Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Final Thoughts on Expanding Education Opportunity - Bridging Differences - Education Week

Final Thoughts on Expanding Education Opportunity - Bridging Differences - Education Week:


Final Thoughts on Expanding Education Opportunity

Dear Deborah,
As you know, I am about to take off for a sabbatical leave in South Africa, so I will be away for the next few months and will have to take a break from our correspondence in Bridging Differences. I've enjoyed our exchanges, but I will need to focus my time and energy on the important work occurring in the townships of the Eastern Cape. The Centre for the Community School at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University has established a support network with several schools and I will be working with the network while I am there, providing technical assistance to help these schools improve the quality of education and mitigate the effects of poverty. I am looking forward to this work.
For my final communiqué with you I would once again like to make the case for a change in direction in how the Obama administration and state departments of education across the country are thinking about school reform and the effort to close the so-called achievement gap.
We have already spent a lot of time in our exchanges criticizing the excessive reliance on standardized testing,