Many of our country's enduring dilemmas are the products of
inequalities in power and wealth created by social class, race, culture,
and sexism. Challenges exist inside and outside the education system.
Although the society has made visible historic progress on many fronts,
our nation's most pressing educational problem remains the opportunity
gap between the children of the haves and those of the have-nots; this
gap has grown with the mounting social inequality of the last 40 years.
We believe the schools can and should do much more to make progress in
many areas. Yet we recognize that improving schools for the families of
the have-nots on any large scale will in the end depend on broader steps
toward democracy and equality. In any case, we are unlikely to renew
our democracy without a fresh commitment to quality public education.
With this understanding we, as members of the North Dakota Study
Group, affirm our beliefs about what quality public education could and
should be:
1. Children, from 4 to 18 (and those with disabilities, from 4 to 21)
deserve a free, comprehensive, quality education with equal access to
resources, regardless of their families' national origin or cultural,
religious, racial, or economic backgrounds. Education should not be a
race with winners and losers, not a competition for scarce resources.
2. Children are active learners, naturally curious about their social and physical environments. In good schools, students are encouraged to imagine, speculate, create, reflect, question.
3. A quality education includes competence in the skills of reading
and writing; knowledge and understanding of mathematics, science,
history, and social science; knowledge of a foreign language, and broad
experience in literature and the arts—as well as development of an
appreciation of these areas. In a democracy, education needs to serve
civic, cultural, and personal, as well as economic, goals.
4. Physical and social/psychological health and well-being are
crucial to students' successful school experience. The responsibility of
public education includes ... adjusting the curriculum and instruction
for students with special needs and seeing that families are informed
about available social services.
5. Educational decisions about curriculum and pedagogy should be
school- and community- based, made primarily by teachers/educators and
parents (those who know the children best). When politicians and the
business establishment—who lack relevant knowledge and experience—take
control of schooling, the effectiveness of public education is
endangered.
6. Teachers, trained professionals responsible for educating the
students in their charge, are primarily accountable to their school
administration, parents, and community. Authentic assessment, central to
effective teaching, is ongoing, classroom-based, relevant to the
curriculum and in the immediate service of student learning.
7. Teaching is a highly skilled, demanding profession; preparation
for effective teaching at all levels requires both academic and
professional preparation and practical experience. Beyond the
requirement for a certified college degree, there is no single best
system of teacher education. ... Evaluation of teacher effectiveness
should be done by peers and in-school administrators, based on
observation and documentation.
8. The school district is a useful interface between schools and the
more remote state and federal authorities. ... Local systems are
responsible to state authorities for reporting on the academic
achievement of students within their districts and for supplying the
state with data to do with educational access and equity. ... Although
there are good, serious, and worthwhile charter schools, we stand in
general against the current corporate-led charter school movement that
serves the interests of privatization, includes for-profit EMOs
(education management organizations) and excludes teacher unions.
9. The interests of the U.S. Department of Education in the overall
level of educational achievement in the United States can be met through
sample assessments.
10. Education for democracy means practicing democratic values
throughout the school system. The exercise of top-down, unresponsive,
and authoritarian educational administration ... contradicts, in actual
practice, principles of social justice which we try to instill in our
students.
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