Civic commitment to equal educational opportunity is in peril, write Richard W. Riley and Linda Darling-Hammond in their essay “Reaffirming the Dream: The Case for Civic Investment.”
Riley, former U.S. Secretary of Education and current vice chair of Carnegie Corporation of New York and Darling-Hammond, professor of education at Stanford University, argue that today’s public schools face two significant challenges: On the one hand, the population of students that schools have traditionally underserved is growing rapidly.
At the same time, however, there is greater and greater pressure for improving outcomes for all students, so that all young people will be equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in the twenty-first century. Thus, Riley and Darling-Hammond contend, schools must do better than they ever did before, with a student population made up of a large proportion of students who have a wide range of needs and have often been ill served by schools in the past.
The views expressed in the essay are the authors’ own.
Read the article in the Winter 2012 issue of Voices of Urban Education