Sunday, November 21, 2010

In Education - Are We Finally Getting It?

Our education system continues in a downward spiral. This opinion piece by Tom Friedman of the New York Times gives me some hope. I come from a prejudice that our system is just a baby sitter for both teachers and students. We talk about the importance of education but reality shows that we are only paying it lip service. Performance seems to be dropping especially when compared to the rest of the world. Maybe Secretary of Education Duncan recognizes fundamentally what needs to be done. If the quote below is an indication, I salute him.

“We have to reward excellence,” he said. “We’ve been scared in education to talk about excellence. We treated everyone like interchangeable widgets. Just throw a kid in a class and throw a teacher in a class.” This ignored the variation between teachers who were changing students’ lives, and those who were not. “If you’re doing a great job with students,” he said, “we can’t pay you enough.”

For the entire opinion piece by Mr. Friedman, go to:

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