A one-two punch in the past few weeks for the under-thirty crowd.
First, an August survey by Intelligent.com found that employers are really not excited about Gen Z. 75% of the companies surveyed found their new Gen Z hires unsatisfactory. A stunning 6 in 10 had fired a recent college grad they had just hired.
What’s the problem? Lack of motivation, lack of professionalism, poor organizational skills and poor communications skills top the list. Or as Huy Nguyen, Intelligent’s Chief Education and Career Development Advisor put it:
Many recent college graduates may struggle with entering the workforce for the first time as it can be a huge contrast from what they are used to throughout their education journey. They are often unprepared for a less structured environment, workplace cultural dynamics, and the expectation of autonomous work. Although they may have some theoretical knowledge from college, they often lack the practical, real-world experience and soft skills required to succeed in the work environment.
Meanwhile, a piece by Rose Horowitch at The Atlantic has been zipping around the interwebs sounding the alarm— students are arriving at college never having read an entire book. This comes as zero surprise to K-12 teachers, who have been ringing that bell for years.
There could be any number of explanations, but it is hard not to notice that Gen Z is the first to grow up entirely educated under the waves of modern education reform—No Child Left Behind, Common Core, Race to the Top, and the Big Standardized Test. These are the students who came up through schools with an education that was centered around test scores which were repeatedly used as a measure of student achievement and school effectiveness.
By 2011, research was already showing that high stakes testing was narrowing the curriculum. From recess to science class, if it wasn’t on the Big Standardized Test, it was not a priority.
Reading instruction was focused on skills rather than content (an approach widely criticized as ineffective), and in the classroom that meant that teachers were pushed to drop complete books (too long and time consuming) in favor of workbooks with short excerpts followed by handfuls of multiple choice questions (better preparation for the format of the Big Standardized Test).
The very format of these tests (and the practice for them) fosters the notion that for every question, there is one right answer, and the student’s task is to figure out what the test writers believe that answer is. Independent exploration and individual ideas are not part of the program. Open-ended discussion gave way to highly structured drill and practice. Texts are not to be long or involved or require days to chew on, but short enough to spit out answers in seconds.
It would be no surprise that students had less chance to develop autonomy and independence than earlier generations.
The big irony here is that the Common Core State Standards, which typified and codified this approach, and whose effectiveness tests like the PARCC and SBA were meant to measure, promised to make students college and career ready. In fact, once “common core” became a politically toxic term, “college and career ready” became the preferred descriptors of this skills-based, test-centered approach.
The tide in the last two decades has been toward treating students as widgets to be engineered to produce better math and reading scores. Teachers have exhausted themselves swimming against this tide (though younger teachers have also come up through this new version of education).
We can point to other possible culprits, from the rise of cell phones and social media to the pandemic to the publication of sensational articles that unfairly characterize an entire generation. Even so, policy leaders, politicians, and technocrats promised that if we listened to them, the new generation would be more college and career ready than any before it. That promise does not seem to have materialized.