Tagged "education" | worship the glitch

NY Times Editorial Board: Scholastic’s Big Coal Mistake →

Children’s books and other educational materials produced by the publisher Scholastic reach about 90 percent of the nation’s classrooms. With this enormous access to what amounts to a captive audience of children, the company has a special obligation to adhere to high educational standards.

It fell short of that when it produced a fourth-grade lesson packet called “The United States of Energy,” a treatise on coal that was paid for by the American Coal Foundation, a nonprofit group. As Tamar Lewin noted in The Times on Thursday, the lessons talked about the benefits of coal and the pervasiveness of power plants fueled by it — and omitted mention of minor things like toxic waste, mountain-top removal and greenhouse gases.

Scholastic is largely a force for good in education, but this is the dictionary definition of corruption, is it not?

In the midst of the worst economic crisis in modern U.S. history, our political leadership has decided to exempt the very wealthy from sacrifice while tragically weakening the one avenue our society has identified for reducing inequality in the nation—our public schools.

Not only is it profoundly immoral to impose hardship on the weakest and most vulnerable members of our society, targeting schools for such huge cuts does violence to the very ideal of equality of opportunity which once used to unite liberals and conservatives.

If the only schools that can function well are in communities where parents have the resources to compensate for the budget cuts, then we are basically creating a social order where children will remain in the social position of their parents into the next generation, and where poor and working-class children are doomed by inferior training to be a servant class for the rich, if they are lucky enough to find jobs at all.

Mark Naison, Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program

Providence plans to pink slip all teachers at the end of the school year →

As drastic as this is, Providence Teachers Union President Steve Smith still managed to go overboard in his response, comparing the layoffs to Pearl Harbor:

“I know how the United States State Department felt on Dec. 7 , 1941.”

2,500 people dying in 1941 is not the same as 1,926 people getting laid off in 2011.

The propagandistic nature of Waiting for “Superman” is revealed by Guggenheim’s complete indifference to the wide variation among charter schools. There are excellent charter schools, just as there are excellent public schools. Why did he not also inquire into the charter chains that are mired in unsavory real estate deals, or take his camera to the charters where most students are getting lower scores than those in the neighborhood public schools? Why did he not report on the charter principals who have been indicted for embezzlement, or the charters that blur the line between church and state? Why did he not look into the charter schools whose leaders are paid $300,000–$400,000 a year to oversee small numbers of schools and students?

The Myth of Charter Schools by Diane Ravitch | The New York Review of Books

via robot-heart-politics

(via robot-heart-politics)

(via folish)

Too often we get into the problem that the business world says college graduates aren’t prepared for the real world. And college says, well they’re not prepared for the real world because they weren’t prepared for college — and high school says they weren’t prepared for college because they weren’t prepared for high school. It’s really easy just to keep pointing downward, and I think that’s detrimental overall to our success as a nation. We have to have a common, national idea of what it means to be an educated 12th-grader, and work from that point.

High School Teacher Cate Dossetti, Teachers counter education reform ideas on tests, pay, USA Today

I couldn’t agree more. Somehow I don’t think the teabagger “states’ rights” crowd is going to get on board with this. They’re not big on education anyway.

Cate is the second person I know who’s been the subject of a national news article today. That ought to keep my Tumblr/Twitter follower-based ego in check for a few days.

education

Teachers counter education reform ideas on tests, pay →

(via jacobjoaquin)

This is a big deal. Scholastic and The Gates Foundation surveyed a truly massive number of teachers. The resulting mass of data paints a picture that simply wasn’t possible to paint before.

•Only 10% say tenure — a kind of job-for-life security based on a few years of satisfactory job evaluations — is a “very accurate” indicator of teacher quality;
•71% say paying teachers more for improved student performance would have only a “moderate” impact or no impact at all.
•97% say supportive leadership is an “absolutely essential” or “somewhat important” factor in teacher retention, while only 25% say the same about pay tied to performance.
•And while most teachers say that traditional textbooks help student achievement, fewer than half say textbooks “engage my students in learning.”

We can no longer afford an academic calendar designed for when America was a nation of farmers.

Barack Obama (via @tylerbreed)