Tag Archives: education

It’s Circular

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Allison Benedikt, over at Slate, wrote this:

You are a bad person if you send your children to private school.  Not bad like murderer bad—but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad.  So, pretty bad.

And this:

[I]t seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve.  This would not happen immediately.  It could take generations.  Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good.

Plainly, given her demonstrated ability to think, she must be a product of just such a public school education.

Oh, wait—proudly so:

I went K-12 to a terrible public school.  My high school didn’t offer AP classes, and in four years, I only had to read one book.

It just doesn’t get any clearer than this.

A (State) Government Proposal

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…behind which I could get (sorry.  My mother was an English teacher of the old school, and knuckle raps are hard to forget).

Tennessee has decided not to consider student performance only when assessing teacher compensation; they’ve decided to use student performance also in determining whether teachers will be allowed to continue to teach.  Last week they decided to

pull the license of teachers whose students consistently fail to improve.

“This is not about taking away teacher licenses, but about making sure our students have the best classroom teachers,” said Kevin Huffman, the state’s education commissioner.

The move also is proactive: the policy requires teachers to show they are boosting student achievement rather than requiring the state to show they are not.  If the teachers cannot demonstrate student improvement—if the teachers cannot demonstrate actual performance—they would lose their teaching licenses.  This places the burden of proof is where it belongs, a good innovation.

The teachers union in Tennessee, the Tennessee Education Association, claims not to oppose holding its members to performance standards, but….

[T]he current plan gives too much weight to the state’s measure of student growth, which she described as “complicated and problematic.”

Here’s the groundwork being laid for the excuse generation wave as the standards are begun to be upheld, which will begin with the 2015 school year.

How strongly will the union actually oppose this move?  With the excuses already starting, the union attitude will be problematical.  We’ll see in the realization, though, how strongly the unions are invested in student performance as opposed to perks for the teachers—and for union leadership.

Education the Obama Way

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In President Barack Obama’s shiny object speech at the University of Central Missouri last week, he talked some about our education system, the obstructiveness of Evil Republicans in not letting Obama have his way on education-related matters, and the politics of the matter.  He also said this:

Our kids don’t care about politics.

Isn’t that a terrible indictment of the Obama Education System?

Focus

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Shailini Jandial George, Suffolk University Law School Professor of Legal Writing, posits the following scenario, which she says is growing ever more common in law classrooms:

[Lara Law Student] arrives to her first-year torts class, flips open her laptop, and rests her iPhone on her desk.  Her professor starts his lecture, while she checks her email.  She visits Facebook to check out “must see” photos flagged by a friend.  When the professor turns to the subject of negligence, Lara Law Student remembers that her mom is getting sued and emails her for an update.  She’s then distracted by a text from a friend inquiring about her lunch plans…and so on.

I think George underestimates the deficiency; such behavior is growing more common in all classrooms.  Regardless, she has a solution:

“Instead of conveying all the class information via reading, lecture, and discussion, which can overtax the verbal channel in working memory,” educations should use more pictures….

[L]aw students can greatly benefit from using visuals to remember rules, apply rules to slightly modified hypothetical situations, and apply rules to completely novel situations in exam situations.

Imagine teaching our social compact documents—our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution—and their underlying principles from pictures (how many drawings did Locke use in his Second Treatise?).  Imagine teaching the British constitution—which is much more document intensive than our own—from pictures.

“Conveying…information via reading, lecture, and discussion” does not at all overtax the “verbal channel in working memory;” each of those media already are rife with visual aids (Locke notwithstanding).  What overtaxes “verbal channels” is lack of practice and lack of focus (both of which STEM-ers as well as lawyers need in spades), and that lack results from all of those distractions which George illustrates in her scenario.

Maybe another education reform would be to enclose classrooms inside Faraday cages.

Meddling with Science Education

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Now the educators are politicizing the “science” to be taught our children.  Newly released national science standard “proposals” will include the pseudo-science of manmade climate change as a “core concept.”

The new standards claim

Human activities, such as the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, are major factors in the current rise in Earth’s mean surface temperature (global warming)

without any regard for the lack of actual science, or even data, to support that thesis.

On the other hand, some of the objections to this politicization miss the point and, if these objections are the ones that successfully defeat the nonsense, they’ll create their own problems.  There is, for instance, the worry that

the very presence of climate change instruction in classrooms will create controversy.

So what?  That actually would be beneficial.  A proper handling of the controversy (of any controversy, come to that) would constitute an excellent mechanism for teaching critical thinking, to say nothing of the opportunity to teach the social aspects of dealing with controversial matters.