cross posted from Daily KosI have already weighed in on the Blueprint, in Obama's "Blueprint" for education - why this teacher cannot support it. Today I want to call to your attention a very important critic by Richard Rothstein, whose current position is as a research associate at the Education Policy Institute, but who spent 1999-2002 as the national education columnist for The New York TimesOn March 23 he posted A blueprint that needs more work at the EPI website. His is a balanced examination, but one that is nevertheless more critical than complimentary. I am going to urge that anyone...
Education: A Race to Equity instead of the Race to the Top
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One of the important names in education that too many currently involved in making policy do not seem to know is Herbert Kohl. Those of us on the Progressive end of the educational spectrum know how important the insight he has offered are, and rare is the progressive thinker on education who has not read several of his books, most notably 36 Children and "I Won't Learn from You:" and Other Thoughts on Creative Maladjustment, the latter a reworking of a slightly earlier essay. Beginning in Harlem in 1962, Kohl has taught every grade from Kindergarten to College, including being a visiting professor...
Books that Broke my Brain
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This meme is going around the net. Interesting to see so many right wingers, and shocking how many actually cite “The Bell Curve.” I would have expected Rand, but Murray? Yes, many on the right aspire to racism. They think they are brave for being willing to acknowledge this in public. ("It’s about the skin color, man. Yeah. It makes you stupid. It's like, scientific.")Not sure why anyone else would care, but here’s mine while I’m slowly emerging from many days of bronchitis brain fog. It was kind of fun to think about. Interesting how few non-fiction books I can think of that really...
The End of "Constructivist"?
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Interesting article on the declining usefulness of the idea of social construction. Not particularly radical, but does make an interesting argument about an overall shift going on at the intersection between the social sciences and humanities. And it's brief, always a benefit (that I seem often unable to provide).Her "co-evolutionary" view dovetails with the article on comics and co-evolution posted earlier.Viewed in the light of contemporary knowledges and material realities, social construction is looking rather outdated. To borrow the vocabulary I learned from Meredith Jones' dissections...
Who Needs a School Bus?
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The Flying Fox transport system. 9 years old, 63 miles an hour, speed control: wooden fork. Brother in a bag. (Okay, I'm supposed to be reading a dissertation. But you were supposed to be doing something useful too, right?) via Boing Boi...
More on Ravitch
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More discussions of Ravitch, and other interesting diaries on education (scroll down) by jeffbinnc on Open Le...
Stats, Poverty, and Not So Smartness
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Interesting discussion for lay people and those who haven't taken stats for a while about the statistics behind a recent study about the relationship between poverty and memory capacity. How can we talk about this better and make "information" like this less destructive to poor kids (who are always affected in concrete ways by expectations created by reports about their (in)ability to learn by those who are supposed to teach them)? Betting on the poor boy: Whorf strikes backvia Boing Bo...
Comics, Evolution, the Brain, . . .
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On the Origins of Comics: New York Double-takeEvolution lets us see comics, like almost anything human or even alive, in a panoramic context but also in extreme close-up, as close as a comics artist trying to grab readers’ attention in this frame or with that angle. And it can zoom smoothly between these two poles. Evolution offers a unified and naturalistic causal system from the general to the very particular. Far from reducing all to biology and then to chemistry and physics, it easily and eagerly plugs in more local factors—in a case like comics, historical, technological, social, artistic...
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