Portland, Maine, Sept. 15, 2006—Angus King, governor of Maine from 1995 to 2003, has joined Tutors Without Limits as an advisor—and as a tutor—and has this to say about why online tutoring is going to become one of the most potent strategies for improving education.

Why Tutors Without Limits

I have five kids, ranging in age from 36 to 12. This means that when Molly, my youngest, finishes high school in six years, I will have had children in public schools in Maine for 37 years. During that stretch, I have known and worked with some 100 teachers and half a dozen principals. I have helped with homework (not always welcome), checked spelling, helped with projects, praised good grades, encouraged better grades, chaperoned field trips (although never a prom) and along the way thought a lot about education, both in the context of my own kids but also in the context of the demands of our changing economy and culture.

As the Governor of Maine for eight years, I also had occasion to do a lot of thinking about the challenges these kids face as the economy shifts and globalizes at an absolutely unprecedented pace. And this thinking inevitably brought me back to education. Although it’s impossible to predict the nature of our economy in twenty-five or even ten years, the one thing we can predict with some certainty is that whatever the jobs of the future look like, they will involve more education and more familiarity with technology than today--and certainly a lot more of both that when most of us graduated from high school 10, 20 or, in my case, almost 45 years ago.

The reality is that education is more important now than at any time in our nation’s history and we urgently have to figure out how to do it better.

There’s no one answer to how to meet this challenge and there are plenty of ideas and works in progress--smaller schools, school-based management, increased professional development (and better pay) for teachers, integrating technology into the classroom, standards and accountability for schools and school systems, more time in class, individualized learning plans, and many others. My conclusion is that we have to press hard on all of these fronts and more, always staying focused upon student achievement as end product.

And one of the strategies is the most basic educational technique of all--one teacher and one student working together--at the student’s pace and up to the student’s capacity. Tutoring is nothing new--it’s as old as education itself and was probably the first educational "system".

What is new today--and what makes TWL such a powerful idea--is the development of technology that enables students and tutors to meet over vast distances, with tutors available to students any place, in any subject, and at any time. It is efficient (no drive time for the tutor, for example), simple and will help to level the educational playing field by eliminating geography as a barrier to the use of this critically important learning tool.

"Tutors Without limits" is more than a label; it’s a concept, a strategy, and a portal to the future for our kids.

ABOUT ANGUS KING
Governor of Maine
1995-2003

Angus King was Governor of the State of Maine from 1995 to 2003. Elected as an independent in 1994 in first run for public office, he was re-elected in 1998 by one of the largest margins in Maine history. Policy focus during his term included economic development and job creation, education, mental health services, corrections, land conservation and environmental protection, and improvements in service delivery by state government. As Governor, King was responsible for a $2.5 billion budget and 13,000 employees. Accomplishments during his terms included a major rebuild of the state’s mental health and corrections systems, including both program and infrastructure; improvements in the state’s service capability, especially including on-line services; a substantial increase in the state's commitment to research and development; and the largest increase of lands in conservation in the state’s history.

King also championed the development and implementation of the internationally recognized program to provide a laptop computer to every seventh and eighth grade student in the state, regardless of location or family income. By the fall of 2002, every middle school classroom in Maine had a high speed wireless network and most classes involved work with the laptops every day as an integral part of the curriculum. This program, now in its fifth year of implementation, is the largest single educational technology project in history and is aimed at making Maine’s students the best educated and most computer literate in the world.