Eduwonk (Andy Rotherham) wrote about international pressures on American education recently. In it, he pointed to a press release by the National Governors Association, where they identified "five transformative steps that the American education system needs to undergo to produce more globally competitive students:" These are good steps. Or are they? The aim of America's education system should be to create the best possible American students, not the best possible African or Asian or European or Latin American students. This it seems will have us forever attempting to catch up to the rest of the world based on their standards. It's not as much about being globally-competitive as it is about being the best you can be. Now I'm not arguing for xenophobic or myopic America-only thinking at all. I'm just saying that there are so many examples of excellence in American schools, why are we not basing our definition of great education based on these? There's one in my backyard - the Seattle Girls School. If the NGA was to look inside the America's borders they would find many successful schools; schools proven to understand this culture and this reality, and able to create greatness within it. At SGS, they focus more on creating an environment in which learning happens than curriculum. Where is the call for more research on this topic? These schools' walls have the capacity to create great students. Perhaps the job should be to find ways to take Seattle Girls School and the hundreds of others like it to scale and achieve results that make the nations of the world seek to be compared to and measured by our standard?
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