UIC Chancellor Paula Allen-Meares calls on education community to collaborate for change

April 02, 2012

UIC Chanceller Paula Allen-Meares welcomed participants of the final World Class Education Colloquium with a call to all education supporters to work together for systemic change in the birth to 20 education system.

From the Kerner report to NCLB, major reform efforts have attempted to make sweeping improvements to the system. However, change has come at an incremental pace.

"We've been at this some time, but the results from the reform effort are piecemeal  and fragmented and we don’t talk to each other," she said. 

No one entity can do it alone, she said, but together, higher education, lawmakers, policymakers, educators and funders can fix the problems in public education. 

"It starts with conversations like the one you're having today."

UIC is committed to helping with that -- so much so, she said, that it plans to "take it to a new level of priority at the city, state national level."

Allen-Meares thanked scholars and other WCEC participants for lending their wisdom to the efforts of this colloquium series. And she thanked funders The Chicago Community Trust and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation for making the series possible.