It is time for a change in our schools.
The Nation's Report Card released last week shows that schools around the nation aren't scoring well on national standardized tests. School leaders know that students are falling behind in our post-pandemic world, but we also know standardized testing has hurt the education system deeply.
Taking aggressive action, AFSA President Len Pugliese reached out to President Biden urging him to convene a national education panel, composed of educators, school leaders, parents and academics, to rethink public education and offer a road map to national and state policymakers, helping move student achievement to new heights.
It is up to us as school leaders to help drive the discussion on what the future of public education should look like to provide our students with a world-class education.
Below is the letter to the president. Feel free to send us your ideas and thoughts.
October 31, 2022
Joseph R. Biden
President of the United States
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20500
Dear President Biden:
It’s time to move the nation’s public education system forward and serve the children of the United States in a modern and individualized way. To accomplish this mission, we urge that you convene a national panel of educators, parents, academics and students to build a new vision of public education success that will push student achievement to new heights and serve as a model for communities around the nation.
Our students’ historically poor showing on the 2022 Nation’s Report Card was no surprise to school leaders. The pandemic both exposed our education system’s weaknesses and exacerbated them. Now, we must use this crisis to reexamine longstanding educational structural and enthusiasm gaps and find the best solutions.
While COVID-19 made it difficult for children to learn and changed the way students were educated, our educational system has been on a problem-plagued journey of education reform for a long time. That journey began nearly 40 years ago with the landmark report “A Nation at Risk” which, in retrospect, emerged from a faulty premise and offered incorrect prescriptions.
The nation’s focus over the past decades on the basics and testing to ensure competence negatively impacted innovative and creative teaching, constrained course selection and undermined meaningful learning for our students. Indeed, the report led to many of the failed policies and practices that have brought our nation to this point—and which have contributed to years of stagnant test scores and yawning socioeconomic learning gaps.
The results of the past 40 years and the 2022 Nation’s Report Card are inflection points, but they must not be punctuation points to this discussion. It’s time to write a new vision for education—one that is better informed by educators, parents and students, and that contains recommendations that allow compelling teaching and the joy of learning to flourish. Convening stakeholders to make strong recommendations on realizing this vision is an important first step in this process. We urge you to take that step.
Finally, educating America’s children must not be a political issue. This year’s report card shows that both blue and red states face the same educational challenges, and both will benefit from the right solutions that lead to a world-class education for students. Let’s come together to make the next 40 years a time of innovation, growth, excellence and joyfulness in education.
Sincerely,
Leonard P. Pugliese, Ed.D.
President
Cc: Miguel Cardona, Secretary, U.S. Department of Education