Earlier this week, noted short-seller Carson Block predicted that AI-driven job losses could eliminate 15% of knowledge worker positions within three years — a disruption he warned could rival the worst economic crises in modern history. And just two weeks ago, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a sweeping policy memo doubling down on his warnings that AI will produce labor market disruptions larger and longer-lasting than any previous technological shift. With all the talk about the risk, there’s virtually no conversation about what we can or should be doing to help the next generation of young people survive the specter of mass technological unemployment.
But as it turns out, we’ve been here before. And the antidote may surprise you.
At the turn of the last century, agricultural jobs evaporated — falling from one-third of all U.S. employment to just 8% in 50 years. Nearly 10 million jobs vanished in less than a lifetime. As economist and Opportunity@Work founder Byron Auguste has noted, when policymakers, employers and parents all realized that the shifting job landscape required a different preparatory path, states passed compulsory education laws. And as a high school diploma increasingly became an economic lifeline, the number of high schools grew an average of one per day for 30 years. Before long, America produced a higher percentage of high school graduates than any nation on the planet.
We are at another such inflection point. In the last few months, we’ve seen the direction some states hope to move, outlined in waivers from key provisions of the federal K-12 education law. A proposal from Alabama — one of the states leading “the Southern surge” in educational outcomes — puts reimagining high school at center stage, so all young people are prepared for work and life. If other states follow, we may be on the cusp of the most significant transformation of American secondary education in a century.
The urgency is real. Today, only 61% of students who enroll in college earn a degree within six years, and more than half of those who do graduate wind up underemployed.
As emerging technologies challenge age-old conceptions of what it means to be prepared for the economy, it should be no surprise that states are once again reconsidering their expectations for the American high school.
Alabama is making its answer clear. It recognizes that while college is still a powerful path, it is not the only one. Their waiver request reflects the recognition that if we’re serious about preparing students for life as adults, we need to acknowledge that what it takes to earn college acceptance and what it takes to thrive in the world of work are not always one and the same. So rather than rely solely on a college admissions test, the state has proposed assessing every student for both college and career readiness.
Under their plan, students would need to demonstrate proficiency in interpreting data and navigating complex real-world documents as well as purely academic tasks like solving quadratic equations.
The state schools chief has been direct: 67% of Alabama jobs requiring high-demand skills pay above the median wage, and students deserve to be prepared for them.
The skills required for these jobs are not new: critical thinking, communication, collaboration, adaptability, digital literacy, and work ethic. What is new is the idea that developing academic and workforce skills become central to the high school experience. It is time we evolve from our singular focus on teaching students what to think, and build high schools that teach students how to think.
For some, such a tectonic shift in what high school should be represents a threat. The work is unfamiliar and seems risky, in precisely the ways advanced mathematics or learning to read complex texts may have seemed foreign to our agricultural-era counterparts. Others express concern about shifting attention of the schools too sharply to the ephemeral needs of the labor market. After all, our public schools aspire to do much more than simply prepare workers for jobs.
These concerns deserve serious answers. Certainly, we must guard against unhelpful tracking and steadfastly avoid watering things down. But that is not what’s happening in Alabama. The state’s goal is to make applied teaching and learning more rigorous, interactive and relevant across the high school experience.
Further, state leaders realize that the nation’s economic imperatives and our broader aspirations for education are two sides of the same coin. A student who learns to navigate ambiguity, make sense of evidence, and strengthen their capacity for synthesis is better prepared not only for a career, but for the demands of citizenship. The skills that allow a young person to thrive in the modern economy are the same skills that sustain a functioning democracy. The alignment of high school with the future economy is essential to shared prosperity, which is itself foundational to sustaining a vibrant and inclusive democracy.
There is challenging work ahead. We must develop research-backed standards to be able to confidently define workforce skills, and create and invest in tools to reliably assess those skills. We aren’t yet where we need to be.
However, states like Alabama aren’t waiting for permission. They are doing the difficult and necessary work to shift expectations and lay a foundation for a more promising future for young people statewide. A century ago, we didn’t tinker with the high school model. We built thousands of new ones. The disruption bearing down on us is no smaller. The question is not whether we can afford to act. It’s whether we can afford to keep pretending that we don’t have to.
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