Opportunity, Work, and the Wayfinding Decade

Opportunity, Work, and the Wayfinding Decade Report 1 of the MyWays Student Success Series Dave Lash and Grace Belfiore October 2017 for Next Generation Learning Challenges The MyWaysTM Student Success Series About this report Report 1, Opportunity, Work, and the Wayfinding Decade, traces All reports in the series are available for download at the growing opportunity gap in this country and examines myways.nextgenlearning.org/report. employment challenges and labor market shifts that have Visual Summary transformed the journey from high school to gainful employment Introduction and Overview into a highly complex and risky wayfinding decade for today’s Part A: Adolescence in an Age of youth; it concludes with four key takeaways for next generation Accelerations educators. Summarizes specific real-world realities and Report 1 is the first of five reports in Part A of the MyWays conditions confronting today’s young people. Student Success Series. Part A, “Adolescence in an Age of Report 1: Opportunity, Work, and the Accelerations,” analyzes the real-world changes and conditions Wayfinding Decade that are most acutely impacting young people and outlines key Report 2: 5 Roadblocks to Bootstrapping a developmental tasks of the adolescent years. Career Report 3: 5 Decisions in Navigating the The MyWays Student Success Series examines the through-line of Work/Learn Landscape four essential questions for next generation learning and provides Report 4: 5 Essentials in Building Social Capital research and practice-based support to help school designers and Report 5: Preparing Apprentice-Adults for Life educators to answer these questions. The series consists of 12 after High School reports organized into three parts, plus a Visual Summary and Part B: Broader, Deeper Competencies Introduction and Overview. for Student Success The primary researchers and authors of the MyWays Student Provides a composite definition of student success in learning, work, and life. Success Series are Dave Lash, Principal at Dave Lash & Company, and Grace Belfiore, D.Phil., Principal Consultant at Belfiore Report 6: Welcome to the MyWays Student Education Consulting. Success Framework Report 7: Habits of Success — for Learning, MyWays is a project of Next Generation Learning Challenges, Work, and Well-being an initiative of the non-profit EDUCAUSE. MyWays is supported Report 8: Creative Know How — for a Novel, through a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Complex World with additional support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Report 9: Content Knowledge — for the Life Students Will Lead the Barr Foundation, and the Oak Foundation. Report 10: Wayfinding Abilities — for Destinations Unknown Part C: Redesigning the Learning Experience for the MyWays Competencies Brings the broader and deeper competencies nextgenlearning.org of the MyWays Student Success Framework into educational practice. Report 11: Learning Design for Broader, Deeper Competencies © 2017 EDUCAUSE. This work is licensed under a Report 12: Assessment Design Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. for Broader, Deeper Competencies Cover photo by Andrew F. Kazmierski / Shutterstock.com. Next Generation Learning Challenges REPORT 1 Opportunity, Work, and the Wayfinding Decade With millions of jobs lost and experienced workers scrambling for every available position — America’s young people stand last in line for jobs. —Annie E. Casey Foundation1 As this report will show, when our children leave high school today, they slam into the worst under-30 employment prospects since the Key reading Great Depression. In addition, while employers increasingly expect prospective employees to have postsecondary education, its cost is Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in an Age of escalating and its financial rewards are uncertain. Accelerations by Thomas Friedman Report 1 is the first of five reports in Part A of the MyWays Student Pathways to Prosperity: Meeting the Challenge of Preparing Young Success Series in which we explore “Adolescence in an Age of Americans for the 21st Century Accelerations.” We begin by tracing the diminishment of American from the Harvard School of Education opportunity through hard work, and then examine the Closing the College Gap: A Roadmap to unprecedented employment challenges faced by today’s young Postsecondary Readiness and people. Next, we summarize the “brawn to brains” shift in the labor Attainment from Civic Enterprises and market, which is shrinking and restructuring the middle-skill labor the Everyone Graduates Center sector — the very sector that young people have historically relied upon to get their start. For almost all students, these changes have transformed the journey from high school to gainful employment into