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Category Archives: social class

It’s the News Media, Stupid (again)

Monday, April 26, 2010

When I first heard Glenn Beck on the truck radio (following Barack Obama’s election) I thought I was listening to a ridiculous caricature of a revolutionary. Here was this obviously white, pin-headed fear monger, using a national broadcast medium to pretend that he was a threatened underdog. Part comedy, part horror show. And now, since [...]

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Rewriting David Brooks

Friday, May 8, 2009

The fight against poverty produces political posturing and fatuous claims about “Harlem miracles.” You go visit any low-income public school, job-training program, or community youth center, and you meet committed, caring, idealistic people, hard at work. Then you look at the results from low-grade standardized tests that have been forced on school communities by politicians [...]

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Make Your Mark Heavy and Dark

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

This is testing week, and I’ve been listening to what the kids are hearing about the tests. “Relax; just do your best.” “The tests give us information about how we can help you.” “You will not be held back or get a bad grade on your report card if you don’t do well on the [...]

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On the Scale of Intervention

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Via Susan Ohanian, a letter to the editor at USA Today about a recent study on poverty and brain development, Stephen Krashen says, Experts quoted in USA TODAY’s article “Poverty dramatically affects children’s brains” seem to think that the solution to poor brain development of children in poverty should consist of “intervention” that includes “focused [...]

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Speaking Math

Saturday, December 13, 2008

I’ve been thinking about our school district’s mathematics pacing guide lately. This past week we gave the required mid-year math assessment to make sure the kids are on track, and I’m seeing the predictable result: Some are; too many are not. So, what now? The pacing guide doesn’t say. It isn’t a teaching tool, you [...]

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Harder vs. Smarter

Monday, December 1, 2008

Bloggers have been all over the Michelle Rhee story, lately. Mike Klonsky: Know-nothing writers like Amanda Ripley kill perfectly good trees to fill pages with crap like this: “The biggest problem with U.S. public schools is ineffective teaching, according to decades of research.” Did you get that? Decades of research? Now instead of weighing school [...]

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Reclaiming Education

Monday, August 11, 2008

Dissent Magazine kicks off a series of articles on education with this one from Susan Harman and Deborah Meier: No matter what the question is, these alarmists have the answer. Why is the economy in bad shape? Look at the lousy math scores of U.S. students in the international competitions. Why are so many young [...]

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Shock Resistance

Thursday, July 17, 2008

I’m reading Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, and I see the standards movement in US education policy now less as an isolated case, that is, isolated to the US and education in particular, and more connected to events in the larger world of politics and economics. It’s good to have a frame of reference for what [...]

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Expectations

Friday, June 20, 2008

My sixth-graders this year showed me something about how the “staus quo” is maintained. A counseling intern working in the building did a weekly series of lessons on goal setting with my students. The kids occasionally responded to little surveys she gave them on various topics, and they discussed their answer choices. Coincidentally, toward the [...]

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The Devil is in the Details

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

By coincidence, I finished reading Sizer’s The Red Pencil at the same time this new “Broader, Bolder Approach to Education” statement was released. Not by mere coincidence, Theodore Sizer is among the dozens of signatories to the statement. Reading his book, and then the proposals advanced in the new policy statement, I have a hard [...]

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