Arizona’s governor, Janet Napolitano, sends out a newsletter. While I admit I don’t get it, friends do, and this one was forwarded to me:
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Dear Friends,
One of my top priorities is ensuring our children receive a quality education to be successful in our 21st century economy. In my State of the State address in January, I called on our educational leaders to take steps to ensure that Arizona schools prepare our students for the future. Last week, the State Board of Education stepped up, granting initial approval to new high school curriculum standards that require four years of math and three years of science.
Under this new plan, Arizona freshmen starting in 2009 will take this new curriculum and benefit from its increased rigor. Employers have long told us that in an innovation-driven economy, students need a math education equivalent to Algebra II to succeed in the workplace. But on an even deeper level, math and science are like mental push-ups – they teach students how to work hard, think logically and problem-solve. Those are skills that our children will need no matter what they study in college or what field of work they enter.
While we work to increase rigor, we must follow the dual goals of raising both our expectations of our students and our graduation rate. We can do both, and the State Board’s actions are a crucial step to achieving this vision. In the coming months, my office will continue to work closely with the State Board of Education and schools across the state to make sure that Arizona students have everything they need to adjust to higher expectations.
Whether they enter college or go straight to the workforce, our students will face high expectations every day – and it’s up to us to give them a diploma that prepares them for that next step in their lives. Thanks to the work of the State Board, we are making great strides in preparing our children for futures full of success.
As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please contact my office at 1-800-253-0883 and ask to speak to Constituent Services.
Yours very truly,
Janet Napolitano
Governor
I thought that this was a HUGE advancement for Arizona schools, which are regularly ranked at the bottom of funding out of all of the states. Science and math provides a huge step towards thinking logically and building lifeskills, and hopefully this new requirement will enable a new generation to start off young adulthood with stronger tools in this area, hopefully leading to a more logically thinking population!
Comments
One response to “Arizona and education”
I’ve been thinking a lot about education myself lately, (there’s a recent post on my blog about the very subject) the Arizona schools are thinking in the right direction. However for many students by the time they get to high school they are so used to school being a complete waste of time that they really quite ready to give up. I don’t entirely blame schools, a lot of parents are even more to blame; especially when they think that the public school system is entirely responsible for educating their children. We need an entire cultural shift.
The public school system was started, in my opinion, to do three things: Teach the children of immigrants to feel “American”, enforce standards for basic public health and hygiene, and to keep young people from competing against adults in the work force. For the most part on these they succeed, you learn the pledge of allegiance, you have to use tissue and be vaccinated and they keep you busy until at least 16 but usually 18 years old. Unfortunately that’s not what our country needs anymore.
I think the whole system needs to be overhauled, its top heavy, under funded, with too many standardized test that haven’t been proven to improve learning, and a general ignorance to diversity. While wealthier kids in either private or suburban schools have things like administrations that listen to parents, funding that allows for playgrounds recess, art and music and even fancy stuff like classrooms, books and paper, standardized test are quite rare and they are encouraged to be proficient in a foreign language. We could really get into core academics here but i don’t need to.
The sad sad thing is that we know what we need to give children to succeed and a lot of times it isn’t even very expensive or high tech, we just need to have the will to give it to them, and expect the very best results. Here are a couple of NPR articles about “executive function” and how creative play, yep, PLAY helps foster a child’s ability to be ready for that science and math program later on.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=19212514
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=76838288
OK I’m going to step down from my soap box right now.