Archive for September, 2008
Chairman Emeritus, Character Education Partnership
Young people today face problems of a poor work ethic, drug abuse, sexual activity, violence, lying, cheating, stealing, and bullying. These are all character related problems. Throughout history, and in cultures around the world, education rightly conceived has had two great goals: to help students become smart and to help them become good. They need good character for both. The need moral character (e.g. honesty, responsibility, respect, caring) in order to behave ethically, strive for social justice, and live and work in community. They need performance character (e.g. hard work, initiative, courage, perseverance) in order to enact their moral principles and succeed in school and in life. To be a [Read more...]
Forge Partnerships to Provide Additional Services to Schools
Additional learning time has been a proven way to help struggling students; studies say some students lose up to 40% of their learning over summer break; subjects like art, music and history are shortchanged in place of test-taking. With a tight budget and unable to extend the school day or school year, the federal government should work to form efficient and productive partnerships with non-profits and NGO\’s who have funding and expertise of their own.
We should be leveraging the skills and focus of these experts and create an infrastructure where organizations can work with school systems to help create after-school programs, summer school and supplementary art programs. Money is not [Read more...]
A Global Scope
I think that Sarah Palin illustrates a perfect example of a massive failing in the U.S. education policy: a narrow scope in geography and the political sciences. The United States’ unilateralism in foreign policy has seeped into our children’s lives and imaginations. It has profoundly affected young people’s understanding of how broad and diverse the world is.
Integrating a broader and more global curriculum into our increasingly globalized livelihoods is imperative to turning out young people and leaders who are equipped to operate, nay thrive!, in this interdependent world (and global economy)!
This post was submitted by Len J..
Parent Education, Multicultural awareness & no test teaching
I fell in love with teaching at the age of 16 when I became a PT pre-school teacher of three year olds in my country of Puerto Rico. After graduating as a Pre-K to 6grd. teacher I came to the US and once more fell in love with teaching when I was asked if I could teach ESL to Vietnamese and Combodian students.
After 41 years in education I can look back and see that the reason I fell in love with education was because these children also loved education. They loved to come to school to learn! Their eyes shined with hunger for knowledge, something that is missing in the [Read more...]
Comprehensive sex education
The absence of comprehensive sex education is costing this country and young people\’s lives dearly. The abstinence-only sex education policies have played out to dire consequences and its time to re-think the ways in which we talk with young people and deliver social services to the people who need them (often times because of a lack of sex education).
This post was submitted by Grace.
Consider race and community
My first recommendation for the next President of the United States is to change what constitutes a black person in the Constitution. There needs to be an amendment for those of mixed race. I recently learned that what constitutes being black varies from state to state and was even told that if a child’s father is black, then the child is black.
Under No Child Left Behind, data is disaggregated in several ways: gender, ethnicity, poverty, age, attendance, grade level; however, mixed heritage students are miscalculated skewing the data in one way or the other. I have seen some school administrators ask parents if the school can classify a mixed heritage [Read more...]
Treat learning like a process
Mine is pretty short. I’d like administrators, educators, and politicians to remember that learning is a creative process, and treat it as such. That doesn’t mean that children shouldn’t know the multiplication tables, or how to read, add, etc, but that learning these, when done with joy, and not just by rote, awakens a lifetime love of learning and fascination with learning as a response to curiosity, not a sickening dread of endless days of drudgery. Also, school buildings that look like prisons don’t help.
This post was submitted by Celeste Kolodin.
More research and development
There is far too little meaningful R&D into what works in American public education. The federal government should create targeted, competitive grants on a matching fund basis to spur important innovation in districts and schools. The goal of these grants should be to foster and support innovation in a way that helps all schools learn from the efforts of those selected to lead the way.
To be effective, these grants must be large enough to support meaningful programs and stable enough to ensure multi-year implementations.
This post was submitted by Jeff Camp.
Teacher Compensation, Testing Alternatives and more
1. Stimulate Equitable Teacher Compensation: Implement aggressive incentive programs for states or districts to implement something like DC Chancellor Rhee’s compensation program, offering teachers the option to lose tenure, be evaluated based on achievement growth data, and be given compensation on par with their colleagues in the private sector, OR continue along with the status quo compensation and evaluation plan. Give unions and teachers the option to earn more $$, and help seed this idea to help recruit the next generation of teachers away from other industries with competitive compensation.
2. Create incentives for districts to use open-source digital content instead of expensive and heavy 20th century textbooks, saving districts thousands [Read more...]
Get rid of No Child Left Behind
I think that we need to get rid of the no child left behind act. It is a hinderance to teachers who really want to teach. They get bogged down in testing and making sure that they are meeting the test standards that they don’t have time to be quality teachers. Teachers should not be teaching to a test. This is not the most effective way to get through to students and leaves a lot of students behind.
Also, teachers’ salaries need to be increased. With the amount of time and work that goes into being a teacher, if we do not compensate teachers properly, we will not get qualified teachers [Read more...]
