Re: convergence?

[Peter Campbell <campbellp@mail.montclair.edu>]

Jerry - this is great news.

So are you and Checker buddies now?

;-)

Peter C.


On Jul 13, 2007, at 10:49 AM, GERALD BRACEY wrote:

> Yesterday I sent in an op-ed to the WP to the effect that even if the 
> achievement gap in reading and math is narrowing, and it is not at all 
> clear that that is happening, the achievement gap in a broader sense 
> is growing.  It makes some of the arguments Monty Neill just made on 
> ARN about what tests measure and what's worth learning.  Not too far 
> removed from James Crawford's recent Ed Week piece, but not cast in 
> civil rights terms, just experiential with examples of kids learning 
> science from the real world vs. learning from a book vs. not learning 
> it at all.
>
> Also yesterday this arrived:
>
> "We should have seen this coming.  We and others who have pressed for 
> higher academic standards in recent years--particularly since the 
> Charlottesville education 'summit' set national education goals in 
> 1989--should have anticipated the 'zero sum' problem that it would 
> give rise to...Insofar as we recognized this, however, we naively 
> assumed that school days and years would expand to accommodate more of 
> everything...
>
> "We were wrong.  We didn't see how completely standards-based reform 
> would turn into a basic-skills testing frenzy or the negative impact 
> it would have on educational quality.
>
> Chester E. Finn, Jr., and Diane Ravitch
> Beyond the Basics: Achieving a Liberal Education for All Children.
>
> This grew out of a conference sponsored by Checker & Fordham last 
> December.
>
> Finn and Ravitch point to 4 trends that need to be reversed for a 
> rebirth of liberal education:
>
> 1. The gradual death of liberal learning in higher education
> 2.  A standards-and-accountability movement increasingly focused only 
> on "basic skills."
> 3.  Growing support for math and science at the expense of the rest of 
> the curriculum.
> 4.  Widening gaps: "the accelerating advantage of the have-a-lots over 
> the have-littles--and we see a worsening gap, not its opposite."
>
> For those of us predicting that 4th trend not just since NCLB but 
> since the Minimum Competency Testing madness of the 1970's it's hard 
> not to ask what took you so long, but still the realization is a 
> welcome one.
>
> The book is at www.edexcellence.net.  I can't get the whole book to 
> download, but have taken down individual chapters.  Dana Gioia's 
> suffers a little bit from being on paper as one might expect of 
> remarks delivered by a poet (he's head of the National Endowment for 
> the Arts), but it's still a wonder.  The webcast of the December 12 
> conference is still up at the same site for anyone want to see and 
> hear his comments.
>
> Jerry
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