Sunday, September 26, 2010, will mark the beginning of
NBC’s week-long interactive summit “Education
Nation.” This week will feature a
“Learning Plaza” at Rockefeller Plaza, a policy summit with education leaders,
a live online discussion with teachers hosted by NBC’s Brian Williams, and a
full week of NBC broadcasting that will highlight successes, failures,
solutions, and what the future may hold for our school system.
For the entire week, a “Learning Plaza” will be open to the public which will host exhibits devoted to five distinct areas of educational policy: the Learner, the Educator, the School & Community, the Nation, and the Call to Action. A “Teaching Garden” will also be featured to highlight the important link between education and nutrition.
In order to directly involve educators, Brian Williams will host a live online “Teacher Town Hall” on September 26, at 12pm Eastern. Together, these educators will discuss the state of today’s classrooms, and brainstorm new ideas for future generations of teachers and students. To join, click here. CEC encourages you to share the unique role of special educators in schools across the nation!
On September 27-28, top education leaders including: U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Harlem Children Zone’s CEO Geoffrey Canada, and President of MIT Susan Hockfield will participate in a series of panel discussions during an education policy summit to identify the challenges that currently face our educational system, the solutions, and implementation.
NBC’s focus on the future of education comes at a time when Congress has been debating the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, now known as No Child Left Behind. While NCLB was officially due to be reauthorized – rewritten – in 2007, several controversial issues including those impacting students with disabilities continue to be debated. Read CEC’s ESEA reauthorization recommendations and recent Policy Insider blog postings.
An Open Letter to those Waiting for Superman
September 27, 2010
I have been in the youth and education field for over 20 years—for the last seven as a special education teacher, three as an administrator and, since 2007, as an advocate and director of an educational consulting firm. Since the issues of how to improve education have moved to primetime and beyond, it has been the strangest two weeks of my life. For years I have dreamed that these issues would be addressed, discussions would be held and strategic focus would be placed on the growing crisis in public education. Now I have more questions than answers, more concerns than comforts, greater fear and yet, greater hope.
After graduating with a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership, and with the help of several like minded-friends including my business partner Allison Caldwell, we started an educational consulting firm called ED101, Inc. Our goal was to become a place where educational ideas would be approachable to non-educators in hopes of creating the community dialogue and input that schools need to improve—and I knew firsthand that schools and youth programming needed positive change. I started my career at age 15 as a youth counselor in New Jersey. I worked in the New Jersey schools—some of the best in the nation, yet with its Newarks, Trentons and Freeholds as well. I saw the inequity of New Jersey schools and watched once abundant public money that funded youth programs dry up in the 70’s and 80’s recessions. As any homeowner knows, maintaining an improvement is often more difficult and costly than implementing the improvement itself.
I later moved to South Carolina with the jobs, and worked as a private school history teacher and youth director. Soon I learned what inequity really was, and discovered what a portable is. I went from a school system that had seen money for “the extras” dry up, to a section of the country that had never seen the extras—from buildings with well-paid teachers, to trailers as classrooms and teachers that had to hold down a second job just to pay the rent. I once thought that The River Runs Dry was a time that had passed, yet it lives even today in South Carolina. More inequities—North and South, urban and rural, black and white, the top scoring to the lowest—these things still haven’t changed. New Jersey still has one of the best school systems in the country, while South Carolina remains one of the lowest. It makes me wonder: if New Jersey is receiving $100 million, will South Carolina receive even more? I don’t think so. Now almost two decades later, I sit and watch as some of the very issues that I have lived with, thought about and prayed for have finally reached the national spotlight, and I can barely watch. Here are some of the reasons why.
Even now, I am listening to the President speak about the issue of teachers leaving the teaching profession. This one is close to my heart, since I don’t teach full-time anymore for some of the reasons he mentions. He uses a one-minute statement to express the challenges of recruitment and retention of high-quality teachers, to mention programs like Teach for America and to suggest the need for merit pay and administrative support. I spent two years studying this issue in one of the poorest performing districts in the country, and I couldn’t draw the same conclusion that he just did. What I found was that we have some ideas why teachers leave, but a clear solution can’t be applied so easily. In fact, there were many reasons why teachers left the profession, including the birth of a child (or children, with three being a threshold amount); changes in their spouse’s or their own work situation; and, of course, each teacher’s fiscal situation—be it lower or higher. I also learned that a supportive administrator is important to teachers, but what does the administrator support, and what do they support the teachers doing?
My fear is that sound bite answers and the desire for a quick fix could cause more problems than solutions. We lack much of the research necessary to make the right decisions to fix America’s schools, as well the right tools to fix them. We are like barbers suddenly being asked to become surgeons, but without the x-rays or anesthesia, without the numerous experts, doctors, support staff or even the fiscal support needed to perform critical, life-saving surgery. We sometimes know what the patient needs, but we don’t have access to developed medications or behavioral supports. Can you blame the doctor who tells a patient that they must quit smoking—yet the patient never does and later dies from it? Isn’t that what we are doing to teachers and administrators who lose kids that never do their homework or never go to school? It’s so easy to say what needs to be done, but that is the only easy part. How long will this focus continue, and does America have the desire to see it through?
The challenges are great, and results don’t happen overnight. Our company has spent the last three years influencing educational changes not only in South Carolina, but nationally and internationally as well. When we go into an area, we ask several questions: What do the stakeholders know—who are the players, and how much room is there for consensus? How dedicated are they to real change, or are they simply looking for a flash-in-the-pan photo op? How much room is there for outside assistance? How well do local politicians, business leaders, agencies, higher ed and K-12 work together? What support services and how much long-term assistance can they receive? How developed is the research, and do the political systems work well enough to implement the prescriptions? Most importantly, what is the climate and who can help us with the changes that need to occur? Answering these questions helps us determine how much change a system can take without total collapse, resulting in more harm than good. Are we flexible enough to change while maintaining the stability that schools provide? I wonder if these kinds of questions were seriously considered before the media blitz before us was born. Why now, and how serious are we about honestly addressing these issues and giving true educational reform the attention and support it deserves?
Schools are not political footballs—they are the backbones of many communities that have lost a lot over the last 10 years. We are in a very conflictive period in our nation. Major pieces of legislation directly linked to education remain unaddressed on the floor of Congress, and state and local budgets look very weak for next year. It is important to note that some argue that the decline of our nation’s educational system began when school board appointments became paid, politicized positions. How many people are really willing to get involved?
There is clear evidence that schools can change, that children have changed (yet there has been very little discussion of crucial generational issues), and we all know that the world has changed. The real question is—can we adults change? Whether taxpayer, board member, educator, parent, professor or politician—we all must change for the sake of our children’s futures. Our willingness or refusal to do so is the one big variable in implementing effective educational reform—are we willing to change who we are and what we believe to become what we can and should be together? If you are waiting for Superman, you’d better find a phone booth quickly. Superman is you, my friends—and that raises another question: has anyone seen a phone booth lately?
Theodore Darid Mauro, Ph.D.
Educational and Training Director
ED101, Inc.
www.ed101.org
ted@ed101.org
Posted by: Theodore D. Mauro | 09/28/2010 at 05:18 PM