The Future of Education

There are many factors that contribute to a student’s academic and personal performance within the context of their PK-12 Education.  Independent of atypical developmental abilities, family wealth is a significant factor in student performance.  Other factors, endogenous to what happens within schools, include community resources available for all children, with a particular focus on sustained financial support for schools.  Although the overall performance of a particular school is driven by the relative wealth of the students in the school, the level of language proficiency among students within the school and the percentage of special needs students in the classroom and building also has an impact on student performance. At the same time, variation of performance between schools with similar populations is driven by the effectiveness of the educators in the building.  If we are going to close the various achievement gaps that plague our educational system, a focus on how to prepare, recruit, and retain highly effective educators, particularly within our high needs schools, is an international imperative.  This paper will address the challenges facing American education as it attempts to a) raise the standard for admitting teachers into the profession, b) increase the cultural and linguistic diversity of its teaching corp and c) improve the performance of historically disadvantaged students.  The paper will demonstrate that having culturally and linguistically diverse educators in the classroom advantages all students but that we need to signigicantly improve the working conditions of educators if we want to increase the percentage of highly performing teachers in our schools.

Keywords: Educator, Diversity, Student Achievement, Accreditation.

References:
[1] Clewel., B.C., Puma, M.J., & McKay, S.A. (2005, April). Does it matter if my teacher looks like me? The impact of teachers race and ethnicity on student achievement. Paper presented at American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, Montreal, Canada.
[2] Goldhaber, D., & Hansen, M. (2010). Race, gender and teacher testing: How informative a toll is teacher licensure testing? American Educational Research, 41, 21, 8-25 1.
[3] Richards, H., Brown, A. & Forde, T. (2004) Addressing diversity in schools: Culturally responsive pedagogy. Denver, CO: National Center for Culturally Responsive Educational Systems.