Forget the Fiscal Cliff – What About the School Cliff?!

Gallup surveyed nearly 500,000 students in grades five through 12 from more than 1,700 public schools in 37 states in 2012, and guess what – student engagement drops dramatically over time. In other words, the longer you are in school, the less you care about – or are likely to get anything out of – being in school.

The Gallup blog reports,

We found that nearly eight in 10 elementary students who participated in the poll are engaged with school. By middle school that falls to about six in 10 students. And by high school, only four in 10 students qualify as engaged. Our educational system sends students and our country’s future over the school cliff every year.

We’ve argued – and continue to argue – that “reform” is not enough to fix this situation – transformation is needed. I recommend reading the Gallup blog post for more details about the drop in student engagement represented by the “school cliff.” Also, see Gallup’s site for the Student Poll.

Jeff

South Carolina Teacher of the Year Award

Here’s a video of David speaking at the recent South Carolina Teacher of the Year Award ceremony. The clip runs about eight minutes, and in it he touches on some of the major themes from the book.

Stop Stealing Dreams – Seth Godin’s Take on Education

I’m thrilled to see someone like Seth Godin take up the topic of transforming education and obviously put quite a lot of thought and effort into writing about. This, for me, is a sign that public attention and debate is spreading – and certainly, with Seth in the fray, will spread even more further and [Read Full Post]

The Freelance Revolution – Shape Shifters needed

Sarah Horowitz’s recent article The Freelance Surge is the Industrial Revolution of our Time provides a great complement to the Seth Godin article I highlighted in my previous post. As Horowitz writes: Everywhere we look, we can see the U.S. workforce undergoing a massive change. No longer do we work at the same company for [Read Full Post]

As we get ready for the 93rd year of universal public education…

Seth Godin has a post today that echoes the core theme of Shift Ed – namely, that our approach to schooling is out of synch with the world in which we now live.  “As we get ready for the 93rd year of universal public education,” Seth says, …here’s the question every parent and taxpayer needs [Read Full Post]

Cultivating Creativity (ShiftEd21 #13)

I’m trying to keep the time required for most of the Shift Ed 21 resources very short, but this video of Ken Robinson talking about how schools kill creativity has been so widely viewed and influential that it is well worth the 20 minutes it takes to watch it. (It also happens to be very [Read Full Post]