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June 20, 2008U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings Joins Former Governor Jeb Bush for National Summit on Education Reform |
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From Education Newsfeed: U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings today delivered the keynote address at Excellence in Action: A National Summit on Education Reform at the Walt Disney Contemporary Resort in Florida. Your continued commitment to the students and parents of our nation would make a mother proud, and I know she is. All of us have played a role in creating a movement to inject standards, accountability and competition into our education system... first at the state level, and then nationwide. With President Bush, we've had a friend in reform, an ally in accountability and a champion for choice. Our job is to make sure improving our schools remains a top priority for the next administration and beyond. We are also exposing a dysfunctional system that often stifles talent instead of nurturing it, that rewards ineffective teachers but offers few incentives to improve, that is often more inclined to deny problems than to solve them. The spirit of this conference, and our mission to champion, is to question the fossilized traditions, mythologies and habits that obstruct progress for students and teachers. Because we believe that effort without achievement is not enough, we must question our means of measuring success, our methods of delivering instruction, even our definitions of what it takes to create a successful student. We have a federal program proposed by President Bush called the Teacher Incentive Fund---with 100 million dollars, which the President wants to double. But as you know, when it comes to education policy, the devil is in the details.
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