Earlier this week, prominent short seller Carson Block predicted that AI-related job losses could eliminate 15% of knowledge worker jobs within three years – a shift, he warned, that could rival the worst economic crises in modern history. And just two weeks ago, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei released a wide-ranging policy memo reiterating his warnings that AI will cause greater and longer-lasting disruption to the labor market than any previous technological shift. For all the talk about risk, there is virtually no discussion about what we can or should do to help the next generation of young people survive the specter of mass technological unemployment.
But as it turns out, we’ve been here before. And the antidote might surprise you.
At the turn of the century, agricultural jobs disappeared, falling from one-third of all U.S. jobs to just 8% within 50 years. Almost 10 million jobs disappeared in less than a lifetime. As economist and Opportunity@Work founder Byron Auguste noted, states passed compulsory schooling laws as politicians, employers, and parents recognized that the changing work landscape required a different approach to preparation. And as a high school diploma increasingly became an economic lifeline, the number of high schools grew by an average of one per day for 30 years. Soon America was producing a higher percentage of high school graduates than any other country on the planet.
We are at another such turning point. In recent months, we have seen the direction in which some states are moving toward exceptions to key provisions of federal K-12 education law. A proposal from Alabama — one of the states leading the “Southern surge” in educational outcomes — focuses on redesigning high schools so that all young people are prepared for work and life. If other states follow, we may be on the cusp of the most significant transformation of American secondary education in a century.
The urgency is real. Today, only 61% of students who enroll in college earn a degree within six years, and more than half of those who graduate are underemployed.
As new technologies challenge age-old notions of what it means to be prepared for the economy, it should come as no surprise that states are reconsidering their expectations for America’s high school.
Alabama makes its answer clear. It recognizes that while college is still a powerful path, it is not the only one. Your waiver request reflects the recognition that if we are serious about preparing students for adult life, we must recognize that the requirements for college admission and the requirements for success in the workforce are not always the same. So instead of relying solely on a college admissions test, the state has proposed testing every student for both their college and career readiness.
As part of their plan, students would be required to demonstrate proficiency in interpreting data and navigating complex real-world documents, as well as completing purely academic tasks such as solving quadratic equations.
The public schools superintendent put it bluntly: 67% of Alabama’s high-skill jobs pay above average wages, and students deserve to be prepared.
The skills required for these jobs are not new: critical thinking, communication, collaboration, adaptability, digital literacy and work ethic. What is new is the idea that the development of academic and professional skills is at the heart of the high school experience. It’s time we move away from our sole focus on teaching students what to think and build high schools that teach students how to think.
For some, such a tectonic shift in what high school should look like poses a threat. The work is unfamiliar and seems risky, just as advanced math or learning to read complex texts might have seemed foreign to our agricultural-era counterparts. Others express concern that schools are focusing too much attention on the short-term needs of the labor market. Ultimately, our public schools aspire to do much more than just prepare workers for jobs.
These concerns deserve serious answers. Of course, we must beware of useless tracking and strictly avoid diluting things. But that’s not what’s happening in Alabama. The state’s goal is to make applied teaching and learning across the high school level more rigorous, interactive and relevant.
Furthermore, state leaders recognize that the country’s economic needs and our broader educational aspirations are two sides of the same coin. A student who learns to deal with ambiguity, understand evidence, and strengthen their ability to synthesize will be better prepared not only for a career, but also for the demands of citizenship. The skills that enable a young person to succeed in the modern economy are the same skills that sustain a functioning democracy. Aligning secondary education with the future economy is essential to shared prosperity, which in turn provides a foundation for sustaining a vibrant and inclusive democracy.
There are challenging tasks ahead of us. We need to develop research-backed standards to confidently define workforce skills and develop and invest in tools to reliably assess these skills. We are not yet where we need to be.
However, states like Alabama are not waiting for approval. They are doing the difficult and necessary work to change expectations and lay the foundation for a more promising future for young people across the state. A century ago, we didn’t tinker with the high school model. We built thousands of new ones. The disruption that is coming to us is no less. The question is not whether we can afford to act. It’s about whether we can afford to continue to pretend we don’t have to.
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https://fortune.com/2026/07/08/ai-jobs-high-school-education-reform-alabama-carnegie-tim-knowles/
