CURMUDGUCATION: RAND Plays Corporate Reformy Buzzword Bingo

CURMUDGUCATION: RAND Plays Corporate Reformy Buzzword Bingo

RAND Plays Corporate Reformy Buzzword Bingo

RAND Corporation, with its vision to be "the world's most trusted source for policy ideas and analysis." regularly contributes to the total thinky tank output of material that wants to be viewed as "a report" or "research" or "a study" or "a paper," but is more like an op-ed or blog post that has put on a tie and juiced up its vocabulary.

This week they cranked out a new one entitled "Reimagining the Workforce Development and Employment System for the 21st Century and Beyond." Its scope is fuzzy and wide, like a wooly mammoth that has overindulged in pizza and beer, and while it doesn't lay all the blame there, it does take some shots at K-12 education, and in doing so manages to tick off plenty of the boxes on the Reformster Talking Points Bingo Card.

Authors with no actual background in education? Check, check, and check. (For bonus points, two of the three are economists.)

Bloodless gobbledeegook? By the truckload. For instance, the authors note that during childhood "people make decisions about schooling and other aspects of human capital acquisition." Yes, I often think back fondly to when I sat down with my children to discuss their human capital acquisition. Them was the days.

21st century skills? Yep. Employers are "struggling to find workers with 21st century skills that go beyond routine cognitive skills and stock academic knowledge to capture competencies in such areas as information synthesis, creativity, problem-solving, communication and teamwork." Wait-- those are 21st century skills? Really? Communication?? Because it makes me wonder how CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: RAND Plays Corporate Reformy Buzzword Bingo