Let’s Get Over the Slump

Innovation Strategies for Learning in a Global Age

By James Paul Gee and Michael H. Levine

More than 15 million children in preschool and the primary grades have just entered or returned to school, eager to learn. Unless we change our nation’s literacy priorities to address both the early reading gap and a newly emerging digital-participation gap, five years from now more than a third of these children will fail to attain the literacy and necessary 21st-century skills to engage with school. They thus will risk spiraling on a tragic trajectory toward academic failure and economic insecurity.

Ensuring that these children of promise develop the competencies needed to succeed in a global age will take a new national commitment to unleashing the untapped power of interactive media.

For the 25 years since the release of A Nation at Risk , the report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, our country has faced wide achievement gaps that derive most centrally from disparities in economic circumstance, educational opportunity, and basic-skills mastery. Today, the United States faces two increasingly related gaps, both detrimental to our continued recognition as the world’s innovation leader. The first is the old reading gap between richer and poorer children, and the consequent disparity in school success between white children and children from some minority groups. The second is the gap between students who have mastered digital media and...