Race To Nowhere & 2011 Tutorpedia Benefit

I first saw Vicki Abeles's documentary Race To Nowhere together with 200 parents last week at Woodside High school, which was featured in Davis Guggenheim's Waiting For Superman. I saw it again last night at Temple Emanu-el in San Francisco with over 300 people. Movies are so much more powerful when you see it your community, and this film has reverberated within 500 communities nationwide. While I enjoyed Waiting For Superman, it is produced for Hollywood and quite biased: too pro-charter school and unfairly anti-teacher and teacher unions. Abeles, a Lafayette parent of three, created this movie for all of us that has the potential to catalyze a grassroots movement of parents, educators, and students. We can all relate to this movie. We've all been stressed out with too much homework, too many tests, too many extracurricular activities, and not enough free time, play time, and down time. Students sometimes feel this as early as 4th grade, and schedules get more crowded, classes get less relevant, and "doing school" (apologies to Denise Pope) becomes more challenging and less meaningful.

As Stanford's Education Dean Deborah Stipek says in the film, "we need to re-think the way we do education in America." One of those ways is by making education more real, relevant, and appropriately rigorous for our children. We need to focus on personal relationships. We need to cultivate critical thinking skills and problem solving techniques. We need more project-based learning. We need to make education more personalized, and focus on the whole child - the artistic and creative child, not just the math whiz and grammar queen.

Come join the conversation at Tutorpedia Foundation's 2nd Annual Benefit, on February 23 in San Francisco, for a dialogue with the Director of Race to Nowhere, Vicki Abeles, along with other education visionaries: Dennis Littky, co-founder and co-director of the internship-based charter network, Big Picture Learning; and Farb Nivi, founder of the innovative ed-tech company, Grockit. Spread the word to your friends and colleagues, educators and non-educators alike, because we can all be motivated to make a change in how and why we educate. Great food, impressive auction items, and a raffle will top off the evening. All proceeds from the evening provide free one-on-one tutoring for low-income students in the Bay Area.