Some blog followers might be interested in a recent post “Re: David Berliner on A Nation at Risk: Three Decades of Lies #2 - ADDENDUM #2” [Hake (2013c)]. The abstract reads:
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ABSTRACT: As a sequel to previous posts “David Berliner on A Nation at Risk: Three Decades of Lies #2” [Hake (2013a)] at http://yhoo.it/10dPm4V and “David Berliner on A Nation at Risk: Three Decades of Lies #2 – ADDENDUM” [Hake (2013b)] at http://yhoo.it/10g1iTV, I'm compelled to point out that today, 26 April 2013, the Fordham Institute http://bit.ly/15WNcPn and American Enterprise Institute http://bit.ly/ZpCkGc, both conservative think tanks, have placed on YouTube at http://bit.ly/10hDbUW a video “A Nation At Risk: 30 Years Later,” featuring such “reformers” as Lamar Alexander, William Bennett, Arne Duncan, Chester Finn, and Michelle Rhee. The only speaker not heaping effusive praise on A Nation at Risk is ex-conservative renegade Diane Ravitch. She says (paraphrasing): “What the writers of A Nation at Risk had in mind was higher standards, better schools, and a stellar public education system. But over the past 30 years the report has become the founding document of the privatization movement - the basis for privatization of the school system and the enrichment of a small number of entrepreneurs.”
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To access the complete 16 kB post please click on http://yhoo.it/10jCnPq.
Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Indiana University
Links to Articles: http://bit.ly/a6M5y0
Links to Socratic Dialogue Inducing (SDI) Labs: http://bit.ly/9nGd3M
Academia: http://bit.ly/a8ixxm
Blog: http://bit.ly/9yGsXh
GooglePlus: http://bit.ly/KwZ6mE
Google Scholar http://bit.ly/Wz2FP3
Twitter: http://bit.ly/juvd52
Facebook: http://on.fb.me/XI7EKm
“[The authors of A Nation at Risk] were wrong. Their predictions were all wrong. And I think it would be almost better to regard it as just a wake-up call. It's a way of using language that was overheated to . . . . get attention. But it had a real-world effect because for one thing it began the wrong march to destroy public education which is now in full flower.”
- Diane Ravitch in YouTube video "A Nation At Risk: 30 Years Later"
REFERENCES [URL shortened by http://bit.ly/ and accessed on 27 April 2013.]
Hake, R.R. 2013c. “Re: David Berliner on A Nation at Risk: Three Decades of Lies #2 – ADDENDUM #2,” online on the OPEN Net-Gold archives at http://yhoo.it/10jCnPq. Post of 26 April 2013 23:46:03-0700 to AERA-L and Net-Gold. The abstract and link to the complete post are being transmitted to several discussion lists.
Showing posts with label Arne Duncan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Arne Duncan. Show all posts
Saturday, April 27, 2013
Monday, November 19, 2012
The Injurious School Culture Enforced by High-Stakes Testing
Some blog followers might be interested in a recent post “The Injurious School Culture Enforced by High-Stakes Testing” [Hake (2012)]. The abstract reads:
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Abstract: Richard Flarend of the Physoc list relayed an AP press release “Fourth-graders who flunk reading have faces marked” at http://usat.ly/QTRkd8 and concluded that an injurious school culture led to this mistake. More generally, an injurious culture with consequences more serious than face marking is currently being forced upon most U.S. schools by the high-stakes testing mandated by NCLB.
In “Public Defender: Diane Ravitch takes on a movement," David Denby at http://nyr.kr/RPfOkF wrote (paraphrasing; supplemented by references to Ravitch's critiques in The New York Review of Books; bracketed by lines "#####. . . . "):
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Diane Ravitch has emerged as one of the leading opponents of the education-reform movement. She has:
1. Written a series of scathing rebuttals of reform measures in The New York Review of Books:
a. "The Myth of Charter Schools" http://bit.ly/h0Lx8Q;
b. "School 'Reform': A Failing Grade" http://bit.ly/TclFCY;
c. "Schools We Can Envy" http://bit.ly/QqtdTi;
d. "How, and How Not, to Improve the Schools" http://bit.ly/RPBDAO;
e. "Do Our Public Schools Threaten National Security?" http://bit.ly/10hxmth;
f. "In Mitt Romney's Schoolroom" http://bit.ly/TcmHxS; and
g. "Two Visions for Chicago's Schools" http://bit.ly/SKjkeA.
2. Written some two thousand posts on a blog http://dianeravitch.net/ she started in April, which has received almost a million and a half page views.
