If you step back from day to day vitriol that characterizes the current education-policy ?debate,? and glimpse the larger picture, two worldviews on education reform emerge. One, articulated by the likes of Linda Darling-Hammond, Marc Tucker, David Cohen, and others, obsesses about curricular ?coherence,? and the lack thereof in our nation's schools.
Last June, the Wyoming Board of Education adopted the Common Core, making the Equality State one of the first states to do so. And implementation of the core standards has begun in earnest, with teachers around the state beginning to align their curriculum and instruction to the new standards.
Adding fuel to a small but growing anti-Common Core fire, Andrew Porter penned an op-ed in Education Week this week that questioned the value and rigor of the Common Core ELA and math standards. He explains:
Excuse the pun, but here we go again.? News out of New York is that Gotham's public schools will ?mandate sex education? (how not to have sex, why not to have it, or to have it safely, whatever).?
Every so often educators and reformers think, if we're educating kids for the future, we need to do a better job of adapting our education system to meet the needs of tomorrow. That our education systems needs to, in some sense, ?get with the times? so that we can better serve our students today.
Jeff Smink's New York Times essay, ?This is Your Brain on Summer,? about summer learning loss, makes me think of my childhood summers in Oregon's fertile Willamette Valley, where I am now vacationing.
It is encouraging news, from Sol Stern of the Manhattan Institute, that New York City's three-year-old pilot project testing the content rich Core Knowledge Language Arts curriculum in ten low-income schools has proved so far, as the D
The Republican presidential field is beginning to take shape, and candidates and maybe-candidates are figuring out where they stand and what to say. Sooner or later, they will need to say something about education. May we suggest a few talking points? Or, better yet, a potential speech for a GOP candidate? ***
Today's Times (unless you read it online yesterday or the day before), covers some fertile educational ground in three important arenas.
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="240" caption="Photo by The Mechanical Turk"][/caption]
This is getting to be an old story (see here and here), but it's an important one.
It is hard to read the Declaration of Independence without being moved by the document's plainspoken audacity, especially recalling that it wasn't then a "document," but a rather blunt call to arms.?
I stewed most of the week about how to respond to Deborah Meier's recent Bridging Differences post on ?college for all.??
There are two stories in today's New York Times that merit some consideration.
The following, by Peter Wehner, originally appeared on the Commentary Magazine blog.
This is what I don't understand about Diane Ravitch.? After several years (more or less) of fairly relentless criticisms of school reformers, she is back to her old self today, telling the New York Times that the new NAEP history? test results are ?alarming.?? ?Well, of course, they are.
The new report from the National Research Council (with its come-hither title, Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education) is sure to add fuel to the anti-accountability fires. It concludes, pretty shockingly, that all these tests haven't made kids any smarter.?
Though I am not inclined to give teachers too much autonomy until they start showing signs of it working to improve our schools, Jonathan Zimmerman raises some interesting issues in his When Teachers Talk out of School essay in this morning's Times.
Louis Menand offers opposing views of college in the latest New Yorker. On the one hand, he writes, college is basically ?a four-year intelligence test. Students have to demonstrate intellectual ability over time and across a range of subjects.
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here
The big fuss about "national curriculum" has lately slid into an argument about whether the federal government may?and should?have anything to do with "curriculum." Actually, it's an argument?limited to the Education Department, which has in its founding legislation a specific prohibition on "controlling or directing" curriculum.
Tennessee is determined, it seems, to sully its reputation when it comes to matters educational. The state that in the 1920s began the anti-evolution battles by bringing?teacher John Scopes to trial for allegedly?speaking of?evolution in his high-school biology class has moved the so-called ?Don't Say Gay? bill along the path from notion to law.
One of the more interesting characteristics of the recent curriculum counter-manifesto was its lead sentence, which had this lovely turn of phrase: we ?oppose the call for a nationalized curriculum.??
The ???counter-manifesto??? released this week in opposition to national testing and a national curriculum is full of half-truths, mischaracterizations, and straw men. But it was signed by a lot of serious people and deserves a serious response. [quote]
This is a guest post by Diane Ravitch, in response to "A Pedagogy of Practice" by Kathleen Porter-Magee.
Alfie Kohn's Education Week commentary about the "pedagogy of poverty" has sparked a renewed debate about which kind of education is "best" for poor kids?and whether it's the same as what affluent children get.
Ross Perlin's new book Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy?removes the comedy from the tableau of the keen,?fresh-faced intern, set on changing the world yet?so far struggling to change even the toner in the office copy machine.
The U.S. didn't triumph over terrorism today but its brave fighting men won a crucial battle when they rid the world of Osama bin Laden. Bravo for them?and may his soul suffer eternal damnation.
Alfie Kohn is the latest to weigh in on ?the pedagogy of poverty,? as he calls it, with his ?How Education Reform Traps Poor Children? commentary in Education Week ?
