Standardized education is a leveling tool of the liberal left

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Posted on 30th June 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Obamaschool | Politics | Testing and assessment

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The setting of the same median goal for all students levels individuals into masses. Sure, you can say you hope many students will do more than pass the minimum standard. Will they? Do they?

Their is an illuminating bit of trivia about all this in an obituary today in the New York Times. The quote that follows begins with the obit’s headline and lede, then a sample of the deceased’s liberal stripes, and concludes with a paragraph (in red) noting the fact that he supported George W. Bush’s education initiative.

William Taylor, Vigorous Rights Defender, Dies at 78

William L. Taylor, who as a lawyer, lobbyist and government official for more than a half century had significant roles in pressing important civil rights cases and in drafting and defending civil rights legislation, died Monday in Bethesda, Md. He was 78 and lived in Washington.

Mr. Taylor is also credited with helping to devise a strategy by liberals to defeat President Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987, partly by recruiting well-known law professors to criticize him.

Mr. Taylor could sometimes be unpredictable, as when he openly supported President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law to overhaul education. Liberal critics called the measure punitive, poorly financed and too oriented toward standardized tests.

Yet Taylor was not convinced. As he probably foresaw, standardized educational tests do not lift all students to an equal and meaningful level of excellence. Instead the forced sameness of learning to the tests tends to settled more and more kids into the same level of mediocrity. Senator Ted Kennedy, who was a visceral and relentless liberal and leveler, is another example, like Taylor, who pushed the Bush vision called No Child Left Behind.

Showing his deep leftist core, Obama has not abandoned No Child Left Behind. Instead he is spending billions of dollars on what he calls Race to the Top. The name of that program belies its actual structure and goal. This, Obama’s major education initiative so far, is trying only to boost “failing schools.” He is building a welfare state of public education where youngsters are promoted with low grades, while billions are spent to push children’ scores a bit higher at the worst schools. The effect is not only to lock in a median mass — but to almost ignore education policy that would reward individual achievement. Assessment is made equal for all, while opportunity to learn settles into a media that gets lower and lower.

Beware of the educator with a level in his hand.

To be honest with our three-year-olds, we must tell them this

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Posted on 27th June 2010 by Judy Breck in Next | Obamaschool | Schools we now have

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As Barack Obama is now completing only the second half of the second year of his Presidency it is clear: American education will breaking apart during your K-20 years. You may have learned an old rhyme. It describes precisely what will be happening as you go through your years of kindergarten, grammar, middle, and high school, and college.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

Because of the year you happened to have been born, you are going to find yourself in the middle of this mess. It will happen to you soon. You are only two years away from the big “K” of kindergarten!

What then are you to do about your own learning in your K-20 years — while the kings horses and men scurry around trying to put something together that is broken beyond repair? Your learning will be strongly affected while Obama pushes socialist education until it breaks what is left of public schooling and cobs onto the education sector for the feds.

If Obama is re-elected in 2012, you will just beginning the first grade. That would mean while you are in the early years of grammar school, there will be four more years of expanding the power of the federal government to mess with school policy at the local level. Big money from taxpayers — flowing through Washington — will set up a national curriculum. As a third-grader, for example, all you will required to learn at school is the same minimum stuff that federal experts have approved for every third-grader in American public schools. You will have to learn what they tell you in order to get into the fourth grade. (Actually, you will only have to learn about 50-60% of the stuff to move to the next grade. You will not learn much.)

Between now and 2020, when you are middle-school age, you will have experienced a decade of orchestrated crisis in American education. President Obama has set the goal for 2020 of having “the best educated, most competitive workforce in the world.” Billions of federal tax dollars have already flowed into states and local districts for education.  Yet there is not enough money even to support schools as they are — much less to lavish on grandiose programs that are somehow supposed to elevate our workforce to the best in the world.

