This is the BATs’ Common Core of beliefs and values.
It probably won’t go far because no one can make any money by adopting it. It won’t sell new hardware or software. It won’t sell new tests or textbooks. It won’t make any entrepreneurs rich. Not much of a future in this brave new market-based world.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is relevant to combating and understanding the CC and its ramifications.
http://www.npr.org/2014/02/16/277057175/states-want-kids-to-learn-a-lot-maybe-too-much?ft=1&f=1001&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
LikeLike
The statement by Dr. Williams, in my opinion, gets essentially everything right about the nature of teaching, as least within my experience. The teachers in a local charter I know do it all, and add the elements of intellectual challenge as well.
If one charter is “good,” others can be, if the right staff can be found and hired and the administration understands teaching as Dr. Williams does.
However, just as in the letter from Grace, in Rhode Island, Dr. Williams doesn’t seem to know WHY teaching the way he advocates is good for the society as a whole.
He says that the purpose of teaching about the civic society is to preserve understanding of the “democratic process.” That’s part of it, the means to the proper ends of society, but he betrays zero understanding that the democratic process is not an end in itself, but merely the means to a fully functioning civil society.
That is the weakness of so much education advocacy on this blog. It sees education as an end in itself, without understanding that it’s only a way of getting people to a full human life. Grace says she wants a society where art is as important as medicine.
I love an admire art too, and understand how great an influence it can have in society, but if you put it before medicine and public health you won’t have people alive to be influenced by it.
What Dr. Williams omits to mention, but which he may assume—we just don’t know—is the rule of law, and personal liberty. These are the ends of education toward which the means of democratic self government should lead.
Most public school teachers don’t have a clue and so yammer on about saving public education when public education doesn’t even know why it really exists.
Grace won’t get what she should have at Brown, and Dr. Williams needs to go back to the beginning too.
NOTE TO ROBERT RENDO: Thank you for your sincere wishes for my health and sincere, if condescending, welcome back. My health is good, thank you. Reform of education reform is but a hobby with me. Even a curmudgeon, resident or otherwise, has to work at his other work sometimes and cannot spend every day here when he purports to be a novelist, poet, playwright, and theatre director, as I do. Next week is “winter break” at my school, so I don’t have to go to campus, and thus my reappearance from under the bridge, so to speak, to try to shock some of my acquaintances into developing their analysis of the ills of educateion beyond knee-jerk attacks on me personally which I take to be a tacit admission that they recognize the truth of my words. Otherwise, why get so upset?
LikeLike
Hi DIane – I’m an early BAT from New Jersey. I’ve tried to channel my best Pete and Woody with this Ed Deform protest song. Thought you might find it interesting. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k77xs0AFNqM Thanks for everything you’re doing! Mike Kaufman
Date: Sun, 16 Feb 2014 20:00:48 +0000 To: mkaufman27@msn.com
LikeLike
Harlan is clueless. Virtually all charter teachers in Michigan are trying to get jobs in the public schools where they have better pay and benefits. The charter teachers are usually brand new grads. who get run into the ground in unhappy work places. There is nothing special about charter teachers because they have all been educated alongside the public school teachers at the same colleges. Why all the propaganda and lies?
LikeLike
In what sense are the Common Core State Standards “common,” you may wonder. Wonder no more:
Common: adj. vulgar, base.
as in “Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind before you reach eighteen.”
–Attributed to Albert Einstein in Bell, E. T. Mathematics: Queen and Servant of the Sciences. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1952.
LikeLike
Whether this was actually said by Einstein is anyone’s guess, but it is certainly a neat encapsulation of Einstein’s view, expressed repeatedly and very forcefully in his essays on education. Here is Einstein on the role of the school and on standardization in education:
“[School] should develop in the young individuals those qualities and capabilities which are of value for the welfare of the commonwealth. But that does not mean that individuality should be destroyed and the individual become a mere tool of the community, like a bee or an ant. For a community of standardized individuals without personal originality and personal aims would be a poor community without possibilities for development. On the contrary, the aim must be the training of independently acting and thinking individuals, who, however, see in the service of the community their highest life problem.”
–Einstein, Albert. “On Education.” Address at Albany, NY, on the occasion of the celebration of the tercentenary of higher education in America. Ideas and Opinions. New York: Crown, p. 60
LikeLike
Reblogged this on 21st Century Theater.
LikeLike