By Helen Vollmer, President, Southwest
Education Reform. Heavy sigh. We hear a lot
about it, but from my experience in querying people about it, the general
response is,” yeah, we need it.” But few can tell you what it is, what’s
being done about it and at what cost (both financially and personally).
This issue of E-volution is all about education from some of
our experts in the field. As we grapple with very real and emerging
issues that affect us as a nation and society in general, one thing is
certain. Education is a very complex undertaking.
In fact, education reform is so complex that it has been a
topic of discussion since Plato’s time (The Republic). Thomas
Jefferson advocated ambitious reforms for public schooling, as did Rousseau,
Thoreau, Dewey (remember the Dewey Decimal system?), Montessori and Bush (No Child
Left Behind).
Clearly, no one has found the silver bullet yet to education
reform. In the meantime, according to an OECD report, the United States
which ties for first place with Switzerland in annual spending per student,
still lags far behind the schools of other wealthy nations in reading, math and
science.
Education topics we all have a stake in include
accountability, accessibility, teacher quality, curriculum standards, bilingual
education, teacher quality, class sizes, instructional philosophies, academic
standards, digital approaches, and mainstreaming students with learning
disabilities. And, oh, yes, did I say funding?
Education should not be a partisan issue but, of course, it
is. The debate will rage on. All we can do is educate ourselves, have a
voice and work within our communities to better schools and academic
approaches. As schools and universities gear back up, let’s not forget we
can always raise our educational standards for those to come. We can do
better.
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