Education leader: Empower teachers, engage parents
BY MICHAEL MARTINEZ • MMARTINEZ@RGJ.COM • MARCH 20, 2010
Parent engagement and customizing learning to meet specific needs are key elements required to foster true education reform, a high-ranking member of the National Education Association said in Reno on Friday.
Lily Eskelsen, a Utah teacher and vice president of the association, spoke to about 600 educators at the NEA's Pacific Region Leadership Conference at the Peppermill, where she detailed successful efforts to bring improvement to what the association calls "priority schools," those institutions that chronically underperform.
Before her address, she talked about the need to empower teachers so they might be integral in school districts' reform efforts and the NEA's campaign to bring real change to the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act, for which a blueprint has been drafted.
"Too many of our kids are dropping out of school, and too many things that were working just fine 20 or 30 years ago aren't working with a new batch of kids," Eskelsen said. "We've got to do things better, we've got to do things in a different way.
"We've all been working under what we all think is total disaster, which is 'No Child Left Untested' and we can't find anybody that says, 'Yeah this works, it's just exactly what we wanted,'" she said.
She said there are enough teachers that have experienced success in various parts of the country.
"All of these folks are here to hear their peers talk about what's working and to take these ideas back