Re: Sub-group Analysis

[ABurke5054@aol.com]

Pete ...Schools can spend enormous amounts of time and taxpayers' money 
looking at "human relationships," turning teachers into "facilitors of learning," 
"building bridges to the future," and any number of other pie-in-the-sky 
endeavors while doing an awful job of teaching the kids.  People send their kids to 
learn and want evidence that they are in fact learning.  Tests, including the 
"standardized tests" that have arisen with NCLB, are an important source of 
evidence that kids are learning.  And while I think most of what you say is 
simply silly, I do agree that there is a weakness in NCLB:  it fails to call for 
direct evidence that teachers are teaching well, which is really what we need. 
Art

In a message dated 1/31/2004 5:08:12 AM Pacific Standard Time, 
pwmjoy@earthlink.net writes:
To Mr. Art, it is not whether or not we can know a good school from a bad
school, but whether or not we can distinguish between an acceptable
philosophy of knowledge and a tool of evaluation it embraces from one that
is unacceptable both philosophically and methodologically. Everyone knows
that the standardized testing juggernaut flows from an illusory empirical
philosophy that pretends that its methodology is a scientifically accurate
reflection of what it supposedly tests, and even if it were accurate, the
interpretation of the results as well as the prescription for addressing
problems it exposes tend to eliminate whole avenues of empirical data like
poverty in its blind approach to the unfortunate, simplistic mandates like
NCLB that it props up as dogma. The dialogue these past few days has more or
less proven that. So, your question can only be adequately answered by a
much deeper look at human relationships and what makes them work or fail.
Those relationships involve knowing where students come from, experiences
they have had, hiring teachers who can relate to them while expecting big
things from them too, reducing class size, having materials that are worth
having, changing the power structure in schools, and reconstructing goals
and evaluation rubrics that require students to show what they know as in
public exhibitions of their work where they have to explain what they have
done, for example, and re-thinking ability grouping as well as teachers
becoming not just subject area experts but real facilitators of learning.
This is where the money should be going, not a process that exposes quite
intentionally what we already know are weaknesses and simultaneously
undercuts the millions of good things happening in schools. Pete Majoy
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