Everyone knows the numbers: By the year 2025, one in three public school students will come from homes where English is not the major language. Minorities, many from low-income backgrounds, will become majorities in many classrooms.  While 79.9 percent of public school students were white in 1980, the number will drop to 57.8 percent by 2025, the National Center for Education Statistics reports.

In this shifting educational landscape, educators simply cannot keep doing what doesn’t work. As a nation competing in a global economy, we cannot afford widespread failure. That’s why our researchers are in the field identifying problems, analyzing data for solutions, testing those solutions, and putting them to work in innovative ways to ensure every child, regardless of background or circumstance, has a fair chance at success in our educational system.

College of Education researchers are looking at learning that is “lifelong,” “lifewide,” and “lifedeep,” embracing different ways of thinking, of talking, of doing. We know that “learning” is not synonymous with “schooling,” that individuals learn across a myriad of settings – in homes, churches,  community centers,  museums, in café conversations in a dozen different languages. How do individuals navigate across these settings? How do they adapt, adjust, learn?  How can teachers leverage students’ wealth of outside knowledge into classroom learning? How can educators support every student in meeting the highest expectations?

In the features that follow, you will learn about two of our early childhood specialists who, after receiving a $40 million, five-year Head Start grant, quickly launched the new National Center on Quality Teaching and Learning designed to improve pre-school instruction for our nation’s most vulnerable young learners.

You will learn about research-based strategies from the college-affiliated, National Science Foundation-funded LIFE Center (Learning in Informal and Formal Environments) for making elementary science instruction accessible to a wide range of students through culturally responsive instruction that brings students’ everyday experiences inside the classroom to support teaching and learning.

You will learn about redesigned Advanced Placement high-school courses that use project-based learning to better serve both traditional and nontraditional AP students with stronger, more appealing work designed to deepen political engagement and learning. Students in these think-on-your-feet courses don’t just learn about our legal system, they’re sitting judges and arguing attorneys in the courtroom.

You’ll hear from education scholars who’ve documented for state lawmakers how college dreams of diverse students can crumble in monocultural classrooms where their culture, their histories, their languages, their knowledge, and their communities are too often disregarded, discounted, or disrespected, creating disconnects that lead to a lifetime of intellectual disengagement with schools.

And, coming back full circle to young children, you’ll learn how the supply of services for autistic children has fallen far behind demand, and what researchers at our internationally acclaimed Norris and Dorothy Haring Center for Applied Research and Training in Education are doing to meet that crisis by building a scalable, transportable training program for adult service providers.

The challenges are enormous, the work is difficult, and it’s not an easy time to do it. Financial support for public education is eroding. With high-stakes assessments, pressures to “teach to the test” are huge. But we cannot turn away from the critical business at hand: We must make an excellent, equitable education a daily reality for every student in America.

That’s our driving mission at the UW College of Education. We are taking the lead in rebalancing the tipped scales of 21st-century education, using fresh, authentic research that sets a national example for what is possible and what is just.

Tom Stritikus, Dean