3. Published The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education [Ravitch (2010a)] at http://amzn.to/pAjeZU.
4. Barnstormed across the country giving speeches berating the reform movement, which, in addition to test-based “accountability,” also supports school choice and charter schools (public institutions that often receive substantial private funding and are free from many regulations, such as hiring union teachers in states that require it), and which she calls a “privatization” movement. The reform movement has the support of President Obama and his Education Secretary, Arne Duncan; it is also championed by the Republican Party; by many governors, mayors, and schools chancellors; and by a variety of wealthy entrepreneurs and fund managers, including Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Whitney Tilson. It has changed educational thinking in states such as Florida, Wisconsin, and Louisiana, and in cities such as Washington, D.C., New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
5. Argued that the reform movement is driven by an exaggerated negative critique of the schools, and that it is mistakenly imposing a free-market ethos of competition on an institution that, if it is to function well, requires cooperation, sharing, and mentoring.
################################
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To access the complete 10 kB post please click on http://bit.ly/SaQB3W.
Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Indiana University
Links to Articles: http://bit.ly/a6M5y0
Links to Socratic Dialogue Inducing (SDI) Labs: http://bit.ly/9nGd3M
Academia: http://bit.ly/a8ixxm
Blog: http://bit.ly/9yGsXh
GooglePlus: http://bit.ly/KwZ6mE
Twitter: http://bit.ly/juvd52
REFERENCES [URL shortened by http://bit.ly/ and accessed on 19 Nov 2012.]
Hake, R.R. 2012. “The Injurious School Culture Enforced by High-Stakes Testing,” online on the OPEN! AERA-L archives at http://bit.ly/SaQB3W. Post of 19 Nov 2012 17:25:15-0800 to AERA-L and Net-Gold. The abstract and link to the complete post are being transmitted to several discussion lists.
********************************************
Abstract: Richard Flarend of the Physoc list relayed an AP press release “Fourth-graders who flunk reading have faces marked” at http://usat.ly/QTRkd8 and concluded that an injurious school culture led to this mistake. More generally, an injurious culture with consequences more serious than face marking is currently being forced upon most U.S. schools by the high-stakes testing mandated by NCLB.
In “Public Defender: Diane Ravitch takes on a movement," David Denby at http://nyr.kr/RPfOkF wrote (paraphrasing; supplemented by references to Ravitch's critiques in The New York Review of Books; bracketed by lines "#####. . . . "):
################################
Diane Ravitch has emerged as one of the leading opponents of the education-reform movement. She has:
1. Written a series of scathing rebuttals of reform measures in The New York Review of Books:
a. "The Myth of Charter Schools" http://bit.ly/h0Lx8Q;
b. "School 'Reform': A Failing Grade" http://bit.ly/TclFCY;
c. "Schools We Can Envy" http://bit.ly/QqtdTi;
d. "How, and How Not, to Improve the Schools" http://bit.ly/RPBDAO;
e. "Do Our Public Schools Threaten National Security?" http://bit.ly/10hxmth;
f. "In Mitt Romney's Schoolroom" http://bit.ly/TcmHxS; and
g. "Two Visions for Chicago's Schools" http://bit.ly/SKjkeA.
2. Written some two thousand posts on a blog http://dianeravitch.net/ she started in April, which has received almost a million and a half page views.
3. Published The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education [Ravitch (2010a)] at http://amzn.to/pAjeZU.
4. Barnstormed across the country giving speeches berating the reform movement, which, in addition to test-based “accountability,” also supports school choice and charter schools (public institutions that often receive substantial private funding and are free from many regulations, such as hiring union teachers in states that require it), and which she calls a “privatization” movement. The reform movement has the support of President Obama and his Education Secretary, Arne Duncan; it is also championed by the Republican Party; by many governors, mayors, and schools chancellors; and by a variety of wealthy entrepreneurs and fund managers, including Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Whitney Tilson. It has changed educational thinking in states such as Florida, Wisconsin, and Louisiana, and in cities such as Washington, D.C., New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
5. Argued that the reform movement is driven by an exaggerated negative critique of the schools, and that it is mistakenly imposing a free-market ethos of competition on an institution that, if it is to function well, requires cooperation, sharing, and mentoring.
################################
********************************************
To access the complete 10 kB post please click on http://bit.ly/SaQB3W.
Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Indiana University
Links to Articles: http://bit.ly/a6M5y0
Links to Socratic Dialogue Inducing (SDI) Labs: http://bit.ly/9nGd3M
Academia: http://bit.ly/a8ixxm
Blog: http://bit.ly/9yGsXh
GooglePlus: http://bit.ly/KwZ6mE
Twitter: http://bit.ly/juvd52
REFERENCES [URL shortened by http://bit.ly/ and accessed on 19 Nov 2012.]
