SCHOOL for TOMORROW

“ For too many grad­u­ates, the Amer­ican high school diploma signi­fies only a broken promise.… The diploma has lost its value because what it takes to earn one is discon­nected from what it takes for grad­u­ates to compete success­fully beyond high school — either in the class­room or in the workplace.”

—The Amer­ican Diploma Project

“ For the past five years, the national conver­sa­tion on educa­tion has focused on reading scores, math tests and closing the ‘achieve­ment gap’ between social classes. This is not a story about that conver­sa­tion. This is a story about the big public conver­sa­tion the nation is not having about educa­tion, the one that will ulti­mately deter­mine not merely whether some frac­tion of our chil­dren get ‘left behind’ but also whether an entire gener­a­tion of kids will fail to make the grade in the global economy because they can’t think their way through abstract prob­lems, work in teams, distin­guish good infor­ma­tion from bad .… While [a soon-​​to-​​be-​​released New Commis­sion on the Skills of the Amer­ican Work­force] report includes some contro­ver­sial proposals, there is nonethe­less a remark­able consensus among educa­tors and busi­ness and policy leaders on one key conclu­sion: we need to bring what we teach and how we teach into the 21st century.”

—2006 Time Maga­zine Cover Story

“ [E]ven in ‘good’ schools, students are simply not learning the skills that matter most for the 21st century. Much of…curriculum and many methods of teaching are nearly a century old and hope­lessly obsolete.”

—Tony Wagner, Ph.D., author of The Global Achieve­ment Gap (2008)

“ Unfor­tu­nately, there’s a mismatch between what science knows and what schools do.… [A]s the world economy demands more nonrou­tine, creative, concep­tual abil­i­ties, too many schools are moving in the wrong direc­tion. They’re redou­bling their emphasis on routines, right answers, and stan­dard­iza­tion.… We can do better. And we should.… [W]e need to help [students] move toward autonomy, mastery, and purpose.”

—Daniel H. Pink

“ Progress in Amer­ican educa­tion depends on finding new forms of school and schooling—and, in partic­ular, on moving educa­tion from the tradi­tional mass produc­tion model to a mass customiza­tion model. In addi­tion, schools must focus more on devel­oping students’ skills and less on requiring students to master any partic­ular acad­emic content.”

—Ted Kolderie and Tim McDonald

“ All students bring their feel­ings to the classroom…when students feel good in their hearts and bodies, their minds will natu­rally follow.”

—Milton Chen

“ Too many of our kids…leave formal educa­tion with no sense of confi­dence about what they are capable of achieving. The answer to that is a person­al­ized curriculum.”

—Sir Ken Robinson