Some people seem to think that I’m saying that racism and the other issues I classify as “weapons of mass distraction” are what movement conservatism is about. They aren’t.
What the movement is about is economics: the core goal is, as Heritage says in its fundraising letters, to roll back the New Deal and the Great Society — or as Grover Norquist puts it, to get things back to the way they were “up until Teddy Roosevelt, when the socialists took over.”
Race and other distractions aren’t the goal, they’re a tactic — they’re how an anti-populist movement wins elections.
I think we can add standardized education reform to the list, also. Oh, and let’s not forget performance pay, which Eduwonkette points out is not generally awarded to workers in the private sector based on client outcomes.
It seemed to me from the beginning of this testing juggernaut that the most certain outcome of using standardized test scores to evaluate schools, teachers, and students would be to set up a grand finger-pointing drama in which everyone claims to be the victim of someone else’s bad faith. I hate to say it, but…there we go.
And even this shall one day pass. But I wonder what might be left of faith in anything by then.
For whatever it may have been worth, I sent George Miller a message, and received a response. I suggested that it would be a better idea to:
- emphasize class size reduction,
- provide resources for quality teacher training,
- provide mentors for new teachers,
- provide teachers in adequate numbers to meet the needs of learning disabled and ELL students,
- and provide for programs that promote parental and family involvement in our schools.
His response was discouraging, though, because he has the idea that accountability using multiple measures means more tests:
For elementary schools, these “multiple indicators” include increases in the percentages of students who move from below basic to basic levels of proficiency and improvements in state science, writing, history, social studies, or civics tests.
No, no, no, no, no.
Oh, and in case anyone thinks that I object to testing because it narrows the curriculum, I don’t. I object to the curriculum itself. Testing just makes it worse.
5 Comments
Yes, curriculum is the enemy. Here’s my favourite article, by Brian Alger, on the subject:
http://www.experiencedesignernetwork.com/archives/000646.html
This quote sums it up:
“One of the effects of curriculum design of any kind is confinement. And the confinement of human experience is an act of violence. A common example of this confinement via curriculum leading to violence is bullying.”
I liked this quote also, “This is often the place where innovation enters the Dead Sea.”
Thanks for that link.
Testing, testing, testing. As another veteran teacher I sat through a recent department chair meeting with my superintendent explaining to us, so we could explain to our department members, why we need to increase our testing, and why that testing means only T/F or multiple choice, something easily disaggregated by some assessment analysis tool to which the district currently subscribes. Curriculum must include some degree of wiggle room……the wiggle room seems to be decreasing exponentially each year.
Great example…
Our current Math curriculum. We teach the same skills K-5. Each year, teachers have the ability to touch on certain skills before they have to move on to the next. Every year, the same skills are taught, only in a different format for a higher level of thinking. Who is writing the curriculum? Were they ever teachers? Probably a mixed bag. We are teaching students to know a little bit about a lot. What happened to mastering a few core skills each year. Check out the differences at http://sitemaker.umich.edu/schueller.356/curriculum. It seems as though the teachers I have contact with all feel the same.
Here is the correct link http://sitemaker.umich.edu/schueller.356/curriculum
One Trackback/Pingback
[...] Noon is talking about reform and merit-based pay on his blog today. I’ve been exchanging a few brief comments with TMAO about merit-based pay in [...]
Post a Comment