Comments on This Swiftly Tilting Planet: DARE

This is a great post, and I'm glad I dug down into...

2007-11-12T12:19:00.000-06:00

This is a great post, and I'm glad I dug down into the comments. So often the best part of a post are down into the comments. Yes, we can never do enough for kids, however, teachers are responsible for the classroom, hold those w/ authority over the system responsible for the system. The system may be broken but there are a lot of teachers out there using McGyver strategies to do a lot with a little.

"we wanted every child to go to college" - have yo...

2007-11-09T22:44:00.000-06:00

"we wanted every child to go to college" - have you heard Phil Schechty speak in the past couple of years? He has a great presentation on how our education system was built to teach a few students a lot, but now we use it to teach a lot of students, some. Why?, because we want to send everyone to college.

You may be right about the Universities looking for money...I am watching universities jump into online graduate programs left and right without much concern for academic rigor.

I really appreciate your comments. Keeps me thinking :)

I like that... Do the best you can, keep moving an...

2007-11-09T05:58:00.000-06:00

I like that... Do the best you can, keep moving and bring everyone you can with you. Sounds right to me.

I don't think that the reason we have NCLB is because we didn't evolve along with society. I think it's because we floated some disreputable policies that dismantled skill based education which produced generations of students who were poorly prepared. And, we wanted every child to go to college (as if that's the sole measurement of success). We collaborated with the Academy to make college the only target (empowering universities and making them a load of money), and dismantled vocational education (saving the department of education a load of money).

Suddenly, no child could be left behind, but every avenue other than college was left behind. Making a load of money for McGraw Hill et al (McGraw Hill with it's 70 years of ties to the Bush family btw).

I'm all for technology, but not if it replaces fieldtrips with virtual fieldtrips and labs with virtual labs. I'm all for portfolio assessment for the classroom, but it's a bear for state and federal assessment. And I want no part of that. I don't like NCLB, but I agree with one thing: we need some way of monitoring what schools are doing and insuring a comparable level of quality from district to district and state to state. NAEP is one way, less invasive... that allows for an assessment of the school itself. I don't have the answer, but I do think it's time we realize that after 50 years of trouble distinguishing the baby from the bathwater... we may not know it yet.

Sorry Audrey, this one caught me on a grumpy day, ...

2007-11-08T21:08:00.000-06:00

Sorry Audrey, this one caught me on a grumpy day, but my point was that our failure to evolve alongside society has caused the NCLB backlash of standardized testing. If educators had provided some innovative leadership for our country over the past 50 years, we may not be in the boat we are in now (who's to say for sure unless the time machine has been invented). If we had developed portfolio and authentic assessments in a much wider scale and showed our society how and why it works, then maybe our parents wouldn't go "I hate the standardized tests, but how else do you measure student achievement?". Education failed to changed because we believed in the tests too.

I have to amend your matra: Do the best you can, keep moving, and bring everyone you can with you.

I'm with you except for the part about how we've f...

2007-11-08T14:33:00.000-06:00

I'm with you except for the part about how we've failed as educators. Give up the guilt wallowing, hair shirt wearing, whip your own back with a cat-o'-nine tails because we can never do enough for the children, they are our future kumbaya, already.

There's only this: Do the best you can and keep moving. End of story.