a complex and risky wayfinding decade for which few are prepared. Furthermore, for low-income students and students of color, these changes — together with significant and growing gaps in postsecondary attainment — are dramatically widening the opportunity gap. We conclude Report 1 with four key takeaways for next generation educators. Report 2 examines the labor market and the 5 Roadblocks to Bootstrapping a Career. Report 3 outlines trends in postsecondary education and the 5 Decisions in Navigating the Work/Learn Landscape and Report 4 studies the importance of social support and relationships and the 5 Essentials in Building Social Capital. Finally, Report 5 outlines key adolescent developmental tasks in Preparing Apprentice- Adults for Life after High School. Together, these reports summarize our research on the first of the MyWays Through-line questions: Why the urgency to change, and what are the real-world conditions that our students will need to address? The resulting profile of the world today, together with other student-success research, drove the development of the MyWays Student Success Framework and its 20 competencies. Our goal was to meet MyWays Student Success Series: What Learners Need to Thrive in a World of Change 1 Report 1 | Opportunity, Work, and the Wayfinding Decade two critical societal needs: 1) the need to rekindle upward economic mobility in the face of troubling economic pressures, and 2) the need to address the developmental and cultural challenges of transitioning from childhood to adulthood in an era of unprecedented change.2 The resulting competency framework is described in Part B, “Broader, Deeper Competencies for Student Success,” a second group of reports that includes an overview of the MyWays Student Success Framework (Report 6) and reports on each of the four MyWays domains (Reports 7–10). Finally, Part C, “Redesigning the Learning Experience for the MyWays Competencies” explores work being done across the country to reimagine and reinvent the learning design (Report 11) and assessment design (Report 12) required to bring broader, deeper competencies into educational practice. With enormous stakes for youth and society, the future of “equal opportunity” may largely be determined by the architects of next generation learning systems and how innovative those systems are in helping young people develop the broader, deeper life competencies we describe. Equal opportunity: Can we rebuild it? “The road to wealth, to honor, to usefulness, and happiness, is open to all, and all who will, may enter upon it with the almost certain prospect of success.”3 —McGuffey’s Reader, 1843 America’s first national “textbook” For most of the past century, America’s social mobility was the envy of the world. Bountiful natural resources, technological inventiveness, free public education, and the highest level of high school attainment in the world produced a rising tide: a growing economy, a rising quality of life for most Americans, and unparalleled opportunities for hard-working families and immigrants to prosper well beyond their circumstances.4 As Robert Putnam notes in his extraordinary book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, upward mobility during the 20th century galvanized one of our most universally held American values: About 95 percent of us endorse the principle that “everyone in America should have equal opportunity to get ahead,” a broad consensus that has hardly wavered since opinion surveys began more than a half century ago.5 Or, as former Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke states: A bedrock American principle is the idea that all individuals should have the opportunity to succeed on the basis of their own effort, skill, and ingenuity.6 The sad truth is that the path to prosperity — or even a basic, stable existence — is increasingly out of reach for many American families and youth. Following an inflection point that occurred around 1970, MyWays Student Success Series: What Learners Need to Thrive in a World of Change 2 Report 1 | Opportunity, Work, and the Wayfinding Decade mobility for low- and middle-income Americans has deteriorated — a trend that led social activist Van Jones to caution: “We should not be lying when we tell our children, ‘You can make it if you try.’”7 Today’s labor market dynamics and the roadblocks currently confronting under-30s have their roots in structural changes that began more than 50 years ago. Indeed, the 1970s connect two decidedly different half-centuries — a contrast noted by economic historians Claudia Golden and Lawrence Katz and many others.8 Focusing on children’s life chances, for example, Greg Duncan and Richard Murnane summarize that shift as follows: Americans want to believe that ours is a land of opportunity,

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