Children or Lab Mice?

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

1. Hannah says:

   July 28, 2013 at 9:18 am

   Data is only as good as the practices put into place to help educate children. Any other practice bastardizes all involved.

   LikeLike

   Reply
2. DonnaJoy says:

   July 28, 2013 at 9:38 am

   Or they are being trained to be factory workers even though many manufacturing jobs have been and continue to be outsource abroad to countries with cheaper labor costs.

   LikeLike

   Reply
   • teachingeconomist says:

     July 28, 2013 at 9:55 am

     Traing students to be factory workers certainly is the traditional role of public education.

     I think that outsourcing has hit the high water mark. The labor force in China has already begun to shrink and wages there are increasing by as much as 25%. Intigrating a quarter of the world’s population into the world economy quickly was bound to create some disruptions.

     LikeLike

     Reply
     • Linda says:

       July 28, 2013 at 10:04 am

       Have you ever considered, when it comes to k-12 public education you really don’t know what you are talking about?

       LikeLike

     • teachingeconomist says:

       July 28, 2013 at 10:07 am

       Linda,

       Perhaps you can argue against my point about the traditional role of schools.

       LikeLike

     • Linda says:

       July 28, 2013 at 10:12 am

       No…I am not wasting my time since you have clearly demonstrated over and over you are not here to consider the experiences and viewpoints of others. Despite the first half of your moniker you don’t know jack about teaching elementary, middle and high school.

       LikeLike

     • teachingeconomist says:

       July 28, 2013 at 10:15 am

       I am here to have a discussion about ideas in education. Why are you here?

       LikeLike

     • Linda says:

       July 28, 2013 at 10:18 am

       No you’re not. Don’t fool yourself TE.

       Call it a day and declare this post closed like you did the last time readers attempted to have a “discussion” with you.

       It was followed up with a nice concise and possibly accurate psychological summary.

       LikeLike

     • teachingeconomist says:

       July 28, 2013 at 10:26 am

       Linda,

       That was a straightforward application of Godwin’s corollary.

       LikeLike

     • Michael Fiorillo says:

       July 28, 2013 at 3:32 pm

       That’s a non sequitur: either you know it and are duplicitously trying to divert the discussion, or don’t and should not be allowed in a classroom.

       LikeLike

     • teachingeconomist says:

       July 28, 2013 at 8:38 pm

       I was responding to a post that 1) talked about public schools training factory workers and 2) talked about outsourcing.

       LikeLike

     • Robert D. Shepherd says:

       July 29, 2013 at 9:28 am

       I recently read that the Indian conglomerate Tata, to which so much outsourcing was done in the past, was creating call centers in Arizona. But yes, the system has always been designed to turn out factory workers and, now, service workers, who have those 21st century work skills: the grit, perseverance, and tenacity to stick to that menial task–obedient test takers who will do precisely what they are told and not complain about it.

       Will you be taking your latte on the veranda, Mr. Gates?

       LikeLike

3. riina says:

   July 28, 2013 at 10:20 am

   So what? I accept your premise about role of traditional public schools. I accept that China may be hitting a cheap labor wall. Unfortunately, neither of those facts matter. Manufacturing will move again-to Russia or Africa or another place. It may even move back here. Does that really justify our “traditional” role or system? Are you genuinely suggesting that because factories might some day return nothing need change? I find that appalling as we never served all students adequately our equitably. The purpose of your comment is unclear.

   LikeLike

   Reply
4. M says:

   July 28, 2013 at 10:45 am

   Well, I’m tired of collecting “evidence”. It feels like we’re caught somewhere between researchers trying to understand students as abstract objects, and victims that are being accused of harming children and trying to collect the evidence to show “hey it’s not met!”.

   Evaluations are the new trial. Administrations the judge, jury, and executioners (in other words, the courts in total). The lack of certification an attempt to flood the system with poor educators to be weeded as well as the focus on “every” child individually rather than communities, an attempt to confuse the scene so much that collecting data and evidence to support it, makes a teacher’s main focus become sifting through an endless ton of paperwork trying to make total sense of every student that can be proven by them and demonstrated to anyone who might come in (say, for a 15 minute period).

   Our education scene is not a research lab. It’s a crime scene. The question to be asked really, are how do we identify the victims and how do we trace 1-to-1 those responsible for the harm inflicted on them.