During your school years, American education is not only very likely to remain stalled back in the 20th century. It is has already entered a time of chaos and collapse that is part of the Obama-Alinsky modus of governance. It is based on: “The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. The ‘Cloward-Piven Strategy’ seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.”

What could be a more obviously impossible demand of America’s public schools than this one by Obama: to have “the best educated, most competitive workforce in the world” by 2020? Gosh, the college class of 2020 is already in middle school — and perhaps half of those kids now in public schools will not even graduate from high school. Many of those who do get a high school diploma will not qualify for college entrance. Either the Obama promise is an empty one, or it is meant to nudge the Humpty Dumpty of education off the wall.

Even a best case scenario will not help you because of the year you happened to have been born.

You will begin the first grade in 2013, the year after the next Presidential election. If Obama has been defeated and the next President is an educational genius, it will nonetheless not be possible for all of his (or her) horses and all of the best men and women to put effective education together to give you then — or for a lot of years after 2013. Yet these will be your best years for learning — as they will be for all children who were born in the first decade of the 21st century. The loss from immersing your generation in orchestrated educational chaos is going be incalculable for you and for America.

The bottom line for you is not to expect education to be given to you by any government. You must take your own learning into your own hands. Once you do that, the 21st century offers you a global learning feast. When you use your opportunity to learn as an individual at the bountiful virtual table of human knowledge you will lift yourself from educational chaos. You will be in the vanguard who enter and help to shape the global golden age of learning.

Every kid who has a smart phone can read this poetry

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Posted on 24th June 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Findability | Mobiles | Obamaschool

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The picture of the girl reading American Negro Poetry is from the Gates Foundation website. Getting the analog book into her hands undoubtedly cost the foundation quite a bit of money. She could, instead, use her smartphone to read comprehensively in the Negro poetry genre for free.

If you will go to the page where the girl is reading and click the picture, you will be cycled through some other classroom projects funded by Gates grants. The starfish dissection (one of the pictures) provides a strong illustration about how much more can be learned through subject websites than in a small classroom module. Sure, actually cutting up a dead starfish has dimensions the virtual experience may not, but wow: a student can learn a very great deal about starfish on a website like this one where there is even a video of a starfish dissection.

In what follows, I am committing the highest level of pedagogical heresy:

I do not understand why the Gates folks pour their support into this bottom line (from the page where the picture of the girl above appears):
“We believe that all students should graduate from high school prepared to succeed in college, career, and life.”

My italics in the sentence above capture the new trend: Do what it takes for all students to graduate from high school and then college. How long will this take! Obama has set the goal for 2020 — ten years from now.

Why not first get a smart phone to every student so they each can read the world’s poetry and virtually dissect starfish? Some of the students equipped and trained do that may miss the assessment credits pedagogues think they need to receive high school and college diplomas. But if youngsters now in school can learn online — not waiting for the halcyon days when all kids succeed in school — far more of them will be prepared to succeed in career and life.

What to do for kids while education roils

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Posted on 21st June 2010 by Judy Breck in Mobiles | Next | Obamaschool | Schools we now have

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These are great words, with definitions from Merriam-Webster:

Roil means: to make turbid by stirring up the sediment or dregs

These are the origins of turbid: Latin turbidus confused, disordered, turbid, from turba confusion, tumult, crowd; akin to Latin turbare to throw into disorder, disturb, make turbid

Turbulence means: wild unruly disorderly commotion : disposition to stormy unruliness : violent agitation or disturbance : great perturbation : disorderly or tumultuous conduct

In many ways, education is roiling. Money is running out, teachers unions picket, textbook committees argue through the night, politicians promise, parents anguish, pundits prattle — and the goal of elevating learning for yet another generation eludes us.

This disorder and commotion are forcing consideration of what children do all day while they are growing up. Under the umbrella term “education,” issues of culture and nurture loom larger and larger. In a Politico article today, Congresswoman Judy Chu (D-Calif) sketches turbulence in the life of kids who are prevented from focusing on learning.

