“The standards, posted on the panel’s web site, lay out the panel’s vision of what American public school students should learn…”
Education is not the same as programming computers. Education is not about the content to be learned but the process of learning. Without methods, standards are worse than useless. Teachers will do whatever it takes to meet standards and students will learn to do whatever it takes as well — education be damned. Without a theory of learning and a methodology for promoting and facilitating learning, the educational enterprise will do more harm than good to human beings.
So what is the current educational methodology in America? Get a bigger hammer.
Come on folks! It’s not WHAT you know that matters. It’s HOW you know.
Nothing reflects the systematic destruction of the American dream more than the deconstruction of our system of public schools. Even president Obama is razzled and dazzled by the free competitive markets scam. Anyone who understands child development and education knows that performance-based pay for teachers and charter schools that compete with public schools for students is a recipe for educational disaster. Individual teachers do not determine educational outcomes and selective institutions with gimmicks do not make an educational system.
There are no low-performing schools in rich communities and the lowest performing schools are embedded in impoverished communities. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what’s going on, though it might help if people had even a modest acquaintance with the art of thought rather than bellies distended from the crap dished out by corporate ad men, lobbyists, and political lackeys.
Today’s NYT – “…consumers have become hesitant to buy Toyotas as questions remain about whether the recall repairs will solve problems with unintended acceleration and about how quickly the company reacted to the problem. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating the timeliness of Toyota’s recalls.”
This “moving” graphic of unemployment rate changes in the U.S. over the past two years does a pretty good job of putting jobs, or lack thereof, in perspective.
The darker the shading, the higher the unemployment rate.
W. E. Deming said that the aim of business needs to be, ,,,to become competitive and to stay in business, and to provide jobs.
In today’s NYT — “American business is about maximizing shareholder value,” said Allen Sinai, chief global economist at the research firm Decision Economics. “You basically don’t want workers. You hire less, and you try to find capital equipment to replace them.”
Six and a half million long-term unemployed represents those who had regular jobs, got dumped, and have remained dumped for six months or longer. Read more…
David Brooks drives me nuts. He’s a smart white guy who just doesn’t get it, (or maybe he does get it). In his column today, “The Lean Years“, he argues that unemployed and underemployed working-class men need to adjust their expectations and methods to fit their circumstance. He suggests that, like the changing of the seasons, economies go up, and economies go down. What he neglects to mention is that, while regular working slobs tighten their belts and sob over their beer, rich white men drink vintage wine and keep getting richer on the backs their victims.
The economic crisis we are in is not a “natural event”. It is not the changing of the seasons. It is the handiwork of crooks and con-artists. The solution is not to bend with the winds of change, it is to change the winds. Wake up America!
I always thought that the tripartite system set up by the Founding Fathers was pretty clever, but it looks like events have overtaken their good ideas. Last night I was thinking that the solution to the GOP blockade in the Senate would be to just make them actually do a talk-all-night filibuster. As explained in the Huffington Post article, “The Myth of the Filibuster“, it doesn’t work that way. Paul Krugman says, “America Is Not Yet Lost“, but it seems to me that he is more correct in suggesting that we really are going down like Poland, not with a bang, but a whimper.
As the efforts to create an American healthcare system wither away to dust, the healthcare crisis has arrived on my front doorstep. My family has “excellent coverage” because my wife is a physical therapist with a major hospital. Nevertheless, my 23 year-old son, who seriously injured his back six months ago, has been repeatedly denied requests for treatment for various “technical reasons” created by policy changes wrought in negotiations between my wife’s employer and the insurer. Despite the pain my son has been living with for six very long months, he managed to tough-out his last semester in college and graduate. Now he is living at home because, under the terms of our health coverage, he cannot obtain treatment in another community. He finally succeeded in getting an MRI a few weeks ago and now has an appointment to see an “approved” local specialist this coming Monday. Read more…
Rueters (today) – “Economists had expected productivity, which measures the hourly output per worker, to rise at a 6.0 percent rate after gaining 7.2 percent in the third quarter. In the second quarter, productivity had risen 6.9 percent.”
I know we all tend to agree that being productive must be a good thing, but remember that in Econo-ese, increasing productivity means squeezing more production out of fewer workers. Layoffs tend to boost productivity. This is why, the same article includes the observation that:
“Productivity has grown for five straight quarters as employers slashed costs, mostly by cutting jobs, to cope with the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. In 2009, productivity grew 2.9 percent, the biggest rise in six years.”
