Market-based education reform was the silver bullet.

However, the market is a tricky thing when applied to an institution where people are the inputs and outputs. And it wasn’t long before market-based reform started to crash and burn.

Even after his market-based policies weren’t working out, President George W. Bush touted No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2011 speech to the US Chamber’s Small Business Summit. “You measure everyday, that’s why you’re successful business people,” he said. “I mean, you know what your business is doing. I believe we should extend that same principle to our public schools.”

Watch the 56 sec video clip here

And he did apply that principle to US public schools. However, by the time Bush gave that speech to the US Chamber, NCLB had been failing for 10 years. But it wasn’t from lack of high standards.  In fact, Bush set a very high standard for his own education reform, when he outlined his NCLB policy goals. One goal in particular, was the most audacious objective ever set in education. He proclaimed that because of NCLB, 100% of US students would read on grade level by the school year 2013-2014. Not only was that goal unrealistic, but it was statistically impossible. He and his reformers moved forward anyway. 

The 2013-2014 school year has come and gone, and in many states over 50% of students are failing the reading portion of their high-stakes assessments every year. Some studies claim the achievement gap is wider than ever before. 

That didn’t stop more market-based reforms. President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top (RTTT)  was the same philosophy, different jingle. His ambition was that competition and reward – two aspects of the market economy – would motive teachers and students to do better on tests. Instead, President Obama’s RTTT only exacerbated an already failing NCLB 

Politicians go to business summits to talk education policy. However, educators do actual research and access academic journals to study the problems with market-based school reform. Here are just a few reform failures featured in academic, researched-based publications over the last couple of years.

1. Goodhart’s Law

Good economists will the remember Goodhart’s Law when making policy. Charles Goodhart was a famous economist, who warned, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” And in an article in the Peabody Journal of Education, O’Neill (2013) refers to this while he examined market-based education reform. The measure (the test) has become the target, and educators chase that target. The results are disastrous for the learning environment. Teachers, who are understandably worried about accountability measures, teach to the test. In turn, schools become test prep factories rather than institutions for learning. Students become focused on the target as well. Students become test taking drones, while critical thinking is compromised. Goodhart’s Law is in full effect in many of today’s schools.

2. Education Industrial Complex 

People have been trying to figure out a way to make money off education for many years. Market-based reform has made that possible. In an article for the Anthropology Education Journal, Yang (2010) calls education reform an industrial complex and targets anyone who profits from it as being part of the problem. Obviously he means testing companies and publishers who develop the curriculum and assessments.  However, Yang (2010) goes further to include, “all the private tutoring companies that profit from Title I schools; all the people in the academy who receive federal grants to study the achievement gap as if it were a phenomenon that exists outside of the logic of public schooling; all the non-profit educational consultants who coach schools into doing more with fewer resources,; all the grant makers who tie test scores to their giving; and finally, all the teachers who pay to be credentialed” (Yang 2010, p. 145). Even worse, the education industrial complex has turned students into commodities.

3. A Giant Bricolage 

School leaders will do anything to achieve in this market-based, data driven environment. Principals and assistant principals spend their days chasing a target usually communicated as a school grade. Koyama (2014) asserts, under the immense pressure of accountability, principals strived to achieve by using bricolage – whatever comes to hand, such as intensive reading programs, test prep, data mining, professional development, and even an extra quarter of school in some cases.  Unfortunately, these efforts have done little to move the student achievement meter. Even worse, teachers feel less supported by administrators than ever before and are leaving in droves.

4. Exodus

While administrators are breaking their backs trying to negotiate the demands of the state and achieve the almighty A+ school grade, their teachers are walking out the back door. The Alliance for Excellence in Education detailed in their report, On the Path to Equity: Improving the Effectiveness of Beginning Teachers, that half of new teachers leave the profession before year 5. In a recent article in the Atlantic, Barnwell (2015) a teacher in an urban school district, described his exodus from k-12 education as being caused by incessant demands of accountability and assessments by the state. When teachers are asked about why the are leaving, they typically cite lack of support by administrators, and the fact they can’t be creative because of the demands for accountability. 

