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.

While state policymakers endeavor to rewrite budgets for the upcoming school year with fewer dollars, let's remember the urgent needs of our students who deserve an education that will prepare them for success in college, career and citizenship.

School leaders across the state must be wondering how they will refocus the attention of faculty, staff, parents, even students, away from the overwhelming feelings of sacrifice, loss, change and uncertainty related to significant budget reductions. It will be imperative over the next few weeks for principals to shift the conversation away from brutal facts and return it to the enduring values embedded in the minds and hearts of all educators: good teaching and learning.

More imperative than the largely technical issues related to balancing the budget are the stark realities of a world that has changed, and students that have changed so dramatically that the instructional models we have been familiar with all our lives are becoming increasingly obsolete. Perhaps more alarming than shrinking budgets is a growing sense that educators are experiencing a sense of crisis with regards to what is taught, and how it is taught, as their best efforts fail to achieve hoped-for results in a world that demands new skills and competencies for all students.

Students today are different than when most adults were in school. They learn differently, they are differently motivated, and they are not inclined to respond with enthusiasm to a "business-as-usual" approach to learning. Our students are learning all the time, in what they call "real time," using resources most of us are uncomfortable and/or unfamiliar with: podcasting, blogging, social learning networks, video games, virtual worlds, Skype, mobile media such as cell phones — students nowadays process information and communicate with one another 24/7 with advanced technological platforms that are inexpensive and provide worldwide access.

Let's not argue about whether students are interested in learning; instead let's get a grip on the fact that WE are not adept at providing an education that is relevant to them. Most of Hawai'i's high school students aspire to attend college, so let's use the problem stated by Tony Wagner of Harvard University: "We are not preparing our students for success in college."

We say that many of our schools are "college preparatory." I take that to mean that we prepare our students for entrance to college, but are less concerned about college completion. Prestigious public and private high schools point to the annual publication of their lists of colleges where their graduates have been accepted. Note that these same schools do NOT typically publish data on how well their students perform at college, fields of study that students are pursuing, and most importantly, data on college completion.

Our best public and private high schools teach a curriculum that is designed to please college admission directors; it is content-rich, focused on covering material that will likely be on the tests, and is "rigorous" from a traditional point of view. Would it surprise you to know that some college admission directors no longer agree with or encourage this approach?

The New York Times recently quoted William Fitzsimmons, the dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard, saying, "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."

There is growing anecdotal evidence that the skills needed to do well in college are vastly different than those we are teaching in high school. There is some evidence that a high school senior's attendance record is a better predictor of first year success in college than his or her SAT scores.

Thoughtful "back-to-school" conversations, led by school principals who are striving to become "change leaders" might focus on any of the 21st-century capacities identified by business leaders and college professors as essential for student success. Here are two of these newly defined capacities, requisite for our graduates when they leave our schools.