An Education President for the 21St Century

Abstract

As this editorial goes to press, Super Tuesday is still spinning in the news cycle. The dramatic primary and caucus season is in full swing, as no candidate has yet clinched his or her party's nomination. Whether a political junkie or a more casual follower of national politics, a record number of individuals have been swept up in the drama of the presidential campaign. Who will be the next president rivets the nation. Whoever he or she is, the 44th president will inherit a troubled educational system, one ready for transformation despite persistent reform efforts since the 1980s. Whatever one's position on the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, a legacy of this federal policy has been to make salient the two profoundly unequal public education systems in the United States. All candidates recognize the moral and cultural imperative to ensure that all children receive an education on par with our most advantaged. The next president will also find a general public and policy community that grasp how much teachers matter. It is now conventional wisdom among researchers and policy makers to assert that teachers are the single most important school-based intervention to foster student learning. But the next president faces daunting challenges to ensure that all children are in the company of quality teachers. With regard to education, the concerns are vexing. As editors, we invited individuals whose work centers on teaching and teacher education to pen letters to the 44th president of the United States offering their advice to ensure quality teaching and teacher education. Our aim was to engage individuals from a range of perspectives and to provoke conversation and lively deliberation about our nation's educational future. Their letters make up this theme issue and were also the focus of the JTE/AACTE major forum at the annual meeting in New Orleans earlier this spring. Collectively, the invited letter writers challenge the next president to be bold and clear in his or her vision to value children and teaching. They urge that individual to use the mechanisms available to the office--the bully pulpit, selection of a secretary of education, and budget development and federal funding for our public education system--to realize that vision. We highlight here two themes that cut across the eight letters published in this issue, improving the conditions of children's lives and lending dignity to the teaching profession. In doing so, we necessarily leave out details and subtleties of each author's message. Thus, we encourage you to read the letters in their entirety. IMPROVING THE CONDITIONS OF CHILDREN'S LIVES Children's living conditions are also their learning conditions. Three authors tackle the impact of childhood poverty and long-standing funding inequities in our schools that directly affect primarily Black and Brown children's chances at learning from teachers who are able to support them to reach their fullest potential. Renee Clift and David Berliner speak to poverty's impact on learning and development. Citing a 2006 report from the National Center for Children in Poverty, Renee Clift reminds us that 18% of all United States children live in poverty, but that figure is much higher for certain racial groups. Thirty-five percent of Black children are poor, as are 28% of Latino/a children, and 29% of American Indian children. To illustrate the impact of poverty on children's learning and development, both Clift and Berliner drill down to the very specific ways in which the inadequate health care that poor children receive affects their opportunities to learn. Berliner notes that recurrent absences from asthma and otitis media (ear infections) dramatically affect poor children's attendance, and he forcefully reminds us that there is no stronger finding in educational research than the relationship between time spent learning and tested achievement. We add that other features of poor children's living conditions also affect learning, such as housing conditions, access to technological and cultural resources (e. …