nothin Mayor Heads To Seattle | New Haven Independent

Mayor Heads To Seattle

Mayor John DeStefano is sending home dispatches from his trip to Seattle to attend a school reform conference. Following is his first dispatch, sent Wednesday:

I am off to Seattle at the invitation of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to participate in a convention on mayors in education. Gates is flying about a dozen mayors out to its Seattle headquarters to promote a principal interest of theirs and mine: public school education.

New Haven will probably be the smallest city participating, which is the case in school reform gatherings typically. Few smaller cities have undertaken the kinds of reforms we are instituting here in New Haven. The fact that a group of mayors is going to Gates is in itself interesting. As Diane Ravitch recently pointed out in her The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” much of America’s public education policy today is being driven by foundations and private donor dollars.

So then why go? First, for exactly that reason. A lot of the resources, ideas and energy for remaking public education are coming from unlikely places and the Gates Foundation is one of the biggest of them. We need to know them and they need to know us.

And second, there is nothing more central to the future of New Haven than our School Change Initiative. Strengthening each school into a high-functioning organization, closing the achievement gap to the state average, cutting the drop-out rate in half and ensuring that every high school graduate has the ability and resources to graduate from college will grow wealth, cut violence and dramatically increase the competitiveness of our community.

Sure, there are lots of other things that we need to do in a host of areas, in policing, in jobs and economic development, in our neighborhoods and our downtown. However nothing is more critical to the future of America and New Haven than the success of school change.

America is about a promise. A promise that if you work hard and do the right things that your kids will do better than you did. That’s called the American Dream. And that dream is dependent upon high functioning public school districts. New Haven is not there yet, but we are on the road to it better than most. And my guess is that a little detour to Seattle will help us further down the road.

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