5. The Death of the Intern

Market-based competition in schools is also hurting College of Education (COE) programs. In fact, the Dean of the COE at Purdue University – Maryann Santos de Barona – described market-based reform as the reason colleges of education have so many problems working with teachers and administrators in public schools. “Teachers and administrators are reluctant to let our faculty research in their classrooms, as this represents a risk that might impact test scores,” Santos de Barona said. Most COE professors will confirm, an intern friendly environment is hard to find these days when teachers’ paychecks and evaluations depend on student test scores. 

6. Joy has become obsolete 

This is rarely talked about in academic journals and never addressed in policy circles, but it’s certainly worth mentioning here. Joyful is not a popular word public school teachers use when describing their jobs these days. Happy is not a feeling students experience when they get off the bus and head into a public school building. Unfortunately, the focus on the target the market-based approach enforces has sucked even the smallest amount of joy left in the teaching and learning experience. Teaching and learning for the sake of teaching and learning no longer exists. If it can’t be measured or tied back to a standard, it isn’t happening in schools. 

Not all is lost, however.

This can all be fixed by focusing on the learning experience rather than focusing on the target. In addition, schools should be recognized as learning institutions rather than warehouses and factories for big businesses to make profits. Also, all high-stakes must be removed from learning. Once students know they can learn without consequence, student engagement will increase. Teachers should be trusted to do their jobs without unrealistic evaluations and accountability measures looming in the background.  And finally, joy can fix just about anything; bring back joy in schools because amazing things happen when people are happy.

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References 

Barnwell, P. (2015, May 27). The Ongoing Struggle of Teacher Retention. The Atlantic. Retrieved May 28, 2015, from http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/05/the-ongoing-struggle-of-teacher-retention/394211/?utm_source=SFFB

Bangert, D. (2015, May 27). Awkward … Ed reform called out at Purdue. JConline – The Lafayette Journal and Courier. Retrieved May 28, 2015, from http://www.jconline.com/story/opinion/columnists/dave-bangert/2015/05/27/bangert-awkward-ed-reform-called-purdue/28031101/

Hayes, M. (2014) On the Path to Equity: Improving the Effectiveness of Beginning Teachers. Alliance for Excellence in Education http://all4ed.org/reports-factsheets/path-to-equity/

Koyama, J. (2014). Principals as bricoleurs: Making sense and making do in an era of accountability. Educational Administration Quarterly 50(2) 279–304. DOI: 10.1177/0013161X13492796

 O’Neill, O. (2013). Intelligent accountability in education. Oxford Review of Education 39(1) 4-16. DOI: 10.1080/03054985.2013.764761 

Yang, K. W. (2010). Rites to reform: The cultural production of the reformer in urban schools. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 41(2) 144-160. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1492.2010.01075.x

In the Huffington Post on Thursday Darling-Hammond said, “It is time to get serious about how to support and enable our education system to respond to the massive changes in learning that some other nation’s systems have been addressing more systemically, with much better results, over the last two decades.”

In 2008, Dr. Darling-Hammond was slotted for the position of US Education Secretary under President Barack Obama. However, even though her qualifications far exceeded Arne Duncan’s, she was passed over at the last minute and the president appointed Mr. Duncan. Linda Darling-Hammond’s credentials are vast and wide and she would have most likely opposed many of the Race to The Top and Common Core initiatives being pushed by politicians and testing executives. So the switch from Darling-Hammond to Duncan was not too surprising.

As a professor at the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University, Darling-Hammond has continuously published on the topics of:

1. Improving teacher professional development to ensure that teachers have the knowledge and skills necessary to teach students with diverse needs.
2. Making organizational changes within schools to support more intensive learning.
3. Ensuring that targeted supports and services are available for struggling students.
4. Conducting classroom assessments that better inform teaching.

She has also helped develop the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, the test used to assess the Common Core Standards in some states like California. She has said this about the Common Core Standards:

My view about what we should be doing re: curriculum and assessments can be found in the last chapter of my book, The Flat World and Education, where I describe how many other countries create thoughtful curriculum guidance as part of an integrated teaching and learning system. In short, what I would prefer and what other more deliberative countries do is a careful process by which educators are regularly convened over several years to revise the national or state curriculum expectations (typically national in smaller countries like Finland and Singapore, and state or provincial in large ones like Canada and China). Then there is an equally careful process of developing curriculum materials and assessments (managed by the Ministry or Department of Education with the participation of educators) and organizing intensive professional development. The development process takes at least 3 years and the initial implementation process takes about the same amount of time and deeply involves educators all along the way. Unfortunately, this was not the process that was used to develop and roll out the CCSS.

