As reform efforts converge on the importance of the quality of teaching, legislators, state and local school board members are sharpening their focus on staff development as the means to that end. Ken Nelson, a former Minnesota legislator who now is executive director of the National Education Goals Panel, is blunt about why more educators should become involved in shaping policy. We did help create the problems of today through benign neglect. We've helped make it the way it is. We need a new way of thinking to help take it to the next level,'' Nelson says.
Educators sometimes think of politics as dirty business.
But you have to compromise. You have to make deals. These are not value judgments. This is how you solve problems in the public arena,'' he says. Ed Reidy, deputy commissioner of education for Kentucky, reminds skeptics that policies already exist, whether or not they've had a voice in creating them.