You are currently browsing the daily archive for July 25th, 2009.
Anthony Cody’s recent “quiz” on education reform is an eye-opener:
Here’s some key facts:
Education reform as represented by the current attempt by the NGA to set something akin to national standards does not involve teachers OR independent education researchers who are not linked to testing agency:
One math teacher is involved in providing feedback to the draft standards once they are written. No teachers are on the working groups actually drafting the standards.
The discussion of charter schools whose effectiveness is always spoken about in almost absolute terms:
More than twice as many charter schools have poorer math scores than the public schools to which they provide an alternative.
And since Charter schools are de-unionized:
Charter school teachers have more than twice the turnover rate of traditional schools.
Furthermore the turn-over rate for young teachers in both types of schools is EXTREMELY high. Its not generally money that given for this leaving, but the limitations placed on the teacher and the bureaucratic framework.
Other facts, the cost of a juvenile inmate in California is 115,000 per year, more than Harvard while many in the public education system get 5,000 to 10,000 spent on them. Furthermore, the state of California has had to cut 12 billion ($2,000 per child) in the past two years.
Most education reform still does not include science education. It is often based on hyped semi-science and statistically flawed research. Why? Education is necessarily politicized.
I have heard skeptics call for a “national school board” because of the influence of states like Texas have unduly large populations and thus force their reform on other states by proxy, and I agree in part. However, NOTHING in education reform is simple. We should be trying to increase the scientific methodology in designing education so the weapons against different types of politicization are stronger, otherwise I doubt that a nationally set policy will change much.
When defined in simple terms, it appears ants are more rational than humans:
This is not the case of humans being “stupider” than ants. Humans and animals simply often make irrational choices when faced with very challenging decisions, note the study’s architects Stephen Pratt and Susan Edwards.
“This paradoxical outcome is based on apparent constraint: most individual ants know of only a single option, and the colony’s collective choice self-organizes from interactions among many poorly-informed ants,” says Pratt, an assistant professor in the School of Life Sciences in ASU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
