For the past several years, U.S. private and public schools have placed a growing emphasis on academics, trying to deal with the rapid changes taking place in today’s world and the disturbing fact that the U.S. trails a significant number of other countries in student achievement.
However, academic performance itself relies on other factors that, frankly, have been lacking in many of our schools for decades.
One of those missing factors is leadership training.
The lack of a leadership education component in many of our secondary schools is one reason we are facing a growing disparity in academic performance and educational attainment among students of different races, nationalities and socio-economic backgrounds. It’s a condition educators refer to as the “academic achievement gap.”
There is another gap we face in preparing our youth for success as adults. Harvard educator Dr. Tony Wagner has identified a “global achievement gap” which defines the growing differences between what our country’s best high schools are teaching and what their students will need for college and later as successful global citizens. It also takes into account how our students rank with their global counterparts.
According to a 2012 survey by the Program for International Student Assessment, the U.S. ranked 35th in math among 64 developed countries and 27th in science. There also are 20 other First World countries with higher graduation rates than the U.S.
Wagner lists four attributes as among those that will be needed by tomorrow’s leaders.
â–ª Agility and adaptability: Given the pace set by technology and other factors, our future adults will need to think, to be flexible and change using a new variety of tools and resources to solve new problems. It is most likely that the jobs our young people will be hired for will either change radically or even disappear in short order. Today’s students need to learn how to deal with massive changes.
â–ª Oral and written communications skills: Employers complain that many young people today have difficulty in being clear and concise about the points they are trying to make. While effective communication is a leadership requirement, it also is a needed attribute throughout an organization’s hierarchy.
â–ª Assessment and analysis of information: By the year 1900, knowledge had doubled every century. That time span has shrunk over the decades until today when human knowledge doubles roughly every 13 months. There are credible predictions that the “knowledge doubling curve,” conceived in the early 80s by futurist Buckminster Fuller, will shrink even further in the near future to a matter of days, if not hours. That creates a critical need for tomorrow’s adults to be able to assimilate and process information at levels unknown to today’s generation.
â–ª Collaboration and leadership: Another frequent complaint on the part of today’s employers is that young people don’t have general leadership and collaboration skills to exert influence and are therefore are ill-equipped to take command in situations they will be expected to face.
The good news is there are programs in place to teach young people these attributes. The ones that stand out as meeting the need for leadership education are the Army, Navy and Air Force Junior Reserve Officers Training (JROTC) programs offered in many high schools. While a good number of schools offer JROTC, there’s a need for more schools and greater student participation where programs are already in place.
Unlike their college ROTC counterparts, the high school JROTC programs are not intended portals into military service after graduation. Rather, they focus on teaching high-school age boys and girls to incorporate responsibility, good personal character, self-reliance and personal discipline into their daily lives.
Notice the emphasis on developing personal character. Character development is as important a component in developing leadership skills in our young people as anything they will learn in a classroom.
JROTC students typically have higher grade point averages and graduation rates than their non-JROTC counterparts. On the other hand, their dropout rate is well under 1 percent — significantly under the double-digit dropout rates experienced in other student populations. What is significant here is that the JROTC successes have extended to students of all races, ethnicities, and socio-economic status.
Without these emphases, far too many of our schools will remain powerless to close the gaps that continue to threaten our nation’s role as a world leader.
Bartell, a retired Army major general, is president of the Army and Navy Academy, a college preparatory military school for middle- and high-school boys in Carlsbad.