How long will education be turbidus? Who and what can fix it? Or will education fix itself, with the sediment and dregs that have been stirred up settling into a new pattern in a changing world. I think the latter is true: education will reconfigure itself around the network of what is known by humankind that is emergent on the internet. The world will become a far better place because all the young global generation will connect to the same virtual pages online to learn their knowledge. Separately, and largely locally, what kids do all day will be resolved in many different ways.

Already we can put individual students into the calming future.

While education roils on, we can snatch one mind at a time out of the turbulence. The action is simple: provide the youngster a mobile device and connection that provide him with his own web browser. We may not soon replace the turbid schools Judy Cho describes, but this very day, she could provide a student there with his own connection to what is known by humankind.

Education needs an emergence wake-up call

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Posted on 19th June 2010 by Judy Breck in Findability | Next

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As emergence shook biology loose from physics in the 20th century, emergence will pry preconceived curricula from the natural networking of knowledge. So far, the education establishment has shrugged off the emergence of knowledge online, and hence is blithely unaware that human learning is entering a global golden age.

Paul Davies described in Edge, how scientists have had to stop shrugging and work to understand the reality and power of emergence:

Although scientists have long had an inclination to shrug aside such questions concerning the source of the laws of physics, the mood has now shifted considerably. Part of the reason is the growing acceptance that the emergence of life in the universe, and hence the existence of observers like ourselves, depends rather sensitively on the form of the laws. If the laws of physics were just any old ragbag of rules, life would almost certainly not exist. [First published as an OpEd piece by The New York Times, November 24, 2007]

Davies writes from the perspective of complexity science, which includes the probing of networks. In the 20th century, as DNA was understood and the functioning of biology was studied at increasing depths of complexity, physicists were toppled from their kingship of science. Emergence, Organization & Dynamics of Living Systems (as the Santa Fe Institute calls it) has taken a place next to physics in our understanding of science and the cosmos. We are overdue in placing emergence as a pillar of pedagogy.

The rise of the internet has caused what is known by humankind to relocate into the network matrix formed by the open internet. Because knowledge itself is a network — as is our brain where we use and emerge knowledge — knowledge does what comes naturally when it gets into the internet: it emerges. In an elegance too beautiful to be untrue, knowledge on the internet resonates with knowledge in the learning mind. They mirror each other as the mind learns and thinks about the emergent knowledge it encounters online.

The education establishment did not create online emergent knowledge anymore than the physicists created emergent life. Both are discoveries. Knowledge has always emerged in our minds — but very new is the internet matrix where knowledge can emerge virtually for us to study and learn.

BTW: Social networking is something entirely different than the networking of knowledge. Both are huge for learning. Social networking, as it relates to education, has to do with people interacting about knowledge. Emergent knowledge is about algebra interacting with calculus, French history emerging from Roman Gaul, the ecology of rice connecting to theories of famine — all the stuff like that which is known, learned, and thought about by humankind.

What would John have done with a smart phone?

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Posted on 12th June 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Mobiles | Next

What would the slave boys shown in a newly discovered 1860ish photo have been able to do if they had had mobile devices connected to the internet in their pockets? The discovery of the photo, with its attached record of John’s sale for $1,150 in 1854, is causing an outpouring of remarks about the way slave children were treated a century and a half ago.

There are those who would assume that the social stuff would have to come first to open the doors for a slave boy: political emancipation, financial support, social acceptance of his different skin color. Fifteen decades after this picture was taken, there are still many children for whom political/social barriers remain. They are still trapped in real and virtual kinds of slavery of many sorts in lots of places around the world.

When the picture was taken, there was no way to connect the actual John shown in the photo with knowledge beyond his slave shack and his master’s grounds. Today it is possible to connect every child on earth individually with the sum total of what is known by humankind. We can put all that into every youngster’s pocket. Certainly there would be some — many! — who would break beyond their shacks and the limits set by their masters.

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