I first heard about The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce on Will Richardson’s blog. He tells us that the full 200+ page study from the National Center on Education and the Economy will be released on Amazon this Friday. You can read the summary by downloading the PDF.

Two choice quotes Richardson pulls:

“This is a world in which comfort with ideas and abstractions is the passport to a good job, in which creativity and innovation are the key to a good life, in which high levels of education-a very different kind of education than most of us have had-are going to be the only security there is. ””Too often, our testing system rewards students who will be good at routine work, while not providing opportunities for students to display creative and innovative thinking and analysis.”

and …

“The one thing that is indispensible is a new system. The problem is not with our educators. It is with the system in which they work.”

Perhaps now that we are starting to recognize the problem on a national level, change might soon be possible? Dare we hope … ?

Another quote Richardson pulls is somewhat disturbing:

“The core problem is that our education and training systems were builtfor another era. We can get where we must go only by changing the system itself. To do that, we must face a few facts. The first is that we recruit a disproportionate share of our teachers from among the less able of the high school students who go to college.”

At first, I was slightly offended by this statement. I’m a teacher, but I don’t feel like I’m among the “less able.” Then I “grew up” again and remembered it’s not all about me. Then I started thinking about the general population of teachers in public schools and had to admit this might be the case. After all, I’m pretty sure I suffered through the classes of some of those people when I was in high school.

Of course, even this is a systemic problem. Why should the best and brightest want to go into a profession where the pay and respect is low and the work required to do the job well demands 50+ hours a week (with compensation for only 35 of those hours)? As a result, the best teachers tend to be those that are the most passionate about helping others and who truly feel a call or a talent for teaching (despite the fact they could often double their salary in the private or government sectors). Unfortunately, those kinds of teachers tend to burn out quickly under the demands and restrictions of the system.

Those that stay? Unfortunately, too many may very well fit the description offered by the NCEE.

Can we please do something about this?

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