What's Going On at CNN?

Why does CNN keep deleting readers' comments about the administration's plans for education reform?

Diane Ravitch had an interview with Randi Kaye about education and it has been an interview to remember, maybe not so much because of the interview itself, but the firestorm created when commentors responded on the site.   The web director or someone at CNN kept deleting the comments criticizing Kaye's questions and general tone of the interview. The questions Kaye asked Ravitch sound as if they came from a StudentsFirst, ACLU or Department of Education press release.

From  "Read These Comments Before CNN Deletes Them":

As readers of this blog know, CNN posted Randi Kaye's August 18 interview with me a week after it aired.

I heard there were about 35 comments, and they were suddenly deleted.

People started posting comments again, possibly 20 or so, and then they too were deleted.

People went back for a third round and posted the following comments.

A reader (Teresa H from Oregon) copied the entire batch of them, on the off chance that they might also disappear.  (I copied and added the last three.)

Isn't this ridiculous?

Why is the web editor at CNN deleting your comments?

Other readers said that none of the comments after Michelle Rhee's interview had been deleted.

You can read the readers' comments at the first link.  As of 8.28.12, there are 62 responses...maybe CNN has thrown up its hands and is allowing this interview (or playbook) of pushing charters, the "failing school" narrative and merit pay to play out.  Here is a reader's response summing up the interview and issue quite nicely:


After watching this video, I am dismayed that Ms. Kaye would not be willing to listen to both sides of the issue. She clearly had an agenda in this interview Ms. Ravitch, that public schools are bad and are failing the country. Ms. Ravitch was consistent in her argument about which test scores should be used to measure student achievement and the neutral/negative impact of merit pay. All Ms. Kaye was willing to rebut those statements with were individual examples out of a potentially limitless supply. Please CNN, present both sides at the same time. Give Ms. Ravitch the opportunity to debate Ms. Michele Rhee for more than a 5 minute segment. The truth about America's public schools is out there, if you only choose to look.

More and more people are asking questions about the lobbyists, education reformers and investors who suddenly have an interest in becoming "globally competitive" and "turning around failing schools".  "IT'S FOR THE KIDS!"...is the battle cry.  But it really isn't.  It's for the elites to make money while using taxpayer funds and their children. 

FOX hasn't had meaningful discussion about education reform as owner Rupert Murdoch is heavily invested ($360 Million for a 90% stake) in Wireless Generation and the success of Arne Duncan's education reform means his investment was a wise one.  If the clamor against education reform becomes too loud and too many questions are asked on how taxpayer money is being used to prop up privatization, he, Michelle Rhee, Bill Gates, David Coleman and other investors lose millions of dollars. 

Here's an article from the WSJ (another Murdoch interest) reporting on Murdoch's Wireless Generation investment and his reasoning for doing so.  Not one of the readers' comments agrees with Murdoch's contentions, but at least the WSJ didn't delete them.

But CNN?  What's in it for that network?  Why did it delete comments multiple times that didn't agree with its preconceived narrative? 

Lean to the Right or Left; Common Core is a Disaster...The Sunday Education Weekly Reader 06.24.12

Common Core is a bipartisan disaster. The Left & Right have sold us out.

Welcome to the Sunday Education Weekly Reader for 06.24.12.  

This week will consist of a reposting of Susan Ohanian's excellent blog entitled School-Standards Pushback: Conservative Groups Oppose National 'Common Core' as an Intrusion on States.

Susan has corresponded with me over the last year or so and while we may have differences in thoughts about how education can/should be reformed, we can find common ground in our concern about common core state standards and longitudinal data systems (LDS) supplying personal data about student/families to various federal agencies.  Politically we may not see eye to eye on all issues, but taking the politics out of common core/LDS and focusing solely on the issues, it is obvious these "reforms" deny the individualism of students, are being directed by special interests (for monetary vs educational reasons) and infringe on student/family privacy. 

No Child Left Behind has been decried by both the left and the right for its unreachable bipartisan goals; so should Common Core be protested for its bipartisan push for privatization of education that is really the shifting of taxpayer money into pre-selected vendors and touting it as reforming education.   These are not standards written by the states.  Ohanian is correct when she writes:

 ...this section of my website is titled Common Core State [sic] Standards. These are the Bill Gates/U. S. Department of Education Standards. Follow the money.

