Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
An educational futurist, in a video on Edutopia, objects to the teaching of data and information. That's the sort of thing, he sniffs, that Google can find.
The futurist wants a high-tech classroom where students work only on sophisticated projects, such as "Is there life on Mars?"
The futurist scorns traditional ways of teaching. For one thing, teachers wasted a lot of time on trivial stuff. His voice almost shakes with incredulity: "Teaching kids that 'In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue' -- why on earth waste time presenting that?"
The reasoning runs like this. Anything you want is on Google, so why bother learning anything? I worry that this is a destructive little sophistry.
Challenging school courses are being eliminated or dumbed-down because minorities refuse to "act white" and study to get good grades to go to college. This is called "progress" in liberal circles, because it's so greatly offensive that white and asian kids dominate the accelerated classes while the blacks and hispanics are stuck on the short bus to nowhere, taught to act like perpetual victims and refusing to take advantage of any opportunity presented to them.
If I were a minority I would be greatly offended by liberals' assumption that I'm so stupid and unteachable that elite courses have to be dumbed down so that losers like me can join them. The smart, ambitious kids who study are held back and bored out of their minds, while the rest of the kids get a gold star for just showing up while learning how to never get ahead in life by never challenging themselves to do better. How exactly does this prepare anybody to compete in the global market? Why does liberal America insist on lowering our high standards to mediocrity?
We can thank the Progressives (or should that be, Regressives?) for doing their job to once again destroy American values that embrace competition, strive for excellence, and to be the best that we can be -- because to do so would be racist and offensive to everybody else who can't keep up, and it's just not fair. waaah.
Across the Chicago region, high school officials say they are making inroads in diversifying their advanced classes, but Evanston is considering the boldest step of all: eliminating an elite honors English course that has traditionally been offered to the highest-achieving incoming freshmen — usually white.
This is the dirty secret in the wars over teacher quality: the low level of academic work at all levels in far too many schools. The consequences of low-level work are seen in poor test results: Students given only work that is below their grade level cannot pass standardized tests about material they have never seen.
This doesn't have anything to do with liberals. It was Bush Jr. who created the No Child Left Behind Act. It was Reagan who allowed tax credits to people who wanted to take their kids out of public schools, and the vast majority of those people were White, leaving city schools to rot, not to mention the effect on the federal budget those tax credits had. Another great idea from the GOP!
BTW, when was the era of "elite excellence"? I taught in public schools in the late 80's and couldn't get out of that cesspool of mediocrity fast enough. The best teachers all left to form their own private school. Most public schools in much of CA have always been notorious for poor quality, at least since the mid-20th century. When was this mythical Golden Age of public education?
Regarding the bold text, our kids don't get this kind of valuable education from public propaganda schools. Schools beat the love of curiosity and learning out of kids long before middle school, and critical thinking skills are no longer part of the curriculum, it's just "learn this and pass the test so I don't lose my job and the school won't lose funding".
Question from a "19 Kids and Counting" fan: Why did you choose homeschooling for your kids and how did you get started with it?
We first heard about homeschooling when Josh, our oldest, was about eight months old.
I went to public school all my life, and graduated from public school. Jim Bob went to public school for six years and then transferred over to a Christian school. Homeschooling was new for both of us.
We knew some families that had older children that were homeschooled. We were so impressed with their families. First off, their children seemed so mature and well-rounded. They were very intelligent, really smart. But besides the academics, they had such a family unity. There was just such a closeness between the parents and the children - a real, genuine love and respect for one another. Jim Bob and I thought, "That's what we want. That is the fruit we want to see in our children and that oneness in our family."
Liberal vs conservative. I don't think it really matters. Look at some very liberal places such as Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Minnesota. All are among the best school systems in the nation. All of these states rank among the top in Mathematics and Science. Look at Mississippi and West Virginia. Conservative states, but they rank dead last in Mathematics and Science. South Dakota and Kansas are conservative and they do well in science and mathematics. Rhode Island and Hawaii are both liberal and don't rank that well in mathematics and science. Liberal or conservative, it doesn't really matter.
