Dear Diane, By the time you read this we’ll have spent an hour at the Channel 13 event (mostly agreeing) about the risks involved in treating schooling like “a business"; and I’ll have spent a few days at a board meeting of the Coalition of Essential Schools; visited my son, Nick, who teaches... Read Full Post >
Dear Debbie, The reason that I directed your attention to the AIR study was that it included only the dozen nations that participated in both TIMSS and PISA. Otherwise, it is confusing to refer to the U.S.'s standing in these assessments because many nations participated only once. When several les... Read Full Post >
Dear Diane, I’ve been exploring PISA and TIMSS scores via the Web and the more I know the less impressed I am at how significant it all is, especially with regard to whether we need a more centralized curriculum. For example, on the latest TIMSS there are nine participants above and 25 below us ... Read Full Post >
Dear Deborah, I think a few words are in order about the AIR study of TIMSS and PISA. The 11 countries that have taken all of these tests are, in addition to the U.S.: Australia, Belgium, Hong Kong, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Latvia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Russia. It is true that Hong K... Read Full Post >
Dear Diane, Agreed. It would be foolhardy to dismiss any data out of hand. Agreed also: There is stuff imbedded in these international studies that we can learn from. In fact, on the whole, the data goes against the current wave of top-down test-based reforms. (On a side note: the potential for... Read Full Post >
Dear Deborah, I have read the reports of the international assessments over the years and think it would be foolhardy to dismiss them out of hand. The professionals who create them and administer them have no axe to grind; they don’t get bonuses if the scores go up or down. They are scrupulous ab... Read Full Post >
Dear Deborah, In the past, say, a century or so ago, school reformers used "democracy" as the magic word. Whatever they were doing, whether it was imposing vocational tracking in the new junior high schools or using IQ tests to sort students for their future occupations, the reformers said that it... Read Full Post >
Dear Deb, You and I disagree on some very basic issues involving curriculum and testing, but we are in agreement on some other very basic issues, such as the public nature of public education and the stupidity of replacing instruction with a testing regime. What you describe is the mindset of the b... Read Full Post >
Dear Diane, Like the distinguished panel of assessment experts whom Commissioner Mills called in to examine it wrote—the old CPESS model was a promising beginning. We had much work to be done if others were to follow suit. Instead others were discouraged and finally prohibited from doing so... Read Full Post >
Dear Deb, Your description of CPESS and other Coalition schools sounds like a memory from a distant past. Education is now in the grips of a very different mindset, one that seeks to turn schools into businesses or to use business as a model for success in education. Test scores have become the co... Read Full Post >
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