Only Connect: The Way to Save Our Schools - Hardcover

Crew, Rudolph; Dyja, Thomas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374294011 ISBN 13: 9780374294014

Verlag: Sarah Crichton Books, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

The superintendent of one of America's largest public school systems calls for the entire nation to reconceive our relationship with public education in order to produce children with the full set of tools they will need to face the economic challenges ahead.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Dr. Rudy Crew is the superintendent of Miami Dade County public schools, the fourth-largest school system in the country. He was formerly the chancellor of New York public schools, the nation’s largest system. He has been superintendent or deputy superintendent in Tacoma, Sacramento, and Boston. 

 

Thomas Dyja is the author of the award-winning novel Play for a Kingdom, among others. He has worked as an editor, book packager, and bookseller. He lives in New York with his wife and two children.

Rudy Crew is the superintendent of schools for Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the fourth-largest school system in the country.

Dr. Rudy Crew is the superintendent of Miami Dade County public schools, the fourth-largest school system in the country. He was formerly the chancellor of New York public schools, the nation's largest system. He has been superintendent or deputy superintendent in Tacoma, Sacramento, and Boston.

Thomas Dyja is the author of the award-winning novel Play for a Kingdom, among others. He has worked as an editor, book packager, and bookseller. He lives in New York with his wife and two children.

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ONLY CONNECT

CHAPTER ONE

WHERE WE ARE, AND WHERE WE HAVE TO GO

When I was young, my father used to give me a hard shake to wake me up. Then he'd stick his head right up next to my ear and say, "Rudy," in his deep voice. "Rudy, time to get up. Sun's coming up and something good is gonna happen today."

My father, Eugene, worked hard. My mother died when I was two, so he raised me and my two sisters on his own, paid the bills as a night watchman at the IBM plant in Poughkeepsie after years of playing jazz in New York City. He had a lot of reasons to stay in bed every morning, but for as long as I lived under his roof, he didn't just get himself up and out; he launched all of us out into the world full of expectations for ourselves and for the day.

Today I'm the superintendent of the Miami-Dade County public school system, the fourth largest in the country, with some 356,000 children in my care. Before that I was chancellor of the nation's largest school system, New York City, which enrolls more than 1.1 million kids. I've been superintendent or deputy superintendent in Tacoma, Sacramento, and Boston. One part of my job has been to help millions of children, parents, teachers, and principals all wake up and believe the same thing that my father used to tell me every morning--that something good was going to happen today, that some light would go on in a child's head that would let him see the way into the future and maybe even someday leadothers there, too. For more than thirty years I've been doing that. But six years after the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act I'm faced with facts like these:

• One-third of American eighth graders cannot perform basic math. That means more than a million thirteen-year-olds can't do the simplest calculations needed to buy a candy bar or ride a bus.

• One-third of all teachers leave the profession in their first three years; by five years, half of them have left.

• A black child in Washington, D.C., has less than a 30 percent chance of learning how to read before he turns ten.

• The odds that any given ten-year-old in a large American city can read are about fifty-fifty, and six in ten for the nation as a whole.

• Only one in five students entering college are prepared for college-level work in math, reading, writing, and biology.

Besides running school systems, I've been a principal, a teacher, a father who put all four of his kids through public schools, and I even went to some of them myself back in the day. So let me tell you: if those statistics don't make you feel angry or ashamed or sad as an American, then at the very least they should make you scared because, beyond the disappointing things those numbers say about our national character and values, they put our future in peril.

For all the laws being passed and tests being handed out, America's public schools continue to struggle. Every year millions of teenagers graduate from high school with no tools, no skills, and no sense whatsoever of what they're going to do with their lives. That's easy to sniff at as if it were someone else's problem. But the fact is, those kids aren't just living in the nation's inner cities; they live in corn-fed towns in Iowa and under the shadows of the RockyMountains, too. And what they're missing in their lives goes deeper than test scores.

The first question is, What will they do for a living? Unemployment for Americans between the ages of twenty and twenty-four runs around 8 percent; 16 percent for eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds. Our usual response to those numbers is a vague clamor for more jobs and better jobs and job training, and then some screaming about all the jobs outsourced to India and China. Well, in my experience American businesses want to hire American workers. The first meeting I went to as superintendent in Miami was with the Chamber of Commerce to discuss the fact that the city's business community wanted to hire more local workers. The problem was--and remains throughout America--that we're not providing enough workers with the skills to compete. Major companies look at our cities and ask whether the public school system can produce the quality of people they need to operate their machinery, program their computers, even simply answer their phones. Ken Chenault, CEO of American Express, and Richard Parsons, CEO of Time Warner, and countless other business leaders I've met have all told me that more and more the answer is no. The young people they're seeing out of American public schools are unable to perform even the most routine, elementary business functions. This, at a time when jobs that involve "complex interactions requiring a high level of judgment," according to The Economist, "make up some 40% of the American labour market and account for 70 percent of the jobs created since 1998." By not producing adequately skilled, adaptable workers, we're all but pointing businesses toward India and other nations where labor's cheaper and worker loyalty is easier to rely on. The research firm Gartner has calculated that information technology outsourcing will go from $193 billion in 2004 to $260 billion by the end of the decade.

Outsourcing is only the tip of the iceberg, though. The real problem lies under the surface, and it's big and dangerous. Not only are our children not able to keep up with the better-equippedcompetition coming from India and China, but if things don't change very soon, all these tens of millions of our sons and daughters will grow up to be adults unable to even function in our economy, let alone compete. As demand for unskilled labor continues to shrink and even the lowest-level jobs require skills beyond what most eighteen-year-olds graduate with, most of them will enter the labor market completely unprepared and essentially clueless as to how to interact with the marketplace. Who will hire them when they don't even know how to get a job? What will tens of millions of young adults barely able to read or multiply do with their lives? Who will pay for Social Security and health care? Even the military will be out of reach for them because they won't be able to pass the entrance exams. There'll be nothing left for them but to take their meaningless diplomas and plunge into the enormous gap that has opened in this country between those who have and those who don't. No matter where you're from--rural Appalachia, suburban Wellesley, or the Ninth Ward of New Orleans--a lack of skills is a tragic life sentence. For millions more, the issue is not that they can't get a job; it's that the connection between effort and earning is gone. They don't want the jobs that are available. I hear it all the time: Who wants to flip burgers or type letters for a few years? I oughta be rich right now!

Letting a generation slip through our fingers hurts more than just our economy. It cuts to the essence of who we are as a nation. Every so often Jay Leno on The Tonight Show takes a camera out to some mall and asks young people easy questions such as "What's the vice president's name?" "Who was the first president?" "What's the capital of the United States?" The joke, of course, is that no one knows the answers. Everybody in the studio laughs away, but if Leno asked the same questions in his own theater, chances are he wouldn't find answers there, either, because the truth is, the audience is laughing with them, not at them. I mean, who could be expected to know anything as obscure as the name of the first president, right?

Well, I've spent my life teaching America's children. My father was a World War II veteran. Dr. King and the Civil Rights martyrs gave their lives so we could all have our full share of America's promise. I am...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Sarah Crichton Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0374294011
• ISBN 13: 9780374294014
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar