What Schools and Districts Need to Know About Integrating Blockchain and Big Data into CCR

Since the founding of the United States, public schools have structured their content and instruction around the definition of what constitutes a student’s readiness for adulthood. Across the years, the curricular particulars of “Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic” have been updated to reflect cultural and economic changes. In the 19th Century, schools focused on ensuring basic literacy, rote memorization, and computation. In the 20th Century, learning literature and algebra, along with a robust knowledge base, became standard thresholds for determining preparation and success. As the year 2000 neared, educational and workforce development sectors coalesced around a movement to ensure that students develop “21st Century skills” in order to be prepared for their futures. Skills like collaboration, critical thinking, problem solving, and digital literacy were seen as vital to take on the new kinds of challenges and roles that would be central to the global economy. 

In recent years, innovations driven by new technologies have emerged which will once again require educational systems to adjust their curriculum, pedagogy, and expectations in order to ensure students are ready for their future. Big Data is fueling machine learning and artificial intelligence; blockchain is changing accounting and financial industries. And both of these are being fed expanding quantities of data from sensors and transactions through increasingly connected people and devices. It can feel overwhelming for educators to develop student readiness in technologies that are younger than they are. But ensuring that students are able to be literate in these emerging fields is crucial to having a successful college and career readiness (CCR) program. 

Big Data and the Need for Students to Develop Data Literacy

Data literacy is the ability to gather, analyze, and communicate insights from data. It is much more than just conducting surveys. Data literacy is viewed as the critical skill needed for businesses to analyze market conditions, sales records, and customer behavior in the private sector. Government agencies at all levels are using both historical data and real-time data from cameras and sensors to manage traffic, deploy social workers and first responders, and to improve service delivery for sanitation, business licensing, tax collection, and fraud detection. Both private and public sector entities have massive data sets of historical records and have accelerating volumes of data due to digitalization of transactions and the increase in data feeds from cameras, sensors, and other devices. 

While not every employee will be designing the systems to gather and analyze the data, in the very near future, these employers will expect employees at all levels to have a basic understanding of how to interpret and act on data driven insights. Currently, fewer than five states explicitly include high school data literacy in graduation requirements. Districts and schools will need to modernize their curricular expectations to keep up with these new CCR expectations.

Blockchain and CCR

Blockchain is related to Big Data and has made headline news in recent years with its most well-known application, cryptocurrency. Blockchain is fundamentally a distributed ledger system that enables secure transactions and data storage with high levels of data security and transparency. Cryptocurrencies use this technology to build economies that trade tokens, which act as currency, and can be traded for government issued currencies such as the US dollar or Euro. 

Building blockchain networks for record keeping or investing in cryptocurrencies as a commodity are now real, professional jobs that require data literacy and other 21st Century skills. REWork, a leading convener of experts for AI and deep learning, has assessed this growing trend by explaining that “since 2015, the number of jobs related to blockchain increased by as much as 600%, and now 15 of the 18 best jobs in the IT industry include the word ‘cryptocurrency’ in their descriptions.” School systems, and high schools in particular, will need to begin embedding these new forms of work into their CCR exploration and development programs. 

Shifting Course Requirements to Include Big Data and Blockchain

There is an active debate in CCR and math education communities about what courses should be required in order to ensure that students are truly ready for the careers they will meet after graduation. Currently, most states require algebra, geometry, and algebra 2, often followed by pre-calculus, for college readiness. There is a significant concern about whether this “road to calculus” is appropriate for most students as data science skills are quickly becoming more crucial and relevant than calculus in business, healthcare, information technology, and other growing segments of the economy. This has led to many educators advocating for students to be put on a data science course sequence during high school rather than a path to calculus. Under this approach, students would enroll in probability and statistics, data visualization, and quantitative communications courses in order to build these skills. 

Beyond ensuring that all students have a basic data literacy, schools need to offer career pathways that will enable students to enter careers and courses of study that are explicitly data science oriented. Northeastern University has reported a projected 42% growth in data science jobs by 2031. Bioinformatics, machine learning architect, artificial intelligence, data engineering, data analysis, and data storytelling are new and rapidly growing career options that have entry points after certificate, associate, bachelors, and graduate school study. 

Ways to Build Data Literacy, Big Data, and Blockchain into CCR

School and district leaders can take steps now to develop these emerging competencies into their CCR programs: 

• Establish a standing committee to review the presence, or absence, of data literacy developing experiences through every year and across content areas. Have the committee make recommendations of data literacy promotion and integration.
• Ensure that teachers have regular professional development on the integration of data literacy in their grade level or subject matter. And consider incentivizing, or even requiring, data science education in teacher evaluation processes. 
• Establish a common language and framework for including data reporting, graphics and tables, and statistics for student assignments. Having each teacher establish their own data language hinders data literacy development because students struggle to carry skills developed in one course or grade to others. 
• Model the need for data literacy by including insights from data on trends within the district or school community in materials to students, parents, and staff. These can be supplemented by sharing articles on emerging fields that are using data science or examples of data science in use by a local company or government.

We Need to Ready our Students for the Changing World

Just as previous generations adjusted to machinery, electricity, and the internet, our students are entering a world being transformed by new technologies. As these technologies change all aspects of life–communications, business, government, defense, healthcare, and more–education must change both in how we teach students and what students are taught.

Ensuring that students are prepared for their postsecondary transition with a sufficient basis for lifelong learning and success is a core function of CCR. Counselors, teachers, and administrators in every school can boost the readiness of students in their community by delivering experiences that ensure contemporary CCR with data literacy and data science, and their applications in the professional world.