If you think play is a child’s business and imagination is something wonderful, please read this article by Peggy Orenstein from last Sunday’s NY Times Magazine. Then, please join the national conversation about recovering childhood for our children (yes, all of them) and making the lifelong process of learning a wondrous adventure again.
Tag Archives:
public education
April 18, 2009
Faith Thinking Aloud »
I.Q.: a Number Signifying What?
I appreciated Nicholas Kristoff’s recent article on the malleability of I.Q., the measure of something that has something to do with intelligence, we think, maybe. What I applaud in Kristoff’s piece is his insistence that we no longer accept the notion that I.Q. is genetically determined. Hear, hear!
The following paragraph, however, has continued to disturb me since I first read it:
Professor Nisbett provides suggestions for transforming your own urchins into geniuses — praise effort more than achievement, teach delayed gratification, limit reprimands and use praise to stimulate curiosity — but focuses on how to raise America’s collective I.Q. That’s important, because while I.Q. doesn’t measure pure intellect — we’re not certain exactly what it does measure — differences do matter, and a higher I.Q. correlates to greater success in life.
Here’s the problem: “we’re not certain exactly what it does measure.” Oh? But it “correlates to greater success in life,” whatever that means and however such success is measured once we determine what it means.
January 3, 2009
Faith Thinking Aloud »
More on Blaming
Under the ruse of accountability, we as a society have begun routinely substituting blaming for problem solving. Ironically, accountability then becomes our avoidance of responsibility for facing the problems, seeking real solutions, and doing our part to effect those solutions. Of course, real steps toward solving complex and serious problems are almost always partial, and they require cooperation and coordination (the sharing of responsibility). Silver bullets are rare.
In our presently disastrous realm of public education under the oppressive weight of No Child Left Behind, the first step in misleading the public was to use scare tactics to smear our public education system as a colossal failure, then keep talking about that failure as though it were indisputable fact. Anecdotal evidence of this alleged failure was easy to produce, of course, because public education is a vast and complex undertaking with countless success stories and countless tales of disappointment and even betrayal of parents’ hopes and children’s trust.
The next step was comparison based upon the quantified but extremely limited (even when not blatantly falsified) measures of standardized testing. The tests supposedly “proved” American students had fallen behind their foreign rivals. This was the Chicken Little phase in the attack.
December 18, 2008
Faith Thinking Aloud »
More on Framing
I see The New Republic (TNR) has accepted a conservative frame for the struggle for the life of our nation’s public schools as a contest between so-called “reformers” (the conservatives) and the so-called “establishment” (teachers who want to teach as professionals and who still believe teaching should be a matter of children’s learning). The article is called, “Why Obama Gets an “A” for Choosing Duncan.”
The deception comes from framing the struggle around “the union” which is then labeled as “the establishment.” Meanwhile, the actual conversation among teachers and administrators with knowledge of teaching and concern for it (rather than simply for management of a business or institutional survival in the current test-and-blame culture of public education) revolves around good, effective teaching that engages students in their own learning, meeting them where they are and enabling them to move forward.
December 17, 2008
Faith Thinking Aloud »
Getting the Frame Right in Education
President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for Secretary of Education has heightened the fears and anxieties on the educators’ listserv I read as a silent member. The fear is that the nation’s public schools will be subjected to another wave of the test-and-blame pretense to accountability.
But the situation has been falsely framed by the people seeking to dismantle public education, and the press has accepted the false frame uncritically, thereby setting up the wrong national conversation. The false frame, put forward for example by David Brooks in the New York Times, is set up by labeling the conservatives as “reformers” and the progressives as “reactionaries.” The second step has been to misconstrue the situation as a matter of “the union.”