The Great Dropout: The Crisis Looming Across Schools and How to Address It

The pandemic's impact on the workforce in the recent past with phenomena like "the Great Resignation" and "quiet quitting" illuminate the changing professional culture in the US. However, the pandemic has also recently triggered a slow and more insidious crisis in schools and universities: the "Great Dropout."

Reports from?UNICEF? and?McKinsey ?on the pandemic's impact on K-12 education have shown that separating millions of schoolchildren from their classrooms has caused long-standing effects on learning. In the first year of the pandemic, students were five months behind in mathematics and four months behind in reading, while absenteeism doubled. Even worse, widening gaps in opportunity and achievement impacted historically disadvantaged populations hardest, highlighting the reversal of decades of progress in US education.?

The current rigid and curriculum-centric education, designed primarily to create replaceable graduates for the workforce, focuses on content without regard for learning its context and application. Schools struggled to function during the lockdown; children spend online classes disengaged with cameras off, often scrolling through social media or even sleeping. Teachers also weren't equipped to switch to Zoom classes, and many struggled with the technology and this new mode of teaching. This situation has been made worse recently by the?mass?departure of teachers? in the US due to high stress, staff shortage, low pay, and the increasing politicization of education.?

In this climate, failing students are often pushed up to the next grade with a learning deficit, making it harder for them to handle higher classes. According to the?NH?Union Leader , Manchester city middle and high schools saw an average 1250% rise in students failing one or more subjects in the first year of the pandemic. This situation creates a cascading effect that impacts children's confidence and interest in learning, leading to disengagement, poor grades, and absenteeism. In this third year of the pandemic, cities and states are seeing?unprecedented ?levels of chronic absenteeism - a precursor to dropping out. They ultimately enter the workforce with significantly lower skills and earning potential than their predecessors, which affects not just them and their families but the community as a whole, leading to a drop in GDP and a rise in poverty. These are the buildng blocks of social unrest, and we must address this challenge now before it becomes a systemic problem.

We must use this crisis to reexamine our education system.

The insufficiency of the current educational model to meet society's needs and keep students engaged in school highlights the need to move away from the strictly curriculum-based system. The diversity of learning styles and?unique ?individual intelligences ?are not well utilized in schools for improved learning but often challenge the already overworked and strained teachers. Perhaps the solution is to shift focus towards helping children recognize their unique strengths and feel empowered to apply them toward market needs.?

Can we recover from this spiral and address the immediate and long-term problems facing many children in our society??

It starts with recognizing that primarily curriculum-based learning does not promote the application of knowledge and often stifles creativity and confidence. By nurturing self-motivated problem solvers in school as employable and self-starting graduates, we can better connect communities to academia and industry. Students must learn to identify and solve problems, design multi-disciplinary solution approaches, understand the business elements, and launch projects to create and capture value. The current education system ignores the innate intelligences of an individual and focuses on narrow, industry-specific skills needed in today's fast-moving market. Today's innovators, influencers, and entrepreneurs must sharpen their natural talents to excel in their craft and creatively take on interdisciplinary challenges, as the current education system needs to support this.?

Can we even train students on the brink of dropping out of school to be innovators and entrepreneurs? It begins with the belief that?children from any background can be nurtured ?to build the skillset and mindset needed to be future innovators and entrepreneurs. It is critically important to intervene before their mid-teens to accelerate their journey, before their fears and limiting beliefs in their ability to learn and create calcify. Ask any entrepreneur what triggered their journey; it was usually not the classroom but some hands-on experience or engagement where they realized they could learn anything necessary to create something new. Such interventions can be curated and scaled to reach children in schools where the current approach fails to inspire and engage. From a psychological standpoint, self-awareness and confidence can be hugely empowering and must be nurtured in the formative years.?

We are amidst a slow-building crisis of school dropouts that may have systemic consequences for communities and nations. We must use this crisis to nudge our current education system in a new direction that will create changemakers and benefit future generations.

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Rajesh Nair is the Founder of EnCube Labs. He served as a Professor of Practice in Innovation & Entrepreneurship at the Asia School of Business, started by MIT-Sloan in Malaysia, and as Visiting Scholar at MIT. He is an engineer, product designer, serial entrepreneur, and educator who founded four companies in the USA. He eceived graduate degrees in Engineering and Management (MIT), Manufacturing Engineering (UMass), and Electronic-Product Design (IISc).?His ten-year research at MIT and ASB over a hundred workshops for children and youth in several countries studied ways to nurture young innovators and entrepreneurs through building local ecosystems from the ground up.

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