The Global Search for Education: More Focus on Change

C. M. Rubin -- In the US we have been on the opposite course of countries Rosetta Stone V3 that have been succeeding educationally....Early Steps to School Success, Save the Children US Programs (photo: Rick DElia)“I saw crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children alike” ? President Barack Obama, 2008Change is painful. Change takes time. Change is trial and error, but isn’t Change ultimately brought about by leadership which has the ability to rally all the policy makers around the all important higher purpose – that of educational excellence?Yes we can close the achievement gap. Yes we can improve our teachers. Yes we can improve our overall education system. Difficult as these changes are to face now, what is the alternative in five years time for our students and our nation if we don’t?This week in The Global Search for Education, I asked Linda Darling-Hammond, with her vast experience in education research, teaching and policy, to focus on Change we can believe in.Linda is Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education at Stanford University and is co-director of the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education. She is a former president of the American Educational Research Association and member of the National Academy of Education. In 2006, Darling-Hammond was named one of the nation’s ten most influential people affecting educational policy over the last decade. In 2008-09, she headed President Barack Obama’s education policy Rosetta Stone French V3 transition team. President Obama owns a copy of her best-selling book, The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine our Future.What is the impact of poverty on educational quality?Poverty influences outcomes around the globe, but the effects of socioeconomic status on students’ achievement are larger in the US than in most other countries. Students in more affluent communities do very well. For example, on PISA, US ?students in? schools serving fewer than 10% of kids in poverty rank above all other countries in the world in reading. Meanwhile , students in schools with high poverty rank near the bottom.?One of the unspoken issues in the United States is that we have more and more kids living in poverty (1 in 4 overall – far more than any other industrialized country), and more and more schools catering to children in concentrated poverty (ratio of over 50% of children). Those are schools that also often get fewer resources from the state. Because of the recession, our tattered safety net, our not paying attention to the issues of growing poverty, the share of high poverty schools is increasing. In high-achieving ?countries, there are virtually no Steelers Jerseys schools where more than 10% of the children live in poverty because in general, childhood poverty rates are much lower.Save the Children ESSS program builds strong foundation for early learning (photo: Rick DElia)What does that mean in terms of changes we need to make?I would argue that we have to think about changes in two ways.