Hake, R.R. 2012. “The Injurious School Culture Enforced by High-Stakes Testing,” online on the OPEN! AERA-L archives at http://bit.ly/SaQB3W. Post of 19 Nov 2012 17:25:15-0800 to AERA-L and Net-Gold. The abstract and link to the complete post are being transmitted to several discussion lists.
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Should Global Competitiveness Be the Main Driver of Education Reform?
Some blog followers might be interested in a recent discussion-list post “Should Global Competitiveness Be the Main Driver of Education Reform?” The abstract reads:
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ABSTRACT: EDDRA2’s Michael Paul Goldenberg pointed to a guest post by Gerald Coles “Educating to Compete in the ‘Global Economy’: Creating Idiot Savantism” at http://bit.ly/NdBMLd. Coles, in turn, pointed to Diane Ravitch's “Flunking Arne Duncan” at http://bit.ly/Ks75SY. Ravitch wrote: “. . . . the nation forgot that education has a greater purpose than preparing our children to compete in the global economy.”
I agree with Coles and Ravitch that “global competitiveness” should not be the main driver of education reform. In a discussion list post “Is the 'Skills Slowdown' the Biggest Issue Facing the Nation?” at http://bit.ly/9kIHAW, I countered David Brooks’ claim http://nyti.ms/LfJp1K that it was, arguing that the “Threat to Life on Planet Earth” was the biggest issue facing the nation.
Likewise, I think the “Threat to Life on Planet Earth,” and NOT “global competitiveness,” should be the main driver of education reform, contrary to the themes of NRC reports: (a) Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Future of 2007 at http://bit.ly/a3g4P3; (b) Is America Falling Off the Flat Earth?" of 2007 at http://bit.ly/qwdyDu; and (c) Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5 of 2010 at http://bit.ly/dtQhbS.
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To access the complete 23 kB post please click on http://bit.ly/KtxakF.
Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Indiana University
rrhake@earthlink.net
Links to Articles: http://bit.ly/a6M5y0
Links to SDI Labs: http://bit.ly/9nGd3M
Blog: http://bit.ly/9yGsXh
Academia: http://iub.academia.edu/RichardHake
Twitter https://twitter.com/#!/rrhake
GooglePlus: http://bit.ly/KwZ6mE
“The global population is precariously large, and will become much more so before peaking some time after 2050. Humanity overall is improving per capita production, health, and longevity. But it is doing so by eating up the planet’s capital, including natural resources and biological diversity millions of years old. Homo sapiens is approaching the limit of its food and water supply. Unlike any species before, it is also changing the world’s atmosphere and climate, lowering and polluting water tables, shrinking forests, and spreading deserts. Most of the stress originates directly or indirectly from a handful of industrialized countries. Their proven formulas for prosperity are being eagerly adopted by the rest of the world. The emulation cannot be sustained, not with the same levels of consumption and waste. Even if the industrialization of the developing countries is only partially successful, the environmental aftershock will dwarf the population explosion that preceded it.”
- E.O. Wilson (1998)
“The paleoclimate record makes it clear that a target to keep human made global warming less than 2°C, as proposed in some international discussions, is not sufficient - it is a prescription for disaster. . . .[[my italics]]. . . Assessment of the dangerous level of CO2, and the dangerous level of warming, is made difficult by the inertia of the climate system. The inertia, especially of the ocean and ice sheets, allows us to introduce powerful climate forcings such as atmospheric CO2 with only moderate initial response. But that inertia is not our friend - it means that we are building in changes for future generations that will be difficult, if not impossible, to avoid.”
- James Hansen & Makiko Sato (2011)
REFERENCES [All URL’s accessed on 30 May 2012, most shortened by http://bit.ly/.]
Hake, R.R. 2012. “Should Global Competitiveness Be the Main Driver of Education Reform?” online on the OPEN! AERA-L archives at http://bit.ly/KtxakF. Post of 30 May 2012 19:44:01-0700 to AERA-L and Net-Gold. The abstract and link to the complete post are also being transmitted to several discussion lists.
Hansen, J.E. & M. Sato. 2011. “Paleoclimate Implications for Human-Made Climate Change,” 20 July, online at http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.0968v2; to appear in Berger, Mesinger, and Sijaci, eds., Climate Change at the Eve of the Second Decade of the Century: Inferences from Paleoclimate and Regional Aspects: Proceedings of Milutin Milankovitch 130th Anniversary Symposium (Springer, in press), a popularization of this paper is online as a 213 kB pdf at http://1.usa.gov/AuzXMw.
