E4 Youth: Engagement, Education, Employment & Entrepreneurship for Youth

Throughout my 20 years as an educator, I have often wondered about the state of our education system and our youth. With almost 40% of Texas high school graduates in need of remedial reading, math and/or science in order to attend college, there appears to be a lack of leadership in making youth and their educational success a true priority. This is not to say that there aren’t many examples of innovation and plenty of dedicated people across the country doing amazing work. It only belies the lack of in depth discussion beyond sound bytes needed to deal with one of the most dire issues of our time. 

We are not being honest with ourselves in how we debate the solutions to reforming our educational system. Results matter. Beliefs matter. A good idea is a good idea no matter who first thought of or rediscovered it. These statements may give you pause but I am not here to proselytize. I hope that we can all agree that we want the best for our youth. 

The world is rapidly changing and we are being left behind. The US is currently ranked in the lower half to third of developed countries in the 3 Rs – reading, writing and arithmetic. Is that to say that our students are dumber? I certainly don’t think so. I believe that our students are simply less Engaged in the educational process because they fail to see relevancy in what we are teaching them. The 3 Rs are important, in fact essential to the long term well being of our society. However, the process of how we get students to learn them has to fundamentally change.  

The industrial age model of education. You know, the good old fashion learning by wrote worked pretty well 40 – 50 years ago. After all, the nature of work was very different back then. America was made great by the factory model – standardized parts and standardized tasks that if scaled properly could become extremely profitable. You could support a family with a relatively limited set of repeatable skills. You could expect to work for a company for 10, 20 or 30 years and retire with a gold watch and a pension. Those days are long gone. 

The nature of work has profoundly changed. We are preparing students for jobs that don’t even exist yet. We have to train them to be critical thinkers that can constantly learn new information and skills in order to remain relevant. E4 Youth, that is Engagement, Education, Employment & Entrepreneurship for Youth is an approach that I have coined to address the 3 Rs.

When I taught sixth grade science, about 2/3rds of the students in my classes were 2 to 3 grade levels behind in reading and comprehension. My job as the “science” teacher was to get them to learn concepts and processes such as the scientific method. Now, I could model a process such as mitosis (that’s cell division) and get them to describe it verbally and even draw it out. However, there was often a disconnect when it came to students reading and writing about that very same process. Decoding scientific terms when you don’t even quite have a grasp of basic english is a daunting and frustrating task. So, it becomes virtually impossible to demonstrate critical thinking or mastery on written or multiple choice exams due to the fact that many students simply can’t read them. 

To combat this, many schools have become quite adept at preparing students for standardized test. After all, the basic objectives and questions used to test students don’t really change much from year to year. Standardized test are meant to assess mass groups of students and making significant changes to them is wrought with political and logistical issues. Questions are often recycled every few years and each year, schools receive access to past exam questions. So, schools essentially have all of the questions that students may be asked to answer and if they are savvy, they can develop a good strategy for wrote teaching those specific questions and “improving” standardized test scores. That is test scores that are supposed to measure critical thinking. 

This type of learning is detrimental to students long term growth. They are conditioned to give pre programmed answers and consequently, they find it hard to place what they are “learning” in context. They are so preoccupied with decoding language that there is very little attention paid to critical thinking – that is analysis, application, evaluation and synthesis. Education is something that is being done TO them as opposed to students educating THEMSELVES. Their dreams and aspirations seem very far removed from their educational pursuits and therefore many perform in a very mediocre manner in the classroom. There is very little intrinsic motivation to want to spend the extra effort it will take to get their reading and comprehension skills in order and acquire the math and science knowledge so many of our students are sorely lacking.  

I believe the role of the teacher in the 21st Century has profoundly changed. Rather than thinking of ourselves as teaching SUBJECTS first, I believe to be truly effective, we must think of ourselves as teaching STUDENTS first. Every student is a different person and a good teacher must be able to listen to and observe them in order to truly have an impact. I know this may seem somewhat contradictory. After all, we are evaluated on how well students understand specific content and concepts. A math teacher is still a math teacher, right? Indeed they are.

Ultimately, we do need to make sure that our students understand the content for whatever subject we are helping them learn. It’s just that I believe we can be more effective if we focus on engaging them first. That is finding out what motivates students, empowering them to pursue those interests and therefore making them accountable for educating themselves. I believe that by pursuing the 4 Es of engagement, education, employment and entrepreneurship, we can be more effective at getting students to master the 3Rs. 

This is the process that I have developed with the outreach program Media Xperiments - a supplemental enrichment program open to students from 13 – 20 at no charge. In fact, we are paying teachers and parents up to $1000 stipends to have their students participate in the program.  Teachers and parents help students use media to show mastery of key concepts and select a field of interest (Fields of interest include Media Communications, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics), Entrepreneurship and Music/Visual/Performing Arts. Students are able to attend tours of businesses within those industries, build professionally evaluated portfolios, participate in educational planning sessions and during the summer work directly with professionals to provide goods and/or services to real businesses and non-profits. 

We Engage students by letting them choose their field of interest, then empower them to Educate themselves by using that field of interest and media to show mastery of concepts. We work with them through UT graduate student led summer service learning projects to give them Employment experience and we involve them in a network like minded peers, professionals and business leaders so that they may eventually become Entrepreneurs.

The E4 Youth Summit, tentatively scheduled for the mid to late July 2011, will showcase the accomplishments of these and other students around Central Texas through performances, screenings and panel discussions.  The summit will also feature panel discussions and workshops for those organizations that serve youth, schools, educators, business and political leaders. Our hope is to bring people together to talk about what is working in education and recognize those students that are doing great things. We also hope to foster new and enhanced relationships between educators, schools, non-profits and the business community that will benefit all of us create new models of Engagement, Education, Employment and Entrepreneurship for youth. 

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