Paul Thomas looks at the new South Carolina merit pay idea (and by "new," I mean "not very new"). A nice tight explanation (again) for how merit pay is a failed idea.
Yeah, that guy who posted the video of the rows and rows of empty shelves has been fired. He's unimpressed.
With Apologies to John Denver, She's Leaving on a Jet Plane, Who Knows When She'll Be Back Again
TC Weber at Dad Gone Wild is the king of tracking all the various connections between people minding the Tennessee education store and their real gig--soaking education for $$ and dumb ideas. Here's more of that.
At Valeries Strauss's Answer Sheet at the Washington Post, David C. Berliner, Norman P. Gibbs, and Margarita Pivovarova explain how much benefit we could get out of dumping the texting industry from education.
Steve Nuzum dismantles some South Carolina gaslighting of teachers.
Liz Meitl is an English teacher and public education advocate in Kansas. In the Kansas Reflector, she points out some of the gaping holes in the state's voucher proposal.
There were lots of reactions to these findings this week, but this piece by Kate Woodsome in the Washington Post is a good one, though not very uplifting. Time to get our collective acts together.
Spoiler alert: of course they will. But Sarah Schwartz at Ed Week takes a look at some of the specifics behind this next wave of assaults on public ed.
Nora de la Cour at Jacobin with some thoughts about how we got here and how Barack Obama and Ron DeSantis are linked.
This piece, in The Hill of all places, pulls no punches: "School vouchers are a taxpayer swindle that fails to raise achievement while eroding public schools and the principle of equal protection under the law outlined in the U.S. Constitution."
At the Answer Sheet (Washington Post), Kevin Welner points out that sometimes, parents are not the best judges of what makes good education, putting him, weirdly, on the same page as Chester Finn this week. What a world.
Jamey Melcher, writing for Chalkbeat's First Person column, points out some of the things that are lost in a school when security starts taking over and locked doors and empty halls become the norm.
Yup. The latest big headlines just scratch the surface. Terri Gerstein has the story at Slate.
This is a long, deep read, but what a picture Mimi Swartz paints of the Texas attempt to dismantle public education. The "if you only read one thing" on the list this week.
Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire in The Nation look at the reverse Robin Hood nature of the new voucher programs (like Iowa's). It's a lousy deal for public schools and taxpayers alike.
At Grumpy Old Teacher, Gregory Sampson looks at the test that Floridians are supposed to consider as an alternative to the SAT or ACT. You will not be shocked by what he finds.
At Forbes.com, I took a look at an Iowa bill that wants to redefine obscenity and send teachers to re-education camp.
And as always, you're invited to sign up for my free substack, where you get all of the usual stuff (except sometimes for the fixed typos that I don't spot until too late, but hey).
Here's the key take-away from the article on the targeting of science classes regarding "controversial" theories:
ReplyDeleteThe phrasing implies that a scientific theory is a "mere guess or hunch," he said. But a “theory” in science is different from the common usage of the word—it refers to an accepted n[and complex] scientific [explanation] based on decades of empirical research [and boatloads of quantitative, supporting evidence]."
In Oklahoma, a lawmaker who introduced a bill requiring that teachers be allowed to support students in critiquing “existing scientific theories” told local news outlets that this and other proposals would ensure students “learn factual information rather than modern wokeness.”
Critiquing "existing scientific theories" would require novice learners to examine reams of very technical data that support these theories without sufficient background knowledge to understand the data itself.
In order to critique the enormous mountain of quantitative and qualitative evidence that supports the Theory of Evolution, teenagers would need working knowledge in the fields of chemistry, geology, paleontology, anatomy and physiology, taxonomy, and genetics.
In order to challenge climate science, teenagers would need extensive technical background knowledge in chemistry, physics, oceanography, geology, and meteorology.
In science there are no "controversial" theories, because the amount of supporting evidence has produced consensus.
The only "controversies" regarding scientific theories come from the scientifically illiterate bent on pushing ideologies that are completely controversial with zero supporting evidence.
One more reason that allowing parents to have a role in developing curricula is just foolhardy.