A Challenge to the Partnership
for 21st Century Skills
Education is a crucial resource that determines our children’s future and our society’s well-being. As America’s citizenry grows more diverse, we must reach out to include all of our children in the promise of America. As the global economy matures, it requires increasing levels of knowledge and deep understanding of the forces that shape our lives and our future. For these reasons, we must intensify our efforts to improve education. This is the historic challenge facing American education in the twenty-first century.
All students—regardless of race or class—deserve a first-rate liberal arts education, rich in the study of history, science, literature, geography, civics, mathematics, the arts, technology, and foreign languages. At the present time, there is growing pressure on our schools to reduce time spent on these disciplines and subjects to make room for what is now called “21st century skills.”
Skills are important and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) has identified skills that all children need such as critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving. But P21’s approach to teaching those skills marginalizes knowledge and therefore will deny students the liberal education they need. Cognitive science teaches us that skills and knowledge are interdependent and that possessing a base of knowledge is necessary to the acquisition not only of more knowledge, but also of skills. Skills can neither be taught nor applied effectively without prior knowledge of a wide array of subjects.
Education policy and practice should be based on sound research and informed by an understanding of what has worked and what has failed in the past. Attempts to teach skills apart from knowledge have failed repeatedly over the last century because they do not work. Unless it is fundamentally revised, the program put forth by P21 also will fail. In the meantime, it is undermining the quality of education in America.
We, undersigned, call on P21 and other advocates of 21st century skills to reshape their effort by putting knowledge and skills together at the core of their work.
- Mark Bauerlein, Department of English, Emory University
- Kevin P. Chavous, co-founder, Democrats for Education Reform
- Antonia Cortese, Secretary-Treasurer, American Federation of Teachers
- Williamson M. Evers, Research Fellow, Hoover Institution
- Chester E. Finn, Jr., President, Thomas B. Fordham Institute
- William Fitzhugh, founder, The Concord Review
- Charles L. Glenn, Professor of Educational Leadership and Development, Boston University
- Barry Garelick, co-founder, U.S. Coalition for World Class Math
- Lorraine Griffith, teacher, West Buncombe Elementary School, Asheville, NC
- Jason Griffiths, Headmaster, The Brooklyn Latin School
- Joy Hakim, author of A History of US and The Story of Science
- E.D. Hirsch, Jr., founder, Core Knowledge Foundation
- Bill Honig, former Superintendent of Public Instruction, State of California
- Kathleen A. Madigan, founder and former president, American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence
- Jack McCarthy, Managing Director, AppleTree Institute for Education Innovation
- Lynne Munson, President, Common Core
- Wesley Null, associate professor, School of Education and the Honors College, Baylor University
- Paul E. Peterson, Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and Director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance, Harvard University
- Diane Ravitch, Research Professor of Education, New York University
- Roberta R. Schaefer, President and CEO, The Worcester Research Bureau
- John Richard Schrock, Professor of Biology and Director of Biology Education, Emporia State University
- Diana Senechal, English teacher, PS108K, New York City
- Michael Sentance, Former Secretary of Education, Commonwealth of Massachusetts
- John Silber, President Emeritus, Boston University
- Jim Stergios, Executive Director, Pioneer Institute
- Sheldon M. Stern, Historian, John F. Kennedy Library (retired)
- Sol Stern, Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute
- Sandra Stotsky, Department of Education Reform, University of Arkansas
- Whitney Tilson, co-founder, Democrats for Education Reform
- Randi Weingarten, President, American Federation of Teachers
- Daniel Willingham, Professor of Psychology, University of Virginia
- Sam Wineburg, Professor of Education and of History (by courtesy), Stanford University
- Peter Wood, President, National Association of Scholars
Blog
News
May 7 • Common Core receives glowing reviews for professional development offered in Beaufort County, NC. Read the full story in the Washington Daily News.
April 25 • Common Core’s Lynne Munson comments on the pressures of high stakes testing and the effect it can have on student learning in Roberta Munoz’s article “Make it of Break it: High Stakes Testing Pros and Cons” on Education.com
April 4 • Common Core has announced that the New York State Department of Education has awarded it two contracts to develop
Pre-Kindergarten-5th grade mathematics curriculum aligned to NY State’s Common Core Learning Standards (CCLS). News release.
