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30 Nov 09

The Dumbing Down of Quality Teaching: How Policymakers Snooker the Public « Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

  • The squishing of “good” teaching with “successful” learning, then, does further collateral damage to the profession of teaching by setting up the expectation that only heroes need apply.
  • By stripping away from “good” learning essential factors of students’ motivation, the contexts in which they live, and the opportunities they have to learn in school–federal, state, and district policymakers twist the links between teaching and learning into a simpleminded formula thereby miseducating the public they serve while encouraging a generation of idealistic newcomers to become classroom heroes who end up deserting schools in wholesale numbers within a few years because they come to understand that “good” teaching does not lead automatically to “successful” learning. F & R help us parse “quality teaching” into distinctions between “good” and “successful” teaching and learning. Now policymakers, voters, parents, and educators need to learn and use those distinctions responsibly. Until they (and we) do, the high price of bad policy and ill-conceived reform will be paid by both teachers and students directly and the nation indirectly.
17 Nov 09

How Researchers Can Silence Teachers’ Voices « Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

  • Change clearly meant one thing to teachers and another to researchers. Teachers had, indeed, made a cascade of incremental changes in their daily lessons. Researchers, however, keeping in mind what policymakers intended, looked for fundamental changes in teaching.
  • Researchers, however, publish their studies and teachers like Mrs. O seldom tell their side of the story. Yet teachers’ perceptions of change have to be respected and voiced because they have indeed altered their practices incrementally and as any practitioners (lawyers, doctors, accountants) will tell you, that is very hard to do. How to honor teachers’ incremental changes while pointing out few shifts in fundamental patterns of teaching is the dilemma with which I have wrestled in researching high-tech use in schools.
19 Oct 09

Privatisation and education — Crooked Timber

  • misdiagnosis of the problems of the public school system, focusing on organizational factors, rather than the more intractable effects of steadily growing inequality
  • Managerialism and market liberalism are at one in their rejection of notions of professionalism and the idea of autonomous academic disciplines. Both managerialists and market liberals reject as special pleading the idea that there is any fundamental difference between higher education and say, the manufacturing and marketing of soft drinks. In both cases, it is claimed the optimal policy is to design organisations that respond directly to consumer demand, and to operate such institutions using the generic management techniques applicable to corporations of all kind. They should compete on the basis of price (fees) as well as quality, and tailor their offerings to market (student) demand. The laws of economics would then ensure an efficient outcome.
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26 Aug 09

Word Spy - YIMBY

  • YIMBY

    n.
    A person who favors a project that would add a dangerous or unpleasant feature to his or her neighborhood. [Acronym from the phrase yes in my back yard.]
16 Apr 09

In Full Interview, John Holdren Eschews New Nukes, Hints at Space Flight Delays : ScienceInsider

  • ScienceInsider: Staying with education, do you think that the Texas state school board's recent decision to add a skeptical view of the study of evolution and the fossil record weaken the state's science standards and weaken national efforts to improve science education?
    Holdren: Well, I have not reviewed that decision carefully. But my impression from reading about it is that it was not a step forward but rather a step backward. Of course, all science needs to be skeptical. It's hard to be against skepticism. But when you get into the domain of promoting particular views about the basis for skepticism of evolution, and those views are not really valid, then I think we have a problem. I think we need to be giving our kids a modern education in biology, and the underpinning of modern biology is evolution. And countervailing views that are not really science, if they are taught at all, should be taught in some other part of the curriculum.
11 Apr 09

Presentation to the United Nations July 18, 1995 by Carol Jacobs, Cayuga Bear Clan Mother, Akwesasne Notes, Fall 1995

  • In making any law, our chiefs must always consider three
    things: the effect of their decision on peace; the effect
    on the natural world; and the effect on seven generations
    in the future. We believe that all lawmakers should be
    required to think this way, that all constitutions
    should contain these rules.


    We call the future generations "the coming faces". We
    are told that we can see the faces of our children to
    come in the rain that is falling, and that we must
    tread lightly on the earth, for we are walking on the
    faces of our children yet to come. That attitude, too,
    we want to have you learn and share.

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