Science writer Jonah Lehrer on algebra: "Abstract concepts, untethered to experience, are never internalized by our neurons."
Mike and Christina discuss Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings's latest round of changes to No Child Left Behind.
httpv://youtube.com/watch?v=dwkaKllgyBY
This Saturday A Nation at Risk turns twenty-five.
As with most birthdays after one's twenty-first, the occasion is bittersweet. As Fordham president Checker Finn reflects in today's Education Gadfly, the lessons of A Nation at Risk, despite the report's landmark status for sounding "an overdue and much-needed alarum," still struggle to be heard over the din of misguided deniers. That's a shame, he says, for the "biggest single reason, I believe, that America's education reform efforts of the past quarter century have yielded such meager returns is that we haven't given them our all."
Indeed, the country's general failure to absorb A Nation at Risk has been the source of many a frustration for Checker:
Whitney Tilson, who blogs on education here , reflects level-headedly in today's New York Daily News on the struggles facing the UFT's charter school . The last paragraph offers a tidy summary of the lessons the UFT, and especially current-UFT-boss and AFT-president-to-be Randi Weingarten, can take away from the experience:
Through its own hard experience with its charter school, the UFT is learning there's a reason why nearly all organizations, both for profit and nonprofit, have managers and employees that are not equals: because the interests of employees are not the same as the interests of the organization. The job of management is to represent the latter, and it needs a significant amount of flexibility in doing so.
Nearly everyone has applauded the UFT for having the chutzpah to stake a claim in the school choice movement, and rightly so. But they've yet to prove that this bold experiment is intended as a true learning experience and not just an effort to co-opt the choice movement and recast it using their own mold. Let's hope that in the months and years ahead they're willing to engage in the kind of serious reflection present in Tilson's op-ed.
(Also, see Eduwonk's take on the school's troubles.)
This Wired Magazine article sheds some light, however obliquely, on why it's so difficult to replicate successful school models in different places.
George Will has a nice column today on A Nation At Risk. He mentions Checker's book, too.
Update: Mike says the column doesn't just mention Checker's book; it "summarizes it!" Let's compromise on "highlights."
According to Sol Stern, it's not his (literal) bomb-throwing past but his (figurative) bomb-throwing present:
Instead of planting bombs in public buildings, Ayers now works to indoctrinate America's future teachers in the revolutionary cause, urging them to pass on the lessons to their public school students.... As Ayers puts it in one of his course descriptions, prospective K-12 teachers need to "be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and... be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, a teacher teaching for social justice and liberation."
Nor is his thinking outside the "mainstream" of the ed school professoriate; Stern reports that Ayers was recently elected Vice President for Curriculum of the American Educational Research Association. Perfect.
You can find a different take on George Will's column over at The Quick and the Ed. The author, Kevin Carey, is a very detail-oriented guy, but one wonders if today he hasn't missed the forest for the trees.
It's no secret that George Will's writing is less than confident (realistic, perhaps?) about the future of public education, but is Carey's assertion that Will "believes that public education is irredeemable, that efforts to improve it are basically useless" correct? One can't know what George Will thinks, but one can know what he writes, and his article today is simply a clear evaluation of the "reforms" that have predominated in the k-12 sphere. Like it or not, they've largely failed. Whether or not Will thinks the whole operation is "useless" and "irredeemable" is never stated, and it isn't all that important, anyway.
Carey nitpicks about some of the least important parts of Will's piece, and he doesn't like Will's harsh tone. Yet, Moynihan (who is mentioned in the column) did not soften his tone when deriding the more-foolish strategies that run amok in America's schools, and neither does Checker. But beyond all that, can Carey truly argue with Will's larger point: that dumb ideas have taken public education in the wrong direction?
Now is as good a time as any to mention that the deadline for Fordham Fellows applications--the day by which all those who wish for Fellowship must submit the apposite materials--is nearing: April 30th it is.
Fordham Fellows is a 9-month program that endeavors to bring bright young things to Washington, D.C., and introduce them to the world of education policy by setting them up with work at one of several top-notch education-policy organizations. Furthermore, Fellows earn the equivalent of $25,000 for their 9-months of work ("equivalent" not because we pay in yuan, but because we're including healthcare and transportation subsidies in the sum).
Click here for information, and hurry!
The Economist has an article about the challenges confronting South Dakota's rural schools and school districts.
In many of these cases, virtual education could be a solution. Education Sector's Bill Tucker recently wrote about virtual education, albeit as a catalyst for high-school reform, in The Gadfly.