April 3 • Common Core Creating Math Maps for New York State. News release.
March 27 • Common Core has announced that it is developing a series of CCSS-aligned K-8 curriculum maps in history and geography. News release.
March 21 • Check out Education Week’s coverage of Common Core’s “Truant From Schools: History, Science, and Art” event!
March 15 • Common Core releases data showing curriculum narrowing affecting all students.
March 9 • Common Core celebrates Virginia’s decision to abandon SB185, a bill that would have eliminated state mandated science and social studies testing for third graders. You can read more about this issue, and Common Core’s advocacy work, in this recent blog entry.
December 8 • Check out Education Week’s coverage of Common Core’s recent national survey of school teachers.
November 14 • Read Lynne Munson’s response to the latest NAEP results. Joanne Jacobs’s “Linking and Thinking on Education” and the Core Knowledge blog also highlighted her piece.
September 15 • A new Salon.com article highlights Common Core’s upcoming study on curriculum narrowing and quotes Executive Director Lynne Munson: “We were surprised at the extremity of the narrowing indicated by the teachers who took our survey.”
July 22 • Common Core releases new, second edition of its popular Curriculum Maps in English Language Arts. News Release
May 6 • Common Core's Curriculum Maps for ELA have exceeded 2 million page views.
February 24 • Common Core's Lynne Munson writes on "What Students Really Need to Learn" in the lastest issue of ASCD's Educational Leadership.
January 5 • Common Core’s Curriculum Maps for English Language Arts have exceeded one million views. See the press release here.
December 8 • Last week, the North Carolina State Board of Education approved revised social studies standards. Thanks to input from Common Core, among others, North Carolina's students will now take four social studies courses, including two US history courses covering the European exploration of the New World through contemporary time.
October 18 • Common Core’s Lynne Munson participates in a New America Foundation panel of leaders working to bring technology into classrooms in innovative ways. Watch a video of the discussion here.
October 11 • Common Core’s Lynne Munson gives Ed Week her perspective on 21st-century learning: "Twenty-first-century technology should be seen as an opportunity to acquire more knowledge, not an excuse to know less."
October 4 • California Governor vetoes curriculum narrowing bill. Opposed by Common Core, the bill would have effectively eliminated the state’s arts and foreign language high school graduation requirement. More...
Spring 2010 • The new issue of the AFT’s American Educator shines a light on 21st century skills, featuring contributions from Common Core’s Lynne Munson and Laura Bornfreund, eduwonk Andy Rotherham and UVA’s Dan Willingham, Diana Senechal, and Diane Ravitch.
December 4 • EdWeek profile questions motives of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. 5
November 10 • You can now read Diane Ravitch’s op/ed on 21st century skills in the Boston Globe, Providence Journal, Metro West Daily News, Lowell Sun, and Quincy Patriot Ledger.
November 3 • Education Week highlights Common Core’s concerns about the appointment of a P21 leader to a key Dept. of Education post.
November • Lynne Munson and Richard Kessler explain why arts education is vital in the November 2009 issue of Parenting magazine.
October 10 • Diane Ravitch’s recent op/ed on 21st century skills has been reprinted in the Providence Journal.
September 16 • A group of prominent scholars, teachers, education reform advocates, and union leaders issued a statement today expressing concern about the program put forth by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) and calling for its revision. Press Advisory (pdf)
September 15 • Common Core’s Diane Ravitch shows how dated the idea of “21st century skills” really is in the Boston Globe
July 13 • Common Core’s Lynne Munson raises concerns about national standards at convention of the American Federation of Teachers. (PDF document)
July 9 • In USAToday Common Core’s Lynne Munson argues that a comprehensive education is more likely than a STEM education to produce new scientists.
July 2 • A USAToday editorial cites and links to Common Core’s “Still at Risk” study which showed how little our 17-year-olds know about history and literature.
June 2 • Common Core releases Why We’re Behind: What Top Nations Teach Their Students But We Don’t, a report showing that the nations that consistently outrank us on international comparison tests provide their students with a fulsome education in the liberal arts and sciences. Why is this news? Because the U.S. is moving further and further away from this model. Read brief excerpts from the documents featured in the report here.
