by Jeffrey R. Henig  on the Teachers College Record site

  When waters get rough, it is nice to have a harbor to run to and a sturdy anchor that can be embedded in the ground below. As education issues become more prominent on the policy agenda, they are more subject to the swirling currents of partisan and ideological conflict. The so-called "politicization" of education policy debate has been evident across a range of hot button issues, including charter schools, class size, and testing with high stakes for students, teachers, schools, and districts (Henig, 2008). Political and civic leaders are drawn, in such circumstances, to the images of objective science as safe harbor, and to validity-in design and in measurement-as stabilizing anchors. Ironically-but perhaps not so surprisingly-experts in measurement and research are typically much more circumspect in their characterization of the power of the tools they bring to bear.

  How Well Are American Students Learning?  by Tom Loveless at the Brown Center for Education Policy at Brookings

   China requires all citizens to hold a hukou, a passport-like document issued by a family's province of origin. The system dates back to 1958 and the authoritarian regime of Mao Zedong. The original purpose of hukou was to control where people lived. Today it serves the purpose of rationing social services, including health care and education. Large cities in China are inundated with migrants who leave poor, rural areas in search of work. Admission to an academic high school in Shanghai is almost impossible for a student not holding a Shanghai hukou. In addition, students can only take the gaokao, the national college entrance exam, in their province of hukou registration. As a consequence, tens of thousands of Shanghai families send their children back to rural villages as the children approach high 4 The Brown Center Report on American Education school age. The only other option is to leave the children behind in the first place, the fate of approximately 60 million children nationwide. 

The Costs of Common Core Testing   by Logan Albright on the Freedom Works site.

  Common Core educational standards, like all recent attempts to expand federal control of the education system, rely heavily on standardized testing in their efforts to improve the competitiveness of American students. It seems that bureaucrats on educational boards are capable of no more creative idea than that repeatedly drilling facts into children's heads and then testing them to within an inch of their life is the only way to improve educational outcomes.

The theory itself is grossly flawed and ignores entirely the myriad ways in which children learn and succeed, but the federal fixation on testing persists, and now we're all going to have to pay a price for it. I speak not only of the price to the students' sanity, to the teachers' flexibility, and to parents' peace of mind, all of which have been written about extensively, but the purely fiscal cost to state governments as well.

 

A Common Core of Corporate Profit by Diann Woodward on the Huffington Post side

   Within two years, Common Core standards found their way into most states, even before the full plan was written. Tom Loveless, policy expert at the Brookings Institute, stated that the Common Core standards were "built on a shaky theory." He found no correlation between quality standards and higher student achievement. Nonetheless, the Gates Foundation used the common denominator of money to buy support from the left, the right, some unions and even the president.

"Really rich guys can come up with ideas that they think are great," explains J.T. Greene, head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. "But there is a danger that everyone will tell them they're great, even if they're not." Most policy makers weren't even aware of what the Common Core standards were supposed to accomplish before they had signed on.

 

 The How of Defending a Liberal Education  by Shastri Purushotma  on the Huffington Post site

  Despite the problems with higher education in the US, there are other places in the world where the situation is downright twisted. One notorious example is Iran, where women are deliberately blocked from studying many subjects, and Baha'is aresystematically excluded from access to higher education entirely - even if informally organized in their own living rooms. Thankfully, despite the many problems American education does have, Revolutionary Guards with machine guns breaking into living rooms and arresting teachers and students studying calculus is not one of them.

Education, which historian Will Durant so beautifully described as "the transmission of civilization," is vital for any individual or country and cannot end with graduation. 

 

Trusting Our Judgment: Measurement and Accountability for Educational Outcomes      

   Education policymakers across the country face an urgent problem: we know there is wide disparity in teacher effectiveness, but we lack meaningful tools to identify and reward the most effective teachers across the system or to ensure that the least effective improve or leave the classroom. The consequences for our children are real. Teachers are widely believed to be the single most important in-school factor in determining student achievement: students with the least effective teachers may learn only half of what their peers with average teachers learn in a year (Hanushek, 2008). Students burdened with very poor teachers two years in a row could therefore find themselves, solely as a result of the quality of their instruction, a full year behind - the kind of gap it may be impossible to close.

Like other educators and officials, I faced this problem directly when I served as New York State Commissioner of Education. Our principals and district leaders found it virtually impossible to remove teachers based on performance, no matter how persuasive the evidence of their ineffectiveness might be. To give one example, in 2008 and 2009, out of some 55,000 tenured public school teachers in New York City, only 3 were fired for incompetence (Medina, 2010).

 

   How would you feel if your kids toiled in a factory run by a British company whose overlords were faceless bureaucrats in Albany?

LIBN's Claude Solnik's in-depth probe of British testing giant Pearson reveals that, over the past few weeks, your children - ages 8-14 - were asked to labor long hours during a six-day span without pay or tangible reward. In the process, they contributed to the testing factory's windfall profits.

Meanwhile the state, which forced this down the throats of our children, took federal money to do the company's bidding. Pearson not only produces the tests but the preparatory and remedial materials necessary to implement them. We pay for this through our taxes and parental angst.

Our kids received no pay, no timely results - merely the pain of mind-numbing test-taking for hours, answering questions with very questionable answers. Incredibly, this disgraceful form of mind management is designed as an evaluation of teachers, not actually their students.

 

The "Best TED talk of 2015.
 

 

 

 

 

  The Secretary of State is supposed to be the nation's top diplomat.
The Attorney General is supposed to be the nation's top lawyer.
The Surgeon General is supposed to be the nation's top physician.
So why is Arne Duncan, the nation's Secretary of Education, behaving more like a schoolyard bully than like the nation's top teacher?
In the face of unprecedented opposition to his administration's program of standardized testing, with nearly 200,000 parents in New York State alone opting their children out of standardized tests that they perceive as not only unhelpful, but downright damaging, Sec. Duncan went on the offensive Tuesday, promising that if the states wouldn't force those children to take his tests, then he would:    "'We think most states will do that,' Duncan told an Education Writers Association conference in Chicago, according to Chalkbeat New York. 'If states don't do that, then we [the federal government] have an obligation to step in.'

A Watch Pot Never Boils  on the TeacherTalkTruth site

   I believe there are parallels between airport security and the testing system in our schools. Both were implemented out of fear. (Our test scores aren't the highest! OMG, we aren't globally competitive!) Both are massively expensive and intrusive systems with little tangible return on investment of time and resources. Both seem to be influenced by the profit motive and the current crony/revolving door government in DC. Both have evolved over time, and we have been like the proverbial frog in the pot of water set to boil. Little by little, we have allowed ourselves to become accustomed to things we would never have allowed if they were introduced all at once.