandson of an immigrant, my grandfather and my father pounded into me that getting an education was absolutely essential (I’m sure my kids would say I did the same to/for them) if I was to succeed in life. As I’ve come to recognize, the same can be said of communities: a community cannot succeed unless it prepares its citizens for the future.

American communities are in a more competitive environment than ever before. Resilient communities have to have a “competitive edge” if they are to keep their citizens and their businesses (and their tax base!). When companies are looking to relocate or to build a new facility, one of the most important criteria in selecting a community is a good school system. For decades, the schools in New York and some of California’s cities were among the best in the country, and these communities flourished (in part) because of that. Now, the exodus of thousands from those states to communities in Texas and Florida each year provides mute testimony that those cities have lost their edge.

While education is often a crucial factor for those selecting a community, it is just as important for the community itself to have an educated public. Educated citizens are more likely to be involved in their community. They are more likely to have higher incomes (i.e., they pay more taxes). A community with an educated public is less likely to have a violent crime problem, or to have a large disconnected youth cohort.

Thus, many communities are caught up in an educational crisis bordering on a disaster. Several recent studies have quantified the losses in basic skills, particularly among the kids assigned to low-performing urban schools. In addition to the loss of skills, we know that some of our kids have paid a severe psychological toll as well.

But a crisis is an opportunity masked by danger. If we saw the same degree of damage from a hurricane, the cry would go up to “Build Back Better!” So let’s build our educational systems back better. In a previous post, I discussed “future-focused” education. When I wrote that in 12/19, I didn’t know what was lurking just around the corner. I think what I wrote still rings true, but in light of what’s happened since then, I’d add three things.

Remedial education. I hope this isn’t a shock to any of you, but a lot of our kids can’t read or do simple arithmetic. There can be many reasons for this: poor schools, parents who don’t care, peer pressure, and so on. On top this, many of our school systems are either lowering standards (=lowering expectations) or are acceding to activists’ demands to switch to new curricula that distort America’s history but offer no solutions for illiteracy or innumeracy. Constructs such as critical race theory offer students excuses for failure but no reasons to succeed. How do these constructs prepare students for a future world that will demand even greater ability to assimilate new knowledge; even greater proficiency in understanding and using new technologies?

These anti-human curricula encourage schools and teachers to see only a child’s identity group, not the child as an individual. If we’re to help these kids, that has to change. We need individualized testing that not only tells us how well each child can reads, communicate and do basic math, but also tells us how we can best reach and teach that child.

Reskilling. Our post-covid economy will be different than it was before. Some jobs will no longer be needed, or at least will drastically change; there is likely to be an increase in demand for some professionals. Our communities are already facing shortages of teachers, doctors and nurses, truckers and law enforcement officers. That’s why “reskilling” is needed: to help those whose jobs have gone away to gain new careers, and to ensure that the skills of the community’s workforce match the needs of employers. Reskilling partnerships would be formed between employers and workers in each community. These would determine current skill gaps and projected future needs. The community reskilling partnership would then engage with its school district(s) and potential higher education partners to design and implement programs to fill those gaps. Again, individualized testing is a key component but in this case must go beyond assessing basic skill proficiency to also determine what additional knowledge displaced workers have gained that may be “repurposed.”

And ultimately these programs must go beyond the current workforce. There are those who believe that economic growth is no longer possible; I disagree. Over one-third of the current workforce isn’t working; millions more have given up on finding work; millions more have been discouraged from working because of disadvantage or disability. If we have learned nothing else from covid, we have seen that technology has opened up many new employment opportunities, especially for those with physical challenges. It is up to each community to match its citizens’ skills with those opportunities.

Learning infrastructure. Our current educational infrastructure is focused all-too-much on statistics, and not on the progress each kid is actually making toward being a functional and contributing member of the community. Just as we currently test kids for their aptitudes, we should be evaluating teachers in terms of how well they are helping each kid in their care to learn. This should not be pejorative but rather done with an aim of matching the child’s learning style(s) with a teacher best able to help him or her progress.

Further, we need a central repository of successful practices – identifying what worked for children with specific profiles. This implies tracking the progress of each child as a function of their learning environment. Sort of like FEMA’s lessons learned, this needs to be readily available to educators at all levels; and they must be free to make use of everything that’s relevant.

As so many of us retreat to our echo chambers, it is far too easy to get discouraged about where our educational systems are going. Programs for the gifted in NYC, LA and elsewhere being gutted (unrecognized, but perhaps the best evidence of elites’ anti-asian racism); curricula being dumbed down. Communities are competing not only against those in their state, region and country but against others around the world as well. The most resilient communities – those that will survive and thrive – will reinvent their educational systems so that all of their citizens will be able to seize the opportunities inherent in a world of kaleidoscopic change. Yes, they will acknowledge their Yesterdays to better understand their Todays, but will keep a laser focus on preparing everyone for the challenges of Tomorrow.