New challenges, costs face educators

During the CSSP Winter Awards Banquet,  Linda Darling-Hammond was recognized as an outstanding contributor to education and received the CSSP Award for Education Research.  Following her recognition she provided an enlightening presentation to the assembly. 

Darling-Hammond highlighted the challenges that face us, as a nation, in providing quality education for all students.  Her compelling remarks identified several shifts in our society that have caused our current schools to fall behind in meeting the needs of students:

· A changing economy that makes "thinking skills" in knowledge work jobs more important than low job skills.
· Students currently attend schools that were designed in the early 20th Century to meet the demands of an industrial and agricultural society.
· The high costs of under-education have not been addressed. Drop outs cost the US $300 billion per year.  Prison populations have tripled and costs have increased by 600%, now competing with higher education costs.
· Expectations for learning have changed - addressing 21st Century skills.

She also identified initiatives of high-achieving nations:

· universal pre-school,
· substantial investments in teacher education and ongoing support,
· strong long-term relationships with students,
· common curriculum focused on higher order thinking skills,
· performance assessments embedded in curriculum,
· equitable spending with investments in high needs schools.

The inequity in U.S. schools was identified as the major factor in low U.S. rankings on international tests.

Darling-Hammond continued her talk by explaining the No Child Left Behind initiative and elements of the initiative that could be adjusted to provide exceptional schools for all children.

Darling-Hammond  is the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education at Stanford University where she has launched the Stanford Educational Leadership Institute and the School Redesign Network. She has also served as faculty sponsor for the Stanford Teacher Education Program. She is a former president of the American Educational Research Association and member of the National Academy of Education. Her research, teaching, and policy work focus on issues of school restructuring, teacher quality and educational equity. From 1994-2001, she served as executive director of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, a blue-ribbon panel whose 1996 report, What Matters Most: Teaching for America's Future, led to sweeping policy changes affecting teaching and teacher education. In 2006, this report was named one of the most influential affecting U.S. education and Darling-Hammond was named one of the nation's ten most influential people affecting educational policy over the last decade.

Among Darling-Hammond's more than 300 publications are Preparing Teachers for a Changing World: What Teachers Should Learn and be Able to Do (with John Bransford, for the National Academy of Education, winner of the Pomeroy Award from AACTE), Teaching as the Learning Profession: A Handbook of Policy and Practice (Jossey-Bass: 1999) (co-edited with Gary Sykes), which received the National Staff Development Council's Outstanding Book Award for 2000; and The Right to Learn: A Blueprint for Schools that Work, recipient of the American Educational Research Association's Outstanding Book Award for 1998.