Archives for the month of: July, 2017
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Courage or Madness: One of Most Amazing Stunts Ever

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2017 //
7

This has nothing to do with education.

It is a video of a man jumping from an airplane 25,000 feet high. He is not wearing a parachute. He has to land in a net almost five miles below the airplane.

Why am I posting it? I have watched it many times. I have shown it to friends. It amazes me. I get a sense of awe. The courage. The madness. The determination. The fearlessness.

Maybe it inspired me to try paragliding, even though I am terrified of heights, not in great shape, and had a guide.

I have never asked, “What were his test scores?” (There! It has a little bit to do with education, tangentially.)

Categories Courage

Robert Sternberg on the Scourge of Standardized Testing: Are We Producing a Society of “Smart Fools?”

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2017 //
61

Robert Sternberg has studied intelligence for many years. In this interview by Scientific American, Sternberg decries the new era of standardized testing.

At last weekend’s annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) in Boston, Cornell University psychologist Robert Sternberg sounded an alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society. Sternberg, who has studied intelligence and intelligence testing for decades, is well known for his “triarchic theory of intelligence,” which identifies three kinds of smarts: the analytic type reflected in IQ scores; practical intelligence, which is more relevant for real-life problem solving; and creativity. Sternberg offered his views in a lecture associated with receiving a William James Fellow Award from the APS for his lifetime contributions to psychology. He explained his concerns to Scientific American.

The interview begins like this:

In your talk, you said that IQ tests and college entrance exams like the SAT and ACT are essentially selecting and rewarding “smart fools”—people who have a certain kind of intelligence but not the kind that can help our society make progress against our biggest challenges. What are these tests getting wrong?

Tests like the SAT, ACT, the GRE—what I call the alphabet tests—are reasonably good measures of academic kinds of knowledge, plus general intelligence and related skills. They are highly correlated with IQ tests and they predict a lot of things in life: academic performance to some extent, salary, level of job you will reach to a minor extent—but they are very limited. What I suggested in my talk today is that they may actually be hurting us. Our overemphasis on narrow academic skills—the kinds that get you high grades in school—can be a bad thing for several reasons. You end up with people who are good at taking tests and fiddling with phones and computers, and those are good skills but they are not tantamount to the skills we need to make the world a better place.

What evidence do you see of this harm?

IQ rose 30 points in the 20th century around the world, and in the U.S. that increase is continuing. That’s huge; that’s two standard deviations, which is like the difference between an average IQ of 100 and a gifted IQ of 130. We should be happy about this but the question I ask is: If you look at the problems we have in the world today—climate change, income disparities in this country that probably rival or exceed those of the gilded age, pollution, violence, a political situation that many of us never could have imaged—one wonders, what about all those IQ points? Why aren’t they helping?

What I argue is that intelligence that’s not modulated and moderated by creativity, common sense and wisdom is not such a positive thing to have. What it leads to is people who are very good at advancing themselves, often at other people’s expense. We may not just be selecting the wrong people, we may be developing an incomplete set of skills—and we need to look at things that will make the world a better place.

Do we know how to cultivate wisdom?

Yes we do. A whole bunch of my colleagues and I study wisdom. Wisdom is about using your abilities and knowledge not just for your own selfish ends and for people like you. It’s about using them to help achieve a common good by balancing your own interests with other people’s and with high-order interests through the infusion of positive ethical values.
You know, it’s easy to think of smart people but it’s really hard to think of wise people. I think a reason is that we don’t try to develop wisdom in our schools. And we don’t test for it, so there’s no incentive for schools to pay attention.

The rest of the interview is worth reading. These days, we have a lot of very smart people acting very selfishly and ignoring the common good. We could use a lot more common sense, creativity, wisdom, decency, and concern for others.

Categories Creativity, Education Reform, Ethics, Standardized Testing

I Recommend This Book: Richard Rothstein’s “The Color of Law”

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2017 //
38

You know how sometimes you read a book and wish that everyone else would read it too?

That’s the way I felt when I finished reading Richard Rothstein’s compelling new book, “The Color of Law.”

I wished that every member of the Supreme Court would read it. Even Neil Gorsuch. I wished that every federal judge would read it.

I hope you will read it.

It is a major contribution to our understanding of the persistence of racial segregation in our society, in housing and in schools.

Rothstein explains that, contrary to common belief, there is no distinction between de jure segregation, which is illegal, and de facto segregation, which appears to be the result of private decisions and happenstance.

Rothstein documents the fact that segregated neighborhoods and racial ghettos were created by federal, state, and local laws, policies, and zoning.

African Americans did not choose to live in densely segregated neighborhoods. They were prohibited from buying into or renting in white neighborhoods. Federal mortgage insurance required segregation. So did state and local laws and zoning. So did public housing.

