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It’s been a one-two punch for the under-30 crowd in recent weeks.
First, an August survey by Intelligent.com found that employers aren’t too excited about Gen Z. 75% of companies surveyed said they are not satisfied with new Gen Z hires. A whopping 6 out of 10 fired new hires.
What’s the problem? Lack of motivation, lack of professionalism, poor organizational skills, and poor communication skills are high on the list. Or as Huy Nguyen, Intelligent’s lead education and career development advisor, puts it:
Many recent college graduates may have difficulty finding their first job. This is because it can be very different from what you are used to in your previous educational curriculum. They are often unprepared for unstructured environments, workplace cultural dynamics, and expectations for autonomous work. While they may have theoretical knowledge learned at university, they often lack the practical real-world experience and soft skills needed to succeed in a work environment.
Meanwhile, an article by The Atlantic’s Rose Horowicz is making the rounds on the interwebs, warning that more and more students are entering college without reading a single book. This comes as no surprise to K-12 teachers who have been ringing that bell for years.
There are many explanations, but Gen Z is the first generation to grow up fully educated under the current wave of educational reforms: No Left Behind, Common Core, Race to the Top, and Big. It’s hard not to notice. Standardized tests. These are students who grew up in schools that centered their education around test scores, which were repeatedly used as a measure of student performance and school effectiveness.
By 2011, studies were already showing that high-stakes testing was narrowing the curriculum. From recess to science class, if you didn’t participate in the big standardized test, it wasn’t a priority.
Reading instruction has focused more on skills than content (an approach widely criticized as ineffective), and in classrooms, teachers have moved away from full books (which are too long and time-consuming) to short books. I was forced to endorse the excerpts and the several workbooks that followed. Multiple-choice questions (better preparation for the format of the Great Standardized Test).
The format of these tests (and their practice) itself supports the concept that every question has one correct answer, and that the student’s task is to understand how the test creator believes that answer. promote. Independent inquiry or personal ideas are not part of the program. Open-ended discussions have been replaced by highly structured training and practice. The text shouldn’t be long, complex, or take days to understand, but should be short enough to spit out an answer in seconds.
It is no surprise that students have had fewer opportunities to develop autonomy and independence than previous generations.
The great irony here is that the Common Core State Standards, which epitomize and codify this approach and which validity tests like PARCC and SBA are meant to measure, promise to prepare students for college and careers. That’s what I was doing. In fact, as “Common Core” became a politically toxic term, “college and career ready” became the preferred term to describe this skills-based, test-centric approach. It has become.
The trend over the past two decades has been toward treating students as parts to be manipulated to produce better math and reading scores. Teachers are exhausted swimming against this current (though younger teachers are also emerging through this new version of education).
Other possible causes can be pointed to, from the rise of cell phones and social media to pandemics to the publication of sensational articles that unfairly characterize entire generations. Still, policy leaders, politicians, and technocrats believe that if we listen to them, a new generation will be better prepared for college and careers than previous generations. I promised to try. That promise doesn’t seem to have materialized.
