Ideas to consider in public schools. (Ted Talks)

1. Rethinking teaching and public
education

2. • What should America do about its disastrous
high school dropout rate? That’s the focus
of TEDTalks Education, the first ever TED/PBS
television special, hosted by John Legend, the
award-winning musician.

3. • The program looks not only at what’s going
wrong in high schools, but how to put it right.
As it happens, the solution is not a mystery;
but putting it into practice will involve a major
shift in current policies.

4. • According to one estimate, if the numbers of
young people leaving school early could be cut
by 50 percent, the net gain to the U.S.
economy from savings in social programs and
gains in additional tax revenues could be
around $90 billion a year - that’s almost $1
BBBtrillion in just over ten years.

5. • That’s a big number. But think too of the
potential social benefits to all of us of
hundreds of thousands of young people
moving on every year to lives that are more
productive and fulfilling.

6. • We’ve known about the dropout crisis for a
long time. In 1983, the Reagan administration
published “A Nation at Risk,” a dire warning of
the need to reform U.S. schools. In the thirty
years since then, federal and state
governments have launched hundreds of
initiatives and spent billions of dollars trying
to do just that

7. • . In the ten years since the launch of No Child
Left Behind, these efforts have intensified. The
results have been unimpressive. Graduation
rates continue to falter and students and
teachers alike are becoming more disaffected.
So what’s the real problem here?

8. • To improve our schools, we have to humanize
them and make education personal to every
student and teacher in the system. Education
is always about relationships. Great teachers
are not just instructors and test
administrators: They are mentors, coaches,
motivators, and lifelong sources of inspiration
to their students.