Linda Darling Hammond Quotes

Of all the civil rights for which the world has struggled and fought for 5,000 years, the right to learn is undoubtedly the most fundamental…. The freedom to learn … has been bought by bitter sacrifice. And whatever we may think of the curtailment of other civil rights, we should fight to the last ditch to keep open the right to learn, the right to have examined in our schools not only what we believe, but what we do not believe; not only what our leaders say, but what the leaders of other groups and nations, and the leaders of other centuries have said. We must insist upon this to give our children the fairness of a start which will equip them with such an array of facts and such an attitude toward truth that they can have a real chance to judge what the world is and what its greater minds have thought it might be. —W.E.B. DuBois

the nature of work will continue to change ever more rapidly. During much of the 20th century, most workers held two or three jobs during their lifetimes. However, the U.S. Department of Labor estimates that many of today’s workers will hold more than 10 jobs before they reach the age of 40.2 The top 10 in-demand jobs projected for 2010 did not exist in 2004.3 Thus, the new mission of schools is to prepare students to work at jobs that do not yet exist, creating ideas and solutions for products and problems that have not yet been identified, using technologies that have not yet been invented.

Linda Darling-Hammond, professor of education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and one of our country’s preeminent testing researchers, has found that assessments and tasks designed and scored by skilled teachers, such as essays, science projects, research assignments, and presentations, are far more effective than standardized tests at promoting learning and diagnosing how students are doing.