Not long ago, we featured a poll on this blog, the idea for which originally came from a speech by Diane Ravitch. We asked readers, "Do we live in an age of insanity or stupidity?" when it comes to education policy.
Here are the results: 33% for insanity; 59% for stupidity; 6% for neither.
But was this really the right question?
We live in an age when education policy is being made by non-educators like Bill Gates, who calls for class size increases in our public schools, while the private schools his children attend have 15 to 17 students per class.
We live in an age when Justin Snider, a writer for the Hechinger Post (which receives funding from Gates) echoes this view, calling efforts to reduce class sizes in the public schools "foolish", while not revealing that the classes he teaches at Columbia University are capped at fifteen.
We live in an age when the Secretary of Education Arne Duncan calls for teacher evaluation and pay to be tied to student test scores, while the Arlington VA schools that his children attend admit that they don't do this; neither does the private school that the Obama children attend, because, as a school administrator points out, "We don't believe [test scores] to be a reliable indicator of teacher effectiveness."
No, as Diane Ravitch has concluded, and I agree: we live in an age of hypocrisy and outright meanness, when it comes to those powerful men making policies for our public schools.
Here are the results: 33% for insanity; 59% for stupidity; 6% for neither.
But was this really the right question?
We live in an age when education policy is being made by non-educators like Bill Gates, who calls for class size increases in our public schools, while the private schools his children attend have 15 to 17 students per class.
We live in an age when Justin Snider, a writer for the Hechinger Post (which receives funding from Gates) echoes this view, calling efforts to reduce class sizes in the public schools "foolish", while not revealing that the classes he teaches at Columbia University are capped at fifteen.
We live in an age when the Secretary of Education Arne Duncan calls for teacher evaluation and pay to be tied to student test scores, while the Arlington VA schools that his children attend admit that they don't do this; neither does the private school that the Obama children attend, because, as a school administrator points out, "We don't believe [test scores] to be a reliable indicator of teacher effectiveness."
No, as Diane Ravitch has concluded, and I agree: we live in an age of hypocrisy and outright meanness, when it comes to those powerful men making policies for our public schools.
2 comments:
Stop the obstruction of the rule of law n education. This is insanity!
http://www.thisisdiversity.com/articles/all/4887/nys-education-tenure-laws-are-under-attack
We live in an age of mean spirited people who are greedy, lack compassion, without fair play, foolish and are asinine.
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