A Quote by Barack Obama
We believed we could prepare our kids for a more competitive world. And today, our younger students have earned the highest math and reading scores on record. Our high school graduation rate has hit an all-time high. And more Americans finish college than ever before.
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Currently, only 70 percent of our high school students earn diplomas with their peers, and less than one-third of our high school students graduate prepared for success in a four-year college.
College has become unaffordable for most of the kids who attend, and, while most of the population won't ever graduate from college, our high schools don't prepare students for that reality by providing vocational and occupational training.
America has a terrible educational problem in the sense that we have too many youngsters not finishing school. A third of our kids don't finish high school, 50 percent of minorities don't finish high school.
Education in our family was not merely emphasized, it was our raison d'etre ... In this family of accomplished scholars, I was to become the academic black sheep. I performed adequately at high school, but in comparison to my older brother, who set the record for the highest cumulative average for our high school, my performance was decidedly mediocre.
There are two versions of math in the lives of many Americans: the strange and boring subject that they encountered in classrooms and an interesting set of ideas that is the math of the world, and is curiously different and surprisingly engaging. Our task is to introduce this second version to today's students, get them excited about math, and prepare them for the future.
Let's also make sure that a high school diploma puts our kids on a path to a good job. Right now, countries like Germany focus on graduating their high school students with the equivalent of a technical degree from one of our community colleges, so that they're ready for a job. At schools like P-TECh in Brooklyn ... students will graduate with a high school diploma and an associate degree in computers or engineering. We need to give every American student opportunities like this.
Think, for a moment, about our educational ladder.
We've strengthened the steps lifting students from elementary school to junior high, and those from junior high to high school.
But, that critical step taking students from high school into adulthood is badly broken. And it can no longer support the weight it must bear.
Our record number of teenagers must become our record number of high school and college graduates and our record number of teachers, scientists, doctors, lawyers, and skilled professionals.
I grew up in a suburb of Baltimore with an extremely high concentration of Jewish families - where the Levys and Cohens in the high school yearbook went on for pages, where I could count far more temples than I ever could churches. Anti-Semitism, in our cultural biodome, was mostly an abstract concept.
What do teachers and curriculum directors mean by 'value' reading? A look at the practice of most schools suggests that when a school 'values' reading what it really means is that the school intensely focuses on raising state-mandated reading test scores- the kind of reading our students will rarely, if ever, do in adulthood.
We must be willing to pay inspiring math and science teachers, who have high paying alternatives in industry, more to teach and reward students who take more challenging courses in high school.
We should also give students more flexibility in the courses they take in high school to prepare them for whatever their goals may be, without sacrificing our rigorous academic standards.
They're coming out of high school exhausted. The pressure in high school is killing these kids. By the time they get to college, they have been fighting for three or four years to get the perfect SAT scores and get into A.P. classes.
Our business in life is not to get ahead of others but to get ahead of ourselves; to break our own records; to outstrip our yesterdays by our todays; to bear our trials more beautifully than we ever dreamed we could; to give as we never have given; to do our work with more force and a finer finish than ever. This is the true idea: to get ahead of ourselves.
When nearly a third of our high school students do not graduate on time with their peers, we have work to do. We must design our middle and high schools so that no student gets lost in the crowd and disconnected from his or her own potential.
Many of our students say, 'We wish we had a mentor in high school. We wish we had someone we could spend more time with, who paid more attention to us, who I could sit down with and talk to when I had a problem.' So relationships are critical.
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