This link has been bookmarked by 4 people . It was first bookmarked on 11 Apr 2008, by Doug Noon.
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19 Nov 10
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28 Apr 08
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Risk, to its credit, worried that “schools may emphasize such rudiments as reading and computation at the expense of other essential skills such as comprehension, analysis, solving problems, and drawing conclusions,” and it asserted, “Our concern, however, goes well beyond matters such as industry and commerce. It also includes the intellectual, moral, and spiritual strengths of our people. . . .”[3] But these caveats were buried beneath the report’s urgent calls to improve the reading and (especially) math skills that purportedly determined the nation’s economic health, and to increase the standardized testing that would spur such improvement.
From an irrational faith in the ability of standardized tests to inspire greater learning, and from an unwillingness to finance more expensive tests that would sample critical thinking as well as basic skills, we’ve again narrowed the curriculum to “minimum competency,” precisely the 1970s standard that A Nation at Risk denounced.
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it is hard to defend the proposition that teachers, especially those of minority and disadvantaged children, have been sitting around making excuses for poor performance when these children have gained a full standard deviation in test score improvement in a single generation.
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But these 21st-century claims are as misguided as those of the last century. Of course, we should work to improve schools for the middle class. And we have an urgent need to help more students from disadvantaged families graduate from good high schools. If those students do so, our society can become more meritocratic, with children from low-income and minority families better able to compete for good jobs with children from more privileged homes. But the biggest threats to the next generation’s success come from social and economic policy failures, not schools. And enhancing opportunity requires much more than school improvement.
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workforce skills cannot determine how the wealth created by national productivity is distributed. That decision is made by policies over which schools have no influence — tax, regulatory, trade, monetary, technology, and labor market policies that modify the market forces affecting how much workers will be paid.
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The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that, for the next decade, only 22 percent of job vacancies will require a college degree or more. Forty percent will require only one month or less of on-the-job training,
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