Special issue: The future of learning & work: How focusing on competencies will support equitable economy recovery

As editors, we had excellent reasons to create a special edition on the future of learning and work long before the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world, leading to massive levels of death and unemployment that has unproportionally impacted Black, Latinx, and people of color.

As this introduction is written, the rationale seems even more compelling for a special issue focused on the role of competencies in workforce and economic recovery. The pandemic’s impact on society has revealed fissures in all of our social systems, but education stands out as especially fragile. In spite of monumental efforts toward improvement in the past several decades, our education infrastructure is simply not providing equitable, workforce-aligned, student-centered learning for too many of our Black, Latinx, people of color, and low-income students and workers. Many of us knew all about this failing before COVID-19, but now the awareness has spread to every household, school, occupation, and community.

As tragic as the onset of the virus has been, educators would be remiss if we did not take this opportunity to advocate for dramatic improvement. Unfortunately, social system transformation rarely happens in good times; usually when the old ways clearly become dysfunctional are people willing to consider alternatives.

The alternatives are there and have been for many years: Competency-based education (CBE) offers a path to better, more fair pedagogy and careers with value for more learners—but only if educators and employers come together to implement them.

Several common themes are interwoven throughout the issue. Assessing the pandemic’s impact is, of course, necessary and unavoidable. It is a unique historical event in which the entire world has been simultaneously affected. However, it is also a familiar story in that different populations have suffered in unequal ways. Linked to this fact, and not surprisingly, a concern for equity presents itself in almost every article. The uneven impact of COVID-19 has illuminated class and racial divides that can no longer be ignored. Unlike the virus, equity has been all too easy to overlook for many with more privileged race and economic backgrounds. Now, however, it shouts for attention.

A long-standing challenge makes yet another appearance in these pages: Close collaboration between educators and employers emerges as perhaps the missing piece of the entire puzzle. We must create clearly defined pathways from the classroom to the workplace (in person or virtual), and learners must know how to follow them to a job or career.

Educators can “buy into” the CBE mindset and make dramatic changes in their programs, but if there are no good jobs at the “end of that rainbow,” the whole effort, time, and expense will be for naught. Learners and workers who are already in despair over their situations will grow ever more cynical about the system’s concern (or lack thereof) for them.

Finally, there is the big question: If these alternatives have been available all along, why have they not been implemented on a much wider scale? Is it only the lack of a crisis that has hindered development? The foundational document in this issue, from Clawson and Girardi of Jobs for the Future, argues that there is another variable: the lack of a sustained national commitment to competency-based, equity-centered education (CBEE).

In calling for such a commitment, JFF reflects that the United States has been able to achieve great things when we have worked toward a unifying goal as a country. What could be more appropriate for a new administration whose president’s inaugural address focused on unity? Of course, if the recommendations of all our authors were followed, it would go far in meeting the crisis outlined here. However, these initiatives will remain incremental until a national framework boosts a cohesive movement that captures the strengths of each one of them and many others. Synergies among the various efforts could result in innovations we cannot, at this time, predict.

Policy is outside the scope of our compilation, but we can hope that education, business, and economic advocates of the Biden administration might turn their attention to the issues we have raised here. Perhaps, with an educator as First Lady, it may be possible that a national commitment to CBE would become this generation’s “moonshot.” We certainly hope so.

For now, I would like to thank our authors for contributing their attention to these important issues during a challenging time for families and communities. I also extend my appreciation to the Associate Editors for their gift of time and talent in helping create a quality special issue: Richard Barnes, Ashley Bliss-Lima, Allen C. Clarkson, Alton James, and Dr. Mara Lockowandt.