The problem with American secondary education is not that students haven’t learned the “right skills,” as the Betsy DeVoses of the world would have you believe.
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High school is broken in America. Its buildings and classes are old and stodgy. As an institution, it’s unchanging, built to crank out factory workers and thus unsuited for our modern, high-tech era.
That’s the convenient fiction repeated by business-minded politicians and philanthropists for some time now. Consider what the US secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, told students in Wyoming last year: “For far too many kids,” DeVos said, “this year’s first day back to school looks and feels a lot like last year’s first day back to school. And the year before that. And the generation before that. And the generation before that.” Later, while visiting a charter school in Florida, DeVos again said as much: “Far too many schools have been stuck in a mode that is basically approaching things that have been done very similarly to 100 years ago, and the world today is much different.”
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