Peter Greene listened to Betsy DeVos speak about how terrible public schools are, and he goes through each of her inconvenient truths.
Two observations:
1. She should have described her talk as “inconvenient opinions” since none of what she says is true.
2. With all her carping about the public schools, she sounds eerily like Arne a Duncan. He is taller than her.
She pines Ned for the days when American students were #1 on international tests but as I explained many times, here and in a chapter in “Reign of Error.” We were never number 1 on the international tests. When they started in 1964, we were last. But in the more than half century since then, we have surpassed all the nations with higher scores by every dimension.
On the other hand, there is no evidence whatever for privatizing our schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Facts in the post factual world.
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Another fraud. How shocking, from the fam of a scam.
DeVos is what is wrong with America right now.
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“from the fam of scamway”??
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Yes. Hmm. If you have to explain a joke . . . I’m off duck hunting.
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Just on C span t he Youth parliament had a VERY interesting debate on education in England. What was VERY apparent they wanted
a curriculum for life skills, preparing them for their lives, NOT just academics. They debated in parliament and students from all over England, Scotland, Wales as well as various parts of Britain and London.
AMAZING students. VERY articulate, well informed. Awesome presentations.
Ages I think maybe 7 or 8 the youngest up to 19 years of age.
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They’re right! Give them the tools and the insights to create and generate their own joys and motivations for whatever path they wish to follow, rather than us pretending we know how to rank and segregate the human race, unnecessarily stressing, dehumanizing and depriving so many, if not most!
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It is sad if students have to defend their rights to an appropriate free, public education, especially in a western European nation. It may come to that here as well. When representatives are getting paid to favor corporations, it may take a lot of evidence and outrage to convince them they are on the wrong path.
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Ugh. How are kids supposed to know what they need? They’re probably just parroting what their progressivist teachers and progressive-ed educated parents tell them anyway: academics suck. This is a stale refrain begun in 1780 with Rousseau and amplified by Dewey in 1915. The academic curriculum is mostly dead already, but it lives on as the eternal bogeyman of the progressive education movement.
Here’s what kids need: science, math, lots of history –well-taught!, literature –to develop compassion among much else, foreign language, art, music, health education, geography, civics. Too bad if it’s not always fun. Too bad if some of it’s hard. Too bad if not all of it is immediately convertible into money-making. We need well-informed, ethical citizens and the anemic child-centered, anti-academic curriculum that prevails in Britain and the US is failing to create them. We need a critical knowledge-centric curriculum, not a child-centered curriculum.
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Ponderosa, you sound like me in 1999-2000, when I published “Left Back.” Content would solve all problems. I believe in content and knowledge-rich curricula, but I now understand that they are insufficient to close achievement gaps.
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For now, content rich curricula in the arts, humanities, and sciences is the only chance we have for helping neglected and the underprivileged to close the knowledge gap. The movement toward a higher order, critical thinking skills approach has done way more harm than good. Promoting ignorance via policy has already backfired. Kids growing up in poverty need more direct instruction – not less.
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They also need regular medical care, nourishment, a home that is well heated and safe, and love.
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Content knowledge and a strong working vocabulary can’t solve world hunger or institutional racism but it can dramatically increase reading comprehension and help brain development along the way.
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Not to mention the fact that knowledge not only helps build knowledge but it makes you a more interesting and a more interested person. Arguing against a knowledge based curriculum is just plain foolish.
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I don’t think anyone is arguing against knowledge here. But for most much knowledge is ultimately forgotten, yet retrievable now thanks to our Google-y world, The Info Age. But our system should not be like Asia’s tendencies toward “stuffing the duck”. We should not totally equate knowledge and education. Joy and motivation should not be totally discounted or treated as some kind of enriching extra, added spice. Let’s face it, most people do exceedingly well in school, at endeavors, in careers because of the ongoing internal, not external, payoffs.
BTW why do they call it Depth of Knowledge (DOK) levels when they are defined by depths of thinking required? Does Depth of Wisdom (DOW) connote Wall Street too strongly, or Depth of Thinking (DOT) call up the Dept of Transportation?
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“toward “stuffing the duck””
You gotta shoot it first. And we all know duck hunters are the craziest of all hunters.
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On a more pragmatic note, I agree with content rich and knowledge based curriculum, but that doesn’t have to mean that one doesn’t address any of the “affective” issues that children bring into the classroom. I would tell students to let school be an oasis to escape to, especially when the s#!t hits the fan outside of school.
