Harvard Education Specialist Tony Wagner has a new book out called “Creating Innovators:  The Making of Innovators Who Will Change the World”.  I have ordered it but not yet read it.  In referencing the book NY Times Columnist Thomas Friedman talks about how K-12 and colleges are not teaching the relevant skills that employers in the marketplace are demanding. 

If the goal of our K-12 education system is to graduate students college ready, if those same receiving colleges are not graduating students marketplace ready, are leading students down a path of non-employment, including our performing, achieving, graduating students?

Friedman states that given the pace of change today, even students who find a job will to reinvent, re-engineer and reimagine that job much more often than their parents. 

The half-life of your first job is pretty short.  Second, third and fourth jobs the same.  What matters more than basic knowledge in a particular field or discipline is the ability to continuously learn new knowledge and skills beyond the basics.  That will involve risk taking.  That will mean becoming comfortable with taking risks.  That in turn means being innovation ready. 

What I find both interesting and remarkable about this is that the best thinking, leading edge reformers in public education that have been in this fight for most of the past decade have long held “college ready” as the gold standard for any high performing or aspiring school to attain.  It would seem that the innovators are innovating on the innovators themselves.  Even our best are not good enough.  Not yet.  No one, not even the most established schools or heralded school reform models know what it is like to graduate students that are innovation ready. 

Much work still to do.