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The Need to Improve Student
Achievement
Knowledge and skills achievement define competitive
advantage in today’s global economy.
This reality means that the higher-skilled,
better-paying jobs will go to countries with the best
educated people.
Unless there is a dramatic and immediate
turn-around in the performance of our K-12 school
systems, most of today’s school-aged children will leave
school academically unprepared for those jobs.
American inaction has already left a generation behind.
The ‘lost generation’ are the children who
attended public school since 1989, the year our top
federal and state leaders unanimously adopted
standards-based reform as the nation’s education
improvement strategy.
Since then, our students have fallen further
behind their international peers.
Today, our high school students rank 25th in math
achievement and 21st in science achievement on
international assessments.
Our school systems are not in
a race for the top, but in an ‘overtime’ struggle to
keep from loosing more ground.
"It's time to stop
making excuses. It's time to set standards and achieve
them," admonished former IBM CEO Louis Gerstner
at opening of the
1996 National Education Summit.
His urgent call-to-action was directed at the
education community and our nation’s policy leaders whom
he implored to get on with the task of developing “clear,
rigorous, concrete standards of what students must
learn.”
Clear, rigorous, concrete standards have not been
developed and student achievement has not improved since
Mr. Gerstner’s issued his call-to-action.
Our students, however, continue to fall
academically behind their international peers with
serious consequences for both them and our nation.
A 2009 study by McKinsey & Company found that the
achievement gaps in
America’s schools
impose “the economic equivalent of a permanent
recession” on our nation.
The
Aligned·By·Design
Initiative
represents a time-sensitive
breakthrough opportunity for our education leaders to
immediately begin reversing this trend.
It empowers the education community to take
effective action to close long-standing achievement gaps
and solve chronic systemic classroom problems.
Its broad-based implementation will enable them
to ensure that the next generation of students leaves
school prepared
to succeed in the highly-competitive, knowledge-defined,
global workforce.
Related Pages
Learn More
To
learn more about how the
Aligned·By·Design
Initiative
enables improved schools and student achievement, please
contact us.
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