The Greater Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce will bring Robert Pondiscio to the Duke City as the keynote speaker for the Chamber’s Annual meeting.
Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, will speak about how to better prepare American schools to navigate the future.
Pondiscio had a column advancing his talk published in the Albuquerque Journal on Friday, Oct. 18.
In it, he said, “For generations, where you lived determined where you were educated, mostly in district-run public schools a short ride away in a yellow school bus. Your parents likely weighed the quality of local schools when deciding where to move or buy a house. But after that, the relationship was unremarkable and sewn with minimal thought into the fabric of most families’ lives.”
He said COVID, the culture wars and the decline of confidence in American institutions at large are much to blame.
“Schools are a rock-bottom basic public service,” he continued. “When they become unavailable or unreliable for months at a time, parents make other plans that become habits and stick. COVID also ripped the lid off the black box of the American classroom, with ‘Zoom school’ broadcast onto kitchen tables across the country, sometimes revealing lessons that rubbed some parents the wrong way, or simply suggested lack of rigor or low student expectations.”
Pondiscio will be in Albuquerque Oct. 30 at the Greater Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce’s Annual Meeting to discuss this in depth. Tickets are available using the QR code or this link.