Paul Thomas: Ravitch Right, Tucker Wrong

5 Comments Post your own or leave a trackback: Trackback URL

1. sheila says:

   March 15, 2013 at 7:29 pm

   “So there’ moments are good. Congratulations & I’m not surprised. So there.

   Reply
2. Robert Rendo says:

   March 15, 2013 at 7:44 pm

   I think David Coleman had something wonderful as a starting point for the CCS, but it morphed into something hideously imbalanced, narrow minded, data obsessed, and very rigid. Not to mention, the strands that progress from one grade to another take into account far more philosophy as to what children should know by a certain grade than actual research evidencing childhood and cognitive development.

   Learning and teaching are “brain” sciences, but I see neither brains nor science in the CCS.

   So there.

   Reply
3. vinnie says:

   March 15, 2013 at 7:54 pm

   Yeah! Sanity! So there! Take that! Aha!

   Reply
4. patriciahale says:

   March 16, 2013 at 10:17 am

   That was a superb post on Chalk Face. Unfortunately the ultimate education reform agenda is far more devious than just using bad research to convince people that American public education is sub-par, and that teachers are the reason. That was
   just the first step so that corporatists could raid and plunder taxpayer dollars meant for schools. Think of of all those little po-dunk tutoring companies that sprang up when
   Title I dollars funded SES tutoring. Public monies have made Pearson a testing giant, and Rupert Murdoch bought Wireless Gen. which uses IPods to DIBELS test the fluency in reading of elementary school students and track their data. My district just signed a 3 yr multi-million dollar contract with Pearson to provide computer based intervention services and also track individual student data. (Will insurance companies want to look at that data to rate teen-age drivers?) Meanwhile, the educators in my district haven’t had a raise in 5 years. Pilfering public money is big business, and it’s done right under the American people’s noses.

   Reply
5. Kris Alman says:

   March 16, 2013 at 12:23 pm

   The imperialist strategies of the National Center on Education and the Economy is best summarized in the 2007 pre-recession and “jobless recovery” paper, “Tough Choices or Tough Times”.
   http://www.ncee.org/publications/archived-publications/tough-choices-or-tough-times-state-consortium-publications/

   The authors write, “Those countries that produce the most important new products and services can capture a premium in world markets that will enable them to pay high wages to their citizens.”

   Their version of American exceptional is captured in the the graphic on p.8, “PROTOTYPICAL U.S. INDUSTRY in 10 years if all goes well”. We should recaption it: AMERICA VS. LESS DEVELOPED COUNTRIES

   If we just hit the targets right with education reforms, America’s workforce will be dominated by the creative class doing the likes of:
   Research
   Development
   Design
   Marketing & Sales
   Global Supply Chain Management

   VIVA LA MARKET!

   Yet the Bureau of Labor & Statistics tells us the hard truth: “…occupations that typically need postsecondary education for entry are projected to grow faster than average, but occupations that typically need a high school diploma or less will continue to represent more than half of all jobs.”

   Click to access art5full.pdf

   Conservatives claim that increasing the minimum wage is a “job killer” while the Dow soars during this jobless recovery. Thank you, Oregon Labor Commissioner Brad Avakian for debating this nonsense in Congress!
   http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2013/03/avakian_defends_oregons_histor.html
   http://mashable.com/2013/03/02/wealth-inequality/

   The authors of “Tough Choices or Tough Times” wrote, “If someone can figure out the algorithm for a routine job, chances are that it is economical to automate it. Many good, well-paying, middle-class jobs involve routine work of this kind and are rapidly being automated… If we succeed in matching the very high levels of mastery of mathematics and science of these Indian engineers — an enormous challenge for this country — why would the world’s employers pay us more than they have to pay the Indians to do their work?”

   If there is a two year return on investment to replace an engineer with a robot that can do the same, you bet the plutocrats will do that! In the meantime, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have set up a cruise ship 12 miles off the Northern California coast in international waters, to hire engineers on the cheap, curtailing H1B visa restrictions.
   http://articles.latimes.com/2013/mar/13/business/la-fi-high-seas-immigration-20130313
   http://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2013/jan/09/citylights1-engineers-dislike-h1b-bosses-gloat/

   Wage suppression and higher education debtor’s prison. That’s a great return on investment for global knowledge brokers like Gates and Murdoch.

   Reply