Early in my career, schools were preparing for the new millennium. At the turn of the century, there were many discussions about education, and how schools should adapt to meet the changing needs of students in the new century. Eventually, these conversations gravitated toward the identification of 21st century skills. These were the characteristics that our students were going to need to be successful in the new millenium. They were the things that schools weren’t so focused on when we were students, but that seemed to be critically important in the information age. The Partnership for 21st Century Skills identified the four C’s: Creativity, Critical Thinking, Communication, and Collaboration. Schools worked to infuse their curriculum with these characteristics. Countless initiatives focused on fostering these skills among students.

I had my own take on what students would need in the new century. Globalization, innovation, and information literacy were on my list, along with collaboration. These were important competencies then. They’re still important now.

But as the new century became noticeably less new, the term “21st century skills” started to sound dated. I dropped that term at the end of 2011 in favor of “Next Generation Skills.” Conference speakers stopped talking about them. Professional development programs stopped focusing on them. By that point, we were concentrating on reading scores and school improvement metrics. Creativity and innovation are hard to measure, and they didn’t show up in our plans for school improvement. Schools started chasing the metrics that were created for them and against which they were measured and compared. We needed to prove that our students were high achievers. We needed to show that all students were growing. We needed to demonstrate that our schools were getting better. And most of that evidence came in the form of reading and math scores. Because schools were under fire to improve these measures, that became the focus of goals, initiatives, and improvement plans.

But education is more than reading and math scores, and schools always knew that. They started releasing “quality profiles” to illustrate all of the ways their students were excelling in non-academic ways. They created “portraits of a graduate” to articulate the characteristics that schools wanted their students to graduate with. Typically, those were 4-6 core competencies that the school community identified as especially important, and separate from the traditional content and curriculum that was taught. The lists are nearly identical, regardless of the school: Critical thinking is always there. Sometimes it’s called problem solving. Or maybe design thinking. Creativity is usually on the list. If a school is more focused on STEM, they might call it innovation. Or if they want to emphasize the business world, they may call it entrepreneurship. But it’s basically the same thing. Collaboration is on the list in one form or another. Sometimes, this takes the flavor of working with diverse perspectives or thriving in a global world. Communication is almost always included. This is an interesting one, because it’s usually defined in a way that both embraces and condemns technology. We want our students to be effective communicators, using all of the digitial tools available to them to communicate efficiently and effectively. But we also need them to put the devices aside and hold conversations face to face with strong eye contact and interpersonal skills. All of the 21st century skills became core competencies in the portait of a graduate.

But we still didn’t focus on it, because there’s no effective way to measure it. How do you measure problem solving? You have to give kids problems they’ve never seen before. But a high-stakes test that does that would be immediately condemned as unfair. And schools would quickly figure out what kinds of innovative problems are on the test, and pepare the students for them ahead of time, defeating the test’s ability to measure how students handle unexpected problems.

So here we are. We’re a quarter of the way through the new century. We know what our kids need. We keep coming back to it again and again. But we don’t have a way to measure it. We don’t have a way to compare schools against how they meet these needs. We can’t quantify it. We can’t cost-justify it. These characteristics can’t be on a checklist of “things we need to teach.” That just doesn’t work.

In my office, I had a poster of the portrait of a graduate on the wall. Several years ago, I wrote “Cultivate Curiosity” on a sticky note, and placed it in the center of the poster. That’s what we need to do. If we have engaged students with a learner’s mindset, we can accomplish any goals. We can meet any metric thrown at us. It starts with engaged, curious learners.

We need students who ask questions. We need students who challenge assumptions. We need students who wonder. We need students with a thirst for understanding. We need students who want to find better ways. We need students who reject the status quo. We need students who don’t believe everything they read. We need students who fight against injustice. We need students who don’t accept that “that’s just the way it is.”

And we don’t get there by adding it to the list. We don’t get there by putting it on posters and T-shirts. We get there by fostering curiosity every day, in everything we do. We model the behavior by asking questions and wondering ourselves. We encourage discovery. We foster a love of learning. Those are the schools we need.

And if those efforts help with our test scores and school ratings, great. But if they don’t, it’s time to step away from those ratings, because they’re not as important as we pretend they are.