[To read the entire series, go here.]Progressive education scholars are, on the whole, the children of the Deweyan progressives of the turn of the century. I say Deweyan, but Dewey is central mostly to educators. A wide range of other key intellectuals, including Jane Addams, Richard Ely, Henry Lloyd, Walter Raushenbusch, and others in a broad assortment of religious, social, and political organizations held common cause with Dewey on many issues.Recent scholarship on the progressives, especially Stromquist’s Reinventing ‘The People’ and McGerr’s A Fierce Discontent, have chronicled the ways...
attempting to change education - some personal thoughts
I wrote this for dailykos and also posted it at my own blog. I decided that it might have some value over here since the piece is clearly related to the main subject of this group blog, and I hadn't posted anything for a while. If there is strong objection, people can let me know and I will pull it.Education is the subject about which I most often write, about which I most often think. When I get a chance to speak with a public office holder, it is the subject almost certain to come up. I write about education and not only here. Last year I urged Yearlykos to have a panel on education and...
She Should Just Stick to History (I Think…)
A recent article in Education Next continues the attack on “social justice” in schools of education. Laurie Moses Hines, an assistant professor of education at Kent State University, Trumbull (in Cultural Foundations, of all areas, for goodness sake), published “Return of the Thought Police” that made the basic argument that “The screening of prospective teachers for maladjustment 50 years ago and the dispositions assessments going on today have remarkable similarities.” Both, she argues, are useless and politically regressive.Oh, it is just all too easy to pick on teacher education programs and...
Self-Defeating Standardization
Note: Over at a new blog worth watching, Next Things, Len Waks comments on "self-defeating standardization." Thanks to Len for allowing this cross-post. - AGRSelf-Defeating StandardizationBy leonard waksThe New York Times today reports that Eli Broad and Bill Gates plan to devote $60 Million to push educational reform to the top of the 2008 political agenda.The two philanthropists call for “stronger, more consistent curriculum standards nationwide; lengthening the school day and year; and improving teacher quality through merit pay and other measures.”These ideas are self-defeating. Nationwide...
Community Organizing and Urban Education: The Series
Aaron Schutz's webpage: http://educationaction.orgThe series has been relocated to my webpa...
A Jeffersonian Life
Crossposted from my blog, Moo2:Albert Borgmann, a philosopher at the University of Montana, writes about a "Jeffersonian life" as an ideal in his new book, Real American Ethics (Chicago, 2006)."The dinner table is that focal thing, the center of grace where we can rest the case of our lives...The particular character of our ethics comes into focus through the American reality that is gathered in a household and at the table. We can think of that gathering as a Jeffersonian life" (p. 197).He goes on: " The beginning of wisdom is to be broadly familiar with the width and depth of American culture...
Fiddling With Test Scores While American Jobs Burn
From Schools Matter:While the Congress deliberates over the Business Roundtable's and the Aspen Institute's Great Domestic Diversion, NCLB, American corporations continue their off-shoring of American jobs, both service jobs and highly-skilled professional jobs. And while the U. S. Chamber of Commerce polishes its plans to transform American high schools into science and math camps, Boeing and Cisco continue to funnel science and engineering jobs to cheap labor markets overseas: Boeing now employs hundreds of Indians for aircraft engineering, writing software for next-generation cockpits and...
Does Education Create Jobs? The Difference Between "Education" and "Empowerment"
One of the key assumptions behind investments in education is that educated people somehow create jobs, so that improving education will improve the economic situation for everyone. However, there is a great deal of evidence indicating that having an educated population doesn’t actually lead to a significant increase in employment.Ralph Gomory (cited by William Greider), for example, argues that it wasn’t the education of individuals that made America wealthy, it was the investment in technology that made these workers more productive.We invested alongside our workers. Our workers dug trenches...
Data-mining of students raises alarms
Some lending companies with access to a national database that contains confidential information on 60 million student borrowers have repeatedly searched it in ways that violate federal rules, raising alarms about abuse of privacy, government and university officials said.The unauthorized searching has grown so pervasive that the Education Department is considering a temporary shutdown of the government-run database to review access policies and tighten security.Some officials worry that businesses are trolling for marketing data they can use to bombard students with mass mailings or other solicitations....
NCLB is in trouble – big trouble
[NYT] When President Bush and Democratic leaders put together the bipartisan coalition behind the federal No Child Left Behind Act, they managed to sidestep, override or flat out ignore decades of sentiment that education is fundamentally a prerogative of state and local government.Now, as the president and the same Democrats push to renew the landmark law, which has reshaped the face of American education with its mandates for annual testing, discontent with it in many states is threatening to undermine the effort in both parties.Arizona and Virginia are battling the federal government over rules...
Major Education Dept reading program sent out for evaluative review – to the company that developed it
[WP] The government contractor that set up a billion-dollar-a-year federal reading program for the Education Department and failed, according to the department's inspector general, to keep it free of conflicts of interest is one of the companies now evaluating the program. . .More on “Reading First”: http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-09-22-reading-audit_x.htmhttp://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/8542.htmlhttp://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Literacy/texasScam....
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