The LDS should be decried by both the left and the right as infringement on civil liberties.  Why is the ACLU silent on this data grab on American citizens?  Folks are upset about credit card information being breached.  Where is the outcry on data being gathered from birth on children that will be shared with federal  agencies and private researchers?

Thanks to Susan for her many years of educational reporting.  I hope a bipartisan movement will emerge against common core standards and privacy grab by the Federal government.  ALL student data should be protected regardless of party affiliation.  ALL students should be able to learn according to their learning style and not be molded to fit into a "one sized fits all" common core assessment model that private companies craft with taxpayer money.

*****************************************************************

From School-Standards Pushback: Conservative Groups Oppose National 'Common Core' as an Intrusion on States:

Ohanian Comment: Conservatives speak out against the Common Core. Liberals are still out to lunch. Godonlyknows what a dither they'll be in if ALEC denounces the Common Core.

The sad fact is this: Liberals sell us down the river on Common Core. Conservatives have fought it from the get-go. Although I do not agree with every point (particularly the curriculum section) they make, Truth in American Education, which is affiliated with a number of conservative groups and individuals, offers a very concise and compelling document in opposition to the Common Core. Their first point is exactly why this section of my website is titled Common Core State [sic] Standards. These are the Bill Gates/U. S. Department of Education Standards. Follow the money.

REASONS FOR CONCERN ABOUT COMMON CORE
Adoption Process

Contrary to proponents’ claims, the Common Core Initiative is not 'state‐led,' but rather the Common Core (CC) standards were created and funded by special interests. States had little to no input.

The federal government has coerced states into accepting the CC standards, by tying
their adoption to Race to the Top funding, No Child Left Behind waivers, etc.

Under the Constitution, the federal government has no role in education policy.
Moreover, three federal statutes prohibit what the federal government has done with
the CC and the attendant assessments.
State/Local Control and Governance

The federal government is funding the creation of the tests that will be aligned with CC and what's on the tests will dictate what's taught in the classroom. The inevitable result
will be a national curriculum controlled by the federal government.

A state must accept the CC standards word for word. It may add 15% content but may
not subtract anything. Anything it adds will not be included on the national tests.

In order to change any strand of the CC, a state must persuade 44 other jurisdictions
(and probably the US Dep't of Education) to agree to the proposed change.

Content Concerns

The English language arts standards in CC de‐emphasize the study of literature and have
been found by a University of Arkansas expert as inadequate to prepare students for
college. She writes: "The wisest move all states could make to ensure that students
learn to read, understand, and use the English language appropriately before they
graduate from high school is first to abandon Common Core’s ‘standards’ . . . ."

The math standards in CC, by moving algebra I from 8th grade to 9th, will ensure that the large majority of students do not reach calculus in high school.

The math standards in CC require that geometry be taught by an experimental method
that has never been used successfully anywhere in the world.

It opens the door for the federal government to push future standards in other subjects.

Cost of Implementation to the States/Localities

The states' costs of implementing CC will be substantial and will include new textbooks,
teacher re‐training, technology, etc. One study estimates $16 billion nationwide in implementation costs alone.

Privacy/Data Sharing

As part of the CC process, the federal government pushed states into creating massive
databases of very personal student and family information, which it can now share with
other federal and state agencies.

My god, how funny is it that The Wall Street Journal becomes the first media that I know of to label the Thomas B. Fordham Institute "right-leaning"? When I looked at 7,000 articles to see how media identified the talking heads they asked for soundbites, here's how Fordham-associated people were identified--over and over and over: policy expert; policy researcher; education reformer. The Institute itself is identified as a "Washington D. C. think tank."
For example, here are some Education Week identifiers for Michael Petrilli:

at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute

a vice-president at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

the executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington-based research and advocacy group

the executive vice president of the Washington-based Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which favors more flexibility for states

Ask yourself how these identifier inform--or fail to inform--readers about what Petrilli's opinions.

As I noted in an article for Extra! The Magazine of FAIR, the Media Watch Group Race to the Top and the Bill Gates Connection: Who gets to speak about what schools need? on occasion, Education Week uses soundbites from Fordham officials three times in the same issue.

