The United States Department of Education published document on Succeeding Globally Through International Education and Engagement lists two broad goals for international strategy: 1) strengthen United States Education and 2) advance the international priorities of the United States. The document goes on to suggest necessary, world-class education for all students, global competencies for all students, international benchmarks, applying lessons learned from other countries, and educational diplomacy and engagement with other countries.
At the risk of sounding overtly negative, I do not believe our schools are meeting the goals of this document. Throughout my teaching career, we have seen No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Common Core Curriculum and myriad other attempts at - wait for it - 'leveling the playing field.' Each time we engage in some new form or standardized curriculum and testing, we run into the same issues: accessibility of materials and resources, lack of funding, inconsistency in implementation, and poor school-home connections, among other challenges.
If we agree that public school students in the United States must be able to perform well against other countries so that they can compete in a global economy, then the approach to realizing these goals must shift. The one-size-fits-all approach clearly does not work; we can have professional development on differentiated instruction, tiered instruction or whatever the latest buzzwords are that are floating around the edusphere, and the curriculum and its assessments will still be flat and taught in isolation.
In my classroom, this means taking the Student Learning Objectives that I put into my annual Teaching Evaluation software and tweaking them, perhaps adding some of the new Social Studies standards or integrating Global Literacy standards. To that end, I had my sixth grade students today explore GeoStories on the National Geographic Education website; tomorrow we will be reporting back and meeting in small groups to discuss the value in adding this type of exposure. We will also be participating in the 2015 Student Blogging Challenge, which invites participants from all over the world to communicate over the course of a 3 month period.