Carnegie Corporation of New York: Meeting the Challenges of the 21st Century

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National Program

In the New Directions report of 1999, we highlighted the fact that undergirding all our national grantmaking was the seminal idea that education and the strength of our democracy are inextricably linked. An example of how we will continue to actualize this idea in our grantmaking is that issues we have previously focused on in discrete program areas—including immigrant integration, advancing urban public education, teacher education, higher education and literacy—will now be fully incorporated into National Program work. We believe that integrating our programs will help the Corporation to address the challenges of our knowledge-based economy, in which closing the gap between “the haves” and the “have nots” is becoming more and more dependent on the ability of citizens to access education through a high-quality system of schools all the way from kindergarten to university.

While earning a college diploma has a substantially greater economic value relative to high school completion than ever before, as a recent article in the Financial Times points out, “Earnings of the average U.S. worker with an undergraduate degree have not kept up with gains in productivity in recent decades.” The situation is grimmer for those who only finish high school, or drop out before earning a degree. Many economists and social critics worry about the fact that while corporate profits are up and salaries among professionals and at the higher rungs of the U.S. economy are soaring—at the same time that social inequality is widening—the benefits of the nation’s economic health are not being distributed with anything nearing equanimity to the great majority of Americans. In order to continue to be competitive on a global scale our nation needs all its citizens to be highly educated, intellectually agile, and trained in the technological skills required to meet the challenges of twenty-first century jobs.

American society needs both our public schools and institutions of higher learning to develop in students not only high levels of skills but also critical thinking capacities and the attitudes, values, behavior, understanding, judgment and mature decision-making needed to act responsibly in our knowledge-based economy, particularly with respect to individual and social ethics and the exercise of citizenship. After all, the value of an education lies in its ability to enhance men’s and women’s powers of rational analysis, intellectual precision and independent judgment, and in particular to encourage a mental adaptability, a characteristic which men and women sorely need, especially now, in an era of rapid change.

It is clear, however, that it is not enough to concentrate only on the economic and competitive aspects of our national life. In our pluralistic society, it is equally important to strengthen the concept of citizenship and of the centrality of our democratic values for both native-born Americans and newcomers—adults and young people alike. Today, there are 18 million students enrolled in our universities; approximately 50 million youngsters attend our public schools and it is critical that all of them engage with our democracy and our democratic institutions. That is why the Corporation, in emphasizing grantmaking to strengthen American education, is incorporating into its work the understanding that we must reinvigorate and, as necessary, reawaken in all citizens—including newcomers—a deep appreciation for the institutions, traditions, culture, and historical legacy that are the essence of America and hence, of our society. The Bill of Rights, the Constitution, our courts, our universities, our electoral system: these are not abstractions serving as the backdrop to economic success. We cannot afford to become complacent about our commitment, as a society, to the principles and institutions that have provided freedom, political equality, and educational and economic opportunity to all Americans over the course of more than two centuries.

It is for these reasons that the Corporation’s National Program is focusing on contributing to a robust American democracy fueled by increased educational opportunity, improved institutions of learning and successful integration of immigrants and other disenfranchised groups. Working towards these goals takes on added importance today because there is little doubt that America has entered a period of rapid and dislocating social change. Global forces challenge the capacity of our educational systems to prepare youth for economic self-sufficiency and to prepare sufficient numbers of young people with the kind of high levels of knowledge and skills to maintain the United States as a world economic power. The United States finds itself in this first decade of the 21st century in an altered position in the world—facing terrorism from abroad and criticism of our country by many for failure to live up to the standards of openness and the democratic ideals of our national heritage. At home, growing economic inequality is fed by labor market shifts that place educational attainment as the key driver of individual success in far more dramatic ways than in past decades. And at this time, when academic achievement is the currency of mobility, racial and ethnic achievement gaps persist, most dramatically seen in the low and static high school graduation rates of African American and Latino students, especially males.

The United States is also experiencing increasing demographic change fueled by complex immigration patterns. The Census Bureau estimates that net international migration will account for more than half of our nation’s population growth by 2015. While California, New York and Texas have the largest numbers of foreign born, the South is the region most rapidly changing through immigration. Immigration provides dynamism to our economy and to American culture. Immigrants infuse our society with energy, talent and renewed belief in the American dream. Yet, large scale immigration also forces American society to engage with the diversity of the world in language, culture and religion. This growing diversity demands strategies for civil and social integration for a successful pluralistic society to develop and thrive. The Corporation aims to contribute to efforts to reengage Americans with our democracy and with democratic institutions and to strengthen our common ground.

