A Sense Of Urgency Over Education

To the Editor:

I, Dan Shea, am running for the Newtown Board of Education because I believe that as a Newtown resident with 35 years of teaching experience, I can contribute to the enhancement of Newtown education. I am also here because my current involvement with the foreign community at Yale University has convinced me that we had better take education seriously if we as a people are going to stem our academic decline and not lose our educated middle class.

The US Department of Education’s 1983 publication A Nation at Risk spelled out our academic decline, but to no avail as our falling international academic rankings clearly manifest. If our graduates are not familiar with history or fail to see its importance, or have difficulty with the grammar of our language and cannot write or speak lucidly and logically, or rarely read unless forced to do so or only when a text message pops up, or view science as boring, irrelevant, and for nerds, or cannot perform basic computations without a calculator, or do not understand or appreciate art or music, they and we are both in trouble. An associate dean at Yale has stated to me that Yale no longer considers itself an American university but an international institution because their student/faculty/postdoctoral populations have become increasingly foreign as a result of poorly prepared American candidates.

If I am elected to this Board of Education, I will work diligently to assure that all students are given the opportunity to develop an enviable and lasting academic foundation that will prepare them for virtually any avenue they wish to consider. Education opens doors; it cultivates civility and intellectual curiosity and a rational, studied perspective. It requires dedicated, hardworking teachers and parents and access to ideas, facts, and creative resources. The word educate is a Latin derivative meaning to lead out, which, in an educational context, suggests leading out of the darkness that is always lurking, threatening to envelope and extinguish the lights of learning and truth. This Board of Education must be the caretaker of those lights because the education we create for our children in Newtown will be their academic foundations for the rest of their lives, a riveting thought that compels one to put all else into perspective.

As our academic scores continue to decline in the international arena, our sense of urgency should rise. If we value education and really want our children to receive an education that is second to none, then the time has come to prove it. Self-serving lip service is useless and embarrassing. What is needed is a restructuring of our priorities and the implementation of a rigorous academic education for as many students as possible, which is why I am seeking your support.

Thank you.

Dan Shea

Democratic candidate for

Newtown Board of Education

44 Queen Street, Newtown                                         October 21, 2011