Will We?
It seems likely that states and policymakers, seeking to avoid controversy, will make the standards so fuzzy that they incentivize only mediocrity. Across Portrait of a Graduate frameworks, vague terms such as “critical thinking,” “lifelong learning,” and “problem solving” pop up like dandelions—superficially appealing but little more than invasive weeds.
If leveraged appropriately, even frameworks grounded in such banalities could bolster rigorous instruction. Rightly understood, the academic competencies outlined in the standards depend on traditional instruction and curriculum. But it seems improbable that the frameworks will in fact spark a return to rigor.
Most readers of Education Next are likely familiar with the shortcomings of a concept such as “critical thinking.” There is probably no such thing as generalizable, content-agnostic critical thinking skills. Cognitive scientist John Sweller has noted the “paucity of data from randomized, controlled trials” finding that interventions intended to improve critical thinking do anything of the sort. Sweller argues that “the only way in which critical and creative thinking can be enhanced is by increasing the domain-specific knowledge base to which the innate and random generate-and-test engine of creativity is applied. Accordingly, the function of education is to enhance a knowledge base. With an extensive knowledge base, critical and creative thinking will follow naturally and automatically.”
Sweller allows that “just because we have not found any teachable, general, critical and creative thinking skills does not mean that they do not exist.” But he cautions that “until a theoretical framework with empirical supporting results appears, advocating for the introduction of critical and creative thinking skills in educational contexts is premature.”
In other words, our ability to think critically about a topic depends not on trainable skills but rather on our breadth and depth of knowledge. A surgeon can think critically about an upcoming surgery because he knows much about biology, human anatomy, and surgical procedures. A historian can analyze primary source documents because she knows much about the historical period from which they come.
Creativity works similarly. Master artists and musicians know vast amounts about their field and techniques. Moreover, they’ve put in hours upon hours of rote practice to learn their craft. An expert pianist would flounder on a flute, and even a classical master might struggle with jazz. Precise technical training and domain-specific knowledge make them masters of a specific area within the broad field of music. As with critical thinking, no amount of loose association, mind mapping, or other so-called creativity-enhancing exercise can achieve its aim.
This same dependence on knowledge applies across the most common competencies listed in the Digital Promise model framework. Thus, in an ideal world, the Portrait of a Graduate frameworks would allow for a renewed emphasis on traditional academics to foster the development of knowledge and skills. But given the already widespread move away from traditional academic instruction, that seems highly unlikely.
Instead, what is much more likely is that these frameworks will become yet another justification to do everything except academics. With poorly defined, unmeasurable goals, teachers can justify most any activity as a means of developing the preferred competencies.
How to foster collaboration and teamwork? Have students build towers with marshmallows and toothpicks. How to foster lifelong readers? Give them comics and have them watch movies based on pop fiction. Digital Promise notes that spaghetti tower challenges and board games are means through which students can demonstrate that they’ve met expectations. When the nonprofit research agency WestEd reviewed 54 graduate profiles across California, “content knowledge” appeared in only 5 percent of them. Not an encouraging proportion.
A journalistic report for The 74 tells of how these portraits are “spurring innovation” in schools. The supposed innovation cited as an example is a presentation on an endangered species, a project I myself did in my student days.
Much of this happy-clappy pedagogy already goes on in schools. Peter Liljedhal’s popular book Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics deemphasizes the need to memorize math facts and standard algorithms and encourages teachers to perform card tricks to get students thinking critically. The Jo Boaler–influenced California Math Framework recommends that teachers show up to school in scuba gear and ask kids to discover how to do math for themselves. Lucy Calkins famously said that “every minute you spend teaching phonics (or preparing phonics materials to use in your lessons) is less time spent teaching other things.” As more schools adopt Portraits of a Graduate the affective elements would provide all the justification such education gurus would need to continue these dubious practices.
And as a natural corollary, the portraits also provide a justification for schools when they fail at teaching fundamental academics. During the pandemic, the teachers union leader in Los Angeles, Cecily Myart-Cruz, said, “It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience.” Perhaps that was an understandable sentiment during the pandemic, but it’s easy to see how this line of reasoning could become a universal explanation for failure. Students may not have learned about the Civil War or mastered basic text decoding, but they learned collaboration and developed well-being.
Replacing rigorous academic instruction with spaghetti towers incurs an opportunity cost. But that cost is only lost academic instruction. When these frameworks direct educational institutions toward tinkering around with students’ psyches, schools risk even more serious consequences.
