Yes, I'm officially distracted from just about everything but The One Ring to Rule Him All (heh), but here are a few tidbits from the news and blogs of late:
-----
Tereza Heinz Kerry speaks out on education (and check out that scary pic):
In terms of education, Heinz Kerry blasted Bush's No Child Left Behind reform measure as an unfunded mandate that has increased bureaucracy. Schools have been hampered rather than helped by its mandatory assessments, she said, and some extracurricular activities are falling by the wayside as schools teach to the tests.
"Tests should be a measure that is enabling, not disabling," Heinz Kerry said. "Tests that are a trap are sinful."
"Sinful"? I thought President Bush was supposed to be the religious fanatic. Elizabeth Edwards says testing is nice and cheap, though. Maybe the idea of something that doesn't cost a lot is what gets Heinz-Kerry's gander up?
-----
Freeven of Mental Hiccups wants to cut out the middleman and pay parents for their kids' high test scores:
What if we said to a parent, “We’ll give you $1000 if your kid does well on the NAEP test; we’ll give you $2000 if he does great?” I have to believe that an extra grand or two would motivate a parent to make sure his kid does his homework and shows up for school on time and ready to learn. I have to believe that parent would be in the face of teachers and administrators who don’t do their jobs. I have to believe that such a program would be especially motivating to poor, minority, and single parents, who need the that extra money and whose kids typically perform poorly.
So, who thinks that the type of people who blow a gasket over the idea of giving teachers merit pay would go nuclear over this idea? Me, for one.
-----
If you feel like subscribing to Time (or already have a password), they've just published an article about how schools might be leaving gifted students behind by not allowing them to skip ahead.
-----
Are science and grammar obsolete, inscrutable, and of no use to today's kids? Well, schools are certainly acting like it. Erin O'Connor is now teaching high school instead of college students; here are her observations about the grammar skills of her young charges (link via Joanne Jacobs):
My colleague and I distributed the worksheet as an informal diagnostic, a way of gauging just where on the grammar curve our students are. What we discovered did not surprise us particularly...Most high school students these days are not on the grammar curve at all. The parts of speech are largely mysterious to them; the rules of punctuation and agreement are likewise unfamiliar. Semi-colons, colons, and dashes do not come into play in their writing because they do not know what they are for. Sentence fragments abound because many do not know that a sentence requires a subject and a verb, nor can they tell reliably when something is a subject and when something is a verb. Forget about objects and indirect objects, simple and compound sentences, subordinate clauses and participial phrases: such terminology is Greek to the vast majority of them.
Don't get me wrong. Kids today are as smart, creative, and sharp as ever. Their grammar deficit is not their fault. They can't be blamed for what they were never taught. It's increasingly unfashionable to emphasize grammar and the rules of syntax in school, the reasons ranging from the hang-loose notion that the rules of usage are confining and binding and irrelevant anyway since language is a living, breathing thing, to the feel-good notion that grammar is boring and mind-numbing and kids will be turned off to reading and writing forever if they have to learn it.
Erin isn't exaggerating here, and she's also not incorrect to call this type of education wrong-headed:
What I've found is that kids--and the adults they become--dislike not being able to tell whether what they have written is written correctly, that they recognize on a fundamental level that they have been done a collective disservice by their teachers, and that they are quite eager to learn a skill they know to be crucial to their ability to function effectively as adults in this world.
And if "educators" don't respond to that, Bob the Angry Flower is happy to show them the errors of their ways.
Meanwhile, Samizdata links to an article by a professor who believes that science is the new Latin, and is just as hated and useless as its predecessor. The comments on both sites suggest that the real problem is with science as it is taught today, and I agree. While most will not find arcane scientific facts any more useful to their adult lives than the declension of Latin verbs, it is absurd to claim that the mental discipline that results from learning the scientific method, rules of grammar, and any foreign language, is not essential to genuine education.
-----
Ontario's current Education Minister is upset with the former Minister, who doesn't think much of the current plans to "revamp" the standardized testing system:
Education Minister Gerard Kennedy lashed out at his Conservative predecessor Saturday, demanding she "apologize'' for her criticism of a proposal to revamp standardized testing in Ontario. Elizabeth Witmer made the comments in published reports Saturday, accusing the Liberal government of trying to lower the province's education standards by redesigning the tests...
"I think that it would be civil of her to apologize,'' Kennedy added, noting that all seven members of the Education Quality and Accountability Office, the provincial testing body, were appointed by Witmer and her Conservative colleagues. "She (Witmer) really might want to consider apologizing to her appointees on that board,'' Kennedy said, adding he can't understand why Witmer is "lashing out'' at her own appointees.
"This is their decision making and I believe they felt they were doing it in good faith as she asked them to.''
So what's all this about? Testing time will be cut in half for a number of exams, and Whitmer - who supposedly orchestrated this change - claims this results in a lowering of standards.
-----
Finally, one elementary school in Florida is calling in the SWAT team - in a good way.
Posted by kswygert at September 27, 2004 04:18 PM