Dear Friends and Colleagues,
By 2030, the activities that account for an estimated 30% of working hours could be automated by AI. The labor market implications are staggering. Approximately 12 million U.S. workers may have to find new jobs, and many more roles will be forever altered.
This isn’t the first time we’ve experienced such a seismic transformation of the U.S. economy. At the turn of the last century, agricultural jobs evaporated – falling from one-third of all U.S. jobs to just 8%. In less than a lifetime, one quarter of the labor force left farming. 9.7 million jobs were lost and the vast majority of Americans lacked the skills the “new economy” demanded.
Then, an amazing thing happened. Not only did parents realize that there would not be enough agricultural jobs for their children, they recognized that as the economy shifted, high school would be key to ensuring their children’s prosperity. And citizens in communities across the nation spearheaded an extraordinary response to a very rapidly changing world. As economist Byron Auguste has explained: “when companies advertised jobs in new fields which required a high school degree, communities demanded—and funded—the public high schools needed to provide them.” In relatively short order, high school enrollment across the United States exploded. In 1910, high school enrollment was under 10%. By 1940, it had skyrocketed to over 70%. Free, universal access to secondary education became the hallmark of the American educational system. And before long, America was producing a higher percentage of high school graduates than any other nation in the world.
There is a critical lesson here. At the turn of the century, the high school movement thrived because the aspirations of families were at the forefront of reimagining schooling.
Today, at the dawn of another seismic economic shift, we need to focus anew on the American high school. Not building new schools this time, rather, their transformation. Specifically, we need to design and establish more rigorous, applied, experiential, and effective models of high school education; develop tools and public policy to help scale and sustain the work, and; build and share knowledge about what works, for whom, and under what conditions. In essence, we need a robust, national R&D agenda guided by education and workforce leaders, research collaborators, and methods advisors to transform the American high school.
At Carnegie, we are working with a broad range of exceptional allies, to identify the key levers to accelerate and sustain high school transformation at scale. Our efforts are anchored by the voices and perspectives of those closest to the work. We are guided by parent organizers and advocates, like Learning Heroes; teacher-developers, like the Center for Black Educator Development; state and system leaders, including courageous practitioners and policy makers from across Indiana, Rhode Island, North Carolina, Nevada, Wisconsin, Arizona and Utah; business leaders and innovators from the commercial and social sector, and; higher education leaders like the Carnegie Postsecondary Commission and our partners at the American Council on Education; and partners dedicated to elevating student voice.
It is an enormous privilege to work with such wise partners, intent on shaping the trajectory of high school transformation for the decades ahead.
While our story of educational transformation will be very different from the one that took place a century ago, one thing both must have in common is the voices, perspectives and aspirations of the stakeholders that our schools serve.
In partnership,
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