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Re: goofiness
Thanks, Joe
----- Original Message -----
From: <MONICALUCIDO@comcast.net>
To: <arn-l@interversity.org>
Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2008 2:16 PM
Subject: Re: [arn-l] goofiness
Thanks for this, Jerry. It gives great hope when knowledgeable leaders
such as yourself are willing to face the corporate Mongol Horde that is
poised to ruin our public schools.
Joe Lucido
Fresno
-------------- Original message ----------------------
From: "GERALD BRACEY" <gbracey1@verizon.net>
Mr. Alter
Back in April, I wrote NYTimes columnist Bob Herbert an email that began,
"I am
still amazed after all these years that people who can be rational and
insightful about virtually every topic under the sun go all goofy when it
comes
to education. Goofy is you in today's column."
Now it's your turn. Goofy is you. It so happens that Bob had also been
visited
by professional fear monger, Bob Wise. I guess there's good money in
fear.
Don't know if Roy Romer turned up in your office, but Roy, who was pretty
smart
when I knew him in Colorado, is the worst of the anxiety peddlers. He
gets $60
million from Bill and Eli to make people afraid, very afraid. For an
octogenarian, he's very energetic about it.
You guys don't seem to get it. "A Nation at Risk" (ANAR) said we were
doomed if
we didn't completely reform our schools. You point out that today we're
#25
among 30 industrialized nations in math. So we didn't shape up as ANAR
demanded. Yet the World Economic Forum ranks us the most competitive
economy in
the world. So does the Institute for Management Development.
The IMD had us replacing Japan as #1 in 1994 and remaining in that
position.
You remember Japan. It had a great economy and the people who wrote ANAR
thought that that was due to Japanese kids' high test scores. After ANAR
appeared, Secretary of Education Ted Bell dispatched assistant secretary
Checker
Finn and a group of policy wonks to Japan to see if we could import their
schools. They said they thought it was possible. But 7 years later,
Japan's
economy sank into the Pacific and took the rest of the Asian Tiger
nations with
it. But Japanese kids continued to ace tests. Get it through your head:
tests
don't count. As Einstein said, "Not everything that counts can be
measured and
not everything that can be measured counts."
Ask your fellow Newsweek pundit, Fareed Zakariya. He noticed that those
high
flying 8th graders in Singapore compared poorly to American kids 10, 20
years
down the road. How come? He asked the Singapore Minister of Education.
We
have a test meritocracy, Mr. Minister said. You have a talent
meritocracy.
There are things we can't test like creativity, ambition and, most of
all, the
American kids' willingness to challenge conventional wisdom. This is
where
Singapore must learn from America. They're trying--a bunch of Singapore
educators visited the adjacent county to mine and were blown away. The
kids
were so ENGAGED with school. Maybe that's why there are 105,000 Korean
kids
studying here. Their parents want them to learn English, yes, but they
hate the
rote learning of Korean schools and the life-determining college entrance
test.
But Korean kids do score high on tests.
Even if tests counted there'd be the fact that among 21 developed
nations, the
U.S had the highest poverty rate. If we're #1 in poverty, is it
reasonable to
expect #1 in test scores? But, really, tests, don't count. In fact, if
you
analyze the test scores by the poverty levels of schools, 30% of American
kids
score higher than the highest country in reading. And another 28% score
high
enough that if they constituted a nation, they'd rank fourth in the world
(out
of 35). But the Bob Wises and Roy Romers aren't interested in such
analyses.
They've got money to peddle fear.
George Washington University professor Iris Rotberg recently wrote, "The
fact
is, test score comparisons tell you very little about the quality of
schools"
(Education Week, June 11). You say it's fashionable to attack tests.
Yes, and
the preceding statement is why. If you wanted to evaluate schools based
on test
scores, you'd be a fool. So would Obama.
If you wanted to evaluate teachers based on test scores, you would be
equally
foolish. The resistance of anyone to teacher evaluation that no one has
figured
out how to do it. You admit this but say, "we have no way of determining
which
teachers can actually teach." It's a bit complicated, this. How do you
separate this year's teacher contribution from last year's? How do you
factor
out home, community, lead poisoning, poor nutrition, asthma (which
somehow
doesn't seem to turn up in affluent neighborhoods), single parenthood,
stress (I
was just reading some pediatric literature on the devastating impact of
stress
on the developing brain)?
By the way, the official 2008 Texas GOP Platform says, and I quote, "The
No
child Left Behind Act has been a massive failure and should be
abolished." Know
what? They're right.
A second by-the-way and a strong request: KIPP admissions are anything
but
random. If Wise or Romer told you that, they're lying. And I want to
see a
citation for your claim that 80 percent of KIPP go to college. If you
look even
at KIPP's own annual reports, you see extremely high attrition rates
from grade
5 to grade 8.
Sincerely,
Gerald W. Bracey
1797 Duffield Lane
Alexandria, VA 22307
703-317-1716
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