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Re: convergence?
Buddies...I doubt it. It hasn't been that long since Checker's only
condition for giving a speech at George Mason U was that I not be in the
room.
JB
----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter Campbell" <campbellp@mail.montclair.edu>
To: <arn-l@interversity.org>
Sent: Tuesday, July 17, 2007 1:54 PM
Subject: Re: [arn-l] convergence?
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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