Holiday's Over !!

Hopes for 2011


All my hopes for vastly improved American public education are based on a single truth: beyond physical security, there is nothing more important to the nation than education. Our short and long term future depends on a well educated population able to hold the more technical, more complex jobs of today and tomorrow. This requires prowess in, particularly, math and science, but cannot be achieved without the reading levels that will permit the study of both. These basics are just as important for those who take the technical school path as the college bound. We must have two goals: raise achievement levels in these subjects nation-wide, and facilitate pupil movement from school to school.

Given that most Americans today are expected to have about a dozen job changes in their careers, the shape of the schooling may be the more immediately urgent of the two goals. We need a system that provides nation-wide standards, but does not impede local control of content. A system that assures families moving around the country, that they will be able to enter their new school at the level they left their old one. Perhaps a system that eliminates grade levels in favor of information units will be in order.

The achievement levels are almost certainly determined by the quality of teaching provided. This makes it essential that we begin to treat teaching as the invaluable profession that it is. Bad teachers must be removed immediately, and seniority cannot be the determining factor in promotions and lay-offs. Unions that do not serve the best interests of the students must be eliminated. The school day must grow longer, as must the school year. The amount of information that must be taught today cannot be crammed into our present out of sync school year. Perhaps the growth of computer based education will ease that situation, but how is not yet clear.

While all of this can be described in a few paragraphs, solutions will not be that simple. Politics should not be allowed to impede progress. Easily said, not easily done: Budget cuts, jobs priority, teachers unions, and newly elected leadership all raise questions about whether this year will, in the end, move us forward or backward..