   Your ideological bias will affect your answer. However, the way the system is being changed, with more and more placed on teachers with less understanding of students, it leads to a way for privatizers to rob the store blind while the “police” (society) focuses on the crime scene outside and supervises those teachers being perp-walked through the scene pointing to the evidence supporting their claims of being effective.

   The unions are the overworked public defender fighting cases on so many fronts, it will win mostly the ones that are glaringly obvious abuses of power.

   But hey, the teachers are the ones with the students in front of them…and all of these mechanisms to check and balance their exhaustive union power that’s protecting them…those are totally passive and shouldn’t worry ANY teacher. Let the looters rob the store while everyone has their backs turned and being told by the media to look at the real scene outside…and when everyone turns around and sees so much is gone, it will be far too late to salvage the business of education and its historical successes or to truly reform it except that states will have tons of public money dedicated to it that they can direct to their favorite looters who will in turn support their campaigns.

   Meanwhile, the real victims on the crime scene, the children hurt in the street, are the ones everyone claims to be concerned about while everyone looks for blame. There will be no justice for them if we do not turn around and look at those really responsible – and it’s those who have power over the system, not those who are forced to work under conditions that strip students of every “non-essential” in favor of the mantra that so long as we work on those teachers, we don’t even NEED all that extra fluff since we’ll have so many outstanding teachers, they’ll overcome all that poverty and they’ll do it without a significant cost to society.

   If only society would turn around and look at who is profiting from this and it sure as hell was never teachers.

   LikeLike

   Reply
5. daveeckstrom says:

   July 28, 2013 at 10:52 am

   Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Well planned data collection and analysis, with the data used to improve the system, is the hallmark of a system that progresses and improves. As teachers, we should be the strongest supporters of solid educational research. It’s the misuse of standardized tests for purposes they were never designed for that we should oppose.

   LikeLike

   Reply
   • Ellen Lubic says:

     July 29, 2013 at 2:04 am

     Whew!

     Thank you Dave for understanding the need for educational researchers to design studies and then to do observation and data collection to show which programs work, where, and why, and conversely, which do not. Grad schools of education have taken some heavy hits here lately, and now these hits for data collection done to devise the best materials, and the best ways to present materials. Generally this data collection is done under the aegis of an NGO such as SRI, and the analysis at the end of the collection process offers information to devise teaching tools such as text books, tests, and to investigate other factors such as parental involvement, classroom aides, and on and on.

     It would seem a crap shoot and reinvention of the wheel if every single teacher were to devise their own methods without the broad perspective of a longitudinal approach. The lack of consistency of the education process would diminish without educational research, data collection, and analysis.

     As a classroom educator in higher ed, and as a researcher who spent years doing field work all over the country in some of the most difficult school districts, I promise you that longitudinal studies that are carefully prepared, skilled data collectors who well trained, and those highly educated in analysis who complete the process, do influence good effective classroom teaching at all levels.

     LikeLike

     Reply
6. LLC1923 says:

   July 28, 2013 at 11:24 am

   In Murdoch’s Wireless Generation/Amplify laboratory, children and teachers are used to reap the profits.

   WG advocates for “data” and labels children with colors – green, yellow or red. Reformers like Duncan drink up the WG Kool Aid while riding on the accountability bandwagon. At the same time WG cashes the checks and advocates for more multi-million dollar federal, state and local contracts. Teachers are forced generate the “data” via the electronic progress monitoring nonsense developed by WG and the insiders. Then, WG and UTHSC-H use the “data” without financial disclosure to write self-reports and white papers for their own for-profit purposes.

   LikeLike

   Reply
7. nano says:

   July 28, 2013 at 7:16 pm

   I don’t work in education, but fascination with data is now universal in the workplace. At the pharmacy, everything is measured: phone call rate, wait times, complaints, inventory, etc. Most of the time the metrics are counterproductive or out of the control of the pharmacist. The real reason for the metrics is for management to justify their jobs, as opposed to people that just watch the system operate under its own inertia and as a way to fire people, as no one can routinely meet the metrics indefinitely. With the structural deformation financialization has wrought on the economy, there is a never ending supply of future employees.

   LikeLike

   Reply
8. Communist Teacher says:

   July 28, 2013 at 8:28 pm

   “Wenn ich data höre … entsichere ich meinen Browning!”

   LikeLike

   Reply
   • Robert D. Shepherd says:

     July 30, 2013 at 12:22 am

     lol

     LikeLike

     Reply