Evening Read
Education historian Diane Ravitch on educational reform, The Big Idea — it’s bad educational policy.
NY Times columnist Frank Rich on why revisionists like Liz Cheney and Karl Rove must be refuted, The New Rove-Cheney Assault on Reality.
Jaclyn Friedman, writer and activist, writes To combat rape on campus, schools should stop keeping it quiet.
Tags: Education, Karl Rove, Liz Cheney, Rape
Dear Diane. You broke it, you bought it.
Unfortunately, the people paying the price are kids for whatever NCLB is supposed to do.
And Frank Rich raises alot of great points — especially about the need to confront the lies, the misrepresentations, the rewriting of history by BushCo acolytes. Not just the ones writing books, and pretending to be pundits on TV or the usual suspects in the VRWC — but also the wannabes. The ones who listen to all of this crap and repeat it ad nauseum in places like DelawareLiberal. We call out the media and the Dems for giving this kind of crap plenty of space to breathe and get to be part of the narrative, when they do what we do which is take the easy way out and try to ignore it. Not exactly a scenario for expanding the reality-based community space.
hmmm revisionist like this:
“The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program — a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium — reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans. The removal of 550 metric tons of “yellowcake” — the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment — was a significant step toward closing the books on Saddam’s nuclear legacy.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25546334/
“Hear about the 550 metric tons of yellowcake uranium found in Iraq? No? Why should you? It doesn’t fit the media’s neat story line that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq posed no nuclear threat when we invaded in 2003. It’s a little known fact that, after invading Iraq in 2003, the U.S. found massive amounts of uranium yellowcake, the stuff that can be refined into nuclear weapons or nuclear fuel, at a facility in Tuwaitha outside of Baghdad. In recent weeks, the U.S. secretly has helped the Iraqi government ship it all to Canada, where it was bought by a Canadian company for further processing into nuclear fuel — thus keeping it from potential use by terrorists or unsavory regimes in the region. This has been virtually ignored by the mainstream media.”
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=462856&Ntt=saddam
What annoys me most about Diane, Cassandra, is “the need to confront the lies, the misrepresentations, the rewriting of history by BushCo acolytes. Not just the ones writing books, and pretending to be pundits on TV or the usual suspects in the VRWC — but also the wannabes.”
She made a nice living creating all the NCLB and testing apparatus. Now she makes a nice living repudiating it. And in all the bazillion words I’ve heard from her in her new role as critic of the policies SHE DESIGNED AND SOLD I haven’t heard anything more solid than, “we trusted too much in reform.”
Well, if we knew the answers, reform would not be necessary. However, our public education system has taken on a conglomeration of mandates unlike any in our previous history. It has its original goals of assimilation, and new charges for multiculturalism. We aspire to educate people from all walks of life, and from all range of ability. It’s a gateway for issues of public health and social service concerns. It’s our common ground for sports. It’s our entrance to the arts and a vague agenda of the high-points of western civ. It would be a big darn job to do all that well, and it’ll take experimentation, and possibly flat out magic, to give us a shot at it.
My assessment of the need to be vigilant in dealing with the VRWC BS was broader than the education bamboozlers, but you have a great point. But there is alot of money to be made in the education business, largely because we keep looking for shortcuts and magic. As Ravitch notes, other industrial countries don’t have the same sturm and drang over education that we do and they ALL have better outcomes. And I’m fond of pointing out that pretty much every season 60 Minutes can find some school that should not be performing doing just that. I think that we know more of the answers than we like to admit — it is just getting to it that seems to be the problem.
And here is Phoney, providing Exhibit A in the wingnut conspiracy bullsh#t parade. Note that the thing that is supposed to alarm people is a nuclear program that consists of yellowcake.
Which counts on you not knowing enough about nuclear chemistry or physics to know that they didn’t have a nuclear program at all.
And here we are talking about the deficient American education and I suppose we should be grateful to phoney for being Exhibit A for that too.
NCLB has helped. I think that we can do better without federalizing education and hundreds of under or unfunded mandates. It may have been better than nothing, but if we started from the right perspective, we would have been a lot better than NCLB. Junk it and return the power to the states. The people want better education and achieve it better than the standards industry and Washington bureaucrats.