All Work and No Play? Listening to What Kids Really Want from Out-of-School Time
Public AgendaNovember 16, 2004
Public AgendaNovember 16, 2004
Achieve, Inc. 2004
We've heard plenty about the outsourcing of American jobs to "Asian Tiger" economies and about the swell of graduate students from other countries (India especially) coming to the U.S. to take high-tech and research positions.
As Checker Finn noted last month, "the NEXT BIG THING in education reform is a serious focus on high school." (Click here for more.) Among the bipartisan chorus calling for high school reform are a few who ascribe America's staggering college drop-out problem to inadequacies in the high schools.
Two decades after being diagnosed as "a nation at risk," academic standards for U.S. primary and secondary schools are more important than ever-and the quality of those standards matters enormously.
Why it seems like only yesterday. . . . Oops, sorry, this is not to be a sappy reminiscence by an aging fogey. (Well, aging, maybe.) But in greeting 2005, I want to explain some momentous changes these past four decades, for American education and for me.
It's a new year and new fights loom in state legislatures. In Utah, buoyed by a study suggesting that it might save $1.2 billion in K-12 costs by allowing students to enroll in private schools, proponents plan to push a tuition tax credit plan. But they've got the state's biggest newspaper, the Salt Lake Tribune, against them, as well as the teacher unions.
College and university campuses across the country claim to be bastions of diversity, where students of every sort come together to learn, socialize and solve the great issues of the day.