To sustain and nourish our democracy, we need to educate those who are already here and to integrate those who arrive on our shores. Thus, America faces the critical challenge of transforming public education to prepare all students of all backgrounds for economic self-sufficiency, for living in a complex society and for participation in a pluralistic democracy. This requires overcoming the persistent racial and socioeconomic inequities in our public education systems, accelerating successful school reforms of the past two decades and creating not only isolated examples of good public schools, but rather creating whole systems of good schools. These schools must prepare their students—particularly low-income, historically underserved groups and immigrants—to graduate with the academic preparation required to succeed in higher education and with the knowledge, motivation, and opportunity to participate fully as citizens of a democracy.

Higher education too must change to meet the dual agenda of maintaining excellence and promoting equity in a changing global economy. American higher education remains the best in the world. Our colleges and universities provide both the liberal arts and technical education that have trained generations of leaders whose contributions to our nation are immeasurable. Many have been talented individuals from all across the globe who came here to study, and who then stayed, became citizens and contributed to our national life and to the progress of democracy. Higher education must maintain its excellence, especially with growing competition for the brightest students from so many outstanding universities coming to the fore in Europe and elsewhere. Higher education must generate broad leadership for a diverse and complex society, preparing more students who are born here and lack opportunity, or who are born abroad, for leadership roles.

Carnegie Corporation has long valued the university as a powerful engine of intellectual, cultural and scientific innovation and growth. Today our society needs this engine to prepare students to think conceptually and perform competently in business and the professions, especially teaching, and to prepare a technically skilled workforce capable of continuous learning. Moreover, we must draw many more of our young people into higher education so that even those who, in a different era, might have been prepared to be “skilled laborers” complete postsecondary education. Much traditionally “blue-collar” work has become more technical, requiring substantially higher levels of literacy and mathematics for problem-solving than ever before. Young people drawn to these careers will not be able to benefit from, or contribute to, our growing knowledge-based economy if they do not receive higher education. It is also, simply put, a waste of human potential not to educate America’s students to best of our ability—and theirs.

While education is the key opportunity conduit in America, it is also the foundation of our democratic society. It is through education that we are enlightened, that we begin to understand the nature of American polity, a pluralistic and multicultural society in which the unique can participate in the universal without dissolving in it. Indeed, education is the engine of American democracy and its unfinished and continuous agenda, providing to those who have not been able to partake in the socioeconomic and cultural benefits of American society a means to open doors that otherwise would be closed to them.

The Corporation views the expansion of educational opportunity as linked inextricably to the revitalization of democracy in times of rapid demographic change and increasing strain on economic mobility. This is foundational, yet not sufficient. Renewing our democratic institutions also demands direct attention to issues of civic participation and integration. In order for the Corporation to contribute to efforts across the country to address these national challenges, we have identified two major directions for our National Program grantmaking—Creating Pathways to Educational and Economic Opportunity and Creating Pathways to Citizenship, Civil Participation and Civic Integration in a Pluralistic Society—as described below.

Creating Pathways to Educational and Economic Opportunity

The Corporation’s focus in this area is to help generate systemic change across the K-12 continuum as well as at the college and university level that is aimed at enabling many more students, including immigrants and historically underserved populations, to achieve academic success and to perform at the high levels of creative, scientific and technical knowledge and skill needed to compete in a global economy. Our high school reform work has been a critical strategy aimed at achieving this goal and has provided important lessons about the kinds of schools that support academic success for all students: they are personal-scale environments, where students are known well by their teachers; they are schools created by educators using a common set of design principles identified through research; their work is bolstered by leadership recruitment and support as well as teacher recruitment and professional development; and they are “partnership schools”—blended designs staffed by both public school principals and teachers working in collaboration with staff from intermediary, community and/or higher education institutions.

While these are the building blocks of an excellent education, there are others that must also be included in laying the foundation for sustainable change in U.S. public education, such as strengthening accountability. For example, few would argue that data-driven decision making is the hallmark of accountability. Yet developing effective and reliable systems of collecting and analyzing data in support of advances in teaching and learning is a daunting challenge for public schools, where data has been organized not for purposes of informing practice but for reporting to regulatory bodies. Improving the usefulness of national, state, district and school data; enhancing the capacity of states, districts and schools to track student achievement and outcomes; and increasing the ability of schools to access and employ data to improve instruction, are among the kinds of efforts that would add to our nation’s ability to both assess and enrich the educational experience of generations of students.

