The aspects of life that help younger generations do better than current ones are complex as they are multiple. Education — and efforts to realign what and how we teach our children — is one of those big and sometimes controversial factors that decide our children's chances to succeed.
“You have to think of it as also a local issue,” said Raj Chetty, the Stanford researcher who spoke at last year's California Economic Summit, who was pointing out that several regional factors like early education, the quality of schools, zoning and public transportation are part of what determines upward mobility.
As CA Fwd and the California Economic Summit have shown in their series Elevate CA, there's no silver bullet to the challenge of economic uncertainty, but instead there are many things that are broken and many ideas for mending the problems.
Recently, we asked school officials about how important retooling and continuously improving education has become now that it's becoming more likely that current generations will not do better economically than their parents.
“If we don't spend enough time really analyzing this traditional way of educating our youth, not only at the K through 12 but also beyond that — college and beyond — and start looking at certificate programs in a different way, we're not going to meet the needs of our community,” said Robert Arias, chief deputy of local and statewide initiatives for the Kern County Superintendent of Schools.
The officials and educators were part of CA Fwd's successful effort to collaborate on best practices at the district level and the overall needs of how to make education more relevant and effective for the students and their families.