Over a year ago I wrote in my blog entry, “Letter to Obama”, and opined that “The great battles before him (Obama) will not be due to the economy or Islamic fundamentalists. They will be the battles to overcome the resistance of reactionaries, ideologues, and even good-willed traditionalists who just don’t get what he’s talking about.”
Obama’s problem today is that he not only understands democracy, our Constitution, and the intentions of our Founding Fathers, but that he actually believes those ideas can work. Most everyone else has given up on those ideas idea as sheer folly. Democratic process is inherently messy and inefficient, which is why Winston Churchill said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms…” While Obama is trying to lead us toward engagement, invention, and creative compromise, the rest are are Hell-bent on bullying the system to satisfy their own desires, interests, and ambitions—-even if it kills them (and the rest of us) in the process.
Redistribute wealth in order to create a global middle class and damp out extreme variability of wealth. This will assure that all humans have a vested interest in the system the assures their safety and well-being. In-system variations in personal wealth, religious belief, location, and circumstance, will be insufficient cause for most system participants to upset the apple-cart. Special causes will still be in play—always are. Crime and conflict will still occur, but they will not be a product of the system. These will tend to be special rather than common. In such a system, the vast majority will help to improve the system, constantly.
Politicians, ad-men,financiers, and other con-artists know that people, like rats, can be induced to act in terms of their basest instincts — avarice, lust, fear, envy, and the like — but this does not mean that human action is determined at that level when said humans employ the basic faculties that distinguish them from rats.
A bird possesses the faculty of flight, this being the essence of its bird-ness. Can a bird be induced to relinquish its faculty for flight by appealing to its basest instincts? YES! But why would anyone deprive the bird of its power of flight, its bird-ness, unless it is their intention to eat the bird?
A useful question: Are you being invited to dinner as a guest or as the main course?
Contrary to their own collective interests and the interests of their clients (students), many educators appear to be buying into the numbers game. The Lotto game mentality has been systematically prosthelytized throughout our culture. Why should educators not buy in when in many states, gambling finances the educational enterprise?
Poker is said to be a game of skill but the skills it rewards are counting, cunning, and deception. The casino credo trades productive skill and craftsmanship based in theory and method, for chance, superstition, and cleverness. In a zero-sum system, we should not be surprised when our children learn to be skilled victims and victimizers.
Skinner put forth a mechanistic theory of learning and educating and his theory serves the poker-playing Alphas among us, quite well. Another theory says that the process of learning occurs in an interdependent community, and educators will do better when they organize schools and classrooms as communities in which every member, teacher, administrators, and students alike, make their contribution to the process as a whole. In common purpose, variation and diversity drive a learning process in which knowledge is created and everybody wins.
In my recent post, “Cycle of Stupidity“, I discuss the cyclical historical record that attests to willful stupidity. The only way out being to stop doing those things that do harm. Now one of my favorite economics commentators sounds the alarm once again in his latest Baseline Scenario posting, “Dollar Doom Loop“.
“We don’t have to do this again and again. We could start by changing our financial system from the roots. We need to credibly remove the promise to bail out our large banks each time they fail. This means forcing them to hold more capital, dividing them up so they are smaller, and then letting them fail when they make poor gambles.”
“Last month two men and their teenage sons tackled one of the world’s most unforgiving summertime hikes: the Grand Canyon’s parched and searing Royal Arch Loop. Along with bedrolls and freeze-dried food, the inexperienced backpackers carried a personal locator beacon — just in case. In the span of three days, the group pushed the panic button three times, mobilizing helicopters for dangerous, lifesaving rescues inside the steep canyon walls.”
“Moral hazard” says a Wikipedia article, “arises because an individual or institution does not take the full consequences and responsibilities of its doings, and therefore has a tendency to act less carefully than it alternately would, leaving another party to hold some responsibility for the consequences of those actions”.
Moral hazard has become endemic in our society. Consider the umbilicuses that we use as substitutes for knowledge — bank bailouts, insurance policies, mutual funds, cellphones and smart-phones — the ever-present illusion that someone will be there to bail us out when we take “risks?”.
Education is not the same as programming computers. Education is not about the content to be learned but the process of learning. Without methods, standards are worse than useless. Teachers will do whatever it takes to meet standards and students will learn to do whatever it takes as well — education be damned. Without a theory of learning and a methodology for promoting and facilitating learning, the educational enterprise will do more harm than good to human beings.
