The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.
Donald Campbell, “Assessing the Impact of Planned Social Change,” Evaluation and Program Planning 2, (1979).
Another sound defense of NPR; liked this quote from President John Kennedy, though:
“The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state,” Kennedy said. “… In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation. And the nation which disdains the mission of art invites the fate of Robert Frost’s hired man, the fate of having ‘nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.'”
Where anything is growing, one former is worth a thousand re-formers.
President Obama while touring a Boston school with Melinda Gates made the following comment:
This idea emerges from a long tradition of linking education to jobs. Nothing new there. And maybe the President is embracing one of the few rhetorical strategies that works around education. You can’t win a public argument challenging the connection between jobs and a good education.
My issue, though, is with the assumption that skills will somehow shift labor markets, as if, in a global economy, the number of well-prepared graduates has a major impact on where the jobs are.
There’s a lot of stink about the Bucks County teacher who wrote crappy things about her students on a blog. Chris L-H has a great response
As I was thinking about this situation, I was struck by the realization that one of the ways that I’ve always judged my classes is whether or not I’ve had a moment where a student says something that stops me in my tracks. If I’ve set my class up right and I’ve laid the groundwork for a community based on respectful exchange of ideas, then almost every time some student will say or realize something and express their idea in a way I’d never considered before. Every time.
If I were smart or at least more organized, I could have a class blog that documented these insights. Are there kids spacing out, texting, or disengaged? Does my classroom practice have issues? Certainly. But at least one measurement of whether I’m succeeding is the regularity of these moments.
Awesome letter in today’s paper:
To the Editor:
Your article reveals the essential weakness of an educational system based on standardized tests: standardized tests teach how to answer questions; a true education teaches the questions to ask.
I’m old enough to remember opening my SAT envelope with my Mom peering over my shoulder. As an adult, I remember getting my GRE scores too. Today, for the first time, I got my scores via computer, and actually had genuine anxiety as I waited for the .pdf to finish loading. In some ways, had I just thrown away $130 to take a test I probably had no business taking?
All is well, though. I scored a 193 out of 200, which is scary, because it is significantly higher than I scored on test of the subject that I have a Ph.D. in. The cut score is 160; average range is 166-188, so I’m good to go once I mail the state my certification application. Interestingly, I scored in the middle with Language and Linguistics (right on the average) but scored 35 out of 36 on composition and rhetoric, well above the mean. So it goes.
Every critic’ll have something to say about this book; I liked the review here, particularly this quote:
Parenting is hard. As anyone who has gone through the process and had enough leisure (and still functioning brain cells) to reflect on it knows, a lot of it is a crapshoot. Things go wrong that you have no control over, and, on occasion, things also go right, and you have no control over those, either. The experience is scary and exhilarating and often humiliating, not because you’re disappointed in your kids, necessarily, but because you’re disappointed in yourself.
I don’t get to read John Dewey across long afternoons or evenings anymore, just me and some coffee and a legal pad, the whole “life-of-the-mind” thing. Now I get to look at my notes, my scribblings in margins, my occasionally typed up written responses. Anyway, I like to give out My Pedagogic Creed on the first day of the student teaching seminar. I’m asking them to re-write their philosophy of education (again) and I want them to look at someone else’s first. Who better than Dewey?
Here’s the quote that stuck with me today:
I believe that the teacher’s business is simply to determine on the basis of larger experience and riper wisdom, how the discipline of life shall come to the child.
It’s not just throwing stuff at kids and seeing what sticks. It’s not turning them loose to “inquire” while you read the “Inquirer.” It’s this — carefully measuring your own ideas, your students’ ideas, your understanding of the content — and figuring what the beast approach is to creating an intellectually rich classroom.
