That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [68]
At the Annual Conference held at Yale on October 29, 2010, James Toltz, who teaches English at Middletown High School in Delaware, said this about participating in the Institute: “Recently my wife asked me, ‘How long do you think you can keep teaching?’ If she had asked me this one year ago, my answer might have been a few more years, maybe five at the most. My answer is just a little bit different now, and it extends from my experience here at Yale … We talk all the time about how we need to inspire our students, and we do, but once in a while we forget that we also need to inspire our teachers.”
By the way, very few people go into teaching for the money, but many people leave teaching because of the money—especially men. If we really want to show our appreciation for teachers, we need to find innovative ways to pay them more.
Politicians: If we want better teachers, politicians will have to become better educators. They have to educate the country about the world in which we’re living, about the vital role education now plays for our economy and our national security, about why raising standards is imperative, and about the skills that students need to acquire. They need to understand that part of their job is traveling around the country, and even the world, to understand the best practices in education so that they can both lead and inform the debate about these issues in their communities. It is vital to our economic growth.
State officials should be competing with one another to raise their educational standards and to demonstrate creativity in using education dollars. For a while, just the opposite was going on. When Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, it mandated that students had to achieve certain standards each year for their schools to benefit from federal funding, but it left it to each state to determine those standards. In recent years, as those standards remained unmet, many states simply lowered them to make it easier for students to pass tests and for schools to avoid the penalty of lost funding or being labeled a “failing school.” Nothing could be more dangerous in today’s world.
In response, in 2009 the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers initiated a nationwide effort to set common standards, enlisting experts in English and math from the College Board and the ACT, and from Achieve, Inc., a group that has long pushed to firm up high school graduation standards. This effort was reinforced by the Department of Education’s Race to the Top initiative, in which states were invited to compete for a share of $4 billion in school improvement money by showing a path to raising academic achievement. States competing in Race to the Top earned extra points for participating in the common effort to establish national standards and then adopting them.
Arne Duncan often complains that one of his biggest challenges as secretary of education is that too many Americans believe that their local schools are basically fine and that it is someone else’s school that needs fixing. One reason people feel this way is that they are comparing their school with the one in the neighborhood or district next door. The relevant comparison is between their school and P.S. 21 in south Taipei or north Seoul or west Shanghai. This will become apparent when their children apply to college and find themselves competing with the graduates of those schools. Good enough is just not good enough anymore.
“One thing that has been missing is honesty,” said Jack Markell, the governor of Delaware, which was one