Most experts agree this is the worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression. The stock market is down almost 25 percent so far this year. Housing prices in the United States are off more than 20 per cent since their peak in 2006. Manufacturing output is falling and consumer confidence has slipped.
<!-- /Summary -->Martin Feldstein, former head of the National Bureau of Economic Research, past chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and a Harvard economics professor - usually a voice of calming reassurance - wrote in The Wall Street Journal: “Sliding into recession, monetary policy already at maximum easing, and fiscal transfers impotent … an unenviable situation, to say the least, for any incoming president.”
I have at least 3 friends who are former teachers. They all said they left because "I loved the kids and teaching. I hated the union, the mandatory testing, the bureaucracy."
My wife's sister and her husband taught at a rural California school. They're avid birders and every year as part of science would take middle schoolers to the Klamath refuge to look at migrating waterfowl, bald eagles, etc. The kids loved it. But when No Child Left Behind came along they were told to stay in the classroom and teach to the tests.
Combining the Finnish model with the City as Classroom ideas of the Remixing cities would probably do more to reform education than another decade of blue ribbon studies.