Washington — U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos told a roomful of CEOs here Tuesday that many students aren’t mastering the skills they need to be prepared for the careers of the future.

DeVos argued that 65 percent of today’s kindergartners will end up in jobs that haven’t even been created yet. Business people, she said, have told her that students need be able to think critically, know how to collaborate, communicate clearly, and be creative.

“My observation is a lot of students today are not having their needs met to be prepared in those areas,” DeVos said at the Wall Street Journal CEO Council’s meeting. And later she noted that the U.S. education system was largely borrowed from Prussia, a country which she noted no longer exists. The system, she said, needs to be changed to offer more students and parents individualized options. “When we empower all parents, that will ultimately prepare students to be active participants in the workforce,” she said in remarks at the Four Seasons Hotel.

For the second time this year, DeVos held up school choice-friendly Florida as a model for the country. The Sunshine State, she said, offers, “the broadest range of choices and the greatest number of kids taking advantage of those choices.” (Other school choice stand-outs, according to DeVos, include Indiana, Louisiana, and Wisconsin.)…

Read the full article: Education Week Politics K-12

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