Here's a sample of how The New York Times identifies Petrilli:

, vice president for national programs and policy of the Fordham Institute, a group that supports education reform.

an education analyst and researcher with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute

an education official under President George W. Bush

a vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a research group that studies education policy

a vice president at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington, an educational research and advocacy organization

And on and on and on, always careful to give no indication of what the Thomas B. Fordham Institute is up to. . . which makes Stephanie Banchero's identifier exceptional.

I found three reporters will to discuss the Gates money connections: Daniel Goldman in Bloomberg Businesweek, Matt Murphy in the Lowell Sun, and Clay Holtzman in the Puget Sound Business Journal.

Gates Foundation personnel are rarely quoted in the press. They don’t need to be: Their money talks for them. Both Golden and Murphy pointed to the tidy sum that the Thomas B. Fordham Institute received from Gates to provide analysis of the Common Core standards.

FYI, here's Fordham's Gates money:

Date: July 2003
Purpose: to strenghten [sic] Ohio's charter school program by recruiting, training, and supporting quality sponsors for existing and future charter schools
Amount: $250,000


Date: July 2005
Purpose: to inform public debate and advance academic achievement in Ohio charter schools by convening charter school leaders, producing research, and disseminating information on charter school issues
Amount: $497,639


Date: July 2005
Purpose: to support the Fordham Foundation in its role as a community school sponsor in Ohio to recruit other high school developers and to share best practices across the field
Amount: $1,849,173


Date: August 2006
Purpose: to support creation of a new education policy network promoting equitable education reform
Amount: $100,000


Date: June 2008
Purpose: to support the activities of an emerging network of state level education advocacy organizations in support of a convening around strategic issues
Amount: $155,000


Date: June 2009
Purpose: to support the PIE Network which brings together policy research groups with state-level education advocacy organizations to advance equity, improve student achievement, share best practices and capture lessons learned in state policy implementation
Amount: $398,534


Date: October 2009
Purpose: to review the common core standards and develop supportive materials
Amount: $959,116

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute is the secondary point here. The real point is the failure of the press to inform the public. The vaunted New York Times slogan "All the news that's fit to print" deliberately ignores and omits a lot of important information. Similarly, the reader must be aware that Education Week's banner: American Education's newspaper of Record presents a record tainted by omission.





By Stephanie Banchero

The Common Core national math and reading standards, adopted by 46 states and the District of Columbia two years ago, are coming under attack from some quarters as a federal intrusion into state education matters.

The voluntary academic standards, which specify what students should know in each grade, were heavily promoted by the Obama administration through its $4.35 billion Race to the Top education-grant competition. States that instituted changes such as common learning goals received bonus points in their applications.

Supporters say the Common Core standards better prepare students for college or the workforce, and are important as the U.S. falls behind other nations in areas such as math proficiency.

A 2010 report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a right-leaning educational-research group, said the Common Core standards "are clearly superior to those currently in use in 39 states in math and 37 states in English. For 33 states, the Common Core is superior in both math and reading."

But conservative lawmakers and governors in at least five states, including Utah and Alabama, recently have been pushing to back out, or slow down implementation, of Common Core. They worry that adoption of the standards has created a de facto national curriculum that could at some point be extended into more controversial areas such as science.

Critics argue that the standards are weak and could, for example, de-emphasize literature in favor of informational texts, such as technical manuals. They also dislike that the standards postpone teaching algebra until ninth grade from the current eighth grade in many schools.

A study released this year by a researcher at the Brookings Institution think tank projected Common Core will have no effect on student achievement. The study said states with high standards improved their national math and reading scores at the same rate as states with low standards from 2003 to 2009.

But mainly, critics of Common Core object to what they see as the federal government's involvement in local-school matters.

"The Common Core takes education out of the hands of South Carolina and parents, so we have no control over what happens in the classroom," said Michael Fair, a Republican state senator who plans to introduce a measure that would bar his state from spending money on activities related to the standards, such as training teachers and purchasing textbooks.

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who took office after the state adopted Common Core, wrote in a letter to Mr. Fair that the state should not "relinquish control of education to the federal government, neither should we cede it to the consensus of other states."

Common Core could take another hit Friday when the 23-member board of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group of more than 2,000 state lawmakers and business members who back limited government and free markets, among other conservative goals, is set to vote on a resolution to formally oppose the standards. The resolution was passed by the ALEC education task force in December.Model legislation often is drafted from the group's resolutions and taken by ALEC members to their state legislatures.

