Class Update: 2/3/11

The first topic on the agenda today was about an organization called Teach for America. Teach for America’s goal is to improve the quality of education in low-income communities.  This organization takes college degree graduates of all academic majors, trains them in a rigorous training program, and in return, they commit to teach in urban and rural public schools for two years. They are working to eliminate educational inequality. This falls under the new concept, alternative licensure. High education schools are collaborating with Teach for America in the hopes to get their employees licensed.

We watched a video presentation given by speaker Tony Wagner, who wrote the book, The Global Achievement Gap. Tony Wagner feels that even the best schools in the United States today do not teach what our children need to survive in the 21st century job market. The seven survival skills are as follows:
1. Critical thinking and Problem Solving.
2. Collaboration Across Networks, and Leading by Influence.
3. Agility and Adaptability.
4. Initiative and Entrepreneurialism.
5. Effective Oral and Written Communication. 
6. Accessing and Analyzing Information.
7. Curiosity and Imagination.

I found this fact particularly interesting, Effective Oral and Written Communication is the number one complaint about recent high school and college graduates, by their employers.

Finally, we read an adapted article from Linda Darling-Hammond's The Flat World and Education: How America's Commitment to Equity will Determine Our Future. This article talks about our current crisis in the education system in the United States today, and discusses changes that need to be made to transform our education system into the 21st century. We broke into our small groups and discussed the article.

I think the numbers speak for themselves; the United States is ranked thirty-fifth out of the top forty countries in math. In Science, we ranked twenty-ninth out of forty. These numbers have dropped since the year 2000 when the No Child Left Behind Act was introduced. These are scary statistics to me, and I agree with Linda Darling-Hammond and Tony Wagner, our Education System needs to be transformed and brought into the 21^st Century.