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The following are the introductory comments of Jane Burger, director of Policy and Planning at The Grable Foundation: The issue is really what happens to that child in that classroom?I think Peter Kountz is right: We need to focus this community on education as the next resource we have here.
It’s interesting to me, wearing the Working Together Consortium hat, that for the 4,000 years I’ve been working on this and trying to convince people that education should be on the public agenda, that suddenly now people are saying to me that it should. It’s not a hard sell anymore. The important thing about the Regional Education Index Report (published last month) is that for the first time as a group we all came together. It is terribly difficult to collect data. There’s nothing consistent. There’s no way to answer the questions. We know what the questions are. We have a lot of research. But we don’t know where we are. So I see this as a first piece in informing the public. If you were to ask me what I think are the most important things we can do to change education, it’s leadership. We have to look at superintendents, principals, teachers and school boards. And all of that has to be focused on the question of what kids learn. We know how to teach kids. We know how kids learn. We just need to organize ourselves around how they do it.
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