But at the same time, I also emphasized learning vocabulary through memorization utilizing written repetition as one tool and using grammar which for almost all I had to teach them what the grammar terms meant in English before they could use that information to connect, find commonalities between Spanish and English. I certainly do not agree with the Krashen school of teaching a second language whereby all one has to do is to focus on the spoken word by playing parrot and the second language will just “sink in” the way one learns a first language-horse manure I say to that.
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Diane: “Left Back” opened my eyes. Every teacher needs to read it.
Akademos: memorized knowledge is more important than most of us think. When you read, you are deploying a vast arsenal of memorized knowledge of word meanings. How do most memorized word meanings get in our heads? Largely by listening to parents, teachers and media, but also by reading and inferring meanings of new words (but this only works if you already know 95% of the words!). Because a lot of us teachers witness kids cramming for a quiz and then seeming to forget the info, we think memorization is hopeless. But memory is not binary. If you live through a unit on, say, cells, a lot of information is going to linger in the mind. You may forget what RNA stands for, but you will remember that it has something to do with the cell. When humans comprehend a speech, movie or text, it’s because they recognize most of the information. Recognition implies a prior exposure –it’s RE-cognition. If we adults do not give kids initial exposures to the things of the world and the words that describe them, how are kids ever going to comprehend the world, documentaries, speeches and texts? There need to be memories –not always crystal-clear memories –in the head; having them on Google does not suffice. A famous doctor (whose name I forget) once said, “We only see what we look for; and we only look for what we know.” Most Trump voters did not see his psychopathology because they weren’t looking for it; they weren’t looking for it because they don’t know much about psychopathologies. Akademos, we need to start “stuffing the duck” with critical knowledge!
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No, folks. The argument is not about the importance of exercising memory, it has to do with the specificity of the knowledge and how critical that really is.
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So many ways to exercise the mind.
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Specificity of specialization, not specificity itself. But maybe specialization itself, too.
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SIC!
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If you enjoy an uneasy laugh or two, on Twitter there is an account called @FakeBetsyDevos. The writer really has (at least to me) a sarcastic and eerily pointed wit as he/she “writes” from the point of view of Betsy.
For me, I’d rather laugh than cry…and I’m out of tears at the moment. Take a look if you are so inclined and are on Twitter. My handle is @MrFlickRocks BTW.
Diane, thank you for this forum. Since the election I’ve come to depend on all of you regulars and occasional commenters to help me adjust to the future under Trump. I thank you all, and I wish you all a very happy holiday.
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Thank you, Rockhound. We will help each other get through these next four years and push the pendulum the other way.
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Been a day now. Still don’t know what an inconvenient trurh is.
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Akademos:
Explanation: When I blog on my cellphone,I can’t see the full title. Never the last word in the title. It is called a Diane Boo-boo.
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Little typo in the title Diane: “Peter Greene: Betsy DeVos’ Six Inconvenient Trurhs”
Did you mean: “Peter Greene: Betsy DeVos’ Six Inconvenient Turds” or “Peter Greene: Betsy DeVos’ Six Inconvenient Truths”
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I think a truhr is a hat you wear while spinning around near the equator and Tweeting recklessly about nuclear proliferation. I’m not sure which way you spin. Against or with the toilet flush?
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I always try to read Peter Greene’s commentary. His wit and wisdom are always informative. From this post, I came away with one agreement with DeVos and one agreement with Green.
First DeVos. I think she is right. Our best students are not learning enough of anything. They are so concerned with getting scholarships by being in the blank club and making a good grade that they forget to learn. Extracurricular activities have usurped learning. That said, none of these children are poorly educated, and it would be silly to,call the situation a crisis, especially in the face of what is happening to,other sectors of society.
A solution to DeVos’ problem is really clear. Fund higher education in a way that makes children want to learn instead of earning scholarships by looking good on paper. I doubt her Republican allies in the choice movement would like that. Higher taxes. Makes everybody’s stomach ache.
Now Greene. He suggests that everybody knows we need to steer ineffective teachers out of education but nobody can agree on which of the teachers are poor. As he puts it, no two lists are ever the same. I would add that this is true despite which rubric of evaluation you choose.
I had a friend that grew up in our small town and went on to a prominent university and a career as an editor of a big New York Magazine. Successful by even the DeVos ruler. Her important teacher was a coach who taught her to take care of her physical health and work hard. The point is that we can never tell what will be important to us because we cannot see the future.
Now put these two ideas together. We will always feel that we could do more, but we have no choice but to work beneath the veil of our inability to divine the real effect of what we are doing. So we should all try to get along with each other and do the best we can, keeping an eye out for those sycophants who are obviously in the game only for themselves. Sorry, Ayn Rand, being in the game for selfish reasons generally yields bad results.
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