Darling-Hammond, once the education darling of President Obama, has since come out opposed to the way Race to The Top has pushed for teacher accountability through high-stakes test scores. Her research shows that she is far more concerned for students and teachers rather than test scores.

Darling-Hammond’s Learning Policy Institute will provide necessary research for decision makers to use when imposing policy onto schools. According to Darling-Hammond, The Learning Policy Institute’s agenda will include:

• Examining effective designs for new schools with structures, curriculum and types of learning that young people will need to thrive in a “radically different, knowledge-based world economy.”
• Sharing early education programs with strong outcomes so that they can be brought to scale. There is an emerging bipartisan recognition nationally of the importance of early education, she said.
• Making recommendations and sharing research on how to attract, train and effectively retain the next generation of teachers; California and other states are already experiencing a diminishing supply of prospective teachers.
• Helping to shape an “equity agenda” that draws attention to the United States’ high rates of child poverty and homelessness and unequal school funding and staffing, compared with other industrialized nations.

Funding for think tanks is typically a concern for those who follow education policy.  The San Francisco-based Sandler Foundation is the lead funder of The Learning Policy Institute, with the Atlantic Philanthropies, the S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stuart Foundation also providing initial support for the institute.

While there is excitement among many that someone like Darling-Hammond is going to Washington, some people in the education world are concerned this is just another think tank with motives that may not be aligned with the best interests of students and teachers. In fact, here are just a few responses from parents, teachers and activists about Dr. Darling-Hammond’s new organization.

“Oh, no!…”

“It is being touted by the Superintendent of Public Instruction in CA as well. I’m having the same reaction.””

“Linda Darling-Hammond is a very good educator. Maybe she can change things for the better.”

“I agree and hope so. She’s also a major player behind the Race to the Top initiatives. She’s been a roller coaster. It’s hard to know how to feel about her starting a new major policy initiative. The last time she got involved with that, public education met it’s most destructive policies to date. We’ll see. We need to watch this very closely.”

Indeed people will be watching very closely, especially those who are inside school buildings having to implement and come to terms with current and future education policy.

I have written many resumes over the years. However, I have sorted through hundreds more in my career. Some were really bad, most were average, and very few knocked my socks off. But I did take notice of the ones that stood out and I identified key components that all awesome resumes have in common.

One thing to remember when constructing your resume, is that resume building is a skill that must be practiced again and again. So if you’re a high school or college student, who’s just starting out, or if you’re someone getting back into the workforce after a long hiatus, these small but impactful practices go a long way when beginning the resume process.

1. Forget the objective. Don’t put an objective line at the top of your resume or anywhere on your resume for that matter. The act of sending your resume to an employer or to a college is your objective. For example, let’s say you’re sending your resume to obtain a position as a summer camp counselor. Putting the objective: to obtain a position as a camp counselor, is slightly redundant don’t you think? We get it; you want to be a camp counselor. That’s why you’re applying for the job.

2. Use words from the job description in your resume.  Many companies and organizations use automated resume sorting software. Basically, a robot is most likely reading through the hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of resumes at the company where you want to work. That robot selects resumes that have key words from the job description. Only then does the resume get to the boss. So use words from the job description! For example, if the job description says they are looking for someone to organize systems or someone who is meticulous with details, put that in your resume – those exact words. Then the robot will put you in the pile for the boss to read.

3. Tailor your resume. People often make the mistake of using one resume for multiple jobs. You need a different resume for each job you are applying for. Each resume doesn’t have to be completely different. However, if you are following the tip in number two above you need different resumes with different key words. Think about the robot!

4. Have someone, other than you, proof your resume. When you are working on something for a long time, you get used to the mistakes and miss them. In fact, I have come across many resumes with silly grammar and spelling errors. Everyone makes silly grammar and spelling errors. That’s why it’s important to have someone, other than you, proof your writing – preferably, someone who knows how to spell.

5. Spend time. Don’t write your resume in one day. Let it sit for a day and go back to it. I bet you’ll find things you want to change. Time makes things better, especially writing. Give your resume a day and revisit it.

