First, a disclaimer: I'm borrowing the title of this entry from a very interesting working paper published by the Harvard Business School.

Second, the topic of this week's discussion: an intriguing plan adopted recently by the Virginia State Board of Education that will require all of the state's seventh graders to set academic and career goals for their high school and professional careers.

The goal of the requirement is to push every student to think about their future in the process of engaging in the powerful exercise of visualization and goal-setting. As part of their academic and career plans, the seventh-graders will have to indicate what they plan to study in high school and how their education will help them get into college or find a job. And the board's rule would require teachers and parents to read and sign their support for their students' plans.

In the realm of school reform proposals, the Virginia Board's requirement is truly unique: it is essentially cost-free, is immediately scalable to all students in the state without regard for socio-economic or minority status, and it is something that few interest groups could reasonably propose. With that recipe, one has to wonder why more states haven't yet instituted similar goal-setting requirements.

But the more important question, of course, is what impact the plan will have for the state's youth. Intuitively, the idea is a good one: any student who starts eighth grade without having given serious thought to their life goals--even if only at a surface level--is one who will benefit from the new requirement. Right now, my guess is that low-income and minority children at historically low-performing schools are the ones who have the most to gain from the simple exercise of thinking about one's future life and plans.

To be sure, teachers will need to be effective in their pedagogy around the required plans; that is to say if teachers encourage students to think seriously about their plans and not just write, "I want to be a doctor" and be done with it, the benefits of forward-planning and goal setting may kick in. But if some teachers are allowed to function as just rubber stamps who give their classes thirty minutes to write down whatever comes to mind on a loose leaf piece of paper to turn in to the state, a worthwhile educational opportunity will have been missed.

Incidentally, in looking for a research study or anecdote to point to about the power of goal-setting, the evidence I kept coming across was a 1953 study performed among Yale University students where, allegedly, the 3% of graduating seniors who wrote down their goals for the next twenty years had accumulated more wealth than the other 97% of non-goal-setting graduates combined in that 20 year period.

The only problem is, that study never happened. There are, of course, plenty of theories around the importance of goal-setting (often times found in business school literature), but so too are their counter-veiling papers such as the "Goals Gone Wild" study I mentioned above that point to negative side effects of hyper-drive goal setting machines.

But even those negatives--distorted incentives, reduced intrinsic motivation, narrowed focus against non-goal areas--are ones that don't concern me quite as much in the Virginia plan where students will ostensibly be setting broad, universally positive goals such as, "go to college at X" or "become prepared for a successful career in Y." There's a big difference between those kinds of educational / professional goals and the often abused business goals in earnings forecasts and the like.

All told, it really seems like the Virginia Board has stumbled across a simple, obvious plan that can only help students who are lucky enough to engage in the serious exercise of visualizing their futures. Maybe in twenty years we'll see how much good it actually brought about!