Schools are segregated because neighborhoods are segregated.

Our society remains racially segregated because of the legacy of a century of legal requirements for residential segregation.

Trump and DeVos will spend their time in office eroding and eliminating civil rights protections.

If this bothers you as it bothers me, please read Rothstein’s book. You will understand how our government segregated America and has left us with festering social problems that have severely deprived our black fellow Americans of their rights and of equality under the law.

We must know our history and work to change what was done. It can be undone. Certainly not by this administration, but there will be others, hopefully others who care about binding our wounds and seeking a better world.

Categories History, Segregation

SomeDAM Poet: “The Midnight Blog of Diane Ravitch”

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2017 //
18

Thank you, dear Poet. I blush. And I laughed out loud.

“The Midnight Blog of Diane Ravitch” (apologies to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

Hear ye, my teachers, of techy wares
The “teaching” inventions of billionaires
Of testing and Cores
Political whores
And a blogger with passion who really cares

She said to her friends, “If the billionaires roll
By software or hard, from your towns tonight
Hang a lantern aloft from the tall flag-pole
At the public school, as a signal light —
One if by Gates and two if by Broad
And I, on the opposite side of the road,
Ready to blog and spread the alarm
Through every American village and farm
For the parents and kids to march arm in arm

Then she said “good night” and with a blogger’s adieu
Warned to “Be watchful of ‘privatize’ clue’”
Just as the wealthy were meeting with pols
And paying the think-tanks and internet trolls
For “proof” that their methods were “tried and true” —
The Common Core and the testing too —
That only THEY know what to do
A propaganda that was magnified
By billions of dollars, far and wide

Meanwhile, her friends, through blogging and tweet
Wander and watch with eagle eyes
Till they read of the program to “personalize”
The learning, by students with tech, for sure
The smell of a hardware and software cheat
By usual folks, with their usual lies
Peddling wares at the techy store

They hoisted the lanterns up the poles
At the public schools, throughout the land
To the top of the masts, hand over hand
Unbeknownst to the blogger trolls
On the internet sites (paid as planned
By billionaires, who worshipped Rand)
Up the flag-pole, so steep and tall
The highest flagpole of them all
They raised the lanterns above the trees
Where Diane Ravitch saw with ease
And moved to action from the call

A flurry of blogs and a trumpet of tweet
A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark
And beneath from her fingers, in passing a spark
Struck out by a blogger both fearless and fleet
That was all! And yet through the gloom and the light
The fate of a Nation was riding that night
And the spark stuck by the blogger in flight
Kindled the Land into flame with it’s heat

You know the rest. In the books you have read
How the brutish billionaires tired and fled–
How the parents gave them piece of mind
(And not of the peaceful restful kind)
Chasing the billionaires down the lane
Then crossing the field to emerge again
Under the trees at the edge of the school
To banish forever the billionaire rule

So through the night, she persevered
And so through the night went her cry of alarm
Through every American village and farm
A cry of defiance and not of fear
A voice in the darkness a knock at the door
And a word that shall echo forevermore!
For borne on the night wind of the Past
Through all our history to the last
In the hour of darkness and peril and need
The people will waken and listen to hear
Of the ominous danger of billionaire greed
Threat to democracy that we hold dear

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Testing

Good News: Chicago Public Schools Outperform Matched Schools Across Illinois!

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2017 //
8

A new study reaches a very heartening conclusion. Despite all the brickbats hurled at the Chicago Public Schools over the past 30 years, student achievement in these schools is the best in the state, when compared to similar students.

There has long been a perception that Chicago, like other big-city districts, has dismal academic performance.

But the new study matched students by race and income and discovered that Chicago students outperform kids in the rest of the state.

This is true for African-American students, white students, and Latino students, whether they are low-income or “non-poor.”

“You name the subgroup, and kids in Chicago are doing substantially better than other Illinois kids outside the city,” [Paul] Zavitkovsky said. A similar analysis by the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research in 2007 had similar findings but never got much attention.

Chicago also has seen significant growth in its graduation rates and in average scores on the ACT college entrance exam.

The UIC study also documents the impact of expanding poverty in suburban and downstate districts. Fifty percent of Illinois public school kids now qualify for free and reduced price lunch, up from 37 percent in 2001. And while most low-income children in the state were at one time enrolled in Chicago schools, two-thirds now live outside the city — and that number is growing.

Zavitkovsky’s key finding: Poverty is an “equal opportunity disruptor.” In suburban and downstate districts where poverty rates have gone up — in many cases by double digits — test scores have faltered or been stagnant. Researchers long ago established that poverty drags down scores.

The author, Paul Zavitkovsky, told NPR:

The household income of a youngster predicts pretty clearly, if you look at averages, how a student is going to do, with remarkable accuracy.

Categories Education Reform
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