President Obama talked today about nations passing us by in math and science and Secretary Duncan announced a new initiative to recruit 10,000 new science and math teachers over the next two years. He also talked about the need for parents to demand the best for their children and to create the political climate where failure will not be tolerated. As part of the solution he suggested that everyone needs to knock on the door of their public school whether they have children or not and ask what they can do to help.
This program and the Waiting for Superman movie once again have raised the profile of public education. Will it make any difference or will it simply be relegated to the back pages and disappear from the airwaves as has happened so often in the past?
4 comments:
Hope is not a strategy. I would argue that what we have seen so far, no matter how well intentioned, will not be transformative. It will have impacts. It will lead to improved educational experience for some students. That, of course, is a good thing. But it won't be transformative across the board. Sturctural changes are called for, and structural changes are being proposed and enancted. And some changes may be influencing some people's mental models. But it won't be enough. The work that is happening is, ultimately, just tinkering around the edges. I imagine something like this: Maybe we are upgrading the engine, the interior, or the suspension of our car. And that is all good. Maybe it will transform our beater car into something better...except that what we failed to recognize was that we while we've always built cars we should have been building boats.
These changes don't get to the heart of what teachers do. Until they do, while we'll all be riding in better cars, we'll still be missing the boat.
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