Consensus, Continuous Improvement Evil

[Arthur Hu <ArthurH@TANGIS.COM>]

Consensus comes from Total Quality Management.
You get facilitated towards a pre-determined consensus.
That is how all of these states all determined that high stakes
testing was a good idea.
The concept that they might be a bad idea never entered consideration.
Consensus has replaced debate/democracy, and this is dangerous
for both sides of the argument since whoever facilitates is in
control.


Continual Improvement is another Total Quality Management idea.
High Stakes Testing allows you to set a baseline from which you
can set a 5-10 year performance quota. No matter how well you are
doing, you can always ask for 10% more until the end of time.


Learning in Context is a popular idea among progressives, but it
is the basis for School To Work - education is useless unless it
can be matched with a real life job. You can't learn that 2+2 = 4
unless it is put into a "context" where you can't even find the
math in it.

_Most_ reform is bad. High Stakes Testing is only one of many
bad reforms. Most new ideas get relegated to the trash heap, very
few survive to the "proven" stage, which is why you ignore the
past at your peril, and "completely" revamping anything is a
recipe for sure disaster.


-----Original Message-----
From: Irv Besecker [mailto:besecker@SPRYNET.COM]
Sent: Monday, June 05, 2000 2:42 PM
To: ARN-L@LISTS.CUA.EDU
Subject: Re: The Paradoxes of Certain Democratic Educational Slogans
(was Algebra...)


This is a useless list, as most lists are.  There is nothing wrong with some
of these phrases, such as consenus, continuous improvement, paradigm shift,
learning in context.  I think Dr. Casey had it right in his response to "all
students can learn."  It is about context.   Irv
-----Original Message-----
From: Arthur Hu <ArthurH@TANGIS.COM>
To: ARN-L@LISTS.CUA.EDU <ARN-L@LISTS.CUA.EDU>
Date: Monday, June 05, 2000 4:52 PM
Subject: Re: The Paradoxes of Certain Democratic Educational Slogans (was
Algebra...)