Common Core evolved from a drive by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers to delineate world-class skills students should possess. The standards, created with funding from, among others, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, set detailed goals, such as first graders should understand place values in math and eighth graders should know the Pythagorean Theorem.

"We brought the best minds in the country together to create international benchmarks that, once mastered, would make our students more competitive, globally," said Gene Wilhoit, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers. He said his group has no plans to create national science standards.

As the standards were being developed, the Obama administration launched Race to the Top in July 2009, which awarded points to states that adopted "a common set of K-12 standards" that are "substantially identical across all states in a consortium," according to the grant's policies. The department didn't specifically mention Common Core, but it was the only common set of standards being developed.

As a result, most state's legislatures or state boards of education adopted Common Core.

The standards have yet to show up in many classrooms as states are just beginning to implement them. But in Kentucky, where Common Core rolled out this school year, teachers are altering instruction and searching for new classroom reading materials.

Jahn Owens, a teacher in Owensboro, Ky., said the more rigorous standards require her to teach her fifth-graders how to multiply and divide fractions. Previously, that was taught in sixth grade. First-grade teacher Heidi Dees has added more nonfiction books to her classroom.

"These standards take students much deeper into the subjects and force them to do more critical thinking," Ms. Owens said. "It's been hard work for the teachers because the implementation was so quick, but we are now more purposeful about student learning."

The Obama administration has awarded more than $360 million to two groups to create student assessments aligned to Common Core.

Wireless Generation, an education-technology company owned by News Corp., which also owns The Wall Street Journal, recently purchased Intel-Assess, a company that creates student assessments aligned to Common Core.

Justin Hamilton, a spokesman for the U.S. Department. of Education, called Common Core a "game changer" but said the administration didn't force states to adopt it. "A bipartisan group of governors created these standards and states collectively adopted them," he said.

But Emmett McGroarty, executive director of American Principles in Action, a conservative lobbying group that wrote the ALEC resolution, said states were "herded" into adopting the standards with no time to deliberate on their worth. He called the standards "mediocre" and costly to implement.

Write to Stephanie Banchero at stephanie.banchero@wsj.com

— Stephanie Banchero
Wall Street Journal
May 09, 2012
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303630404577390431072241906.html?mod=wsj_share_tweet

---

An Education in the Dehumanization of Americans

I've had several people tell me they felt sad and upset when they read MEW's article When High Stakes Testing becomes Abusive, it's Time for Parents to Keep their Children Home.  A kindergartner's teacher wouldn't let her use the restroom because the class was in the middle of testing...that wasn't even "required testing".  The little girl had a terrible accident and had to sit in her waste until the testing was finished.  She was given a garbage bag to wrap herself in. Why didn't the teacher let the child use the restroom?

Many kids right now are taking Missouri Assessment Program (MAP) tests, the state standardized testing required by law.  Those tests start in third grade, but the superintendent says the reason the teacher was sticking so closely to MAP testing guidelines, even for a kindergartner, is because she was trying to simulate the stringent rules to prepare students for what's to come.   

What kind of teacher would allow a child to sit in her own excrement and have her embarrassed?  Is this what they teach college students preparing for the teaching profession?  Are college students taught the most important goal is to protect the system and treat children's needs as secondary?

Maybe some teachers took the same lessons as some TSA agents in Madison, Wisconsin.  The Gateway Pundit wrote an article about a young woman who was being patted down by a TSA agent and the woman was visibly upset.  Had she suffered previous sexual abuse?  The young woman's response was very intense and this was obviously traumatic for her. The attitude of the agent is similar to the teacher's response to a hurting 6 year old child.  Witness another example of dehumanization and indifference:

How can a human being not recognize or attend to another person's obvious suffering?  How could a teacher or a TSA agent inflict such distress on a child or an adult and just ignore the pain and embarrassment?   Does the system harden these people to not recognizing others as human beings?  Do you notice how the agent marches away after her patting down of the young woman and ignoring her emotional distress?

What is happening to Americans?  Why are we allowing schools and governmental employees to treat citizens in this manner?  Why has maintaining the system overtaken the needs of the people in the system?

