The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don't Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need--And What We Can Do About It

The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don't Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need--And What We Can Do About It Features

Additional The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don't Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need--And What We Can Do About It Information

Education expert Tony Wagner has conducted scores of interviews with business leaders and observed hundreds of classes in some of the nation’s most highly regarded public schools. He discovered a profound disconnect between what potential employers are looking for in young people today (critical thinking skills, creativity, and effective communication) and what our schools are providing (passive learning environments and uninspired lesson plans that focus on test preparation and reward memorization).

He explains how every American can work to overhaul our education system, and he shows us examples of dramatically different schools that teach all students new skills. In addition, through interviews with college graduates and people who work with them, Wagner discovers how teachers, parents, and employers can motivate the “net” generation to excellence.

An education manifesto for the twenty-first century, The Global Achievement Gap is provocative and inspiring. It is essential reading for parents, educators, business leaders, policy-makers, and anyone interested in seeing our young people succeed as employees and citizens.

For additional information about the author and the book, please go to www.schoolchange.org


 

What Customers Say About The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don't Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need--And What We Can Do About It:

Tony Wagner completely understands the problems with our education system, explains the problems, and then offers realistic solutions. What more can you ask.This is the first optimistic book on education I have read in years because the author breaks down the issues into problems that can be solved. In my 30 years in education and business, I have never read as good an analysis.Read it. Act on it.

A must read for educators who are truly interested in the future of education in our country. "Race To The Top" funding needs to be directed to states who adopt Wagner's proposals.

Important information for educators and parents. There is a great deal of truth to what the author purports. We need to reverse the backward spiral we're presently on.

The content of the book doesn't help.Seriously, I have teachers that are using this thing as everything from a doorstop to a joke book.Ya wanna know what the problem with our schools is. Sure, there are carrots placed so low they never haveto get off the ground, but there is no stick anymore. It's simple, we've put the kids in charge of their own education. They get to decide what they have to learn, and we've removed any incentive for them to actually learn. Bring back the ability to hold kids back a year and they will get the point. They will learn.

The program of educational reform put forward in this book, if implemented, would accelerate rather than halt the decline of the United States as a free people known for a robust entrepreneurial spirit.This book---*The Global Achievement Gap*---exemplifies and is symptomatic of the debilitating narrowness and shallowness of historical and intellectual perspective that has reached epidemic proportions in America, and that Wagner would seek, whether he knows it or not, to solidify as the end result of American public education. True humanism is an endangered species in America as it is; modeling our educational system after the the myopic corporate world will all but kill it.Those of us engaged in educational reform would do far, far better to take note of these books, also intended for a general audience, instead:*Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense for Reform in Liberal Education* by Martha C. Nussbaum, who is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago and who has worked with the United Nations on issues of development and international cooperation and is a past Central Division President of the American Philosophical Society.*First Democracy: The Challenge of An Ancient Idea* by Paul Woodruff, who is Dean of Undergraduate Studies and Darrell K. Royal Professor in Ethics and American Society at the University of Texas at Austin.These two prominent figures in the American intellectual scene offer arresting and compatible visions of education and social values that make Wagner's work by comparison look like a toddler's play in a sandbox---no, worse: they expose the kinds of educational praxes Wagner is pushing to be a deadly threat to an already anemic American civic culture and to the imperiled vibrancy of our democracy.--- Steven Hailey