January 2008
Message from the
director
Terese Rainwater
The State Scholars Initiative started 2008 with one major project just finished and another in the works. State Scholars is about to ship the just-wrapped SSI DVD, which we’ve been working on over the last year. Do the Math is designed to help businesspeople present the case for a rigorous course of study to 8th graders in a lively, informative way (see the story below for details).
On the horizon is the SSI National Summit on Academic Rigor and Relevance, an invitational meeting slated for this April 28-29 in Boston. The goal of the summit is to convene national business and education leaders to brainstorm ways to improve high school rigor and relevance (for information on the meeting, see the back page). Both the summit and the Do the Math DVD are designed to continue the critical conversation about why a rigorous education is so important today. But they are also vital attempts to investigate how we can best convince students that this is so.