Peggy Noonan has noticed this behavior as well.  From "America's Crisis of Character":

I think more and more people are worried about the American character—who we are and what kind of adults we are raising.

Every story that has broken through the past few weeks has been about who we are as a people. And they are all disturbing.

A tourist is beaten in Baltimore. Young people surround him and laugh. He's pummeled, stripped and robbed. No one helps. They're too busy taping it on their smartphones. That's how we heard their laughter. The video is on YouTube along with the latest McDonald's beat-down and the latest store surveillance tapes of flash mobs. Groups of teenagers swarm into stores, rob everything they can, and run out. The phenomenon is on the rise across the country. Police now have a nickname for it: "flash robs."

Also starring on YouTube this week was the sobbing woman. She's the poor traveler who began to cry great heaving sobs when a Transportation Security Administration agent at the Madison, Wis., airport either patted her down or felt her up, depending on your viewpoint and experience. Jim Hoft of TheGatewayPundit.com recorded it, and like all the rest of the videos it hurts to watch. When the TSA agent—an adult, a middle aged woman—was done, she just walked away, leaving the passenger alone and uncomforted, like a tourist in Baltimore. 

She continues:

In New York the past week a big story has been about 16 public school teachers who can't be fired even though they've acted unprofessionally. What does "unprofessionally" mean in New York? Sex with students, stalking students, and, in one case, standing behind a kid, simulating sex, and saying, "I'll show you what gay is." 

The kids in the flash mobs: These are their teachers. 

Finally, as this column goes to press, the journalistic story of the week, the Los Angeles Times's decision to publish pictures of U.S. troops in Afghanistan who smilingly posed with the bloody body parts of suicide bombers. The soldier who brought the pictures to the Times told their veteran war correspondent, David Zucchino, that he was, in Zucchino's words, "very concerned about what he said was a breakdown in . . . discipline and professionalism" among the troops.

In isolation, these stories may sound like the usual sins and scandals, but in the aggregate they seem like something more disturbing, more laden with implication, don't they? And again, these are only from the past week.

The leveling or deterioration of public behavior has got to be worrying people who have enough years on them to judge with some perspective.

Something seems to be going terribly wrong.

Maybe we have to stop and think about this.

Maybe when people are viewed as human capital instead of human beings...

• and the most valuable aspect of who they are is information to be data mined for what they can contribute to a workforce, 
• and they are continually reduced to being referred to as a subset instead of an individual,
• and they are physically touched and searched for no reason other than they have been randomly selected for such a procedure, 
• and they are punched out, robbed, stripped naked and no one stops to help...but there are plenty of people who assist in the crime, 

the dehumanization of Americans is to be expected.  When we are all "common" and reduced to data, to treat others with dignity is not supported by the system and must be mitigated.  We are left alone and uncomforted, as Noonan contends.

Something IS terribly wrong in America.  We have a poverty of the soul.  

Stop. Take a Breath. Remember What Education Is For. It's Not for the Government, Coporatists or Technocrats.

Apparently I'm not such a dinosaur after all.  I still have my records from junior high school with the psychedelic art and liner notes.  Vinyl is making a comeback.  Alternative recording musical offerings as 8-track tapes, cassettes, CDs, etc have come full circle as musical aficionados find their way back to the old-fashioned vinyl LP.  

It's time to take out those 33 RPM records, set that needle onto the edge and settle back for either the A or B side of some great Joni Mitchell, Allman Brothers, Cream (or your favorite band) while flipping through the album notes.  It's a tactile experience demanding your attention  as you need to turn over the record to the other side after the needle reaches the middle.

According to the Wall Street Journal in "It's Alive! Vinyl Makes a Comeback":

The digital revolution was supposed to do away with a lot of fusty old relics. First compact discs took their toll on the long-playing (and long-played) vinyl record; then iPods and digital downloads began doing the same to CDs. But long after the eulogies had been delivered, the vinyl LP has been revived.

Substantial. That's the word I keep hearing from the fans of vinyl. Records are admirably physical, the antithesis of the everywhere-and-nowhere airiness of "the cloud."

The embrace of vinyl isn't just some retro fad, but a push-back against the techno-triumphalism that insists there is no future for physical artifacts like books and newspapers. It's a small declaration of independence, a refusal to let the march of progress stomp on one's pleasures.

Vinyl is an assertion that efficiency isn't everything.

