Amy K. Conley serves as a high school English teacher at Fortuna High School in Humboldt County, California, where she works to promote educational programs that foster excellence in service-learning, literacy, and equity, and lecturer at Humboldt State University in elementary education literacy practices. The first woman in her family to attend college, Conley has always sought to improve access to literacy in diverse populations. She has taught in California for 19 years, primarily as a high school English teacher, graduated with a Master's (2000) in Mass Communication from San Jose State and is currently enrolled in the Collaborative Online Doctorate in Education Leadership, a joint venture between California State University, Channel Islands and Fresno State University. She received a $17,000 Institute For Teaching grant from the California Teachers Association to establish a district-wide service-learning program in Humboldt County. Since 2001, Conley has volunteered to teach adults in her community to read and served on three library and literacy boards. She has served the California State University’s Expository Reading and Writing Curriculum program as a teacher, facilitator, and module writer since 2008. Conley has written for Edutopia in the area of service-learning and intrinsic motivation. In 2017, she wrote a book Teachers, Mindset, Motivation, and Mastery: Research Translated to K-12 Practice.
What is education for? You may have different answers whether you are a parent, teacher, business owner, college student, but the answers are not merely based upon your role. Philosophy determines perspective, and ultimately, policy, when street-level bureaucrats implement policy through their philosophical lens. A recent article in The Week, “The value of education is not what you think” by Jeff Spross (2019) relates how two different philosophies of education, human capital and signaling, result in quite disparate national educational policy. The human capital theory argues that education increases earnings because it adds knowledge and skills to workers, making them more valuable as employees. Signaling theory counters that idea with research showing that education is much more valuable as degrees that signal employers the employee has what it takes in intelligence, perseverance, and economic and social resources. Human capital argues that education develops employees; signaling a...
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