6 Things the United States Needs if We Want Another Globally Competitive Generation
I happened to be cruising the internets and stumbled upon this article. She had 9. I’ve got 6.
1. Universal Pre-K
No secrets here. Quality Pre-K programs can prepare disadvantaged students for academic success and teach more fortunate students empathy. It’s no magic bullet and we still need to insure quality, but c’mon, this is a no brainer.
Rigorous studies have found that high-quality preK education programs can improve children’s learning and development in both the short and long term, but public preK programs have on average performed less well than researcher-designed model programs (Camilli, Vargas, Ryan, & Barnett, 2010; Duncan & Magnuson, 2013). The extent to which today’s state preK programs produce the types and magnitudes of effects associated with persistent academic improvements in smaller-scale studies remains unclear (Bailey, Duncan, Odgers, & Yu, 2017).
2. Foreign Language Instruction
Guess what? We want our citizens to be competitive globally, but only on our terms. Our students overall don’t learn a second language and what’s more troubling, it doesn’t seem as if we are in a hurry to fix this. The best time for students to learn a new language is in elementary school, but this is also the least likely time for them to be exposed. Unless your parents speak another language in your home, you’re really unlikely to be bilingual in our society. Contrary to popular belief, there ain’t a lot of English speakers in the world.
4. A Viable Teacher Pipeline
The entire country is suffering from a teacher shortage that is a product of teachers being undervalued, underpaid, and under prepared. Paying teachers more money is a start, but it’s still not a panacea. The key is to also create and maintain the opinion that teachers and teaching is valuable. Our country, our states, and local districts have done very poor jobs of portraying teaching as valuable work that needs to be done in order to maintain our country’s position in the first world.
Creating a teacher pipeline that is sustainable has to be something that is invested in. This means creating a system to funnel highly qualified and highly motivated people into the teaching ranks and giving them the reasons to remain teachers. Which brings me to…
5. Diversity in the Teaching Ranks
In a country of ever changing demographics, teaching is stuck in a time vortex. The vast majority of teachers are white ladies. This isn’t a sustainable model especially when we consider that study after study after study seems to point to the fact that this homogeneity isn’t helping create successful situations for our learners. In fact, even students seem to crave diversity amongst the teaching ranks. Tapping into this might be the key to insuring that we don’t have teacher shortages any longer.
What if we told high achieving neighborhood students that state governments would pay for their college educations in exchange for their teaching for 6 years after graduation? With the high cost of education and the drain on future earnings that student loans can have, my guess is that many students would cue up in order to be eligible. After the 6 year term, they would free to continue teaching or begin another career.
This would also allow communities to be served by students that live there. They would know the neighborhoods, the families, the in and the outs. They wouldn’t be viewed as outsiders but as native sons and daughters returning to ameliorate their neighborhoods. Which brings me to…
6. Doing Education with Communities
We’ve got a bad habit of treating people, especially poor people and people of color, like they are unable to contribute to solution finding. These groups tend to have a bad taste in their mouth because we do education TO them, rather than WITH them. Involving the communities in which schools sit an opportunity to be contributors to the decisions made and the rationale behind those decisions could lessen the animus that can be palpable many times. This is the absolute key to legislation being passed and conditions being improved. If the communities stand with the schools, there’s nothing that can’t be accomplished.
