The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) – a “nonpartisan research and advocacy group committed to restructuring the teaching profession” – publishes a monthly bulletin on, what else, teacher quality issues. (And, no, I will not get drawn into questioning how an organization run by Kate Walsh, affiliated with the Fordham Foundation and the author of “Teacher Certification Reconsidered: Stumbling for Quality” can truly call itself nonpartisan”.) In the most recent bulletin they pick up the Jay Greene “research” about ed schools teaching more multiculturalism than math. Sigh. See my recent...
If NCLB is Such a Success, Why Do Poor Kids Need a Way Out of the Public Schools?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/29/washington/29educ.html[NYT] President Bush’s call for a $300 million program called Pell Grants for Kids is the latest effort by his administration to channel tax dollars to low-income parents to help them send their children to private or religious schools.His proposal, in his State of the Union address Monday night, was denounced by some top Democratic lawmakers and teachers’ union officials as a national “voucher” program that would only drain resources from urban public schools that in many cases are in need of money.And some critics said that the president’s...
Ed Links
Totally Cool if Irrelevant: Digging Up an Ant City Beauty in the banal [Walter] Benjamin read the modern era from its refuse: cityscapes, word puzzles, quotations from forgotten books, Russian toys, shopping arcades. He believed, writes Leslie, “that contemporary literacy has less to do with the ability to read words and more to do with reading images”. THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE...IS ART? [Neils] Bohr's discerning conviction was that the invisible world of the electron was essentially a cubist world. By 1923, de Broglie had already determined that electrons...
Ed Links
From Bookforum.com: The wheel of consciousness The first chapter from Physicalism, or Something Near Enough by Jaegwon Kim. A review of Artificial Consciousness. Is it possible to be too aware of our own consciousness? A review of Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic. A review of The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness by Jeff Warren. A review of The Self?, ed. Galen Strawson. Don't just stand there, think: Research suggests that we think not just with our brains, but with our bodies. A review of The Brain That Changes Itself:...
OLPC staff ignoring local context
As a followup to my earlier post on OLPC, see Alexandre Enkerli's response and then the following Q&A taken from a discussion forum on an OLPC fan website. Someone was preparing for an interview with OLPC Chief Connectivity Officer Michail Bletsas, and I suggested a few questions. But if the report of Bletsas's answers is correct, his lack of responsiveness to important issues is disappointing.Q. Africa has by far the lowest internet diffusion, for a variety of reasons, and the WHO has created a CD-ROM distribution network and the hard-copy Blue Trunk Library program in part to compensate....
Failure to Add (Anything to the Debate) or Has Jay Greene Jumped the Shark?
Another swipe at education schools. Jay Greene and Catherine Shock tell us that ed schools supposedly teach twice as many diversity courses than math courses. Can one say bad research? Can one say it’s been done? Has Jay Greene jumped the shark?Simply put, the research is shoddy. As Sherman Dorn has noted, it is more akin to the ACTA’s screed on Ward Churchill rather than proper syllabi analysis (such as Rick Hess’s on educational leadership analysis). (Eduwonkette takes a swipe at the research as well.) I’ll focus only on the multiculturalism side, as that is the research I know. The problem...
Educating Citizens About Organizing: Beyond "Just Doing It" (Community Organizing and Urban Education)
[See the whole series here]On October 6, 2007, the “Beyond Social Service” conference brought an extremely diverse group of approximately seventy Milwaukee residents together to learn about social action. The conference aimed to spread information about organizing more broadly in a city where ignorance about social action is a growing crisis.Some organizers seem to believe that we don’t need educational separate from our ongoing campaigns for change. All we need, it has been implied, is more and better organizing. The problem is that funding for organizing is extremely limited, as is the visibility...
Ed Links (Post Holiday Edition)
Orthodox Economic Education, Ideology and Commercial Interests: Relationships that Inhibit Poverty Alleviation (pdf) Many factors have been cited for the continuing, intractable poverty condition in most poor countries. . . . However, there is still another cause that has been insufficiently elucidated. That cause is the combined and iterative impact of three unwholesome relationships: (1) the relationship between the narrow, ideological graduate economic education and the orthodox development perspective held by the international agencies - a perspective that emphasizes growth of output without...
OLPC skepticism/hope
Early last month, Aaron Schultz explored some of the skepticism towards the OLPC project. On Sunday, Aaron Barlow was skeptical of the value of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative, Nicholas Negroponte's vision of putting a cheap, energy-efficient computer in the hands of millions of children worldwide. Aaron's not alone. Business Week's Bruce Nussbaum has gotten his digs into OLPC (twice, in September and December), as did the Putting People First blog and Alexandre Enkerli. While there are some dissenting views from an anthropological perspective, and while one of the Red Hat programmers...
If Business is to Decide What Education Will Be, We Must Decide What Business Will Be
Posted, too, at Schools Matter:The New York Times has this piece and the CBC this on the millions of disappearing birds that have been displaced and killed off by habitat destruction, pesticides, and other chemicals. Last year a big back page story was the wholesale evacuation of billions of bees from their hives, an unsettling phenomenon that still remains largely a mystery today.The sad fact that these stories do not resonate or even register on the attention meter of most Americans is the tragic tribute to another generation mis-educated toward satisfying the most crass and debased forms of...
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