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p20-23,53 Soaringp5320 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | WINTER 2010–2011Soaring SystemsHigh Flyers All Have Equitable Funding, Shared Curriculum, and Quality TeachingI said to my children, “I’m going to work and do everything that I can do to see that you get a good education. I don’t ever want you to forget that there are millions of God’s chil-dren who will not and cannot get a good education, and I don’t want you feeling that you are better than they are. For you will never be what you ought to be until they are what they ought to be.”–Martin Luther King, Jr.1By Linda Darling-HammondNow more than ever, high-quality education for all is a public good that is essential for the good of the public. As the fate of individuals and nations is increasingly interdependent, the quest for access to an equitable, empowering education for all people has become a critical issue for the American nation as a whole. No society can thrive in a technological, knowledge-based economy by depriving large segments of its population of learning. But at a time when three-quarters of the fastest-growing occupations require post-secondary education, just over one-third of our young people receive a college degree.2 Meanwhile, in many European and Asian nations, more than half of young people are becoming col-lege graduates. At a time when high school dropouts are unlikely to secure any job at all, our high school graduation rate—stuck at about 70 percent—has dropped from fi rst in the world to the bot-tom half of industrialized nations. At a time when children of color comprise a majority in most urban districts, and will be the major-ity in the nation as a whole by 2025,3 we face pernicious achieve-ment gaps that fuel inequality, shortchanging our young people and our nation.Recent analyses of data prepared for school equity cases in more than 20 states have found that on every tangible measure—from qualified teachers and reasonable class sizes, to adequate text-books, computers, facilities, and curriculum off erings—schools serving large numbers of students of color have signifi cantly fewer resources than schools serving more affluent, white students.4 Many such schools are so severely overcrowded that they run a multitrack schedule with a shortened school day and school year, lack basic textbooks and materials, do not off er the courses students would need to be eligible for college, and are staff ed by a parade of untrained, inexperienced, and temporary teachers.5Although many U.S. educators and civil rights advocates have Linda Darling-Hammond is the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Edu-cation at Stanford University, where she is codirector of the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education and the founding director of the School Redesign Network. She is a former president of the American Educa-tional Research Association and a member of the National Academy of Education. Th is article is adapted with permission of the Publisher. From Linda Darling-Hammond, Th e Flat World and Education, New York: Teachers College Press. Copyright © 2010 by Teachers College Press, Colum-bia University. All rights reserved. ILLUSTRATIONS BY MICHAEL WOLOSCHINOWAMERICAN EDUCATOR | WINTER 2010–2011 21describe a set of elements that, when well designed and con-nected, reliably support all students in their learning. These ele-ments ensure that students routinely encounter well-prepared teachers who work in concert around a thoughtful, high-quality curriculum, supported by appropriate materials and assessments. These elements also help students, teachers, leaders, and the system as a whole continue to learn and improve.While none of these countries lacks problems and challenges, each has created a much more consistently high-quality educa-tion system for all of its students than has the United States. And while no system from afar can be transported wholesale into another context, there is much to learn from the experiences of those who have addressed problems we encounter. A sage person once noted that, although it is useful to learn from one’s own mistakes and experiences, it is even wiser to learn from those of others.Although Finland, Singapore, and South Korea are very different from one another culturally and historically, all three have made startling improvements in their education systems over the last 30 years. Their investments have catapulted them from the bottom to the top of international rank-ings in student achievement and attainment, graduating more than 90 percent of their young people from high school and sending large majorities through college, far more than in the much wealthier United States. Their strategies also have much in common. All three:• Fund schools adequately and equitably, and add incentives for teaching in high-need schools. All three nations have built their education systems on a strong egalitarian ethos, explicitly confronting and addressing potential sources of inequality. In South Korea, for example, a wide range of incentives is avail-able to induce teachers to serve in rural areas or in urban schools with disadvantaged students. In addition to earning bonus points toward promotion, incentives for equitable dis-tribution of teachers include smaller class sizes, less in-class teaching time, additional stipends, and opportunities to choose later teaching appointments.8 The end result is a highly qualified, experienced, and stable teaching force in all schools, providing a foundation for strong student learning.• Organize teaching around national standards and a core cur-riculum that focus on higher-order thinking, inquiry, and prob-lem solving through rigorous academic content. Working from lean national curriculum guides that have recommended fought for higher quality and more equitable education over many years—in battles for desegregation, school finance reform, and equitable treatment of students within schools—progress has been stymied in many states over the last two decades as segregation has worsened, and disparities have grown. While students in the high-est-achieving states and districts in the United States do as well as their peers in high-achieving nations, our continuing comfort with profound inequality is the Achilles’ heel of American education.These disparities have come to appear inevitable in the United States; however, they are not the norm in developed nations around the world, which


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