13th
US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan thinks differently about education on the Charlie Rose show.
This speaks to an educational creativity that Academic Impact embraces. Ai is hoping to offer educational enrichment summer courses, perhaps utilizing a public school facility.
DUNCAN: Yes, and let me tell you what — not just lengthening, obviously, the school day, but a wide variety of after school activities: drama, arts, sports, chess, debate, academic enrichment, programs for parents, GED, ESL, family literacy nights, potluck dinners. At home, we attached health-care clinics to about two dozen of our schools. Where schools truly become the centers of the community, great things happen. So I think we need the schools open much longer hours, and by the way, we don’t have to do this all ourselves as educators. You can bring in great nonprofits: the YMCAs, the Boys and Girls Clubs, mentoring and tutoring groups to co-locate their services and bolster the community from the school. And every neighborhood in our country, you have schools. In every school, you have classrooms, you have computer labs, you have libraries, you have gyms, many have pools. Those buildings don’t belong to you or I. They don’t belong to the unions. They belong to the community. We have these great physical resources, and we even maximize them.
