If you hopped in Doc Brown’s DeLorean and traveled to the year 2039, what would your utopian public education system look like?
That’s the question Step Up For Students President Doug Tuthill posed to Patricia Levesque, CEO of the Foundation For Excellence in Education, on this episode of PodcastED.
For Levesque, utopia begins and ends with equalizing opportunity – putting more money, more power, and better information into the hands of parents who traditionally have had little of all three.
“If you give parents the ability to have power and leverage in (their child’s educational) process so they can curate…that is the ultimate form of accountability,” Levesque says.
Both Tuthill and Levesque believe that if you started building public education from scratch, funding systems wouldn’t look like what we have now. Funding would be based on each child’s unique needs – with an eye towards equal opportunity.
The two influential policy wonks also discussed equalizing access to out-of-school learning opportunities, including travel, computer science becoming a core component of every child’s education, giving teachers more control over their professional development through professional spending accounts, and raising teacher pay.
You can listen to this thought-provoking podcast below, or on the Apple Podcasts app. Thank you for listening.