Switching to vinyl makes me wonder if the increased use of IPads and computers in the classroom will experience a similar backlash.  The use of digital curriculum increases the speed on information imparted, but it doesn't necessarily mean the information is absorbed more quickly by people.  It may just mean technological overload for students.  And what happens when an overload occurs? A short-circuit is in the making and the student can't concentrate and real learning is impeded.  

At dinner this weekend with friends, two of them indicated they had deactivated their Facebook accounts and they don't miss them.  Stephen Lazar, a teacher who had a large Twitter following wrote a blog entry entitled "Why I am no Longer Tweeting":

Last year, I became convinced I developed adult ADD.  I felt like I was loosing my ability to concentrate on any one task for an extended length of time.  Luckily, teaching is a job that rewards being aware of many different things at once, so it didn’t affect my job performance.  There were times when it was a challenge for me to focus on extended conversations with my wife, though.  I seriously considered going to see a psychiatrist and talking about going on adderall (which I, unlike many of my generation, never used recreational in high school or college). 

As common core standards demand more and more computer assessments and the move toward more and more virtual schools and computerized text, keep your eye on the students.  If adolescents are anything like adults, eventually  they will throw up their hands and withdraw from the technological front lines and demand the time, the rhythm and the tactile experiences necessary for thorough learning, not just surface learning to pass the assessments.  

The Federal government can insist students and people are only human capital and this human capital is nothing more than massive data sets.  The assessments will make companies very rich (via taxpayer funding for their use and implementation) while looking for students to answer the questions set up by private corporations to help the workforce, not the student.  

The plan to make the perfect student, the perfect worker, the perfect widget may just backfire.  Folks are beginning to walk away from the technology designed to make our lives better and our minds sharper.   They are becoming more selective about what they read and with whom they share information.  Are we witnessing the beginning of an anti-technology movement that will hopefully doom the federal/global takeover of American education?   Revisiting the WSJ article above:

 Vinyl is an assertion that efficiency isn't everything.

 
What's important in education might not just be for efficiency after all.  What might be important is to encourage and nurture the time it takes a student to fully understand the subject studied before moving on to stay on track for that common core rubric or "one size fits all" playbook.  It's time for parents, teachers and school districts to demand their public educational institutions refuse the implementation of the techno dreams of Bill Gates and the other corporatists determined to take over the delivery and content of education:

The embrace of vinyl isn't just some retro fad, but a push-back against the techno-triumphalism that insists there is no future for physical artifacts like books and newspapers. It's a small declaration of independence, a refusal to let the march of progress stomp on one's pleasures.

Enjoy this musical interlude from Cream, "I Feel Free" with stills from "Easy Rider":

 

 

Why Use Longitudinal Data Systems on Students when Palm Reading is Probably As Effective (and Cheaper)

Can data determine your child's future in the work force?  That's the plan of the Department of Education and the use of the Longitudinal Data System.  Student data will be shared with various federal agencies so employers will be able to identify workers fitting their unique requirements. 

How dependable is this data in scrutinizing children?  According to a recent Wall Street Journal article and the teenage brain, adolescent behavior may not determine the character or future actions of children, and children may have little control over their actions at certain stages.  From "What's Wrong With the Teenage Mind":

"What was he thinking?" It's the familiar cry of bewildered parents trying to understand why their teenagers act the way they do. 

How does the boy who can thoughtfully explain the reasons never to drink and drive end up in a drunken crash? Why does the girl who knows all about birth control find herself pregnant by a boy she doesn't even like? What happened to the gifted, imaginative child who excelled through high school but then dropped out of college, drifted from job to job and now lives in his parents' basement?
 
Adolescence has always been troubled, but for reasons that are somewhat mysterious, puberty is now kicking in at an earlier and earlier age. A leading theory points to changes in energy balance as children eat more and move less.

It's a fascinating peek into how teenage brains operate and how they are operating differently than just a few generations ago as society has shifted:

...contemporary children have very little experience with the kinds of tasks that they'll have to perform as grown-ups. Children have increasingly little chance to practice even basic skills like cooking and caregiving. Contemporary adolescents and pre-adolescents often don't do much of anything except go to school. Even the paper route and the baby-sitting job have largely disappeared.


