Champions of Change Blog

Champions of Change: Investing in Infrastructure for a More Competitive Economy

Editor’s Note: Champions of Change is a weekly initiative to highlight Americans who are making an impact in their communities and help our country rise to the many challenges of the 21st century.

Recently I was honored to join the “Champions of Change” discussion at the White House during National Transportation Week.  We were asked to focus on transportation workforce issues, a very timely topic, and I am pleased to have this opportunity to provide further thoughts.

I am proud to be part of the transportation construction industry because we put people to work, improve the nation’s quality of life and enable our economy to be more competitive.

Several participants in the White House meeting mentioned the importance of reauthorizing the federal surface transportation and aviation programs.  If we really want to put Americans to work, there is no better way than by passing long-term, well-funded versions of these important measures.  The long-term certainty of federal transportation investment will give the industry a much clearer view of our future market opportunities.  That will enable us to make additional investments in human capital, as well as equipment and supplies that will put even more Americans to work.

Confronting Challenges to Educators and Students

To prepare children for a global world, our district takes a broad approach to learning. While building foundational skills and concepts, we also move beyond that foundation to develop students’ higher order thinking skills. That is, we design learning experiences and pose questions that push students – even our youngest students – to apply, analyze, evaluate, and create with the knowledge they are gaining. This is what will be needed as we move into the future, citizens who can be critical consumers of ideas and information and who can shape skills and understandings in new ways to solve new problems.

What can others do to support this work? Principals, teachers, families, and students can all collaborate to recognize that this is the vision of learning and take responsibility for growing that vision – setting high expectations for children’s learning with engaging tasks and real-world applications of what they are learning. At the federal level, the most critical leverage point rests in designing high-quality assessment systems that will support schools in their pursuit of deep learning, not narrowly focused skills in isolation. Promoting with greater clarity what is meant in policy by “multiple measures” – multiple ways that schools and students can demonstrate evidence of learning and growth beyond traditional standardized tests – will drive instruction and learning to be deeper and richer.

These were just some of the ideas that I shared a few short weeks ago as an invited guest at the White House “Champions of Change: Winning Our Future” educators roundtable discussion.  The opportunity to be a part of that discussion was remarkable in that it demonstrated to me the efforts that policy makers in this country are making to listen to teachers in the field and the solutions they are seeking to what they know are challenges to educators and students.