This commentary is part of a series of articles prepared by Voices of Educators, a nonprofit coalition designed to foster debate and public policy change within Hawai'i's public education system, in partnership with The Advertiser. It appears in Focus on the first Sunday of the month.

What if everything you know and believe about college admissions were about to change?

In the New York Times this past September, William Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard University, commented that, "It would be much better for the country to have students focusing on high school courses that, based on evidence, will prepare them well for college and also prepare them well for the real world beyond college, instead of spending enormous amounts of time trying to game the SAT."

The problem that leading institutions of higher learning may be hoping to solve begins with the emerging beliefs that schools today are not doing an adequate job of preparing students for success in college, career and citizenship; and SAT scores are no longer good indicators of the kind of preparation needed for success in post-secondary education.

Commenting recently on a lack of correlation between high school and college studies, Harvard professor Tony Wagner noted that, "What it takes to get into college versus what it takes to succeed in college are not aligned."

Educators are also beginning to understand that students today are different than they were 20 or 30 years ago. Today's students learn differently, are motivated differently, and are not inclined to respond to traditional modes of teaching and learning.

In short: These students are absolutely learning, but rather than in school, they are learning in Web 2.0 and even Web 3.0 environments that are foreign to most adults.

Parents, too, are vigorously asking us about the capacity of our public schools to equip students with 21st-century survival skills, and about the "added value proposition" of an expensive investment in a private school education. Such pressures oblige us to question our values, our assumptions, our theories - everything we have always accepted as true about schooling.

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills, an advocacy coalition focused on infusing 21st century knowledge and skills into education, recently reported that "in an economy driven by innovation and knowledge ... in a society facing complex business, political, scientific, technological, health and environmental challenges ... and in diverse workplaces and communities that hinge on collaborative relationships and social networking, ... the ingenuity, agility and skills of the American people are crucial to U.S. competitiveness."

The report argues, as we do, that our world has shifted from one propelled by an industrial economy to one driven by an information-services economy. In response, America's schools must recognize and teach 21st century skills such as "thinking critically, creatively and entrepreneurially; solving complex multidisciplinary, open-ended problems; communicating and collaborating; making innovative use of knowledge, information and opportunities; and taking charge of financial, health and civic responsibilities."

An indisputable factor in American schooling is the force of standardized testing—dictating classroom curriculum, resulting in boring, out-of-touch teaching, and displacing more innovative, collaborative, and effective learning. In our schools and classrooms, assessment drives instruction. If we want to change the way teaching and learning occur, we need to reinvent our approach to assessment.

We need to provide opportunities for students to approach and create solutions to real problems, in collaborative teams, and then to communicate their findings publicly— radically changing our schools' curriculum to one that fosters the kinds of knowledge and skills called for in the Partnership for 21st Century Skills report.

The problem is that standardized tests are multiple-choice measures of basic low-level skills that simply do not assess the capacities needed to perform well at the next level of schooling.

However, there are new assessments emerging and now available that do measure skills needed for the 21st century. In a 2008 Education Sector report, Elena Silva notes that the College and Work Ready Assessment shifts the focus of assessment away from the typical measures "useful for meeting proficiency goals for the federal No Child Left Behind Act," to more performance-based measures that ask students to solve "multifaceted problems by thinking creatively and generating original ideas from multiple sources of information."

Here in Hawai'i, the CWRA is being piloted this spring semester in several public high schools that participate in the Hawai'i Change Leaders Project, funded by the Harold K.L. Castle Foundation and Kamehameha Schools.

Any shifts to new ways of measuring student performance uncover a fear, lurking in the hallways of our schools and in our homes, that tests like CWRA are not reliable measures aligned with accountability. Try telling that to William Fitzsimmons and others in higher education prepared to consider new measures of student capacity for college admissions, while also encouraging high school educators to teach capacities and skills that matter in real life.

Voices of Educators is composed of some of Hawai'i's top education experts, including: Liz Chun, executive director of Good Beginnings Alliance; Patricia Hamamoto, superintendent of the Department of Education; Christine Sorensen, dean of the University of Hawai'i's College of Education; Donald B. Young, Hawai'i Educational Policy Center; Roger Takabayashi from the Hawaii State Teachers Association; Sharon Mahoe of the Hawai'i Teacher Standards Board; Alvin Nagasako of the Hawaii Government Employees Association; and Robert Witt of the Hawaii Association of Independent Schools. Visit their Web site at www.hawaii.edu/voice.
Robert Witt is executive director of the Hawaii Association of Independent Schools.