Listen to My Podcast with “Ed’s Not Dead”

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1. SomeDAM Poet says:

   May 24, 2020 at 12:10 pm

   “Tombstone”

   Here lies Ed U. Cation
   Died from Common Core
   Teacher devaluation
   Charters, tests and more

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   • Bob Shepherd says:

     May 25, 2020 at 10:19 am

     A New Day

     Here lie Deform and Disruption
     Which Bill nor Betsy could save,
     And teachers and parents and students
     Dance upon the grave.

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   • SomeDAM Poet says:

     May 25, 2020 at 8:45 pm

     The Common Cored

     Mr Ed ain’t dead
     Simply had a cold
     Spent a time in bed
     Caught it from a mold*

     Common was the virus
     Chilled him to the core
     Very undesirous
     VAMmit on the floor

     *Rhizopus colemanus

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   • Bob Shepherd says:

     May 26, 2020 at 12:57 am

     Rhizopus colemanus

     ROFLMAO!!!

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2. Bob Shepherd says:

   May 25, 2020 at 10:11 am

   Some highlights of this wonderful podcast. So nice to hear thoughtful actual educators speak for a change!

   “If you are grading now, you are grading privilege.” [Great to hear them attack the using of letter grades. So backward, but widespread. One day we will come to our senses.]

   “Performance is just one area of development.” [Amen!!!!]

   “School grading and standardized tests fall into the same category in that they are designed to produce winners and losers.” [What grades do is promote competition, produce winners and losers for people who put the world together as Donald Trump does, and, IMPORTANTLY, undermine the notion that one learns as an end itself, for the sake of learning, microconditioning over time kids not to be intrinsically motivated. And, of course, there’s great research showing that extrinsic reward systems are actually demotivating for cognitive tasks.]

   But the podcast really gets cooking at 31:37, when Diane comes on. I’ve listened to a great many of these conversations with Ravitch, and I never tire of them. She is always so real and quotable and witty. Here, a few gems from this:

   “Deep in the belly of the beast [an ed-reform-oriented administration], I was hearing people say, ‘Lots of charter schools open, and then they close.’ It turns out that the men or women running them are taking money and shifting it into their bank accounts.”

   “One after another, the charter schools failed, and I thought, well, that didn’t work!”

   “I like to point to a meeting in DC at a conservative think tank called the American Enterprise Institute in 2006, and I was asked to summarize, at the end of the day of presentations, how NCLB was working. And there were a dozen scholars who were invited to give papers. Is choice working? Is Annual Yearly Progress working?—all the reports that were with analyses by scholars from around the country. And every one of the papers said, well, it’s not working—it’s not working in Miami. . . ; it’s not working in New Jersey; it’s not working here; it’s not working there. And at the end of the day, when I was asked to summarize the day’s proceedings, I said, ‘It’s not working.’ What else are you going to say?”

   “This book [The Death and Life of the Great American School System] reflected their [teachers’] experience. And it was the first time they had ever read anything that said to them, you’re not crazy—this testing is crazy, the whole push for choice taking money away from public schools is crazy.”

   “When we look at test scores, we are looking at the end result of a lot of other problems we have not addressed, and the first is just, basically, are the children born healthy? Many children whose mothers never saw a doctor are born with developmental disabilities that could have been avoided had they had medical care.”

   “Poverty and affluence are the most important determinants of test scores. If your concern is test scores, you don’t address testing directly, you address the conditions in which children live.”

   “I wanted to send a very loud message to the Disrupters, stop pouring money down this hole [Ed Reform]. . . . A lot of philanthropists—not Bill Gates, not the Walton family, and not Eli Broad—but a lot of philanthropists are realizing that it’s a waste of money to continue to invest in what’s called K-12 Reform, meaning testing, standards, and accountability, and instead they are going to be putting money into education in the arts, education in mental health. . . . They’ve been following Bill Gates like lemmings because he is a self-declared genius, and on education, he really doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

   OK. I’ll stop there. Brilliant stuff!!! Listen to this wonderful piece in its entirety. You’ll be glad you did.

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3. ciedie aech says:

   May 25, 2020 at 2:13 pm

   “following Bill Gates like lemmings…” Right over the cliff.

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