The experience of trying to achieve a real goal in real time in the real world is increasingly delayed, and the growth of the control system depends on just those experiences. The pediatrician and developmental psychologist Ronald Dahl at the University of California, Berkeley, has a good metaphor for the result: Today's adolescents develop an accelerator a long time before they can steer and brake.

This doesn't mean that adolescents are stupider than they used to be. In many ways, they are much smarter. An ever longer protected period of immaturity and dependence—a childhood that extends through college—means that young humans can learn more than ever before. There is strong evidence that IQ has increased dramatically as more children spend more time in school, and there is even some evidence that higher IQ is correlated with delayed frontal lobe development.

The author makes the argument that children do not have the apprenticeship skills necessary to learn how to attain skillsets and success via repetition and failures.  As we have noted previously, they will be judged on data sets and standardized internationally benchmarked tests.  Students' futures will be decided from assessments at birth...and into adolescence... and into college or career training.  With society changing and brain development differing from past generations, how informative and reliable is this data?


The education "reformers" should ditch the multi-billion dollar plans they have for the taxpayers, parents and children and practice the ancient art of....palm reading...to determine where to channel the human capital in future endeavors.  Palm reading might just be as accurate as tracking data from the teenage brain via the Longitudinal Data System (and much cheaper).  From news@xinahuet.com:



TAIYUAN, Jan. 31 (Xinhua) -- Education authorities in a north China city on Tuesday banned schools and kindergartens from carrying out palm-reading tests that could allegedly tell a child's intelligence and professional aptitude.

"We have issued a circular to criticize the three kindergartens that offered palm-reading tests for 1,200 yuan (190 U.S. dollars) per person," said Ma Zhaoxing, education bureau chief in Taiyuan, capital of Shanxi Province.

Earlier in January, some parents in Taiyuan complained to Xinhua that they had been offered the test, which could allegedly help them find out their children's aptitudes in music, mathematics or languages, so as to cultivate these talents accordingly at an earlier age.


Mei Mingzhi, a company executive with Shanxi Daomeng, said the test could help determine a child's innate intelligence and potential and was applicable to all children aged over three months.

The test, however, was described as pseudoscience by Zhao Yulin, a family education specialist with Shanxi Academy of Social Sciences.

Zhao, who did some research work on palm-reading three years ago, said the test was originally based on genetics and the multi-intelligence theory, but had apparently gone beyond science and could be misleading.

Does data from the Longitudinal Data System (gathered from developing brains of children) go beyond science as well and could be misleading?  Just substitute the word "data" for "palm reading" in the article.  Could a case be made they are both less than reliable in determining if a child will be successful in life...or not?

The Sunday Education Weekly Reader: Visual Soundbites for 02.05.2012

Welcome to the Sunday Education Weekly Reader for 02.05.2012.  The visual soundbites from Twitter for the week:
 

• Federal Officials breaking the law affecting public education students.   Is the Department of Education thumbing its nose at American taxpayers and parents?....Department of Education, So what if we break the law goo.gl/fb/6x9Ss

• Is your child late to school?  In Loudoun, VA, expect a deputy to appear on your doorstep.  “It’s not just trying to meddle in someone’s affairs or dictate how someone raises their child,” said Wayde Byard, spokesman for Loudoun County Public Schools. “It’s a child welfare issue, basically.”  Nanny state gone wild?....VA Parents summoned to court b/c their kids were a few minutes late to school Washington Post - http://goo.gl/vLdob

• If schools adopted these rules from 1898, would we have better schools that wouldn't cost billions of dollars in "reform"?.....Just found this "Good Manners" chart, supplied to schools in 1898 (It's a PDF): http://bit.ly/kPFP7h

• WSJ article on French children vs American children.  Is this what is missing in American education and much of American parenting the key to raising more successful American children?  Maybe if children had more of "this", it wouldn't require billion of dollars in education "reform" either....Why French Parents Are Superior http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204740904577196931457473816.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories

 

 

**************************************************

 

Educational thought of the week picked up from twitter encapsulating what's wrong with public education.  

 

Are schools day care facilities or academies of intellectual pursuit?  Is the reason children are sent to school to give a break to the parents?  Maybe the parents need to read the aforementioned WSJ article.

 

Starting to suspect that the reason why kids have to go to school isn't that they need an education. It's that parents need a break.