Funny, I found this release issued by the Evanston High School at the same time the OP's link was published.
EVANSTON, IL. - On Monday night, the Evanston Township High School board unanimously voted to restructure the ninth-grade experience, beginning next fall, by requiring all freshmen to earn honors credit in a required Humanities course rather than allowing certain freshman students automatically to receive honors credit based on high 8th-grade standardized test scores.
The board-approved proposal will eliminate the honors-only track in Humanities, an interdisciplinary English and history course, and place all freshmen reading at grade level in the existing mixed (honors and regular) level Humanities course that offers the same honors-level curriculum, aligned with Advanced Placement (AP) program standards, that is taught in the honors-only sections.
All freshmen in Humanities will be able to earn honors credit, which confers a .5 boost in a student’s grade-point average, based on demonstrated achievement on several assessments; those who do not earn honors credit will receive regular credit. A small percentage of freshmen that do not read at grade level will be placed in Humanities with Support to help accelerate their reading skills.
While this model will apply to Freshman Humanities next year, the following year it will expand to include freshmen biology, pending further study during the 2011-12 school year.
By restructuring the way freshmen can earn honors credit, mixing together a broader range of students, and offering them all an honors-level curriculum in Humanities, the ETHS administration and faculty anticipate that many more students, particularly non-white students, will be encouraged to take more honors and AP classes during their four years at ETHS.
According to ETHS Superintendent Eric Witherspoon: "This proposal is about the ETHS structure that disadvantages freshmen by determining their placement, in honors-only or mixed-regular and honors-level sections, while they are still in 8th grade, based on standardized test results. This is about the compelling data we have shared many times with the board showing that students in lower tracks almost never make it to the honors and AP levels during their four years of high school. The data clearly reveal that students who are tracked into less-challenging classes as incoming freshmen, before they have taken a class at ETHS, do not get the honors rigor or the high expectations required to take more challenging classes as sophomores, juniors, and seniors."
Witherspoon stressed this was not a proposal to eliminate honors and AP classes at ETHS. "On the contrary, this is a proposal to make the freshman experience so demanding that we increase the demand for honors and AP classes," he said. A founding member of the College Board’s Advanced Placement program, ETHS now offers 24 AP courses in a variety of disciplines and honors credit in 118 courses across the curriculum.
In this tenth-anniversary edition, Gatto updates his theories on how the U.S. educational system cranks out students the way Detroit cranks out Buicks. He contends that students are more programmed to conform to economic and social norms rather than really taught to think.
I love that this was posted on an extreme Left-wing lunatic blog like Salon: Liberal administrators go out of their way to punish and remove good teachers from urban schools where the kids are virtually unteachable-
I don't think they do but the fact that right-wingers are, in many cases, blatantly anti-intellectual might has relevance here.
Life must be fun when you can make up your own "facts".
Quote:
Marco Rubio has asserted that teaching evolution is equivalent to Soviet indoctrination. It requires an insane amount of stupidity to "think" that is true.
Ann Coulter has asserted that science (evolution) is a religion and religion (Genesis 1-3) is science. Once again a level of stratospheric level of stupidity is required to "think" Coulter is right.
Neither of those people represent conservatives, even if lefty idiots claim they do.
I haven't made up facts. Many right-wingers, in fact, go out of their way to support Rubio and many right-wingers are, in fact, huge fans of Ann Coulter.
Of course you've made up your own facts, specifically when you claimed that many right wingers are "blatantly anti-intellectual". That's a classic worn out left wing talking point that gets thrown around any left wing fool wants to claim some sort of self created superiority. These are the same left wing fools who ignorantly claim that liberals haven't turned many of our colleges into their own left wing playgrounds while using tenure as protection from the real world. Anyone with 1/3 of a brain knows that liberal instructors are plentiful in the college system and in many cases you have to just put up with that sort of insanity for a semester in order to pass.
Once again, Rubio and Coulter don't represent conservatives. They may claim to be conservatives but they don't represent conservatives.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