6. Be proud. When writing your resume, get into the frame of mind that you are awesome and this is your chance to show prospective employers how awesome you are. Maybe listen to Beyonce or watch your favorite home run or touchdown before you start your resume. Whatever you need to do, get pumped to show that robot you’re amazing.

If you’re interested in more information about courses we will be offering related to resume building, please click the link below and we will send you a building a badass resume checklist.

Get the Awesome Resume Checklist HERE!

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Really angry.

I radiated it. Not just anger, but also frustration and indignation.

When casually asked, “Hey Kathleen!  What have you been up to?” Instead of the standard reply, “Not much. How are you?” I would fly into a full-fledged, red-faced rant about any and all of the following:

• testing companies
• unnecessary faculty meetings
• education mandates coming from non-educators
• school grade calculations
• VAM scores
• 10 page Danielson teacher evaluation rubrics
• testing companies
• testing calendars
• closed media centers due to testing (we closed ours Feb-June)
• remedial reading programs made by the same people who make the tests
• Jeb Bush
• Arne Duncan
• Bill Gates
• my local school district’s leadership team
• the superintendent
• my former boss
• my local school board
• every school board
• governors who don’t know anything about education
• Pam Stewart
• legislators, every last one of them
• unions who don’t support their teachers
• teachers who complain but don’t vote or stand up for what they want
• parents who complain but don’t vote or stand up for what they want

I even got with other angry people and we got pissed off together. We took to school board podiums; we went to conferences; we went on the news; we stood on the side of the road with signs; we assembled and mobilized.

I had the pleasure of working with education activists whom I love and respect, women who had been fighting this fight long before I quit my job in public education to join them.

And the ranting worked. We got things done. We got our local School Board to opt out of state tests (they later opted back in). Together, we brought national awareness to these issues and helped hundreds of thousands of people refuse high-stakes assessments.

I put on webinars, wrote blogs, and conducted research. All fueled by my anger.

My anger was energizing. It helped me work harder and longer. It was like a drug that made me clear and focused.  I felt like I could do anything the more and more pissed off I got.

Then something happened.

I was out on a long run, Rage Against the Machine playing through my headphones.

One of my favorite songs to run to, “Take it back! Take it back! Take it back!” was interrupted by a phone call. I looked at the screen and the name of my former boss appeared. He was also a former friend before he made the list. I knew something was up, because it had been a year since he had called me. I had a sinking feeling.

“Kathleen?”

“Yeah, George.” I said cautiously. I missed him, but I was too angry to tell him that.

“Kathleen, have you gotten a call about Coach?”

I knew before I even asked, “No, why?”

He told me that our friend, who was my mentor for the last 10 years, suddenly had a heart attack and died just a couple of hours before.

The Universe opened up and a huge hole appeared.

Coach, who was like a father, brother, and best friend all rolled into one, was gone. He had given me my start in education, had yanked me off the slow, arduous path I was on and changed the trajectory of my life. And in the last year of my angry rebellion, I had pulled away from him because my fight against all things public ed was more important than staying connected with him. He had invited me to the movies, and I passed. He invited to several other outings with his family, and I made excuses why I couldn’t go.

And now he was gone.

While standing there on the side of the road, hanging up the phone, the anger left my body like smoke coming off an extinguished candle.

I tried to be angry but I couldn’t find it anymore. I knew I was done fighting.

My outrage was replaced by anguish and my natural tendency to second-guess past decisions, although he taught me to never look back.

“Make a decision and then move forward.” He’d say. “Don’t look back, Jasper.”

So that’s what I am doing. Moving forward, eyes straight ahead.

Over ten years with him, I learned to empower people to realize their potential and take action to achieve their goals. I challenged young people to look at the world differently and reach beyond their comfort level. He taught me how to do that, and that’s what I want to do.

The absence of anger has made me realize how much I miss working with high school students and teaching them to be part of the solution. How can I expect them to do that when I am busy yelling about the problem?

Resentment and discontent are soul-sucking and toxic. So, I’ve decided to be the solution rather than focusing on all the troubles.

I’m not abandoning my feistiness towards education issues and bad policy. I will continue to bring awareness to those elements. However, I am going to spend my time helping others find ways around these problems.