>Here are some more phrases to tell if a bureacrat has been
>replaced by a OBE pod body snatcher:
>
>
>All students can succeed
>Accountability
>Average is No Longer Good Enough
>Bell Curve is No Longer the Paradigm
>Best practices
>Chalk and talk
>Collaborative
>Consensus
>Continuous Improvement
>Deep understanding
>Delphi Process
>Developmentally Appropriate
>Drill and Kill
>End of Mediocrity
>End of Social Promotion
>Facilitator
>High Expectations
>Higher Order Thinking Skills
>Higher Standards
>Holistic Scoring
>How good is good enough
>Increase student learning
>Learning in Context
>Leave None Behind
>Lifelong learning
>Mastery
>Math for all
>Math power
>Meaningful Diploma
>No Exception, No Excuses
>Outcomes
>Proficient
>Quality Producer
>Rote learning
>Restructuring education
>Root and branch
>Rubric
>One High Standard for All
>Outcome Based Education
>Paradigm Shift
>Performance Based Education
>Sage on the stage
>Seat Time
>Skills for the 21st century
>Stakeholder
>Standards Based Education
>Student Learning
>Total Quality Management
>Varying Learning Time
>What students should be expected to know and be able to do.
>World class standards
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Dr. Leo Casey [mailto:LeoCasey@AOL.COM]
>Sent: Monday, June 05, 2000 1:21 PM
>To: ARN-L@LISTS.CUA.EDU
>Subject: The Paradoxes of Certain Democratic Educational Slogans (was
>Algebra...)
>
>
>I am at a bit of disadvantage here, because Gerald sent his article as an
>attached file, and once again, it came across in unintelligible code. [Even
>for those who receive the posts one by one, rather than in digest form,
more
>and more of us will not be downloading such attachments, since that is the
>primary way one acquires nasty little viruses in one's computer.]
>
>But I do want to make give a cheer (not three, but one) for slogans such as
>"all children can learn." Not three cheers, because the slogan is far too
>simple and unnuanced, leading easily to a view of all children as the same,
>as one homogenized mass which can and should learn in the same way and at
>the
>same rate. But one cheer, because there is a fundamental democratic thrust
>in
>its spirit, a refusal to surrender to the invidious sorting that quickly
>throws away all too many young people, invariably poor and of color, as
>incorrigible in terms of learning and education.
>
>Personally, I prefer something along the lines of "leave no child behind,"
>since it does not pretend that child are the same, but sets out the moral
>imperative that no matter what it takes -- and, as often as not, it will
>take
>much more (educational resource-wise) for those who start with much less
>(economic and social capital-wise) -- all children must be educated well,
>and
>given comparable opportunities at life's start.
>
>I want to insist upon this one cheer, and on this democratic and
egalitarian
>precept, because I see a contrary view, which does find its way into
>discussions on this listserv, that the problem with "high" or "rigorous
>standards" of any sort is what might be called, from this viewpoint, the
>innate intellectual inequality of children. Some children can never master
>the same educational standards as other students (no prizes for guessing
>which children tend to predominate in these two categories -- the answer is
>so obvious as to be axiomatic), this line of argumentation goes, because
>they
>are just not as intelligent. [Intelligence so understood is a genetic
>inheritance, and not a socially acquired quality.] It is essential, I
>insist,
>to reject such a view, and to insist that while children are different, and
>will learn in different ways and at different paces, children have
>fundamentally equal capacities for learning and intellectual growth.
>
>Deborah Meier wrote:
>
>Gerald,
>
>I can't resist, so while no one (but you maybe?) will read this long
screed,
>your wonderful little piece set me going.
>
>We need - as you suggest - to "finish" the unfinished "all children can
>learn" slogan.  Can learn what?  All--well, almost all--human children can,
>I'm prepared to say, learn--if we organized life to make this kind of
>learning accessible--to use their minds well--to tackle big and important
>ideas, to take on complex ideas, to tackle novelties, to go beyond their
>immediate experience of life to imagine other possibilities.  But it does
>not
>mean "equally well"--that's an oxymoron of a sort.  Nor does it mean that
>they will all tackle the same ideas well.  We tackle stuff we are
interested
>in much better than stuff we aren't.  And while learning "habits" may
>transfer they don't transfer in a simpleminded fashion. That's why we tried
>to think about the "kinds" of habits of mind that might be apart of any
>learning experience so as to foster such "transference"--those CPESS
"habits
>of mind".  They aren't magical, but they are one approximation of an
>approach
>to this issue.
>
>Of course, the idea is even more preposterous when one takes a thoroughly
>unequal society and insist that in the 1/6 of children's lives spent in
>publicly supported schooling, we can make up for all the other advantages
>and
>disadvantages that impact on our intellectual lives--our idle curiosity,
our
>willingness to engage in abstract play, our leisurely pursuit of our own
>ideas, etc. not to mention the particular vocabulary, grammar and syntax
>that
>comes to  us all with our mother's milk. It's "neat" when it just happens
to
>also be the "mild" that goes with the culture of power represented by
>schools
>and school achievement norms. (Race adds to the conundrum because it is
>another place where kids' lives are bifurcated--with some kids turning on
or
>off of the "culture of status", and thus picking up or not picking up the
>incidental knowledge that makes schooling more or less easy to take.)
>
>And it's even more preposterous when the schools themselves are not equal.
>And when the response to the cry for more "rigor" and "high achievement"
>produces even more unequal responses--of course!  Note the data from
>Connecticut--as scores go up the gap widens.  The NYC data recently shows
>something similar.  Coaching for the SAT, we discovered at CPESS, was good
>for most kids.  But it actually harmed the scores of about 20%, and it did
>most for the kids who already had the highest scores!  The gap was greater
>after coaching, not before.
>
>And it's even more preposterous when the society seems hell bent on
>increasing the family income and life-style gap between the top and bottom.
>
>So an absurd notion that given equal input (which doesn't and can't exist)
>we
>would get equal output (which couldn't happen even if the former were
>possible--we are NOT robots!), is made quadruply more absurd.
>
>But we all pretend it's true because it "sounds" good, American as apple
>pie.
>
>Thanks, Gerald, for bringing the subject up.
>
>Leo Casey
>United Federation of Teachers
>260 Park Avenue South
>New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
>
>Power concedes nothing without a demand.
>It never has, and it never will.
>If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
>Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who
>want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and
>lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.
>-- Frederick Douglass --
>
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