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Predicting the Past - Education Week News (subscription)
31.03.09
General Motors stock is selling for less than a cup of Starbucks coffee. Armed with that urgency, experts and policymakers are turning back the education clock to the 1970s, those golden years when self-esteem, the whole child, and our current state of academic bankruptcy were born.
We were almost headed in the right direction for about five minutes. The federal No Child Left Behind Act, with all its faults—and its faults are legion—properly refocused schools on academic content and fundamental skills like reading. Unfortunately, NCLB promptly plunged off the testing deep end, taking its credibility with it. Now, right on schedule, here comes the education pendulum, hurtling toward the other policy extreme.
Like former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his invocation of 9/11, education reformers exploit the refrain "21st century," as in "21st-century skills," "21st-century global competition," or "21st-century bridge to sell you." Not that there’s anything wrong with preparing kids for the 21st century. I stopped using parchment and quill pens in my classroom months ago. But garbing recycled bad ideas in the new century can’t help us, especially when our real problem is that most students haven’t mastered the skills that mattered in the last century, and that will continue to matter,...
Source: Education Week News (subscription), MD
April 2009
Calendar
3 Calliope Café, 6:30 pm, Rowland Center
7 Booster Club meeting, 5 pm, classroom off gym lobby
8-9 Parent and Teacher Conferences (see below)
13-17 Spring Break
29 Evening Open Parent Association meeting, 5 pm, Rowland Center
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From the Headmaster
Dear Families,
As you may have read in the newspapers, Burr and Burton recently underwent the first layoffs in many years. Four non-teaching positions were eliminated due to challenges of the global economy and our need to streamline administrative costs. Layoffs are a difficult task, but these and other cost-containment measures are necessary so our budget will balance next year.
In determining how to address the budget issues, we have taken great care to ensure that we continue to be able to nourish the academic, athletic and artistic programs of this school. To give you a flavor for the philosophy behind our decisions, please find below two basic points that not only guided the current decisions, but will lead us through these difficult times:
• We will protect, above all else, great teaching and passionate learning, and we will do everything we can to support the work of educators in the classroom. We will continue to be a leader in education and educational innovation. We will continue to be a school that attracts and retains the best teachers in the land.
• We will resist calls to strip down to the so-called “essentials” and, instead, will continue to recognize that education is an endeavor of the mind, body and spirit. The vibrancy of this school is in large part due to the many ways that students can find personal success, and the expansiveness of the Burr and Burton opportunity must continue.
In short, we will continue Burr and Burton’s long tradition of excellence, we will continue to provide the full range of opportunities for students to explore their passions and talents, and we will unabashedly seek to fill this school with great educators. You can consider these statements to be a commitment to you as parent, taxpayer, tuition-payer, and caring citizen.
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