Education
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Big Data and Learning
The New York Times has a "Bits" section this morning devoted to "Big Data". It's quite a lot to absorb, and I, at least, come away from it with my biases confirmed: In general, it's better to have more data than less, but data is only as good as your interpretation of it. And if you
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Why the Coming Common Core State Standards Are a Technocratic Disaster in the Making
Anthony Cody sums it up pretty well. The column is really about how the national teachers' unions, as usual, are on the wrong side of this: The Obama administration's education policies have been, by and large, a disaster. And Republicans are poised to rev up their attack machine on these grounds and teacher unions will be smeared
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Erase to the Top
Here are some posts I put up when this cheating scandal in Atlanta first broke in 2011. See here, here and here. The emphasis on test scores is all about the technocratic compulsion to measure one kid againsst another, one teacher against another, one school against another–to what end? Does anyone with good sense think that
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School Choice is Not a Solution
The Milwaukee voucher schools have never outperformed the public schools on state tests: See here and here. The only dispute about test scores is whether voucher students are doing the same or worse than their peers in public schools. Accountability? Read here about some very low-performing schools in Milwaukee that have never been held accountable. One of them opened in 2001. Over
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The Common Core State Standards
I remember when I first heard about the movement to develop a national common core for K-12 public school curricula, I thought, "Why not?" Why not set standards that will give a high school diploma some meaning? Why not set up a national curriculum that insures that every kid has a solid grounding in history,
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America’s “Education Crisis”
Linda Darling Hammond in a recent interview: Well, there are a couple of things to know before we talk about the scores. First of all, the United States has more children living in poverty, by a long shot, than any other industrialized nation. Right now about one in four children are living in poverty. In most
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Common Core State Standards: More Top-Down Stupidity
I remember when I first heard about the idea of having a national common core standards in K-12 education, it didn't seem like a bad idea. Why not set standards to insure a basic minimum so that we can be sure that every child is getting the education he or she deserves? But, like many
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Intrinsic Motivation and the “School Cliff”
(h/t Dan PInk) In my ongoing effort to define what Liberalism 5.0 might mean, I want at some point to talk about the work of buisness writer Dan Pink, whose books Whole New Mind, Drive, and most recently, To Sell is Human, are important contributions to our understanding about work and motivation. His reporting on
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Conservatives Backing away from Ed Reform . . .
. . .leaving Liberal Democrats holding the bag: Conservative and liberal "reformers" were joined at the hip in supporting top down mandates by the Obama administration that put NCLB-type testing on steroids. Now, presumably, conservatives will step back at let the Democrats take the full blame for Race to the Top, School Improvement Grants, and
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Ravitch Thought Experiment
Diane Ravitch today: Suppose you wanted to destroy public education. Suppose you wanted to make it so unpleasant to be a teacher or a student in a public school that everyone began to long for a way out. What would you do? Let’s see. You would subject kids to tests repeatedly to the point that