What Schools Need

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In his Inauguration Speech, President Obama declared, “We will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.” What must President Obama and the Congress do to lift our schools from the 40-year decline they have suffered under both Republican and Democratic leadership?

The answers are not simple – standardized tests and sanctions have evidently not been enough. What is needed is a national commitment to creating schools in which the best people want to make lifelong careers as educators. This means not only better salaries for teachers but better school leaders and much improved support from families. It means health care for children, universally available pre-school for three-year-olds, and affordable day care for all families. It means that families turn off televisions and turn on reading lamps for everyone so that literacy skills and imagination are fostered. Children begin their education at birth and need families who care for them, talk to them, feed them nutritious food, and give them drug- and violence-free homes.

We need an educational system that learns from the best of its past and the best of what’s happening across the world. Every child should be bi-or tri lingual in the United States of America. Every child should have the choice of attaining his or her highest educational outcomes so that the nation is rebuilt by people who produce good things for the 21st Century. This means more mathematics and science, of course, but it also means learning a moral center, a commitment to altruism, and a patriotism that is grounded in community good.

The Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at UC Santa Barbara welcomes the challenges and change sure to come as it celebrates a hundred years of preparing educators in Santa Barbara. Two events, out of several this winter and spring, bear special mentioning as the country welcomes a new federal administration. The events were planned to reflect major challenges facing the state and the nation if we are to embrace our moral responsibility to care for and educate children. They also represent examples of the Gevirtz’s School special mission to present accurate, research-based, and non-partisan information to our local and national communities.

The first was Accountability in K-12 Education: Where Do We Go from Here? This event, on February 9, was the third in our “Policy Goes to School” series, featuring candid and hard hitting discussions of the real effects of the past eight years of the No Child Left Behind legislation on children’s learning, and how we can and must move forward to support schools in closing the pernicious achievement gap that plagues U. S. schools.

The second event, still coming up, is also free and open to the community: a lecture by the nationally acclaimed child advocate Marian Wright Edelman on February 23 at 7:30 p.m. at UCSB Campbell Hall. Ms. Edelman, the founding president of The Children’s Defense Fund, is a noted author and speaker. Her talk will highlight her latest book, The Sea is So Wide and My Boat is So Small: Charting a Course for the Next Generation, in which she defines what our nation must do for its children if it is to be a great and enduring nation.

Both these events are timely for our School as we plan our move into our new building with a renewed sense of mission for the next hundred years. We invite the community to come to our February centennial events and be part of the change that we need to save American public education, which after all, is the foundation of our greatness as a nation. Together we can all proceed to innovate, imagine, and inspire. -UCSB's Gevirtz Graduate School of Education Dean and Professor Jane Close Conoley

Related Links

• Policy Goes to School series
• Edelman talk details

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