- Like raucous pep rallies, autumn school-supply binges, and despising every page of Ethan Frome, there’s something comfortingly banal about multiple choice tests. But there have always been doubts about the benefits of having kids choose between four potential antonyms for “circumscribe.” As a corrective, the Common Core-aligned PARCC and Smarter Balanced tests feature sections devoted to “performance tasks”—longer, in-depth assignments designed to evaluate strategic and critical thinking. The new approach combines a short classroom activity with complex individual components, such as argumentative essays or multi-step math problems. While advocates claim that the exercises give a fuller picture of students’ mastery over the material, some teachers lament lost instructional time and fret about the difficulties of implementation. We’ll know which side was right later this year, when Fordham releases its review of the next-generation assessments; until then, it’s usually safe to fill in “All of the above.”
- In life, unlike in multiple choice exams, the correct answer isn’t always presented as part of a menu of options. You either know the quadratic formula or you don’t; either you can make a persuasive argument or you can’t. It is therefore critical to teach kids valuable skills for their future lives, and New York City’s fleet of career academies—yet another feather in Mayor Bloomberg’s cap— is doing just that. The Wall Street Journal recently covered the fifty-one public high schools, which now prepare some twenty-six thousand kids across the city to excel in fields as diverse as disaster management, fashion design, and maritime trades. Career and technical education has been shown to significantly boost graduates’ income, with no negative impact on their likelihood of attending college; that’s why public policy guru Robert Putnam recently took to our pages to extol its virtues. And it’s why we included it as a focus of our forthcoming volume on upward mobility, due out later this year.
- But career training alone can’t close the stubborn gaps in opportunity and achievement that have opened up across our educational landscape. The New York Times’s uplifting profile of Florida hotel magnate Harris Rosen shows that the pathway out of poverty must extend from the years before kindergarten to those following high school. A wildly successful entrepreneur who ascended from hardship himself, Rosen chose to reinvest his continental breakfast riches into the Orlando suburb of Tangelo. Over two decades, he has spent $11 million bankrolling both free day care centers and full scholarships—including housing and incidental costs—for every local senior matriculating to the state’s public colleges and trade schools. Rosen’s largesse has spawned a community revival: Crime is down, property values are up, and children are starting their academic lives ready to learn. It’s a story right out of Disney. Or at least Disneyworld.
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