We should...

I was listening to an interview yesterday on CNN with Joel Klein, the former Chancellor of New York City Schools. His vision for educational reform not only helped me get through my cardio workout faster;), but really had me thinking more deeply about the impact that his ideas have had on New York schools, but COULD HAVE on the Nation as a whole.

In his interview he spoke to the importance of having highly qualified professionals in teaching.  This means, instead of pulling from the bottom percentage of undergrad classes, we follow the model of other countries and recruit our teachers from the top percentage of graduating classes. This means that we have to start to consider restructuring our system to make this profession more highly marketable to a different audience.  Having highly qualified, innovative,  passionate professionals with a growth mindset in our classrooms has been a source of discussion for years and years, however I beleive the reason we don't tend to pull from the top percentage of graduates, and furthermore we don't retain teachers is because that mindset finds the current "boxed" educational system frustrating.  I don't think it's that we can't recruit, and retain highly qualified educational professionals, it's that our system speaks of growth mindset, but is set up under a fixed mindset system.

According to Klein, we should be able to have the freedom to look at educational systems and structures under a growth mindset, and we need to! This country currently has about 35% of it's graduates college and career ready...35%! There's no excuse for that. Yes, we have college and career ready standards in the common core, but at some point if we really want to put actions behind the language in those standards, we have to have a larger discussion about the systems and structures we currently have in place. If the nation's average is 35% graduating college and career ready, we have an issue...a large issue, and we must begin to have courageous conversations around the WHY?

We need to look at what other countries are doing that are graduating higher percentage of college and career ready students, we have to do some deeper analysis of our current system, and we have to have enough people passionate about changing it to actually advocate for change.

It's time. Students are growing up in a fast-paced, technology driven, very competitve society and yet we remain steady across the board in terms of systems and structures.

It's time for courageous dialogue, and discussion, and more importantly CHANGE!  As educators, we need to have a louder voice in this.  This is our future we are talking about, and yes we can say that and get warm, fuzzy feelings, but this is a very serious issue that we need to attend to in this Nation. It is our duty as citizens, educators, parents etc. to take a step and be a voice for change.