No Child Left Behind And The Military

[October's Autumn]

I think it is not educators that think up these things, but bureaucrats who have "beliefs" for lack of a better term. So they "believe" testing is going to show accountability, even though there isn't anything in the way of evidence.

I have beliefs about a lot of things, but without any credentials, nobody's going to hire me to make sweeping changes to implement them.

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... and even if you did people wouldn't necessarily let you It is most frustrating.

[October's Autumn]

October, I think you are correct and it is not a rant to say that the "destruction of public education" is the long term goal. A  friend of mine works as a Kindergarten teacher in a school that is on the last stage of redestruction (or whatever). They have placed all staff on alert. She spends her time having her kindergartners write a "mission statement" (really!); she is not allowed to integrate instruction during reading time (though what ever happened to kindergarten as a vehicle for socialization and readiness???); she must use a programmed text with all students; etc. etc. --des

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I know!!!! The great thing about subbing is I get to be in all grades. I can't believe what we have to do in Kindergarten! It is Kindergarten for heaven sake! They are children! Little teeny tiny children who have to use the potty every 45 minutes

[FredP]

A  friend of mine works as a Kindergarten teacher in a school that is on the last stage of redestruction (or whatever). They have placed all staff on alert. She spends her time having her kindergartners write a "mission statement" (really!); she is not allowed to integrate instruction during reading time (though what ever happened to kindergarten as a vehicle for socialization and readiness???); she must use a programmed text with all students; etc. etc.

This all makes me think of a current book called What Happened to Recess, and Why Are Our Children Struggling in Kindergarten?

[flowperson]

Let's see.

First we program machines to help us manage and handle our boring and tedious works.

 

Then we program ourselves in order to mesh more effectively with the world our machines are managing for us while being run by the programs we wrote for them.

 

Then we program the lives of our children so that they may mesh more effectively with the world we programmed for them and for their peers. In the course of this they gradually lose their ability to play, except, of course, on programmed machines, and in managed team sports scenarios. ( Music and the arts may be the sole exceptions to this scenario.)

 

Over dinner once about twenty years ago a friend asked me what the most difficult thing facing us all in the next few decades might be. I answered that it was probably going to be the switch from trying to live in an analog world fashioned somehow by God, but which had the advantage of sometimes springing surprises upon us that we had to contend with and solve; to living in a digital world where everything was becoming programmed, where modeled foreknowledge would become increasingly available to us for decision making in order to move time forward, and where spontanaety and surprise would gradually be reduced. BORING!!!!

 

Of course I'm writing this on a programmed machine.

Am I programmed? Of course! By my parents' and their ancestors' genes and the environments that they existed in in the past.

But that was MORE IN NATURE as we go back, and LESS IN NATURE as we move forward.

Am I some sort of closet Luddite?

My head hurts!!!!

 

GO? STOP? DEFAULT?

[Cynthia]

Thought this would make you shudder

 

NCLD comes to a college near you!!!

 

(AP) - America's system of colleges and universities is famously decentralized, producing experimentation and variety, but making it hard to tackle big-picture issues such as access and affordability on a national scale.

 

On Monday, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings planned to announce a major initiative to address that problem: a commission charged with developing "a comprehensive national strategy for post-secondary education," according to remarks in an advance copy of a speech she planned to deliver at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

 

The commission will be led by Charles Miller, former chairman of the board of regents of the University of Texas system.

 

In her first months on the job, Spellings has focused largely on the No Child Left Behind Act for K-12 and more recently on Hurricane Katrina. But while the federal government accounts for less than 10 percent of K-12 spending, it generates about one-third of spending on higher ed, through research grants and the Education Department's financial aid programs.

 

Spellings said she was "not advocating a bigger role for the federal government in higher education" but said the country "needs a coordinated approach to meet rising enrollment numbers and new economic demands."

 

Spellings outlined the commission's instructions only generally, saying it would tackle issues like affordability and how well colleges prepare students for the global economy.

 

The commission will also likely focus on a concern Spellings has expressed frequently: the lack of solid information about what colleges are and are not doing well. Last week, Spellings told The Associated Press how hard it was to find good information to help her daughter, now a college freshman, compare schools.

 

"As you know, higher ed is not famous for its transparency," she said.

