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> Summary of Events > Town Meeting #4 - June 10, 2009 - Education and the Economy
Town Meeting #4 - June 10, 2009 - Education and the Economy
The fourth Reinventing Stamford town meeting took place from 5 to 8 pm on Wednesday, June 10th at the auditorium of the Ferguson Library. The focus of the event was the intersection of education and the economy. The event was co-sponsored by the Stamford Public Schools and Stamford Achieves.
A reporter once asked the famous hockey player, Wayne Gretsky, the secret of his success. Gretsky told the reporter that most other hockey players skate to where the puck is, while he skates to where the puck is going to be. In the K-16 education system, where we have a 17-year learning cycle, we better be thinking like Wayne Gretsky. In fact, to stretch a metaphor, we need to skate to where the ice has yet even formed, as many of the jobs which high school freshman (let alone kindergarteners) will have when they are 25 are not yet invented.
We need to be thinking now about how to create the innovation-capable workforce that will define our future. Instead, our schools (in Stamford, the U.S. and globally) are still producing for an industrial-era, rules-based economy of managers and semi-skilled workers that no longer exists. What we need to be doing is producing graduates with pattern recognition skills essential to innovate.
These ideas come from the work of Richard Murnane and Frank Levy in their watershed book, "The New Division of Labor," which was provided to attendees as food for thought.
As before, the focus of the event was small table conversation. To provoke conversation, we assembled a terrific interview panel including a leading teacher educator, and a senior leader of Connecticut's largest teacher's union, and one of the nation s leading thinkers on workforce policy and education reform:
Andrew Lachman, Director of the Connecticut Center for School Change,
Mary Loftus-Levine, Vice-President for Policy at the Connecticut Education Association, and
Louis Soares, Director of Workforce Policy, Center for American Progress.
They were interviewed by Carol Coletta, President of CEOs for Cities, the nation's leading cross-sector network focused on urban policy. Carol also hosts a nationally-syndicated weekly NPR radio program, Smart City.
The interview panel and the small table discussion following focused on three questions:
What does a person need to know to be an effective worker, citizen, parent and life-long learner in the 21st Century?
How do we best help learners develop the skills they need?
How can we do it in a way that enables all learners to succeed, regardless of race, family income and language spoken at home?
The sequence of these questions is critical, as unless we are focused on developing the right skills, how we do it is irrelevant.
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