Mark Naison is the tireless advocate who co-founded the BATs (otherwise known as the Bad Ass Teachers). Wherever I go, I find BATs. He has created a genuine force, an outlet for teachers who want to act and feel helpless. As BATs, they are ready to act and they do.
Here he reviews Reign of Error.
He says that if reformers were serious about choice, they would open more “portfolio” schools, that is, schools were students are assessed by presenting their work to a panel of judges, including their teachers, not by taking standardized tests. He does NOT mean “portfolio districts,” where schools open and close like shoe stores.
Naison also says that reformers should “Create, or recreate the vocational and technical high schools that were once a fixture in every American city, and give them full or partial exemptions from state tests. Let these schools to be targeted to growth areas in the American economy as well as sectors where high wage jobs have existed for a long time- construction, automobile and elevator repair, computers and the like. These schools would give parents a most welcome alternative to schools which feature little more than test prep and no direct job preparation. And would create positions for a new generation of teachers who would love their jobs.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
If the purpose of schools is to prepare our children for their lives as adults, then restoring technical schools is definitely a step in the right direction.
We need to look at the adults in our society and determine what the most important educational need are.
Teaching to the test, Core curriculum and other standardized testing procedures seem to interfere with what students need to know and how to use that “Knowledge.” Rote memorization doesn’t teach students how to think, make decisions, review and come to conclusions.
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“Rote memorization doesn’t teach students how to think, make decisions, review and come to conclusions.”
No it won’t but there are times that rote memorization can be a valid strategy in learning facts/information/vocabulary in an efficient manner. It should be just one “tool” of many that the teacher can utilize depending on the situation and needs of the students.
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I agree. Some stuff you just have to memorize, and then you have it to draw upon when you are thinking, making decisions, reaching conclusions, etc. The trick is to not stop after the memorizing, but to apply it.
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The disappearance of vocational high schools and the lack of support for middle colleges (other than of the purely ‘alternative education’ flavor) is a mystery that I suspect is solvable with some decent digging/detective work. I’ve been appalled by the seeming insistence by some/many folks on the left that everyone should go to college (and the implication that they should do so immediately upon high school graduation), and the attacks from some right-wing quarters on anyone left-of-center who questions that “wisdom” (see, for example, comments made regarding Diane Ravitch’s alleged (and in fact fictional) call for poor kids not to go to college – the fact is that she simply suggested that it’s not necessarily the case that everyone needs to go, without making the slightest suggestion that there was a class or identifiable group (by race, ethnicity, gender, etc.) who shouldn’t go or didn’t need to go), and I agree completely. College isn’t an automatic and never has been. It benefits some individuals but can just as easily be an enormous waste of time and/or money. For any given individual, it might be a horrific idea at one point in his/her journey, and a terrific one at another point. But a policy that makes college THE goal of K-12 education (or “career-readiness” for that matter), simply fails to recognize a number of reasons why that’s far too simplistic a view of the power of a college education to lead to more $$ and a happier life, and to see options in K-12 that in fact might do a far better job of those things, and/or other things that seem to be conveniently lost in the shuffle when college and/or career are the only two goals allowed to be discussed.
I’m all for the notion that every single person has the right to pursue a college education. But there is not exactly a dearth of opportunities for that right now. This is not pre-World War II America, when for the most part only the (male) children of the affluent went to college, regardless of being well-suited to succeed there (the proverbial “Gentleman’s C” is an artifact of that bygone era (a more recent reminder of which we see in the fact that a dullard like George W. Bush was a shoo-in for Yale thanks to privilege rather than merit, and could graduate despite being anything but a serious student or scholar). In those days, plenty of bright, well-qualified students were directed away from the “college-bound” track in high school (if they even pursued graduation) and were seen as earmarked for office jobs (if they were female) or low-wage blue collar work.
Eventually, skilled, unionized trades started to make it possible for some segments of the population to rise economically without a college education. And then the GI Bill changed the game in many new ways. But before another two generations had graduated from high school, the game had changed dramatically, and we now see a very different picture of what happens when it’s far easier to get into college than it is to find a decent job after graduating with a mountain of debt accrued in the pursuit of the “holy” bachelor’s degree. Somebody hasn’t been paying attention to reality and apparently thinks it’s still 1945, apparently. A lot of somebodies.
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MPG: are you going to do that digging/detective work? I would like to know more about that too.
I remember in the 90s our town kept talking about TECH PREP, which was a program for just that (technical career prep), but I don’t know if anything ever came of it. I do recall in rural Kansas there was a nice industrial lab type situation in the middle school. Also, we took vocations in 7th and 8th grade. We had a quarter of home ec, shop, researching careers and jobs, environment. Does that still happen?
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EduShyster gives you a brief shout out too:
The ‘P’ Word vs. a Whole Bunch of People Who Don’t Even Know What It Means
Diane Ravitch: we have no one to blame for this dispute but you—and that’s in addition to the many things for which we were already blaming you! Ever since you used the word “privatization” in the subtitle of your polemical screed (which we have not actually read), we have been so confused. We mean, who on earth is talking about privatizing our schools? We’ve never encountered anyone who believes in such a thing. Does the word even exist? We’re not even sure we know how to pronounce it, having never heard the word before. Well, come to think it, we may have encountered it once or twice, but only in very private settings. Like the Union League in Philadelphia, for example. Advantage: Ravitch. Her book is currently #10 on the New York Times bestseller list, *baffling* subtitle and all.
http://edushyster.com/?p=3371
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