 

The announcement comes amid growing concerns that the relative independence of American colleges and universities - though a strength in many respects - can also be a disadvantage in competing with other countries.

 

"We absolutely need (the commission)," said David Longanecker, executive director of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education who served in the Clinton administration. "I think it's very important that we raise to a national level and a federal level a discussion about what's happening to our competitiveness."

 

The Higher Education Act making its way through Congress is focused on narrow issues of efficiency in financial aid, and not large national problems like low graduation rates, he said.

 

"None of the countries we would like to compare ourselves to or think we're better than have as many students drop out college," Longanecker said.

 

The commission is expected to make recommendations by next August 1. Members include North Carolina Gov. Jim Hunt; David Ward, president of the American Council on Education; and Jonathan Grayer, chairman and CEO of education and test-prep company Kaplan.

 

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On the Net:

 

Education Department: http://www.ed.gov

[FredP]

Ugh. Let's let our competition for global dominance determine our philosophy of education. What a fantastic idea.

 

Unfortunately, if this all goes forward, what will most likely happen is an even larger rift in educational opportunity. The prestigious schools will remain prestigious and get even more expensive, and the just-give-me-a-piece-of-paper schools will become mired in bureaucracy and stay (relatively) cheaper. We'll be another step closer to a caste society.

[flowperson]

Since the end of world war one, America's competitiveness and social progress had been largely driven by the advancement and application of high quality basic and theoretical research results (mostly funded by government and, to a lesser extent before 1980, by industry) This is a model that worked well until the rise of Japan in the 1970's as a research and manufacturing giant, mostly through the combined industrial research efforts of its major multinational corporations.

 

During this run of dominance in innovation by the U.S., university admissions were relatively open to anyone who could qualify academically since tuitions were fairly low at high quality state universities. Then in the 1960's and 70's things began to change as state legislatures cut back on budget commitments to higher education to the extent that state funding at the state university that I am most familiar with dropped from about 50% of its total budget to about 20% of its total budget.

 

To make up the slack tuitions began to rapidly escalate, major funding drives were initiated by major universities so that now many state universities have large endowments, and major research universities were encouraged to enter into more research contract arrangements with major multinational corporations for additional support. Larger research universities now also earn significant amounts of income through the licensing of innovation rights to other companies for product and market development. All of these above activities took and continue to take precious administrative attention away from the universities' most valuable activity, to teach things well to smart people, no matter what their economic or social status.

 

While all this was taking place, more and more graduate students, these are the people who are the worker bees of university research, were recruited from foreign nations. After completion of their degrees they went back to their home nations ( if they were not totally corrupted by the good life in America and stayed) to found technology-based companies which are now pushing U.S. companies out of market share right and left. India and China come to mind. Singapore is now THE place to do high quality biotech research. On and On

 

Generous nation that we are, we forgot the basics of what first made us great in this regard. Smart people who could think outside of the box and turn smart ideas into big money world wide. We are now starting to pay in the marketplafce for our governmental underfunding of academic education and research to the extent that we must have a "commission" tell us what the problems are, even though they are well known to some of us who have been around awhile.

 

Our recent policy decisions haven't helped us to get on the road to correcting these problems anytime soon. After 9/11 immigration authorities made it much harder for high quality foreign students to come here and stay here long enough to enhance their educational experiences, and help our engine of innovation at the same time. Concerns by the religious right have seriously limited our ability to pursue new treatments for devastating medical conditions. Led by the Defense Dept. ( which has, believe it or not, traditionally funded the lion's share of new and innovative basic research in the U.S.) the federal government is beginning to significantly reduce its share of dollars used to support "basic" research and instead plans to use this money to support more "applied" research at universities.

 

This all will, in the end, shift our research interests from those which have relatively wide market potentials in the long run, to those which have more limited and narrow market potentials in the short run. Is this a good thing, or are short-sighted profit considerations driving decisions even at this level?

 

Add it all up and what we have here is a group of experts that will tell us some of this information in a wonderful report that none of us will see, and the last fifty years or so of bad choices will be covered up to everybody's continuing detriment. We'll all be able to continue to watch our deficit grow apace while we line up at Wal-mart and Target to buy wonderfully engineered, designed, and manufactured products that were not made in the U.S. because the powers that be thought it was a better idea to give all that away!!!!!! UGH INDEED!!!!!

Edited September 20, 2005 by flowperson