Holiday Wishes for Education
With only three weeks of shopping left in this holiday season, we here at ICW often get asked what holiday gifts we would wish to see. While we might individually dream of a Blu-Ray player or a Nintendo Wii (and yes, these are hints for my wife), as a group, we have more modest wishes to improve our education system. So if you’re at the mall this year, keep an eye open for these five fantastic gifts, along with complementary stocking-stuffers to make the season (and our future) bright:
1. Stronger, more rigorous educational standards throughout the country – This one truly is the gift that has the potential to keep on giving. By instituting more rigorous standards across the country, we will better ensure that our students will be prepared for their postsecondary education and career goals, as well as ensure that our businesses have a renewable source of well-skilled employees to meet their personnel needs.
Stocking-Stuffer: More dynamic testing that measures a student’s grasp of this rigorous content, not just their memorization of it. This would mean more extended response questions that challenge the student’s ability to analyze information critically and problem solve.
2. More of those innovative charter schools – Charter schools can provide parents and students alike with more options that better suit their educational needs. These schools are often bastions of intriguing, innovative practices that are made possible by increased flexibility in their operations and personnel decisions. You wouldn’t limit yourself to one store for all of your holiday shopping - why would you do it for your child’s education?
Stocking-Stuffer: Better enforced accountability among existing charter schools. Schools that are failing to meet their students’ needs should not exist, regardless of what kind of school they might be. Having a charter school system without the threat of having a charter revoked misses the point of the exercise completely and certainly should not be construed as leaving coal in the students’ stockings, as it often is.
3. Greater transparency for postsecondary education – If so many people revile the U.S. News and World Report’s annual ranking of our nation’s colleges, why do they get so much attention each year? The answer is simple – it’s as good of a tool to hold postsecondary institutions accountable as any that we currently have. That alone should speak volumes to the black hole of data coming from our colleges and universities. Postsecondary data will never be as easy to come by or measure as our elementary and secondary education system because, for the most part, everyone is learning something different. Still, there’s little excuse for not having better transparency among some simple factors such as completion, retention, and remediation rates. With tuition rates acting increasingly like the Grinch each year, it’s not much to ask that they have some basic information to base their education decisions upon.
Stocking Stuffer: Improving articulation agreements between community and career colleges and 4-year institutions. Students that work hard and perform well should not be penalized in money and time by having to re-take classes they’ve already completed. It’s a needless barrier to self-improvement that disproportionately hits those that need it most.
4. More support and coordination for career technical education (CTE) – CTE has been proven to help lower dropout rates and raise student achievement levels by adding a much-needed level of relevancy to the classroom experience. By providing them with work-based learning opportunities, dual and concurrent enrollment programs, and the ability to compete with their peers in competitions held by career technical student organizations, you have an educational model that is both innovative and stimulating for students of all ages and abilities. And really - what child wouldn’t want to open up a robotics kit or a biotechnology lab?
Stocking Stuffer: Better programs to improve the number of people that obtain degrees in STEM fields. CTE should be better leveraged to assist in this goal as well, but after a decade of stagnation in this area, we need all the help we can get to keep pace with the likes of China, India, and Korea.
5. A reform minded Secretary of Education – This is the gift we’ve behaved ourselves for all year long. There is simply far too much at stake right now to keep the status quo. We cannot afford to wait another decade to improve the skills of our workforce, and having a Secretary in place that is willing to try new methods and initiatives is vital to maintaining our standing in a global economy.
Stocking Stuffer: Better coordination between Departments of Education and Labor, both federally and in states. Labor and education are two sides of the same coin, and as such, we’d be delighted to find them working more collaboratively to achieve their common goals.
On behalf of all of us here at ICW, we hope you have a safe, healthy, and well-educated holiday season!
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