Wilson, E.O. 1998. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Knopf. Amazon.com information at http://amzn.to/JQXfrq, note the searchable “Look Inside” feature.
**************************************************
ABSTRACT: EDDRA2’s Michael Paul Goldenberg pointed to a guest post by Gerald Coles “Educating to Compete in the ‘Global Economy’: Creating Idiot Savantism” at http://bit.ly/NdBMLd. Coles, in turn, pointed to Diane Ravitch's “Flunking Arne Duncan” at http://bit.ly/Ks75SY. Ravitch wrote: “. . . . the nation forgot that education has a greater purpose than preparing our children to compete in the global economy.”
I agree with Coles and Ravitch that “global competitiveness” should not be the main driver of education reform. In a discussion list post “Is the 'Skills Slowdown' the Biggest Issue Facing the Nation?” at http://bit.ly/9kIHAW, I countered David Brooks’ claim http://nyti.ms/LfJp1K that it was, arguing that the “Threat to Life on Planet Earth” was the biggest issue facing the nation.
Likewise, I think the “Threat to Life on Planet Earth,” and NOT “global competitiveness,” should be the main driver of education reform, contrary to the themes of NRC reports: (a) Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Future of 2007 at http://bit.ly/a3g4P3; (b) Is America Falling Off the Flat Earth?" of 2007 at http://bit.ly/qwdyDu; and (c) Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5 of 2010 at http://bit.ly/dtQhbS.
**************************************************
To access the complete 23 kB post please click on http://bit.ly/KtxakF.
Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Indiana University
rrhake@earthlink.net
Links to Articles: http://bit.ly/a6M5y0
Links to SDI Labs: http://bit.ly/9nGd3M
Blog: http://bit.ly/9yGsXh
Academia: http://iub.academia.edu/RichardHake
Twitter https://twitter.com/#!/rrhake
GooglePlus: http://bit.ly/KwZ6mE
“The global population is precariously large, and will become much more so before peaking some time after 2050. Humanity overall is improving per capita production, health, and longevity. But it is doing so by eating up the planet’s capital, including natural resources and biological diversity millions of years old. Homo sapiens is approaching the limit of its food and water supply. Unlike any species before, it is also changing the world’s atmosphere and climate, lowering and polluting water tables, shrinking forests, and spreading deserts. Most of the stress originates directly or indirectly from a handful of industrialized countries. Their proven formulas for prosperity are being eagerly adopted by the rest of the world. The emulation cannot be sustained, not with the same levels of consumption and waste. Even if the industrialization of the developing countries is only partially successful, the environmental aftershock will dwarf the population explosion that preceded it.”
- E.O. Wilson (1998)
“The paleoclimate record makes it clear that a target to keep human made global warming less than 2°C, as proposed in some international discussions, is not sufficient - it is a prescription for disaster. . . .[[my italics]]. . . Assessment of the dangerous level of CO2, and the dangerous level of warming, is made difficult by the inertia of the climate system. The inertia, especially of the ocean and ice sheets, allows us to introduce powerful climate forcings such as atmospheric CO2 with only moderate initial response. But that inertia is not our friend - it means that we are building in changes for future generations that will be difficult, if not impossible, to avoid.”
- James Hansen & Makiko Sato (2011)
REFERENCES [All URL’s accessed on 30 May 2012, most shortened by http://bit.ly/.]
Hake, R.R. 2012. “Should Global Competitiveness Be the Main Driver of Education Reform?” online on the OPEN! AERA-L archives at http://bit.ly/KtxakF. Post of 30 May 2012 19:44:01-0700 to AERA-L and Net-Gold. The abstract and link to the complete post are also being transmitted to several discussion lists.
Hansen, J.E. & M. Sato. 2011. “Paleoclimate Implications for Human-Made Climate Change,” 20 July, online at http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.0968v2; to appear in Berger, Mesinger, and Sijaci, eds., Climate Change at the Eve of the Second Decade of the Century: Inferences from Paleoclimate and Regional Aspects: Proceedings of Milutin Milankovitch 130th Anniversary Symposium (Springer, in press), a popularization of this paper is online as a 213 kB pdf at http://1.usa.gov/AuzXMw.
Wilson, E.O. 1998. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Knopf. Amazon.com information at http://amzn.to/JQXfrq, note the searchable “Look Inside” feature.
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