Education Secretary Arne Duncan is traveling around speaking and listening to ideas from the public. Wisely, he is also engaging with the public online. Here’s a snippet from his Ed.gov announcement:
I will be going to 15 other places across the country to continue this conversation.
There is one more place I will be going to listen and learn. Here.
In the coming weeks, I will ask questions here. Topics will include raising standards, strengthening teacher quality, using data to improve learning, and turning around low-performing schools.
But I will be reading what you say. So will others here at the U.S. Department of Education.
Today, I want to start with a simple set of questions:
Many states in America are independently considering adopting internationally-benchmarked, college and career-ready standards. Is raising standards a good idea? How should we go about it?
I’m real glad to hear that he is going online, though sad that the democratic engagement piece is missing several key online tools that have become the norm, including on Obama’s transition website, tools such as the ranking of comments and commenting on comments, which would greatly encourage a conversation rather than a straight posting of disconnected thoughts.
Nonetheless, I suggest people go to the site and add their comment. As Duncan wrote, he and members of the U.S. Department of Education will be reading these comments, and I’m taking them at their word. (I surely hope that Obama and his inner circle will be reading them as well, or informed about them from Duncan, so that Obama stays current on the voices of the people on education issues).
Here’s my comment, already posted:
Yes, we should raise standards. But I would differ from your statement about the kinds of standards we should identify and to which we should hold schools accountable. We live in a democratic society grounded in the values of participatory decision-making, individual freedom, personal and community responsibility, and social justice. Therefore, let’s hold schools accountable to practicing those values and nurturing them in young people. Specifically, we might assess the extent to which schools:
- support the voices of students, teachers, parents, and community members in educational decision-making
- provide opportunities for young people to have degrees of control over their own learning
- nurture in students the skills of creativity, curiosity, intellectual development (which is distinct from memorizing academic facts), compassion, cooperation, and self-direction they need to be contributing members of society.
Let us not simply look at young people as adults-in-training to uniformly train into the future workforce. Young people are individuals with unique interests and rights, and the goal of education goes broader than career and workforce. It involves the growth and empowerment of young people to lead successful, happy lives and to be leaders and stewards of the values and rights that form the basis our democratic society.
Ultimately, the over-riding standard for schools in a democracy ought to be that schools are a beacon of democratic values and practice. How can we possibly hope for the strengthening of a more vibrant democratic society without creating spaces for young people to live and learn in democratic environments?
What do you have to say? Join the conversation. Here’s the link again.
Raising standards is a wonderful idea. All the “No Child Left Behind” program did was lower them. I know first hand. I just graduated from a public high school in Tennessee. School became a joke. Credits were basically handed to people just to make the school look good. This was very frustrating to me and others in honors and the IB program. Many students work very hard for their grades and it’s very discouraging to see some one else recieve the same credit as you when they weren’t even in class half the time. My school went about bettering itself the wrong way. They tried to control the kids with force and unnecessary rules, when I believe that higher standards will in effect “control” them. I think that giving students more freedom on small issues will keep them happy even if standards are higher. High standards will require the students to be more focused on school. Those who don’t follow the trend will learn quick enough.
Education begins in the cradle. More people would improve if we prepared a manual for parents that would entail information that a child should internalize as he grows such as, days of the week and how to read a calendar.identification of the letters of the alphabet, how to talk in sentences, how to greet people. the names of family members and other personal information, lef to right progression, parts of the body, flowers, plants and vegetables, etc..
It might even include some lesson plans. It takes insight to use a developmental process for teaching information.