It is also clear that strengthening human capital is critical to creating good schools and excellent colleges and universities. Developing and sustaining a talent pool that produces high-quality teachers, principals and other educational leaders is especially important—though often very challenging—in a time when the institutions that must educate and train these individuals are themselves under pressure to meet the new and daunting demands of a society in flux. Yet, all the successful reforms in public education and university practices that the Corporation has supported or observed have included robust and focused strategies for recruiting, preparing and retaining high-quality leaders and teachers. Among other strategies, central to success in this area is developing greater knowledge about the elements of successful leadership and about promising approaches to strengthening leadership and teaching through recruitment, training, mentoring and support, including induction programs.

An additional concern is the need for all students who will be competing in a knowledge-based and globalized economy to graduate from high school with the literacy and math skills that will enable them, at least, to attend community college without requiring remedial courses. This is currently the minimum standard for entry into apprenticeships in such vocational areas as the building trades, technology and health care. More students—many more than schools are currently producing, especially among economically disadvantaged minority and immigrant populations—must also be prepared to substantially exceed these standards and earn a bachelor’s degree. High schools need to do more to build a coherent set of standards and skills that will provide a pathway to success in college, as well as help students develop the creative and intellectual thinking skills needed for success at the higher levels of education.

In turn, colleges and universities must identify and integrate into the curriculum the knowledge, skills, broad competencies, and attributes that mark a successful graduate. This is a particularly important goal for the public institutions that educate seventy percent of the nation’s students and prepare the large majority of its new teachers. The quality of teaching and learning in higher education must receive attention if we are to maintain a vibrant democracy and compete economically as a nation.

In that connection, mathematics is a critical gateway subject and core competency for college preparation and technical careers at all levels. The sciences provide both a method of approach to problem solving and the basic knowledge needed in our complex society for carrying out civic responsibilities such as serving on a jury (which might, for example, involve understanding the relevance of DNA test outcomes) or voting on social issues such as stem cell research. Developing coherent and demanding math standards, improving the teaching of math and science at the secondary level and, equally important, finding ways to address the shortage in math and science teachers at the middle and high school levels are all areas of Corporation concern.

A high level of literacy based on being able to understand the knowledge and information conveyed through written text is the foundational skill for all the competencies noted above. From the middle grades on through college preparation, standards and practices related to literacy and comprehension require both attention and improvement both for students who are native English speakers as well as for the increasing number of English-language learners in our nation’s classrooms.

Creating Pathways to Citizenship, Civil Participation and Civic Integration in a Pluralistic Society

In Democracy in America, written in 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that the United States was that rarest of places, a nation that actually belonged to its citizens. Today, as America’s citizenry becomes increasingly diverse, it is important to ensure that all Americans continue to be able to participate in our national life and, in turn, share the responsibility for the success of our democracy.

One key to maintaining the strength and vibrancy of the American democracy is to reimagine, strengthen and incorporate civic education as a core responsibility across the K-12 grades and in higher education, as well. Too often, civic education has been treated as a narrow subject-specific area and has little traction in the current standards and accountability environment. Rather, promising developments in civic education are found where it has been integrated along with other subjects as part of a broad college preparation curriculum. Young people need a deep understanding of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the importance of a balanced justice system and the many other institutions, rights, responsibilities, privileges and principles that are the framework for the life of our nation. Young Americans are tomorrow’s leaders but without a rich civic education they will be ill-equipped to guide our nation through the challenges ahead.

Understanding the deeper meaning of being an American is also an important element of immigrant integration, which has been a focus of the Corporation’s work for some time. Underpinning our efforts in this are is the need to answer these questions: How do we, as a nation, help the approximately twelve million immigrants who are here legally but have not yet become citizens and the twelve million who are in the U.S. today but without legal status, to come out of the shadows and integrate into the communities in which they live? How do we help them become part of our national fabric?

Together with increased educational opportunities, an emphasis on immigrant civic integration can do much to prevent fragmentation of our population and the exclusion of millions—conditions that may affect even those immigrants who attain citizenship but remain “guest workers” who never fully participate in, benefit from, or contribute to the American commonweal.

Grantmaking activities across all the areas of our National Program will include research, policy analysis and advocacy, communications, support for promising innovations, demonstration programs and replications, and support for capacity-building in selected institutions to contribute to achieving the goals of the National Program. The Corporation’s work will be carried out in the context of collaboration with other foundations, when appropriate. One of the Corporation’s great advantages has been our commitment to the idea that who does the work mandated to us by Andrew Carnegie of “advancing and diffusing knowledge and understanding” is less important than making sure critical work actually gets carried out—and carried out successfully. Understanding where other foundations may have greater or different strengths than Carnegie Corporation, or complementary missions, and working with them toward common goals remains a priority for all of us.