Oct
25
Sunday Morning Ramblings
October 25, 2009 | Tagged ramble, sunday morning | Leave a Comment
“Our education failure is the largest contributing factor to the decline of the American worker’s global competitiveness, particularly at the middle and bottom ranges,” argued Martin, a former global executive with PepsiCo and Kraft Europe and now an international investor.
“That is the key to understanding our full education challenge today. Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them work could have a long wait. Those with the imagination to make themselves untouchables — to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies — will thrive.” Thomas Friedman
“A year ago, it all exploded. Now that we are picking up the pieces, we need to understand that it is not only our financial system that needs a reboot and an upgrade, but also our public school system. Otherwise, the jobless recovery won’t be just a passing phase, but our future.” Thomas Friedman
If you haven’t read it yet, take time to read Tom Friedman’s editorial in the New York Times three days ago. Fundamentally, he is correct that the key to change is education. We have to address the issues of 20th century teaching vs 21st century teaching to bring change in schools. School seems so stuck in the past that we can’t see the future. Not a surprise, we noticed a Google in South Carolina hired people globally to work in there new plant. In our local high school, students would rather hide instead of taking the South Carolina High School Assessment Program (HSAP), which students are required to pass in order to graduate from high school. These are the kids who have no dreams and the kids who could not play by the rules of “school”. Then we have students who know the rules so well and they do well but aspire to be production workers at the local steel mill or the paper company. These are jobs that may not exist in a few years. Then we do have our achievers who go in life and excel.
We have maintained our standard of living by borrowing and overconsuming above and beyond our real income. When the Great Recession wiped out all the credit and asset bubbles that made that overconsumption possible, it left too many American workers not only deeper in debt than ever, but out of a job and lacking the skills to compete globally. Wall Street sold us out by borrowing money from Asia- China especially who has been stock piling American dollars for years. We are not the industrial nation that we use to be. We are a new nation that takes great pride in learning from our past, but to move forward, we must be able to accept the challenges of change.
Education reform can lead that change in this nation. We have to stop putting band aid to fix our low test scores. We have to rethink testing and accountability. We have to revisit No Child Left Behind. We have pay attention to what is working in schools that are successfull. Public, private, or charter schools- it should not matter. The general public may not know what is best for a school. For the last two years, I was in a school that the culture of the community hindered the education process. Athletics was the community’s priority. I live in a state where a political machine plays a great influence in the agenda of schools. We have to remove the political agenda from “school”.
“Bottom line: We’re not going back to the good old days without fixing our schools as well as our banks.” Thomas Friedman
Just read the article…..