ConversationED will be a solution to the problems many people face in public education in this country, by helping people hack their education. That’s right, if you are dissatisfied in education and education policies, we will help you hack your education to find ways YOU can make it better.

Here are just a few hacks we are working on:

• Workforce Essentials: Things you wish they’d teach you in school like organization, time management, professional communication and problem solving.
• Resume Building – Quick and Dirty Tricks to get noticed in a Sea of Applicants
• Finance – Understand your loan terms before you owe government-backed companies hundreds of thousands of dollars for your liberal arts degree.
• Down with the 5 Paragraph Essay – Learn How to Write for Real.
• The MLA Lie: No one uses it after high school so we’ll teach you APA – the formatting your professor wants you to use.
• SAT/ACT prep – Skip the FSA, get the concordant score, and move on with your life.
• Happiness courses. Yup that’s right, how to be happy. This is something we believe everyone should have a chance to learn.
• Wellness – Nutrition, Exercises, Mindfulness and a more productive life.
• Academic Courses that don’t Suck:
  • Genetics I, II, & III (Skip the parts of the cell and get to the good stuff!)
  • Math as a language
  • Research
  • Pairing literature with history

We are going to help people circumvent a bad system and decide for themselves how they want to learn and thrive. Maybe you can’t leave public education or you don’t want to. We will be here when you want something different, a solution to whatever problem you are feeling in your learning.

This is going to take us a while. We have a very small team and by small I mean 3 people. But those 3 people are the most creative educators I know.

I’ve missed being an educator. I’m back, and I hope you will join me.

If you want to learn more about what we are doing and how to hack your education, we have a really cool infographic you can download for free. Click Here to get the FREE infographic. Or click the image to the FREE infographic and Hack your ED!

1. He received a lot of parental engagement on the chat he probably wasn’t expecting.
2. He didn’t “engage” much with the parents who were asking him the tough questions regarding his education policy that affect their kids.

In fact, Duncan didn’t say much, but parents and educators certainly did.

His first tweet:

YAWN….

That’s like saying, “As parents, we know the sky is blue,” or “we know our kids like ice-cream.”

He then tweeted:

And that’s when he stepped in it, because parents know exactly what questions to ask.

In fact, here are just a few of the hundreds of tweets that poured in by parents (To see the full bombardment of questions, go to Twitter and search #PTChat):

Seldom throughout the chat, the education secretary got a few easy ones thrown down the middle over the plate that he had no problem taking a swing at:

Wendy  was one of the only people The Education Secretary responded to.

And parents got engaged and used all kinds of strategies hoping the Secretary of ED would engage with them back:

But, he didn’t answer any of these tweets, and they kept coming in. Many were from educators:

Not surprisingly, Mr. Duncan didn’t use any of his 140 characters to answer.

Sadly, parents wanted answers about their children with dyslexia:

To the dyslexia concerns, Mr. Duncan said only:

Lots of people speculated that it wasn’t him on twitter at all. That it was probably a 23 year-old intern who knows very little about eduction. Although the intern could probably come up with better ed policy than Arne Duncan.  About 30 min into the chat, Duncan went silent.

Ultimately this Twitter Chat #epicfail on the part of Arne Duncan. Some suggestions:

1. When talking about parental engagement, be sure you’re ready to actually engage with parents.
2. Use less catch phrases that mean absolutely nothing and get in and answer the tough questions.
3. When engaging with parents of dyslexic kids, try not to throw dyslexia stats and figures at them. They know the stats.
4. If you organize a Twitter the chat, man up and stay in the game. Don’t bail before it’s over.
5. Choose topics you’re willing to participate in with parents. Otherwise, it looks like a 23 year old intern is tweeting for you.

Check out part 1 – The Space Race

Check out Part 2 – A Nation at Risk

Check out Part 3 – No Child Left Behind

Last week I gave these “college and career ready” students an assignment: prepare a group presentation on important topics in education and present those topics to the class. Because they are recent high school graduates, their idea of important education topics and my idea of important education topics were drastically different. For example, I would have picked teacher evaluations, education reform, or the consequences of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top on the learning environment.

When they chose topics like dress code, shaming in school, music education programs, testing, and sex ED, I didn’t protest. I sat in the back row of my giant classroom, and listened to these future educators, standing side by side, nervously presenting in an auditorium to their peers.

