Skip to main content

Students need to be nurtured; teachers need resources; DE and US DOE need to get the hell out of the way

Here are two recent first-person articles regarding the welcome backlash against the pervading high-stakes testing mentality being used to corporatize teachers in America.

Both are worth your time.

I would love to teach, but . . .

How to truly evaluate a teacher

The driving idea behind American public education used to be that teachers were responsible for nurturing children to help them develop into competent, independent learners as adults who would become good citizens.

The driving idea behind American public education today seems to be that teachers are surrogate corporate trainers for entry-level jobs and to meet college entrance expectations.

Which is truly interesting because . . .

The entire workforce and structure of post-industrial America is changing rapidly, and it is not the corporate dinosaurs like those supporting Vision [enter appropriate year here] who are leading the way. The future is one of crypto-currencies, dispersed work forces, 3-D printing, and lots of neat stuff that our children all inherently understand better than overpaid men in charcoal suits.

The whole traditional experience of higher education is changing rapidly, and within 20 years I'd bet that without a massive government takeover more than half of the colleges and universities in the US that now exist will be out of business.  My children and yours in high school are among the last generation that will continue to pay outrageous prices for an education that the marketplace will soon bring them almost for free.

Corporate educrats are, in the military vernacular, still fighting the last war.

And they are fighting it here in Delaware on the backs of Delaware teachers and students.

It's past time to think about providing Delaware teachers resources instead of new tests and evaluations.

For $119 million we could have bought every single student in Delaware a good laptop, or, we could actually have invested $5 million each into Delaware's 22 schools with the highest percentage of poor, non-English speaking, or special needs students, and then sat back to see what happened.

The biggest impediment to doing something like that?  The US and DE Departments of Education--and a General Assembly crammed with politicians who gleefully take campaign donations from DSEA on the one hand and Rodel on the other, then allow millions of education to go other places than into classrooms.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?