The Future of Education: The New Secretary of Education's Five Questions
Friday, January 09, 2009
Posted by Steve Hargadon
Posted by Steve Hargadon
I want to encourage you to share your thoughts on the new "Future of Education" Community.I've started this community to provide an opportunity for those who care about education to share their voices and ideas on charting the course of education in a networked world. It's a place for thoughtful discussion on an incredibly important topic. The site will launch officially at the end of the month with the start of a weekly interview series, but I'm inviting some participation now because of an email Carol Broos sent out.
Carol is one of twelve teachers who have been invited to participate in a round table discussion concerning the direction of education with the new Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on January 21. She was sent the following questions, and is asking for feedback and ideas. You can respond either at the new http://www.FutureofEducation.com site or her wiki at http://education20.pbwiki.com/FrontPage. Here are the questions:
1. What is the one most important education issue you wish Secretary Duncan to focus on during his tenure and why?
2. How shall the tenets of the No Child Left Behind act be altered or invigorated? What are its positives? How can its negatives be improved?
3. How should the new administration respond to the nation’s need for better prepared and more qualified teachers?
4.What should the new administration do to increase student engagement in mathematics, the sciences and the arts?
5. How should funding equity issues be addressed?
There is also a discussion topic on what questions were not asked that might have been.
Thank you so much for helping Carol. If you like the idea of this site, and would like to help or have any ideas, please let me know at steve@hargadon.com.
[Cross-posted from www.stevehargadon.com. Driving into the unknown photo by http://flickr.com/photos/miikka_skaffari/2692030222/]
Labels: arneduncan, carolbroos, futureofeducation
1 Comments:
Thanks for posting this, I sent it to the Vermont ED TECH List Serv. Instead of responding to all of these (of which I have many thoughts), I thought I'd send a short comment about Question No. 4 resulting for something I overhead this week. Increasing student engagement is mathematics, sciences, and the arts is going to be very difficult as long as we keep measuring a school's success only by its math and reading scores. I've been watching schools trying to make AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress benchmarks) submit their plans to the Department of Education and these plans decrease the amount the time and quality of science and arts instruction. Both these disciplines are becoming peripheral in school action planning; and resources for mathematics instruction are mostly allocated to intervention (getting kids who are below the standard to meet the 'standard'). How about adding measures of success for a school that include creativity and inquiry. It takes a brave and insightful leader with foresight about the impact to our children and our country to make decisions in our schools that ensure that the arts and science education do not continue to decrease in value in schools.
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