Each presentation was 5-10 min.

As the third group of the night set up in the front of the room, their PowerPoint came into view onto the giant screen. In giant letters read College Readiness? with this image underneath:

Then the group of five young women launched a series of questions at us.

“How many of you know how to balance a checkbook? Raise your hands” Only eight students, out of eighty, raised their hands.

“How many of you understand credit and how interest rates work?” Two students put their hands up.

“How many of you understand your student loan terms?” Not one hand went in the air.

“How many of you feel overwhelmed because you never learned time management skills necessary for our life here in college?”

Every hand shot up.

I looked at their presentation title again: College and Career Readiness?

I peered at the question mark and smirked.

The term “college and career readiness” is political speak, that actually translates to, “We need more tests, so testing companies can make more money, so we can get more dollars for political campaigns.”

In fact, “college and career readiness” has absolutely nothing to do with college or career. It’s a catchy slogan invented by people, who stand to gain hundreds of millions of dollars from Common Core and high-stakes assessments. And the slogan has been extremely effective in selling education reform over the last 15 years.

It’s like a salesman pitching you a timeshare in the “Orlando Area”. He says you’ll be minutes away from Disney World. It’s only when you check in that you realize the “Orlando area” is 110 square miles and you are nowhere near that damn mouse or his friends. Your family is pissed.

The phrase “college and career readiness” is just as ambiguous as the timeshare in the “Orlando Area”. Like the timeshare, it was pushed onto us by a bunch of sales people, also known as politicians. And we’ve learned that “college and career readiness” is as much about the real world as a timeshare off I-4, somewhere in Orlando, is the same as a hotel in Walt Disney World.

Arne Duncan – the US Education Secretary – said in 2011, “The truth is that we want all students to develop employability skills. And I am pleased to say that the Common Core standards, developed by the states, deliberately incorporate what is often thought of as career-ready skills, such as problem solving and communication skills. The next generation of assessments currently being developed by the states under the Race to the Top assessment competition, will also assess these higher-order skills.” 

Mr. Duncan is not an educator. In fact, he has never taught anything. He never had to construct lesson plans, or deal with students who don’t have enough to eat at home. He has never stood in front of a classroom trying to engage a bunch of apathetic teenagers. He is not and never will be an educator. Still, he is extremely proud of his education reform efforts, which produced the Common Core Standards and the all the profit generating assessments that go with them.

And Mr. Duncan loves to use the slogan “college and career readiness”.

Although his slogan is appealing, my students’ college and career readiness skills won’t prevent them from going into tens of thousands (in some cases, hundreds of thousands) of dollars in debt with federal subsidized, student loans. They will make decisions about financial aid that will affect them for the rest of their lives, without ever having a class on interest rates, loans or credit. The skills students really need to survive in the real world are not assessed on the PARCC exam, the FSA or the SBAC. Those skills aren’t assessed on the ACT or SAT either. 

Keeping students ignorant about interest rates and federal loan terns is all part of the design. If students understood their federal student loans, they probably wouldn’t take the money. If everyone understands how they’re being used, who will the feds exploit?

Instead these students will have to learn the hard way about balancing bank accounts only when theirs become overdrawn and riddled with overdraft fees.

This is not the students’ fault. They have done exactly what we asked them to do – pass tests that assess “21^st century, college and career readiness skills”.

By the way, 21^st century skills – another catchphrase – are more about beating China in algebra than they are about cultivating independent, self-sufficient young adults.

At the end of the presentation the group outlined a set of demands they want public schools to implement:

• Authentic internships with real companies (Not just an on the job training class where kids leave school before the end of the day and go to their low-paying job at McDonalds).
• 2-3 semesters (at least!) of study in high school in finance, budgets and accounting. This should include everything from balancing a checkbook to paying bills to taking out loans. They also wanted to know about complex financial subjects, like interest rates, that affect their lives.
• Comprehensive training for all students on resume building, interviewing skills and how to act once you get the job.
• Intensive training in time management. Students said they are overwhelmed because they have never learned this invaluable skill.

After class a student approached me and said, “I spent my whole life preparing for tests that do nothing for me after high school. It was all a complete waste of time.”

I said, “Well kid, not a total waste of time. You did learn the Pythagorean Theorem.” 

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