A Chance to Make History
2Education@Google (more info below)
April 21, 2011
Presented by Wendy Kopp, founder and President of Teach for America.
ABSTRACT
In her new book "A Chance to Make History" Wendy will discuss how we can accomplish something unprecedented in our nation's history and unprecedented around the world -- we can provide children facing the socioeconomic challenges that come along with growing up in low-income urban and rural communities with an education that transforms their life prospects. In the growing numbers of settings where this is happening, the accomplishment is a function of the same elements that account for success in any endeavor -- it is about embracing an ambitious vision (in this case a vision of academic excellence); it is about developing committed, capable teams to pursue the vision; it is about building strong cultures of achievement and management systems that foster continuous improvement; and ultimately, it is about doing whatever it takes (in this case, providing students with the extra supports and time they need to achieve outstanding outcomes). To enable low-income students to "make history," we need to avoid the temptation of overly simplistic answers that can distract time and energy from the core of the solution and instead go about building the necessary capacity in our education systems to operate this way and effecting the policy changes to make it easier to do so.