More often than not, the most effective leaders have been shaped by teaching successfully in high needs classrooms. Because of their experience, they know that it is possible for low-income children to achieve on an absolute scale and understand what we need to do to allow them to fulfill their potential.
I'm happy to admit that I'm a hopeless optimist.
Teach For America is working hard to be one significant source of the leadership we need.
All over the world, children facing the challenges of poverty attend schools that aren't designed to meet their extra needs; across country lines, the lives of marginalized kids look far more similar than they do different.
If the world's leaders are serious about improving collective well-being, we'd better get serious about prioritizing education in our nations and in our global discussion.
Fostering the leadership necessary for transformational outcomes in education is hard work, and in countries around the world, there is a constant search for easier solutions.
Research confirms that great teachers change lives. Students with one highly effective elementary school teacher are more likely to go to college, less likely to become pregnant as teens, and earn tens of thousands more over their lifetimes.
Technology has enormous potential to address educational needs more efficiently, help teachers improve their performance, and enrich and individualize student learning.
Competition and competitive rhetoric can be healthy. It's what drove the United States to pursue the Soviet Union into space, creating countless innovations along the way.
We collaborate with other countries on issues like public health and climate change because we understand these issues affect our collective welfare.
Teach For China recruits top American and Chinese college graduates, like 26-year-old Yang Xiao, to teach in the country's most disadvantaged schools.
It's time to declare a cease-fire in the education arms race. We have far more to gain from collaborating to solve our common problems than competing for higher rankings.
The U.S. has a long history of walking up to the precipice of rigor and then walking away. As voters, let's support leaders who were courageous enough to make the hard decisions necessary to move our system forward. And as parents, let's put our faith in our educators, our children and tests that hold them to their highest potential.
There is a perception in our communities that we have low educational outcomes in low-income communities because kids aren't motivated or families don't care. We've discovered that is not the case.
Every time a child's promise is cut short by their legal status, our country wastes precious resources and loses talent we need.
Countries have largely been left alone to handle or ignore their educational problems as they see fit. In part, this was because we assumed that the contexts and challenges were so different from nation to nation that education could not be tackled at the international level.
Across the globe, disadvantaged children are not living up to their potential because if they attend school at all, the schools are usually not designed to meet their extra needs.
Mindsets, skills and leadership, experience and access, and critical consciousness - we need all four of these things for our students to be the leaders, people and citizens we want them to be.
